Lesson 136

Sickness is a defense against the truth.

No one can heal unless he understands what purpose sickness seems to serve. For then he understands as well its purpose has no meaning. Being causeless and without a meaningful intent of any kind, it cannot be at all. When this is seen, healing is automatic. It dispels this meaningless illusion by the same approach that carries all of them to truth, and merely leaves them there to disappear.

Sickness is not an accident. Like all defenses, it is an insane device for self-deception. And like all the rest, its purpose is to hide reality, attack it, change it, render it inept, distort it, twist it, or reduce it to a little pile of unassembled parts. The aim of all defenses is to keep the truth from being whole. The parts are seen as if each one were whole within itself.

Defenses are not unintentional, nor are they made without awareness. They are secret, magic wands you wave when truth appears to threaten what you would believe. They seem to be unconscious but because of the rapidity with which you choose to use them. In that second, even less, in which the choice is made, you recognize exactly what you would attempt to do, and then proceed to think that it is done.

Who but yourself evaluates a threat, decides escape is necessary, and sets up a series of defenses to reduce the threat that has been judged as real? All this cannot be done unconsciously. But afterwards, your plan requires that you must forget you made it, so it seems to be external to your own intent; a happening beyond your state of mind, an outcome with a real effect on you, instead of one effected by yourself.

It is this quick forgetting of the part you play in making your “reality” that makes defenses seem to be beyond your own control. But what you have forgot can be remembered, given willingness to reconsider the decision which is doubly shielded by oblivion. Your not remembering is but the sign that this decision still remains in force, as far as your desires are concerned. Mistake not this for fact. Defenses must make facts unrecognizable. They aim at doing this, and it is this they do.

Every defense takes fragments of the whole, assembles them without regard to all their true relationships, and thus constructs illusions of a whole that is not there. It is this process that imposes threat, and not whatever outcome may result. When parts are wrested from the whole and seen as separate and wholes within themselves, they become symbols standing for attack upon the whole; successful in effect, and never to be seen as whole again. And yet you have forgotten that they stand but for your own decision of what should be real, to take the place of what is real.

Sickness is a decision. It is not a thing that happens to you, quite unsought, which makes you weak and brings you suffering. It is a choice you make, a plan you lay, when for an instant truth arises in your own deluded mind, and all your world appears to totter and prepare to fall. Now are you sick, that truth may go away and threaten your establishments no more.

How do you think that sickness can succeed in shielding you from truth? Because it proves the body is not separate from you, and so you must be separate from the truth. You suffer pain because the body does, and in this pain are you made one with it. Thus is your “true” identity preserved, and the strange, haunting thought that you might be something beyond this little pile of dust silenced and stilled. For see, this dust can make you suffer, twist your limbs and stop your heart, commanding you to die and cease to be.

Thus is the body stronger than the truth, which asks you live, but cannot overcome your choice to die. And so the body is more powerful than everlasting life, Heaven more frail than hell, and God’s design for the salvation of His Son opposed by a decision stronger than His Will. His Son is dust, the Father incomplete, and chaos sits in triumph on His throne.

Such is your planning for your own defense. And you believe that Heaven quails before such mad attacks as these, with God made blind by your illusions, truth turned into lies, and all the universe made slave to laws which your defenses would impose on it. Yet who believes illusions but the one who made them up? Who else can see them and react to them as if they were the truth?

God knows not of your plans to change His Will. The universe remains unheeding of the laws by which you thought to govern it. And Heaven has not bowed to hell, nor life to death. You can but choose to think you die, or suffer sickness or distort the truth in any way. What is created is apart from all of this. Defenses are plans to defeat what cannot be attacked. What is unalterable cannot change. And what is wholly sinless cannot sin.

Such is the simple truth. It does not make appeal to might nor triumph. It does not command obedience, nor seek to prove how pitiful and futile your attempts to plan defenses that would alter it. Truth merely wants to give you happiness, for such its purpose is. Perhaps it sighs a little when you throw away its gifts, and yet it knows, with perfect certainty, that what God wills for you must be received.

It is this fact that demonstrates that time is an illusion. For time lets you think what God has given you is not the truth right now, as it must be. The Thoughts of God are quite apart from time. For time is but another meaningless defense you made against the truth. Yet what He wills is here, and you remain as He created you.

Truth has a power far beyond defense, for no illusions can remain where truth has been allowed to enter. And it comes to any mind that would lay down its arms, and cease to play with folly. It is found at any time; today, if you will choose to practice giving welcome to the truth.

This is our aim today. And we will give a quarter of an hour twice to ask the truth to come to us and set us free. And truth will come, for it has never been apart from us. It merely waits for just this invitation which we give today. We introduce it with a healing prayer, to help us rise above defensiveness, and let truth be as it has always been:

Sickness is a defense against the truth.

I will accept the truth of what I am,
and let my mind be wholly healed today.

Healing will flash across your open mind, as peace and truth arise to take the place of war and vain imaginings. There will be no dark corners sickness can conceal, and keep defended from the light of truth. There will be no dim figures from your dreams, nor their obscure and meaningless pursuits with double purposes insanely sought, remaining in your mind. It will be healed of all the sickly wishes that it tried to authorize the body to obey.

Now is the body healed, because the source of sickness has been opened to relief. And you will recognize you practiced well by this: The body should not feel at all. If you have been successful, there will be no sense of feeling ill or feeling well, of pain or pleasure. No response at all is in the mind to what the body does. Its usefulness remains and nothing more.

Perhaps you do not realize that this removes the limits you had placed upon the body by the purposes you gave to it. As these are laid aside, the strength the body has will always be enough to serve all truly useful purposes. The body’s health is fully guaranteed, because it is not limited by time, by weather or fatigue, by food and drink, or any laws you made it serve before. You need do nothing now to make it well, for sickness has become impossible.

Yet this protection needs to be preserved by careful watching. If you let your mind harbor attack thoughts, yield to judgment or make plans against uncertainties to come, you have again misplaced yourself, and made a bodily identity which will attack the body, for the mind is sick.

Give instant remedy, should this occur, by not allowing your defensiveness to hurt you longer. Do not be confused about what must be healed, but tell yourself:

I have forgotten what I really am, for I mistook my body for myself.

Sickness is a defense against the truth. But I am not a body.
And my mind cannot attack. So I can not be sick.

INITIAL INSIGHT: This lesson is very clear, as have been the preceding lessons with a similar message. I am not the body I appear to be. I am quite apart from it. I am not victim to my story, but the maker of it, the writer of my own script. I am not guilty of any of this and I am free to change my mind, and I have help to do so.

Using the truth, I am learning from the Course, I have accepted responsibility for my life; full responsibility for all that is in my awareness. Instead of overwhelming me and making me feel unbearably guilty, it has freed me. I can now effect change in a simple and clear way, and this is change that is reliable and unwavering.

Oh, my gosh. All this suffering and pain that we experience, and for what? We are having crazy thoughts, that’s all. Nothing is done to reality and so nothing is done to us as we are part of reality. There is no world, there are no bodies, and sickness and death do not exist. We fool only ourselves with our defenses and they would be called silly if they were not so tragic. Why do we keep hurting ourselves like this? Why do we resist that inner desire for God and for our true Home?

Jesus tells us that we choose sickness and we do know what we are doing and that the forgetting we chose it is also a deliberate decision. We want to keep our story going, keep the laws we made to maintain the illusion and so we have established defenses against the truth and sickness is one of them. It is important that we learn to recognize these defenses for what they are so that we can make a different choice. It is really an issue of perception. How do I perceive myself and how do I perceive the body? I can simply ask the Holy Spirit to correct my perception.

DAILY APPLICATION: Here are a couple of examples of this.

I have experienced several miraculous changes in the body experience through practicing what Jesus is telling us. By miraculous I mean they stand outside the laws of man and embrace the laws of God. I was thinking about one of those miracles the other day. I used to get really exhausted if my day went on for too long and was too strenuous.

For instance, if I worked outside in the heat, and drove for many miles, if I suffered a lot of stress from dealing with traffic and weather, by the time I got to my hotel I would be shaking from exhaustion, and in pain. I had reached the point that work was just too much for me and I didn’t know what I was going to do about it. Then I was led to some of these lessons and encouraged by Spirit to read them again, but to read them with Him.

As I opened my heart to understanding, I made that shift from thinking I had to affect the situation to knowing that I only needed to allow my mind to be healed. Here is something that occurred after this practice. I had one of those days. Well, actually, I had three of those days in a row. I worked in heat and humidity. I drove many miles each day. I fought heavy traffic in rain that was so heavy I could barely see. I gave a presentation to a group of disgruntled people. The day just went on and on.

After 16 hours of this, I finally got to the hotel and was glad of it. But what I noticed is that while I was tired, I was not exhausted. I wasn’t shaky or discouraged. I was just tired and ready for rest. The world would say that I am older now and that this kind of physical exertion should be harder on my body, not easier. But I am under no laws but God’s, and I let go of some of the desire to defend against God, so I have a different experience now.

Here is another situation.

I saw through my defense one morning and I have never since doubted that I choose sickness and I now understand why I choose it. I was doing the lesson that morning, and it was one of the lessons that say I am not a body. Suddenly, I had a revelatory moment in which I knew this was true. I absolutely knew it. I sat there stunned at this sudden knowing.

Almost immediately before I could even think about what had just happened, I got really sick. I started throwing up and was feverish. I was living with my daughter at the time and my little granddaughter had been sick. I had the thought that I caught it from her, but also I knew enough to question that belief.

Then it hit me. I was defending myself from the truth that I am not a body. What better way to do this than to be sick? It all came together in my mind and when it did, I started laughing. So, there I was, hugging the toilet, throwing up and laughing like a loon. Because I had made another choice, even though I was not aware of making it, I chucked the whole defense system. I could not use sickness to convince myself that I was, indeed, a body. Within minutes the entire episode was over and I was fine.

Now when I read this explanation for sickness in this lesson, I have no doubt that it is true.

“Sickness is a decision. It is not a thing that happens to you, quite unsought, which makes you weak and brings you suffering. It is a choice you make, a plan you lay, when for an instant truth arises in your own deluded mind, and all your world appears to totter and prepare to fall. Now are you sick, that truth may go away and threaten your establishments no more.”

That was exactly what happened that morning. That was in 2005, I think, and it made such an impact on me that I remember it like it was yesterday. It changed everything about how I view sickness. You might think I would never be sick again, but that’s not how it worked, evidently. It seems I have a strong desire to defend my little world.

INSIGHTS FROM HOLY SPIRIT: It is true that the body can only reflect right-minded thoughts or wrong-minded thoughts. When the body is sick it is reflecting the idea that you are your body and it is defending against the idea that you could be anything else. You are literally convincing yourself that you are weak and defenseless.

The answer does not lie in finding the specific thought that caused a specific illness and then changing that thought. Instead, notice what your body seems to be indicating about your thinking. Do you feel weak, tired, sick, and suffering? Now that you have noticed this be willing to realize that you did this to yourself. You chose to feel these things so that you would believe your story of being a body and being an individual. Now realize that this is not making you happy and be willing to do something different. I will do the rest.

Me: Am I wrong to care about my body being in pain, and to try to heal my body? After all, if it is not real what difference does it make? And if I try to heal it, won’t that be a defense?

Holy Spirit: Do you think it is God’s will that you experience yourself in pain? Do you think it is helpful to suffer? It is a matter of purpose, Myron. When you notice the body is in pain, what purpose do you see in that awareness? Do you think your purpose is to heal the body? Or do you see your purpose is to heal the mind? If your purpose is to allow Me to correct your thinking then you will be truly healed.

As you allow Me to work with your mind, you will become clear as to what would be most helpful to do in the dream. Sometimes you need do nothing, and you simply accept the truth that you are not a body and that it needs no defense. Sometimes you are not ready to accept this is the truth, and you choose to use magic to allow yourself to feel healed.

You are not wrong to take medicine or see a doctor. You are not wrong to want to be free of pain. Choosing to use magic is not a cause for guilt nor is it going to set you back as you fear it will. You and I are working at the level of mind. You know that your purpose is to heal the mind. Give Me your willingness to see differently and you will have served your purpose.

GRATITUDE: I still choose sickness occasionally. But I know what is happening. When I find myself in any kind of situation that is uncomfortable in any way, I remind myself that I didn’t just walk into this. I desired it. With the ego-mind, I made an image of my desire. I am experiencing it as I chose. I can change my mind by changing the mind with which I think. I choose to think with the mind I share with God, rather than the ego-mind. I ask Holy Spirit to do this for me. I open myself to His healing answer.