Day 122
21. WHAT IS THE ROLE OF WORDS IN HEALING?
1 Strictly speaking, words play no part at all in healing. The motivating factor is prayer, or asking. What you ask for you receive. But this refers to the prayer of the heart, not to the words you use in praying. Sometimes the words and the prayer are contradictory; sometimes they agree. It does not matter. God does not understand words, for they were made by separated minds to keep them in the illusion of separation. Words can be helpful, particularly for the beginner, in helping concentration and facilitating the exclusion, or at least the control, of extraneous thoughts. Let us not forget, however, that words are but symbols of symbols. They are thus twice removed from reality.
Many times I have heard people say that God always answers prayers, but sometimes the answer is no. I understand why they say this. They pray certain words and they do not seem to be answered. This paragraph explains why that is so. God does not hear our words. He hears only what we are really asking for, and one way that this causes confusion is that we don’t always acknowledge, even to ourselves, what it is we really want. So we don’t recognize the answer when we get it.
I have seen that sometimes I really want the opposite of what I ask for. In Chapter 8 of the Text, it says:
Yet you are not asked to dispel your hallucinations alone. You are merely asked to evaluate them in terms of their results to you. If you do not want them on the basis of loss of peace, they will be removed from your mind for you.
And certainly this has been my practice for a long time now and so I know that it works. Yet sometimes what I say I want is incongruent with what I really want. I notice that I am not at peace. I fully realize that peace is not restored by a change in circumstances, but in a change of mind. I am not confused about this part. So I ask that the belief behind my lack of peace be healed. The incongruence occurs because while I do want to be peaceful, I don’t want to give up the belief that has created a loss of peace. When this is the case I am not really asking for healing even though my words say that I am.
An example of this is occurred with the story of “Johnny” that I talked about before. I was judging Johnny as evil, and because this is not the truth and not the Will of God, I was miserable. I cannot judge and be at peace and I really wanted my peace back. But at the same time, I could not, for a long time, bring myself to forgive him or the situation or even myself for my judgments.
I knew that I was supposed to see him as innocent, but I kept looking at his actions and believing them and so I saw only guilt. I would ask that my thinking be corrected, but in my heart I still wanted him to be guilty. God did not hear my words that said that I was ready to have my false belief removed. He heard only my heart that said I wanted to keep my judgment for now.
The very moment that I wanted to be at peace more than I wanted to find Johnny guilty, my heart prayer was answered. The anger I had felt just moments before was gone. The judgments I had made were no longer of interest to me. They were seen as the call for love that they are. Dear God, what on earth makes me ever cling to judgment when I can have this blessed peace anytime I choose? Well, each time this happens the contrast in what I think I want and what I really want motivates me to decide more quickly than before.
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