ACIM Chapter 8. IX. Healing as Corrected Perception, P 5, 6

ACIM Chapter 8. IX. Healing as Corrected Perception, P 5, 6

IX. Healing as Corrected Perception, P 5

⁵ Healing is release from the fear of waking and the substitution of the decision to wake. The decision to wake is the reflection of the will to love, since all healing involves replacing fear with love. The Holy Spirit cannot distinguish among degrees of error, for if He taught that one form of sickness is more serious than another, He would be teaching that one error can be more real than another. His function is to distinguish only between the false and the true, replacing the false with the true.

What stands out to me is that all healing involves replacing fear with love. And I was thinking about feeling sick, and it doesn’t matter “how” sick. Headache or cancer, it is all the same. Sickness is scary because it triggers the fear that I am just this frail body and subject to pain, suffering, and death.  It may only be a headache today, but maybe it will be a brain tumor tomorrow. This is the fear inherent in sickness and the reason they are all the same. Sickness says that I am endangered and I am not eternal.

When I ask the Holy Spirit to decide for me what this headache means, I understand that sickness is not true because it is not God’s Will. He reminds me that God is Love and therefore cannot be sickness. I am in God and like God therefore I am safe. So, I can rest in the truth of what I am. I have done this and I have proven to myself that if I accept the truth in place of the false. The fear is replaced by love and what I have done is undone. I have seen that I will not have what I don’t believe in.

I have had migraines that simply disappeared when I reminded myself of the truth.

Pain is not God’s Will so it can’t be true. I let the belief in pain go to the Holy Spirit to be removed from my mind and there was nothing in my mind to project the headache onto my body. I have done the same thing with other sickness and pain.

Not every time does it work so easily. What prevents me from accepting the Holy Spirit’s healing? Sometimes I have use for the pain. Maybe the headache is preferable to what I would have to be doing instead. Maybe the pain or sickness has a significant hold on me. Perhaps I believe in the sickness more than I believe in the cure. Maybe I believe the sickness is a punishment for a perceived wrong, the antidote to guilt.

Regardless of the faulty reasoning, I can undo what I have done very simply if I am willing to bring these dark thoughts to the light. Light always dissipates darkness. Love always replaces fear if that is my true desire. This is as true for other forms of error. If I become afraid about finances, the fear is overcome by love when I remember that lack is not God’s Will so it cannot be true. Special relationships are painful and there is much fear in them. And yet, when given to the Holy Spirit for healing, they become holy, loving and joyful, relationships.

In every case, the answer is the same.

Is it true? Is it love? If not, it cannot be real and I can disregard the appearance of reality. If I see something that cannot be true, I must be looking at an illusion projected from a confused mind. It is the mind that needs correction, not the circumstances and I have within me the solution to this problem.

The Holy Spirit will respond to the slightest invitation to heal. He doesn’t look at the circumstances and decide how much effort it will take to undo it. He just knows that if it is not true and loving it is not God and therefore does not exist. Because He does not accord it reality, it is not there. As I accept His judgment I am healed.

IX. Healing as Corrected Perception, P 6

⁶ The ego, which always wants to weaken the mind, tries to separate it from the body in an attempt to destroy it. Yet the ego actually believes that it is protecting it. This is because the ego believes that mind is dangerous, and that to make mindless is to heal. But to make mindless is impossible, since it would mean to make nothing out of what God created. The ego despises weakness, even though it makes every effort to induce it. The ego wants only what it hates. To the ego this is perfectly sensible. Believing in the power of attack, the ego wants attack.

The ego believes that there is power in attack. For most of my life, when I felt endangered in any way, my first thought was to defend myself through attack. Even after I learned that the power I felt in defending myself was false, I would sometimes act on the desire. An example of this happened while I was still working in sales. A coworker failed to complete a task that affected me. I asked him for the rest of the information, and he said that he wasn’t supposed to do that part.

I felt endangered because this was my customer, and my income was threatened.

At first, I was frustrated that he was arguing the point with me, and I argued back. I could hear the attack in my voice, as I am sure he did, and he just became more defensive. I stopped myself and told him I would get the information he needed to finish the task. Actually, I was more frustrated with myself than with him at this point. I kept reacting to this person, and I kept forgiving it, and then I did it again.

The ego thinks that this person is a threat to me and that the only way to defend myself from him is to attack him. The ego always feels like attack is power, and so it always wants to attack. I see that, and I also see that attack makes me feel anxious and afraid. If I need to attack, it seems that I must indeed be imperiled. If I am imperiled, then I must not be the eternal, divine being that I am learning to identify with.

This conflict in my mind made me feel weaker still and confused about what I am.

It seemed like a moment at work, a brief, though unpleasant, encounter with a coworker. But the effect of choosing conflict and choosing attack is not inconsequential, and the effort to make it seem so is the ego attempt to hide from the truth. The ego is always either attacking or hiding.

I have learned that I want to do neither. I have learned to look at my thoughts and feelings and to allow them to be corrected. Looking without guilt is painless and effective. If I feel guilt when I notice the attack thoughts, I realize that it is just another belief to be released. Belief in guilt is just a further attack, and an attack does not protect me. Quite the opposite, it increases my fear and creates doubt as to my true identity.

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