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Gentle Healing Lesson 153, Manual for Teachers, Text.  7-1-19

Gentle Healing Lesson 153
In my defenselessness my safety lies.

“You who feel threatened by this changing world, its twists of fortune and its bitter jests, its brief relationships and all the “gifts” it merely lends to take away again; attend this lesson well. The world provides no safety. It is rooted in attack, and all its “gifts” of seeming safety are illusory deceptions. It attacks, and then attacks again. No peace of mind is possible where danger threatens thus.”

Anyone who has had a sudden inexplicable disease or accident knows that the world provides no safety against this. It is the same with finances. You can have the best plan in the world and save and invest wisely, and still, have it all come tumbling down even though there was no flaw in your strategy. Relationships crumble, people you love die. The world provides no safety and that is just a fact.

“The world gives rise but to defensiveness. For threat brings anger, anger makes attack seem reasonable, honestly provoked, and righteous in the name of self-defense. Yet is defensiveness a double threat. For it attests to weakness, and sets up a system of defense that cannot work. Now are the weak still further undermined, for there is treachery without and still a greater treachery within. The mind is now confused, and knows not where to turn to find escape from its imaginings.”

When things seem to go wrong with our plans, we can become angry or depressed, which is two sides of the same coin. In anger, we project our guilt outward in an attempt to defend ourselves. In depression, we project the guilt on ourselves which is a different kind of defense, one in which we punish ourselves in hopes of preventing further punishment from without (from God).

When we think we are victimized and unfairly treated we feel justified in defending ourselves. We think this is going to get us something we want, but the only thing it gets us is more unhappiness and more fear because the need for defense seems to prove we need defense. Not only do we feel attacked from without, but now we feel attacked from within because nothing we do helps and we are left confused.

“It is as if a circle held it fast, wherein another circle bound it and another one in that, until escape no longer can be hoped for nor obtained. Attack, defense; defense, attack, become the circles of the hours and the days that bind the mind in heavy bands of steel with iron overlaid, returning but to start again. There seems to be no break nor ending in the ever-tightening grip of the imprisonment upon the mind.”

How have we endured this for so long? How could we have been so blind to what was actually happening for so long? In my past marriage, it seemed to me like my husband was the cause of all the misery I felt and I was constantly defending against his attacks on my peace. Even as a Course student, I failed to see the obvious, that whatever he did it was my mind that was making me miserable. It was my defenses that were binding me to the misery I suffered. It was my own thoughts and my continual defenses causing the confusion that was keeping me from seeing my part and thus releasing myself.

“You do not realize what you have done to sabotage the holy peace of God by your defensiveness. For you behold the Son of God as but a victim to attack by fantasies, by dreams, and by illusions he has made; yet helpless in their presence, needful only of defense by still more fantasies, and dreams by which illusions of his safety comfort him.”

This was me in my marriage. I felt attacked and attacked in return as if my defenses could somehow save me from my own thoughts. This world is my illusion, the image of beliefs in my mind projected outward, seen as real and defended as true. Then I pretend that I don’t know where it all came from as if it has nothing to do with me.

Instead, I pretend that I am being acted upon by someone else and so it must be their fault. This is what I was doing to my husband. I was using him as the scapegoat for my own choices, and at the same time, I was teaching us both that we are helpless against the dreams of our desires. This is what I do every time I defend myself. I scare myself and I lose myself and I feel helpless against a hopeless situation.

“Defenselessness is strength. It testifies to recognition of the Christ in you. Perhaps you will recall the text maintains that choice is always made between Christ’s strength and your own weakness, seen apart from Him. Defenselessness can never be attacked, because it recognizes strength so great attack is folly, or a silly game a tired child might play, when he becomes too sleepy to remember what he wants.”

This was the answer to the self-made prison in which I found myself in my marriage. I was not able to come to this realization while I was in the marriage, but once out of it, I did the work necessary to heal the relationship. I remembered that defenselessness is strength. I remembered that I had been choosing my own weakness but that I could choose Christ’s strength because it is mine to choose.

Once I realized this and made up my mind that the peace of God was far more important to me than being right, it was just a matter of letting the grievances come up and meeting them armored in love instead of blame. Through the strength of God in me, I was able to release my defenses and see all of the acts that I had once decided were unforgivable as simply unimportant.

“For our true purpose is to save the world, and we would not exchange for foolishness the endless joy our function offers us. We would not let our happiness slip by because a fragment of a senseless dream happened to cross our minds, and we mistook the figures in it for the Son of God; its tiny instant for eternity.”

When my husband and I were married there was absolutely no way either one of us could have acted differently, working from the beliefs we both held at that time. More importantly, none of it was Reality. It was all a dream, an ancient memory we had put before our eyes so we could perhaps see it differently this time. And even the first time around it was just thoughts of something impossible, thoughts of something different from Reality.

There are moments within the day in which I play those childish games of defense, but I am very aware of them now and so change my mind as quickly as possible. For instance, I have times, though rarely, when I start to worry about money and my defense is to plan ways to earn more or spend less or something else within the world. I can even become angry with (defend against) someone who owes me money and has not paid me or may not pay me. But when this happens, I recognize it for what it is. I am not letting my happiness slip by because a fragment of a senseless dream happened to cross my mind.

Manual for Teachers
Because I desire healing and to heal and because I am willing to do my part to achieve this, I am vigilant for judgments in my mind and as quickly as I can I let them go. The peace I experience and the peace that those around me tend to experience is witness to my role as healer.

Here is something that has been important to me in this process. If I find myself judging a person or a situation the temptation is to remove myself from what I am judging to relieve myself of that discomfort. But I don’t do that. The person or situation is my savior and I will lose my opportunity to be saved if I distance myself.

Text
I am as God created me, and I am this eternally without exception. I am like God because God created me like Him. Nothing that is unlike God exists. “Nothing beyond Him can happen, because nothing except Him is real.” So all the things I see and do and believe cannot be real if they are unlike God. I must be dreaming, living an illusion.

Because of what I am as God’s Son, I can choose to experience even that which is not real. If I am experiencing something, it is because I chose to do so.  My holy mind establishes everything that happens to me. My responses to what happens to me are determined by my perceptions and my perceptions are determined by my mind. I am completely responsible in every way for all that I see and how I see it.

Perhaps at one time this would have felt oppressive. I do remember feeling overwhelmed at times and asking Holy Spirit to help me. Two things happened that helped me to see it all differently, and to accept the responsibility that is clearly mine. The first was that I realized I am responsible for the world I see, but I am not guilty for it.

The only reason I was running from the responsibility, trying to project it onto others is because I thought I was guilty. It was the guilt that was oppressing me, not the responsibility. Once I realized that I could not be guilty, and could accept at least to some degree that I am the completely free Son of God and can have any experience I want, I felt the burden of guilt lift and I could breathe again.

Once I was not afraid of my responsibility I could see that this knowledge was my salvation. If I am responsible for everything that means I can change my mind and undo what has been done. If my holy mind established everything I presently see, it can establish that which I now prefer to see. I do this through the Holy Spirit in my mind.

And that brings me to the second really important understanding. I do not heal my mind; the Holy Spirit does that on my behalf. I have an essential role to play, and that is to understand I need healing and then to desire and accept that healing. The rest is accomplished without my help. I think of this as setting aside all thinking, all active participation. I sit quietly in God and invite healing to take place. I open to healing and I allow it to happen.

It sounds so easy, and it is easy. Yet, I still some resistance, but not much. I see the ego mind trying to take a bigger part, but I don’t fall for that anymore. I used to fear that nothing this easy could be valuable but I have through practice come to realize the value of doing my simple part. I used to see myself choosing to stay in the story, trying to find a solution there, being the one who succeeds. But now more often than not, I see myself returning, over and over, to that quiet place in my mind, inviting the truth to join me there.

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