Sickness - The Big Picture
Summarized from David Hoffmeister
Posted by aplecompte on December 29th, 2009
All apparent symptoms of sickness are the result of an attack thought, the attempt to project unconscious guilt stemming from the belief in separation onto the body. The mind believes it is guilty; and it is so determined to hang on to that concept, that sickness seems like a small price, because sickness is a witness that the body can tell the mind how to feel. It is a witness that smallness, that vulnerability must be true. The deceived mind so much wants to be right about being a separate self that it uses the body as proof. The sick body is the witness that it calls to the stand.
In the miracle it is seen that the mind was mistaken about what it thought it was; it no longer sees that it is in the body and no longer needs to see the body as a symbol of sin or as proof that separation is real. That is where the patient can rise up in the miracle and say, “I have no need of this.” Because the decision is seen to be a decision of mind and returned to the mind. The body is no longer victim.
In the ultimate sense the body can’t be sick and the body can’t be well. The mind in the miracle sees it is not in a body, and therefore the body isn’t being used as an effect or employed to be the victim. The body is seen as causeless and not a real effect. It is perceived to be outside the mind instead of containing the mind.
The body [is] healed by miracles because they show the [ego] mind made sickness, and employed the body to be victim, or effect, of what it made. Yet half the lesson will not teach the whole. The miracle is useless if you learn but that the body can be healed, for this is not the lesson it was sent to teach. The lesson is the mind was sick that thought the body could be sick; projecting out its guilt caused nothing, and had no effects. T-28.II.11
It is important to stay consistently with the single lesson that the mind is sick and not the body. The wrong mind is the only thing that can be sick. A learning device cannot be sick; sickness is only a faulty interpretation of the learning device. In the Teacher’s Manual, Jesus says that it is rare that the lesson is consistently applied to all situations. He is pointing to how much vigilance it takes to stay with that lesson, to generalize that and transfer that to all situations and settings. It is trying to maintain vigilance about what can be sick.
Let’s look more broadly at your life under the Purpose of Forgiveness; how you use and see the body is what is important. Do you see the body as an insignificant learning device or are there ways in which it still seems very important to you. Reality is whole. So to see a chair as a chair is sick. Because, in the ultimate sense, to see anything as if it has a separate existence in and apart from everything else is a sick interpretation. You see how different that is from seeing a body as sick in the world’s eyes. To the world a chair is a chair and a sick person is a sick person because they have symptoms that let us know that they are sick versus healthy. Yet it’s the mind that is breaking the world up into little boxes and categories. That is sick. That is what we have to start to see. That is where the sickness lies.
God orders our thoughts. So to order our own thoughts is sick, our preference that something be this way instead of that way. The mind that believes it can order its own thoughts is a sick mind, but it doesn’t want to see that, it doesn’t want to see that it is wrong. So making it seem as if something like sickness happens to the body, completely without the mind’s intention, proves one’s vulnerability and justifies one’s guilt.
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. W-136
When the Course says sickness is “causeless and... cannot be at all,” sickness has to be traced back to where it came from. Did it come from God? That’s the ultimate question every time. And the answer is always, no; it came from the wrong mind.
God’s plan for salvation is for you to change your mind about your mind in this instant. "I am Christ mind." That’s it. Then there is the ego’s plan—if someone acted differently or if this circumstance was different than it is—then I can be right about who I think I am. The ego will change anything but its mind about itself. And Jesus says, “Yet after we have considered just what the ego's plan is, perhaps you will realize that, however preposterous it may be, you do believe in it.” W-71 You are trying to do the preposterous all the time. You are trying to change something external to bring about salvation, and it will never work.
It’s important to stay attentive. In any situation, use your reaction as a starting point to see where you are making an interpretation of the situation that is hurting you right now. You recall the two mindsets: right-mind and wrong-mind. Whenever you are feeling coercion, confusion, doubt or restlessness; ask yourself, “Can Christ be restless? Can Christ be doubting?” The uncomfortable feeling means that there is a fundamental identity confusion and that you want to cling to the way you have constructed it in the wrong mind, rather than the way it is. Without Purpose, this world is just a pile of unassembled parts.
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. W-136
We are redefining what sickness is, from being a few so called symptoms in the body, to just looking out at the world and seeing separate trees. As long as the mind is seeing separation everywhere and believes that those trees have an existence in and of themselves, that is a sick perception. A false belief; like sickness, can only be forgiven and released.
The Holy Spirit’s function is to translate duality, or misperception, into healed or true perception, which is the bridge to Oneness. Using the Holy Spirit’s Purpose, the entire scene becomes unified in perception. The scene becomes peripheral, like an unimportant backdrop, because of the shining Purpose of forgiveness that is being held out in front. It is a happy dream.
Hold in mind how impossible sickness or separation is. Anything that is judged or valued is ordering of thoughts. That judging is what makes the error real. As long as there are better and worse, error seems real. And that is the underlying metaphysics of why you don’t want to judge, because it makes the error real. It makes the world real in the mind of the thinker.
You are called to be the living proof that there is no sickness or death. If anyone could be sick or die, there is no God. Yet if God is Love, there is only Love and nothing but Love. There is no compromise or middle ground to be found in this. When you turn on a light in a dark room, the dark is no more. Similarly Life and death, wellness and sickness, cannot co-exist. What is Real and what appears to be its opposite cannot both be true if Truth is true and only Truth is true.
Awakening through a Course in Miracles, What is the Meaning of Guilt? Reversing Cause and Effect, The Impossible Belief in Illness
