III. The God of Sickness, P 11
11 Only at the altar of God will you find peace. And this altar is in you because God put it there. His Voice still calls you to return, and He will be heard when you place no other gods before Him. You can give up the god of sickness for your brothers; in fact, you would have to do so if you give him up for yourself. For if you see the god of sickness anywhere, you have accepted him. And if you accept him you will bow down and worship him, because he was made as God’s replacement. He is the belief that you can choose which god is real. Although it is clear this has nothing to do with reality, it is equally clear that it has everything to do with reality as you perceive it.
Journal
Even though sickness is not real, because we believe it is real, it is our experience and so we suffer from that belief. As Jesus says in another place in the Course, “What you believe is true for you.” (I hope I am quoting that exactly right, but it is the essence of what he said, for sure.)
An important thing he is telling us here is that if we see sickness in anyone else, we will believe in it and so we will also experience sickness as if it is real. This doesn’t mean that I will not see that someone thinks they are sick and that their sickness is real. It means that I will not join them in their belief.
I have times when I support the belief in sickness in myself, but never completely. I might feel sick. I might notice the ego trying to interest me in sickness with its obsession with the body and how it feels. But I also know that this is not really a body thing. Sickness appears as if it is in the body, but it is really in my mind. It is more like it appears on the body in the same way a movie appears on the screen.
The actual idea of illness is in the mind, therefore, the only thing that needs to be healed is the mind that believes it could be sick. I am the Son of God, and I exist in God. I can only be what God is and God is not sick. Sickness is the thought of death, which is the thought of separation from God. Since I am a Thought of God, and thoughts do not leave their source, I cannot be anyplace except God.
God is Life, not death, so death cannot be in God, therefore death cannot be in me. Now I replace the word death with the word sickness, and I can do this because they are the same thing, and I see that I cannot have sickness in me. If I think I do, if I have an experience of sickness, I must be dreaming of something that cannot happen.
When it feels like in is happening, it is a painful dream and I want to stop dreaming it. I can stop dreaming it because I already have. We dreamt of separation and then we stopped thinking it. We are simply reliving the dream. Since Awakening has already occurred, I cannot fail to become aware of the truth at some point.
This is what I am doing now as I study and practice the Course. I am remembering the difference between dreaming of death and knowing Life. Part of that process is to see only the truth behind every illusion. When I see that someone is dreaming of sickness, the way I heal that one is to know this is not possible, no matter how dramatic the dream.
When I cannot do this, I release my fear and my false beliefs to the Holy Spirit so my mind can be healed. I do no one, myself or my brother, any good if I am an unhealed healer. To reinforce this I am re-reading today’s lesson. In Lesson 167, we are told there is no death, and we are told why this is true.
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