ACIM Chapter 10. III. The God of Sickness, P 10, 11

ACIM Chapter 10. III. The God of Sickness, P 10, 11

III. The God of Sickness, P 10

10 If God has but one Son, there is but one God. You share reality with Him, because reality is not divided. To accept other gods before Him is to place other images before yourself. You do not realize how much you listen to your gods, and how vigilant you are on their behalf. Yet they exist only because you honor them. Place honor where it is due, and peace will be yours. It is your inheritance from your real Father. You cannot make your Father, and the father you made did not make you. Honor is not due to illusions, for to honor them is to honor nothing. Yet fear is not due them either, for nothing cannot be fearful. You have chosen to fear love because of its perfect harmlessness, and because of this fear you have been willing to give up your own perfect helpfulness and your own perfect Help.

The idols that I worship are the blocks to love’s awareness.

To remove the blocks, I must stop worshipping illusion in all its forms. I worship them when I believe in them. For instance, I sometimes worship fear. I get caught up in a fear thought and obsess over it. This is my worship of an idol.

It can be a little thing or a big thing. It doesn’t really matter because they are all the same. Either my thoughts are true, or they are false, real, or unreal. Another example is when I use the body to foster fear. I get sick, or it does something strange, or I hurt it and feel pain. Suddenly, I am back at the altar I erected to fear for the body. I bow down to it and tremble before it. At some point, I notice what I am doing, and I laugh and get up, dusting myself off as I do.

As I increasingly recognize these points of choice, these moments when I see I am worshipping an idol I see that I have a choice. I can keep giving the idol my attention, or I can shift my awareness to the truth that remains forever in my mind. Points of choice. Jesus has told us that choice is the only freedom we have allowed ourselves in this dream. I take full advantage of it.

Here is an example.

One time, when there was a lot of drama in my story, I started feeling like everything was out of control. It was a scary feeling, and I worshipped at that altar for a while. But as I began to come to my senses, I asked that my mind be healed. I became willing to understand anything that I needed to understand, and I became open to knowing whatever I needed to know about this.

I saw how I became weaker and weaker in my own eyes as I continued to obsess over the story. It felt like I couldn’t do anything and had no power. This was the ego talking, but I had allowed my awareness to fixate on self as body and so was strongly identified with it. Eventually, I recognized this point of choice, and I chose to fix my mind on God instead, and in so doing, I got in touch with my available power.

Through the power that is God and, therefore, is me as well, I made different choices. The past dissolved from my mind, along with the sense that I was weak and powerless. My life is always a clear reflection of what I want and what I worship. With a gentle laugh, I set aside my god of despair and walked away from it. My life now reflects a different choice.

III. The God of Sickness, P 11

11 Only at the altar of God will you find peace. And this altar is in you because God put it there. His Voice still calls you to return, and He will be heard when you place no other gods before Him. You can give up the god of sickness for your brothers; in fact, you would have to do so if you give him up for yourself. For if you see the god of sickness anywhere, you have accepted him. And if you accept him you will bow down and worship him, because he was made as God’s replacement. He is the belief that you can choose which god is real. Although it is clear this has nothing to do with reality, it is equally clear that it has everything to do with reality as you perceive it.

Even though sickness is not real, because we believe it is real, it is our experience and so we suffer from that belief. As Jesus says in another place in the Course, ⁵What you believe is true for you. ⁶In this sense the separation has occurred, and to deny it is merely to use denial inappropriately. ⁷However, to concentrate on error is only a further error. ⁸The initial corrective procedure is to recognize temporarily that there is a problem, but only as an indication that immediate correction is needed. (ACIM, T-2.VII.5:5-8) So, when I feel sick or in pain, I don’t deny that this is what seems to be happening. I see what is happening and then remind myself of the truth.

I do this with any kind of discomfort.

Whether it is from a disease or a fall; it is all the same. I experience pain from inflammation. This is a good opportunity to remind myself that pain is not real. I feel it as if it is real, but the truth is that if pain is real, God is not. Thus, I have recognized a problem indicating the need for correction. Since nothing exists prior to thought, I accept responsibility for my unforgiven thoughts and ask for correction.

This is as true if the sensation is in my body or someone else’s. When a friend who seems to be suffering from a migraine calls to ask for prayerful support, I recognize that she believes in this pain and I understand. I used to believe in migraines, too. But I don’t now, so I can stand firm in that truth while the painful sensations are too compelling for her to do that for herself. When I am too focused on the illusion of sickness, I can call on her to support the truth in my mind, which helps to loosen the illusion’s grip on me.

Sometimes, I support the belief in sickness in myself, but never completely. I might feel sick. I might notice the ego trying to interest me in sickness with its obsession with the body and how it feels.  But I also know that this is not really a body thing. Sickness appears as if it is in the body, but it is really in my mind. It is more like it appears on the body in the same way a movie appears on the screen.

The actual idea of illness is in the mind.

Therefore, the only thing that needs to be healed is the mind that believes it could be sick. I am the Son of God, and I exist in God. I can only be what God is, and God is not sick. Sickness is the thought of death, which is the thought of separation from God. Since I am a Thought of God, and thoughts do not leave their source, I cannot be anywhere except in God.

God is Life, not death, so death cannot be in God; therefore, death cannot be in me. Now, I replace the word death with the word sickness, and I can do this because they are the same thing, and I see that I cannot have sickness in me. If I think I do, if I have an experience of sickness, I must be dreaming of something that cannot happen.

When it feels like it is happening, it is a painful dream, and I want to stop dreaming about it. I can stop dreaming about it because I already have. We dreamt of separation, and then we stopped dreaming it. We are simply reliving the dream, remembering the dream. Since Awakening has already occurred, I cannot fail to become aware of the truth at some point.

I am doing this as I study and practice the Course.

I am beginning to remember the difference between dreaming of death and knowing Life. Part of that process is seeing the truth behind every illusion. When I see that someone is dreaming of sickness, the way I heal that one is to know this is not possible, no matter how dramatic the dream is.

When I cannot do this, I release my fear and false beliefs to the Holy Spirit so my mind can be healed. I do no one, myself or my brother, any good if I am an unhealed healer. To reinforce this, I am re-reading today’s lesson. In Lesson 167, we are told there is no death and why this is true. It makes excellent reading to expand on the subject.

I accept what Jesus tells us about sickness, and so I understand that it is not real any more than are pain and death. That doesn’t mean that I am never sick or in pain, and this body will die, of course. But what I am, spirit, cannot be touched by any of this. It is important that I learn that what is experienced in the world is illusion. I need to know what I am not to begin to realize what I am.

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