III. The Function of the Teacher of God, P 1
1 If the patient must change his mind in order to be healed, what does the teacher of God do? Can he change the patient’s mind for him? Certainly not. For those already willing to change their minds he has no function except to rejoice with them, for they have become teachers of God with him. He has, however, a more specific function for those who do not understand what healing is. These patients do not realize they have chosen sickness. On the contrary, they believe that sickness has chosen them. Nor are they open-minded on this point. The body tells them what to do and they obey. They have no idea how insane this concept is. If they even suspected it, they would be healed. Yet they suspect nothing. To them the separation is quite real.
Journal
In the first paragraph, Jesus tells us that we do not change the patient’s mind for him. That is not our part. We will have to wait for the next paragraph to be told our part in their healing.
Here is what I love in this paragraph. Jesus is completely uncompromising in telling us that we choose our sickness; it does not choose us. I almost hate to write about this and I seldom post on my Facebook page my thoughts on this. Some people who are suffering from illness often take offense and will argue for their illness. I can understand this. I understand how the error occurs.
If someone has chosen illness and are in denial about this, they probably do not understand how it occurred. Sometimes we hide our motives from ourselves. I know that this has happened to me. It has been a while since I believed that sickness chose me, but even so, I am sometimes flummoxed as I try to understand why I did this to myself or how I did it.
What I have discovered through A Course in Miracles and my own Inner Teacher is that my choice for sickness is always driven by guilt. Guilt demands punishment and illness is one of the ways we punish ourselves. I may not know which particular story of guilt is the one that drove me to this punishment, but if I need to know, the Holy Spirit will inform me. Sometimes it doesn’t seem to matter. Guilt is not real and so none of the forms it takes are real.
I have learned that I hold onto sickness when I see some value in it. Sometimes I can find the value within the story. For instance, I need a headache so that I don’t have to do something I should have said no to in the first place. Or I choose sickness because I feel unloved or lonely and want someone to pay attention to me. The ego mind has use of sickness to keep us firmly in the story of separation and bodies. Ultimately, the ego uses sickness to prove that I am a body and so I cannot be part of God. Sickness settles it; I am not as God created me.
Another reason why the idea that we choose sickness is hard to swallow is that in the untrained mind it brings up guilt. It is bad enough to be suffering, one does not want to feel guilty for suffering as well. But as the mind is healed, the guilt falls away and responsibility takes its place. I am not guilty of anything, but I am responsible. And with the acceptance of responsibility, comes the solution.
If I chose sickness, I can choose health as easily. When I am occasionally sick, I ask the Holy Spirit to heal my mind of the beliefs that sourced this sickness. I become willing to look at my choice with the Holy Spirit and to hide nothing from Him or from myself. What is the value of this sickness? As I lose interest in keeping the sickness, it is no longer sustained by my mind and generally goes pretty quickly.
Of course, I don’t want a sick body. It is a miserable way to experience this illusion. But more importantly, I want the mind to be healed. The body is used by the ego to prove I am separate from God, but the Holy Spirit uses it to undo that belief. The body experiences sickness and that tells me that there is something in my mind that needs to be seen and released. The body is used as a classroom and as I learn my lessons, the body takes on a new purpose, that is to communicate love. I become a more effective teacher of God.
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