Lesson 140
Only salvation can be said to cure.
“Cure” is a word that cannot be applied to any remedy the world accepts as beneficial. What the world perceives as therapeutic is but what will make the body “better.” When it tries to heal the mind, it sees no separation from the body, where it thinks the mind exists. Its forms of healing thus must substitute illusion for illusion. One belief in sickness takes another form, and so the patient now perceives himself as well.
He is not healed. He merely had a dream that he was sick, and in the dream he found a magic formula to make him well. Yet he has not awakened from the dream, and so his mind remains exactly as it was before. He has not seen the light that would awaken him and end the dream. What difference does the content of a dream make in reality? One either sleeps or wakens. There is nothing in between.
The happy dreams the Holy Spirit brings are different from the dreaming of the world, where one can merely dream he is awake. The dreams forgiveness lets the mind perceive do not induce another form of sleep, so that the dreamer dreams another dream. His happy dreams are heralds of the dawn of truth upon the mind. They lead from sleep to gentle waking, so that dreams are gone. And thus they cure for all eternity.
Atonement heals with certainty, and cures all sickness. For the mind which understands that sickness can be nothing but a dream is not deceived by forms the dream may take. Sickness where guilt is absent cannot come, for it is but another form of guilt. Atonement does not heal the sick, for that is not a cure. It takes away the guilt that makes the sickness possible. And that is cure indeed. For sickness now is gone, with nothing left to which it can return.
Peace be to you who have been cured in God, and not in idle dreams. For cure must come from holiness, and holiness can not be found where sin is cherished. God abides in holy temples. He is barred where sin has entered. Yet there is no place where He is not. And therefore sin can have no home in which to hide from His beneficence. There is no place where holiness is not, and nowhere sin and sickness can abide.
This is the thought that cures. It does not make distinctions among unrealities. Nor does it seek to heal what is not sick, unmindful where the need for healing is. This is no magic. It is merely an appeal to truth, which cannot fail to heal and heal forever. It is not a thought that judges an illusion by its size, its seeming gravity, or anything that is related to the form it takes. It merely focuses on what it is, and knows that no illusion can be real.
Let us not try today to seek to cure what cannot suffer sickness. Healing must be sought but where it is, and then applied to what is sick, so that it can be cured. There is no remedy the world provides that can effect a change in anything. The mind that brings illusions to the truth is really changed. There is no change but this. For how can one illusion differ from another but in attributes that have no substance, no reality, no core, and nothing that is truly different?
Today we seek to change our minds about the source of sickness, for we seek a cure for all illusions, not another shift among them. We will try today to find the source of healing, which is in our minds because our Father placed it there for us. It is not farther from us than ourselves. It is as near to us as our own thoughts; so close it is impossible to lose. We need but seek it and it must be found.
We will not be misled today by what appears to us as sick. We go beyond appearances today and reach the source of healing, from which nothing is exempt. We will succeed to the extent to which we realize that there can never be a meaningful distinction made between what is untrue and equally untrue. Here there are no degrees, and no beliefs that what does not exist is truer in some forms than others. All of them are false, and can be cured because they are not true.
So do we lay aside our amulets, our charms and medicines, our chants and bits of magic in whatever form they take. We will be still and listen for the Voice of healing, which will cure all ills as one, restoring saneness to the Son of God. No voice but this can cure. Today we hear a single Voice which speaks to us of truth, where all illusions end, and peace returns to the eternal, quiet home of God.
We waken hearing Him, and let Him speak to us five minutes as the day begins, and end the day by listening again five minutes more before we go to sleep. Our only preparation is to let our interfering thoughts be laid aside, not separately, but all of them as one. They are the same. We have no need to make them different, and thus delay the time when we can hear our Father speak to us. We hear Him now. We come to Him today.
With nothing in our hands to which we cling, with lifted hearts and listening minds we pray:
Only salvation can be said to cure.
Speak to us, Father, that we may be healed.
And we will feel salvation cover us with soft protection, and with peace so deep that no illusion can disturb our minds, nor offer proof to us that it is real. This will we learn today. And we will say our prayer for healing hourly, and take a minute as the hour strikes, to hear the answer to our prayer be given us as we attend in silence and in joy. This is the day when healing comes to us. This is the day when separation ends, and we remember Who we really are.
INITIAL INSIGHT: These are the ideas that stood out to me in this lesson.
What difference does the content of a dream make in reality? One either sleeps or wakens. There is nothing in between.
It can feel hard not to be concerned about the content of the dream while we are still dreaming. For instance, someone I love very much is in trouble. I so very much want his dream to be happier and thinking about what is happening to him can make me cry. I am breaking my heart over this. So, what I do is ask the Holy Spirit to correct my perception of this situation. Then I accept His correction.
That is what I do with the challenges of experiencing this long dream of separation. What I know is that none of it matters because none of it is real. What does matter is awakening from the dream and that is basically what this lesson is about. It is what Jesus is telling us here. He is saying to us that we are having a bad dream. Wake up, he says. Wake up!
His happy dreams are heralds of the dawn of truth upon the mind. They lead from sleep to gentle waking, so that dreams are gone.
Because waking up suddenly would be frightening, there is a plan in place that allows us to awaken in increments. Our mind assimilates an awakening moment and then later we get another. This goes on for as long as it takes. This is like being gently shaken until our mind surfaces from the dream. When enough awakening occurs that there is more light in the mind, the dream becomes happier. This is still a dream, but it is a dream heralded in by the Holy Spirit and so it doesn’t lead to more dreaming. It leads us out of the dream altogether.
Atonement does not heal the sick, for that is not a cure. It takes away the guilt that makes the sickness possible.
This section tells us what causes sickness of all kinds; it is the guilt in our mind. The Atonement is the Holy Spirit’s plan to remove guilt from our mind so that we wake up and there is no more sickness. When we say that we accept the atonement in a situation, we are saying that we accept the Holy Spirit’s correction. When we meditate on the idea that we accept the atonement, we are saying that we are ready to wake up and are asking for that.
There is no place where holiness is not, and nowhere sin and sickness can abide. This is the thought that cures.
Here, Jesus is telling us that sickness is not possible because there is no place that holiness is not. We can experience sickness only in the dream. In reality, sickness does not exist. Again, we are being told that awakening is the way we are healed. Everything we do to heal the body is further dreaming. There is no body to be healed. The sickness is not in the body, it is in our mind.
Let us not try today to seek to cure what cannot suffer sickness.
We can dream of being healed by special foods, magical potions, doctors, medicines, practitioners, energy workers, healers of all kinds, but the only cure is to wake up. And remember, Jesus also says take an aspirin if you have a headache. In other words, none of these modalities is a sin, they just don’t cure; they only bring us temporary relief.
But today, today let’s focus on healing the mind that is sick.
We will try today to find the source of healing, which is in our minds because our Father placed it there for us.
This morning in my meditation, I sought that source of healing as I went inward. As Jesus told in Lesson 31, “try to sink down and inward, away from the world… It is quite possible to reach God. 2 In fact it is very easy,… This is what we are to do. We are to go down and inward and find God, the Source of all healing.
DAILY APPLICATION: This is the lesson that helped me to understand healing as it really occurs. I understand now that sickness is the projection of guilt. Without guilt, sickness could not exist. And, I understand that if I am sick, I chose sickness just as I choose everything else that shows up in my life. I chose sickness as a defense against God because I didn’t want to wake up.
I understand why an aspirin gets rid of a headache. I chose to be free of the pain and so I made a magic pill to do this for me. In this way, I could get rid of the pain without giving up the thought error that caused it, and without admitting to myself that I chose a headache, to begin with. By doing it this way I am protecting my secret desire to remain separate from God because a headache seems to prove that I am a body.
The beginning of true healing occurred when I realized that aspirin and all other forms of bodily healing are not really healing me. The most elaborate forms of healing we come up with are not really doing anything except answering my desires. I desire to experience sickness and so I do. I wish to be relieved of the effects of my desires (pain and suffering) and so I decide that a pill or some other form of magic will do that for me and it does. All the while I pretend that the illness came from something outside of me, as did the cure, so I can keep intact the dream of separation, and so that I can continue to be the queen of my sad little kingdom.
There is only one cause for sickness and that is the belief in guilt. There is only one cure for sickness and that is the release of the belief in guilt. This is true of every sickness and every degree and form of the sickness. If my emotions are sick or my financial situation is sick or my body is sick, and if this is a little upset or a life-altering form of sickness, it is all the same because the cause is the same and the cure is the same.
The Illusion of Jet Lag
It was getting very close to time for me to fly out to Portland and present a workshop. As I got closer to the time, I started to think that I should have planned to arrive a day early so that I could recover from crossing two time zones and spending an extremely long day getting there. I have always been sensitive to jet lag and I started to get nervous as I think that I won’t be able to do a good job or enjoy the workshop if my body is suffering from this weird time thing.
But this is just an illusion, isn’t it? I was dreaming that I had a problem with time zones and my body. I had decided that since I had this dream in the past I would have it again and there was nothing I could do about it. That was the thought I sat with in the meditation. I invited Spirit to speak to me about this. I opened my heart to healing. The ego fought against this.
The ego thinks that when I ask for help from Spirit, I am talking to it. So I kept getting hints on how to deal with jet lag from the ego. This is the way I used to deal with sickness. I would look for a cure in the world. Is there a pill, a special drink that I could use? The ego says to take an Ambien as early as possible the night I get there and that will help. It says to plan the workshop in detail with lots of notes so that I will say the right things no matter how I feel. The ego says to fix the world; Holy Spirit says to heal the mind that made the world.
When I rest my mind in the certainty that jet lag is just another illusion, and I remind myself that I don’t want to trade one illusion for another, the ego tries to panic me. It says this will never work, that I have made a terrible mistake, that I am doomed. Then it really puts the pressure on as it tries a different tactic. I start to feel stupid (guilty) for not planning the trip better, for not giving myself an extra day to recover. But I am innocent, so it cannot be true that I am guilty of this. I let that thought go to the Holy Spirit and wait for God’s Word to do its healing work in my mind.
It is hard on the ego when I give it nothing to do. It wants to find a solution, to do something. But I was not interested. I was not looking for a solution, I was looking for a cure. I didn’t want to have a different, better dream. I wanted to wake up. I let go of trying to “do” anything and just allowed Holy Spirit to do what needs to be done.
What happened is that I let go worrying about the situation. I let go of trying to control the outcome. I let go of thinking I have an expected outcome. I just let this go into God’s Hands and I looked forward to seeing how it would unfold. When I think about it now I realize that I was confusing the mind with the body, anyway.
The Holy Spirit works through my mind and that has nothing to do with the body. I have often had the experience of thinking I am too tired to speak, and yet when it came time to speak, my mind worked just fine and the body went along for the ride. Nice reminder, Holy Spirit. Thanks.