II. The Shift in Perception, P 4
4 With this idea is pain forever gone. But with this idea goes also all confusion about creation. Does not this follow of necessity? Place cause and effect in their true sequence in one respect, and the learning will generalize and transform the world. The transfer value of one true idea has no end or limit. The final outcome of this lesson is the remembrance of God. What do guilt and sickness, pain, disaster and all suffering mean now? Having no purpose, they are gone. And with them also go all the effects they seemed to cause. Cause and effect but replicate creation. Seen in their proper perspective, without distortion and without fear, they re-establish Heaven.
Journal
I find the idea of pain and sickness as a function of the mind to be easy to understand. I believe what I read here. The body is not the source of what seems to be happening to it. It is the mind that creates and the mind that produces form, all form, including pain and sickness. When I feel pain, I remind myself that the pain did not originate in the body, but in my mind. Even further, it is not in my body at all but in my mind being projected onto the idea of a body.
If pain and sickness occur as a function of the mind, then it is the mind that is cause and the body experience as effect. And if this is true for pain and sickness and the body, then it is true for every form within the world, and this means that the mind is the cause of the world altogether. The mind is the cause of all of it, and the forms we see with our eyes are the effect of what the mind caused. What this means is that we have been wasting our time trying to heal and fix the effect. It is the cause that must be adjusted if we want a different effect.
What would be the outcome of placing cause and effect in their true order? Here is what has changed thus far within my story of the body and the world around me. When I get sick, I never look for a cause outside my mind. The idea of one might come into my mind briefly, but I know that is just an old habit and meaningless to me. I think the most persistent of these ideas is that the size and shape and weight of my body are caused by outside forces like what I eat and how much exercise I get. I still go back and forth on that even though I know the truth.
I still get sick sometimes but because I know the cause, I immediately turn to the Holy Spirit to heal my mind of the beliefs that produced this form. As Jesus told us, all thought produces form at some level. If my thought is of the lower level, that is untrue thoughts, I will see it as form in the body and other places in this world. Even the truest perception will not produce form on a higher level, I think, but just make for a happier dream.
If the thought is of the higher level, that is, true thoughts or thoughts I think with God, then I assume I will see it as a higher form, at another level. There is a place in the Course where Jesus tells us that there is a real world beneath this illusion we have made. So maybe that is how higher thoughts produce a higher form. Who knows what that is like? Maybe a world of light and color, of pure love, beautiful beyond our imagining. But I digress.
The point that Jesus is making here in this paragraph is that all we see is caused by our mind. If we are willing to accept this, and if we are willing to allow the mind to be purified of ego thinking, then all we see will change. Pain and sickness, poverty, cruelty, suffering and death, all will be gone because the sick mind that caused these things will have been healed. From a healed mind comes a healed world. It is the only way that this can work. Cause is first, effect follows. The final outcome of this lesson is the remembrance of God.
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