ACIM Workbook Daily Lesson 137, Year 2022

ACIM Daily Lesson 137 When I am healed I am not healed alone.

Lesson 137

When I am healed I am not healed alone.

1. Today’s idea remains the central thought on which salvation rests. ²For healing is the opposite of all the world’s ideas which dwell on sickness and on separate states. ³Sickness is a retreat from others, and a shutting off of joining. ⁴It becomes a door that closes on a separate self, and keeps it isolated and alone.

2. Sickness is isolation. ²For it seems to keep one self apart from all the rest, to suffer what the others do not feel. ³It gives the body final power to make the separation real, and keep the mind in solitary prison, split apart and held in pieces by a solid wall of sickened flesh, which it can not surmount.

Recognition of Sickness as a Defense

If you are sick or when you are sick, at first glance these last two lessons could trigger feelings of guilt. I know that this has happened to me in the past. I felt like a failure and even embarrassed to say that I was sick. After all sickness is a defense against God. “Shouldn’t I be better at this by now?” I would ask myself. This is not the intent of these lessons. Jesus would never encourage guilt in us or a sense of failure.

These lessons are only explaining to us what sickness is and why we choose it. As we learn that sickness is a form of defense against our true Self, we are on our way to healing our minds. I have pain in my body right now and I know that there are two things that can happen. I can see the pain from the point of view of the ego, or I can see it with the Holy Spirit.

Learning to Be Patient

This is what I came to do. It is very possible that the pain will go away as my desire for union and for God becomes stronger. It might not seem like that is what is happening. My experience of this tells me that my desire for union is not automatically embraced fully. It takes time to instruct my mind to see things differently. That’s OK. I used to use time to hide from God and Oneness. Now I am using time to undo that belief. I am learning to be patient with myself.

No One Can Be Healed Alone

3. The world obeys the laws that sickness serves, but healing operates apart from them. ²It is impossible that anyone be healed alone. ³In sickness must he be apart and separate. ⁴But healing is his own decision to be one again, and to accept his Self with all Its parts intact and unassailed. ⁵In sickness does his Self appear to be dismembered, and without the unity that gives It life. ⁶But healing is accomplished as he sees the body has no power to attack the universal Oneness of God’s Son.

Sickness is the effect of believing in separation so it makes sense that healing is the result of choosing oneness. From the perspective of the split mind that believes we are separate individuals with private minds, this makes no sense. How is it that as my mind is healed, so is yours? But Jesus isn’t talking to Myron. He is talking to me and He is talking to the decision-maker. He is reminding me that I am not Myron. And so, I am not bound by the rules the split mind devised in order to have this experience. There is only one mind that we all share. As I do my part to heal that mind, we all benefit.

The Simple Truth

4. Sickness would prove that lies must be the truth. ²But healing demonstrates that truth is true. ³The separation sickness would impose has never really happened. ⁴To be healed is merely to accept what always was the simple truth, and always will remain exactly as it has forever been. ⁵Yet eyes accustomed to illusions must be shown that what they look upon is false. ⁶So healing, never needed by the truth, must demonstrate that sickness is not real.

Jesus tells us in this paragraph that neither separation nor sickness has happened. No matter how vivid the dream of sickness is, it is still just a dream. We are still in God safe and healed and whole. Nothing can change this because nothing can change God. ⁴To be healed is merely to accept what always was the simple truth, and always will remain exactly as it has forever been. Still, we believe what our eyes show us and so we need to see healing in order to believe in the truth.

A Counter-Dream

5. Healing might thus be called a counter-dream, which cancels out the dream of sickness in the name of truth, but not in truth itself. ²Just as forgiveness overlooks all sins that never were accomplished, healing but removes illusions that have not occurred. ³Just as the real world will arise to take the place of what has never been at all, healing but offers restitution for imagined states and false ideas which dreams embroider into pictures of the truth.

²Just as forgiveness overlooks all sins that never were accomplished, healing but removes illusions that have not occurred. That sentence is very clear to me. It describes what we are doing here now that we are ready to awaken from the dream. I look with my eyes at sickness in the body, relationships, finances and other ways. This sickness is a physical manifestation of a sick mind. These manifestations are not reality, just thoughts experienced as if they were there. Just as a sick mind reflects a sick world, a healed mind reflects a healed world.

Healing Is a Worthy Function

6. Yet think not healing is unworthy of your function here. ²For anti-Christ becomes more powerful than Christ to those who dream the world is real. ³The body seems to be more solid and more stable than the mind. ⁴And love becomes a dream, while fear remains the one reality that can be seen and justified and fully understood.

The world seems very real to those who think they are in it. For them, Heaven seems like the dream and out of reach. I will not act like the world is not real so it doesn’t matter. The world is not real but it does faithfully represent to us the effects of our sick thoughts. We are here because it is here that the mind is healed. It is here in the midst of the dream that we awaken from the dream. Healing is our purpose as long as we are in the world.

Healing Is freedom

7. Just as forgiveness shines away all sin and the real world will occupy the place of what you made, so healing must replace the fantasies of sickness which you hold before the simple truth. ²When sickness has been seen to disappear in spite of all the laws that hold it cannot but be real, then questions have been answered. ³And the laws can be no longer cherished nor obeyed.

8. Healing is freedom. ²For it demonstrates that dreams will not prevail against the truth. ³Healing is shared. ⁴And by this attribute it proves that laws unlike the ones which hold that sickness is inevitable are more potent than their sickly opposites. ⁵Healing is strength. ⁶For by its gentle hand is weakness overcome, and minds that were walled off within a body free to join with other minds, to be forever strong.

We Must Practice Forgiveness

We can start to see why healing is so important. It is the way we demonstrate that the world is not real and that sin is not real. Beneath these illusions is the truth, oneness, and innocence. To know this as true, we must practice forgiveness. Otherwise, we will believe that the illusion is strong and healing is weak. Guilt keeps us walled off from each other and so we fail to experience the freedom and strength of minds joined. Healing is freedom, it is shared, it is strength. Freedom witnesses to our true self, to our oneness, and to the power of God in us.

Legions Upon Legions Are Healed Along with You

9. Healing, forgiveness, and the glad exchange of all the world of sorrow for a world where sadness cannot enter, are the means by which the Holy Spirit urges you to follow Him. ²His gentle lessons teach how easily salvation can be yours; how little practice you need undertake to let His laws replace the ones you made to hold yourself a prisoner to death. ³His life becomes your own, as you extend the little help He asks in freeing you from everything that ever caused you pain.

10. And as you let yourself be healed, you see all those around you, or who cross your mind, or whom you touch or those who seem to have no contact with you, healed along with you. ²Perhaps you will not recognize them all, nor realize how great your offering to all the world, when you let healing come to you. ³But you are never healed alone. ⁴And legions upon legions will receive the gift that you receive when you are healed.

All Healing Is Healing of the Mind

Did we ever think that healing was not important, that it didn’t matter? Jesus is letting us know in this lesson that this is not true. All healing is ultimately healing of the mind. When we seem to be sick in body, that is just a reflection of an unhealed mind. We do not have to be bound to these absurd laws of the body. We can gain our freedom from them as we free our mind from the beliefs that caused sickness. And again, he reminds us that we are not healed alone. Jesus says that legions upon legions will receive the gift that you receive when you are healed.

The Healed Are the Instruments of Healing

11. Those who are healed become the instruments of healing. ²Nor does time elapse between the instant they are healed, and all the grace of healing it is given them to give. ³What is opposed to God does not exist, and who accepts it not within his mind becomes a haven where the weary can remain to rest. ⁴For here is truth bestowed, and here are all illusions brought to truth.

12. Would you not offer shelter to God’s Will? ²You but invite your Self to be at home. ³And can this invitation be refused? ⁴Ask the inevitable to occur, and you will never fail. ⁵The other choice is but to ask what cannot be to be, and this can not succeed. ⁶Today we ask that only truth will occupy our minds; that thoughts of healing will this day go forth from what is healed to what must yet be healed, aware that they will both occur as one.

We are being asked to accept healing and to know that this does not take time. It is ours for the asking and what we receive is the memory of who we are. As we accept healing, that healing goes forth to what yet needs healing. All we need to do is practice this lesson as asked. Let us allow our minds to be healed so that many others will be healed along with us.

Our Practice

13. We will remember, as the hour strikes, our function is to let our minds be healed, that we may carry healing to the world, exchanging curse for blessing, pain for joy, and separation for the peace of God. ²Is not a minute of the hour worth the giving to receive a gift like this? ³Is not a little time a small expense to offer for the gift of everything?

14. Yet must we be prepared for such a gift. ²And so we will begin the day with this, and give ten minutes to these thoughts with which we will conclude today at night as well:

³When I am healed I am not healed alone. ⁴And I would share my healing with the world, that sickness may be banished from the mind of God’s one Son, Who is my only Self.

Oh, what a thought! Today as I practice this lesson, I am doing my part to banish sickness from the mind of God’s one Son, Who is my only Self. So little is asked of me and so much is given in return.

I Bless My Brothers

15. Let healing be through you this very day. ²And as you rest in quiet, be prepared to give as you receive, to hold but what you give, and to receive the Word of God to take the place of all the foolish thoughts that ever were imagined. ³Now we come together to make well all that was sick, and offer blessing where there was attack. ⁴Nor will we let this function be forgot as every hour of the day slips by, remembering our purpose with this thought:

⁵When I am healed I am not healed alone. ⁶And I would bless my brothers, for I would be healed with them, as they are healed with me.

To enjoy the Pathways of Light Insights on ACIM Lesson 137 click here.

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