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Study of Manual for Teachers 5-9-12

Day 129
3 That forgiveness is healing needs to be understood, if the teacher of God is to make progress. The idea that a body can be sick is a central concept in the ego’s thought system. This thought gives the body autonomy, separates it from the mind, and keeps the idea of attack inviolate. If the body could be sick Atonement would be impossible. A body that can order a mind to do as it sees fit could merely take the place of God and prove salvation is impossible. What, then, is left to heal? The body has become lord of the mind. How could the mind be returned to the Holy Spirit unless the body is killed? And who would want salvation at such a price?

In the first paragraph of this section I worked out that Atonement, forgiveness and healing are all interconnected. The Atonement is the undoing of the ego and forgiveness is how I undo it, and the result is healing. The ego is absolutely against the idea of a healed body because it holds that the body is autonomous, and separate from the mind. If the body is healed through healing the mind, you can see the threat to the ego belief system.

I want to look at the idea of sickness very closely to see how the ego uses sickness as a defense against truth and how a sick body takes the place of God, thus making salvation impossible. I think I understand this, then I get confused when I try to put it into words. The ego is dead set against this idea.

The first thing I notice is that the ego says that sickness is the result of sin. I catch a cold and the ego says that someone gave it to me, so that someone is guilty of making me sick. I need to defend myself against this person by staying away from them. I have noticed myself stepping back from sick people, even being angry in my mind that they don’t stay home instead of spreading their germs everywhere. As I look at this I realize how sickness in the body is a useful tool for the ego to create division, to increase the belief in separation, to reinforce fear, guilt, blame and shame.

When I believe that a cold is something I catch I am giving the body autonomy. I am saying that the body is separate from the mind and that the body as its own agenda, its own mind and that I am helpless against it. I am saying that all the right thinking in the world won’t protect me when someone sneezes on me and I catch their cold. Since I cannot control what happens to the body, the body must be god and I must be its servant.

Then I ask the body what it needs, how I can placate it and bring it back to relative health so it will stop hurting (me). I listen to its needs, and bring it Nyquil and ice cream. I coddle it, and listen to its complaints and believe everything it threatens, an infection, pneumonia, maybe death? Seems extreme, but it could happen. People die of complications all the time.

And if I pray for healing, the ego warns me that there will be a price for my betrayal to its thought system. I think that awakening will bring me healing and the ego says that if the body is the source of my pain then healing of the pain will necessitate the loss of the body. Since I believe myself to be in this body it says that this will mean that I have to die to be saved. Better to stick with the Nyquil for now. I don’t have to give up the idea of awakening, just postpone it. Keep studying and doing practices and keep plenty of magic potions on hand to conciliate the body while I wait for awakening to find me.

What Jesus is helping me to understand is that the body is not autonomous. Sickness does not come from anything outside my mind because nothing is outside my mind, not the body or its pretended agents of destruction. It is an ego conceit that the body can get sick without my consent, and a further absurdity that it can get well by something else outside my mind. This whole thing, a body that is outside the control of mind, is an attack on truth, a defense against God.

God is not separation, is not attack, is not sickness, is not suffering, pain or death. A sick body seems to prove that God is dead, or at least powerless against proof that all of these things exist. If I see myself as a body or even in a body, and I have used the body to prove that there is something outside of God, then I have succeeded in separating myself from God. I have succeeded in destroying God’s very essence, which is Wholeness. No wonder I tremble in fear of God and vastly prefer a world of war and pain and death to facing my Creator Whom I seem to have betrayed in the worst way.

The idea that the body could be sick…. . This is the sticking point. This is where the ego rails against me and calls me crazy, or at the very least, mistaken. I must be misinterpreting this. Of course the body can be sick. It has been sick many times, sometimes very sick. And yet, if the truth is true, then the body cannot be sick. If I think the body is sick, I must be delusional. I must be imagining a body that could be sick. To believe in a sick body, I must believe I am something I am not. Can God be sick? I am His Son, in Him and part of Him. I cannot be sick. Holy Spirit, as I look at the doubt and uncertainty in my mind, please lead me out of temptation. Bring me back to truth.

© 2012, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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