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.
I remember when I first read this. I was surprised that I never noticed before how sickness is a way of being separate from others as well as keeping one bound to the body. When I am in pain, I am in pain alone. I can tell you about it but it is my pain. You can feel pain, too, but it is your pain you feel. This applies equally to physical, psychological, and emotional pain. Sickness is a way to stay separate from others.
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.
Once we accept that sickness is of the mind, not the body, it is clear that sickness separates us from each other so healing is the decision not to see ourselves as separate. Making separate is an attack on our Oneness and sickness is often the manifestation of that attack. Even if we are one of those people who seem not to have sickness very much, other forms of suffering occur. When we no longer feel the need for separation, we no longer need sickness of any kind.
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.
In Reality there is no sickness of any kind. This is the truth and nothing can change that, but in our confusion, we think there is both Heaven and earth and that we can have illusion here and then die and return to Heaven where all is good. Or at least, most of us have a Heaven story or if not, then an oblivion story. But it is here that we think we are and it is here that we are healed.
We do this by questioning all our beliefs. We question what we hear and what we see and what we think. We look at it with the Holy Spirit and let Him sort it all out. In the end our mind is purified of all but a healed perception that is so close to the truth that we can easily be drawn into God. Sickness is no different than any other impossible belief. As we begin to look at sickness as just an error in the mind, we will experience what we call a healing.
I thought Joel Goldsmith put it very well. This is what he said about praying for people. “If you can grasp this idea, it may save you from making the fatal mistake of trying to heal somebody or somebody’s body, When I see your body through spiritual sense, I behold you as God made you, and you will declare that you have been healed. God’s creation is intact; it is perfect and harmonious, and that perfect and harmonious creation is right here and now. But this cannot be seen with the physical eyes. It can be discerned only through spiritual vision, spiritual sense – through spiritual consciousness, or what is called Christ-consciousness.
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.
Here is another way to think of this. Sickness is the story from the perspective of the ego’s guilt and fear. Healing is the alternative. It is the story from the perspective of the Holy Spirit’s correction. For every story and every variation on that story, there is a correction. We can spend our time here reviewing the ego story or reviewing the same story but from a point of view of the corrected version. To do so, though, we have to release the beliefs that keep the ego story in our awareness.
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.
There can be a temptation to believe that sickness doesn’t matter because it is all an illusion anyway and because the script is written. But remember that there is a version of the story where the belief in sickness and the justification for sickness is rejected and health takes its place. That script is written as well and is available to us. The cost of admission is the desire for healing and the determination to release the beliefs that source sickness.
Remember, sickness is in the mind and only appears in the body because it is a thought we are trying to get rid of. But thoughts leave not their source so we get sickness and are stuck with the thought that caused the suffering. We are meant to use whatever the ego makes to prove it is an illusion and that we remain as God created us. He did not create us sick.
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.
Healing shows us that sickness is just part of the fantasy and not real at all. It shows us that fantasy cannot overcome truth.
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.
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.
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.
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 we are not healed alone. Jesus says that legions upon legions will receive the gift that you receive when you are healed.
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.
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.
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.
Isn’t exciting to think of the good we do today, all the brothers and sisters we help, as we practice this lesson?