VIII. The Body as Means or End, P 6
6 Sickness is a way of demonstrating that you can be hurt. It is a witness to your frailty, your vulnerability, and your extreme need to depend on external guidance. The ego uses this as its best argument for your need for its guidance. It dictates endless prescriptions for avoiding catastrophic outcomes. The Holy Spirit, perfectly aware of the same situation, does not bother to analyze it at all. If data are meaningless there is no point in analyzing them. The function of truth is to collect information that is true. Any way you handle error results in nothing. The more complicated the results become the harder it may be to recognize their nothingness, but it is not necessary to examine all possible outcomes to which premises give rise in order to judge them truly.
I am trying to remember what it feels like to be really sick so that I can bring these ideas into my mind and visualize them first from ego and then from Holy Spirit. It occurs to me that this is just as true when applied to someone else since there is no one else. So I am thinking about my son who has experienced sickness and injury in the last few years.
When he was very sick and we didn’t know why, I was very frightened that I would lose him. I pushed him into seeing one doctor after another, trying to find the cause and so find a solution. My fear drove my thoughts and my actions. My fear kept me from recognizing the nothingness of the sickness.
In the end, I finally desired peace more than I desired anything else and so that is what I received. In the end, the doctors never discovered a cause or a solution, but his body recovered anyway. The Holy Spirit didn’t need to take x rays or MRIs. It didn’t need to do anything with the body because the body was not the cause and so the body could not be the solution.
“The function of truth is to collect information that is true.”
So in the end, the Holy Spirit showed me the truth that sickness is an illusion and is not the Will of God, therefore it cannot exist. It collected the truth for me and showed it to me.
Only the mind can be sick and only the mind can be healed. When my mind was ready to accept healing, my son’s body was healed. This is not really surprising when it is remembered that there is only one of us and that the idea of body is in the one mind. It is not necessary that I accept healing once and for all to experience a miraculous healing of the body, mine or someone else’s. It is only necessary that I have a moment of pure clarity, a whole hearted desire, and in that holy instant, the miracle occurs.
My son also had a back injury that has not healed, even with surgery. He suffers so much and the ego mind has gone all over the place with this. I feel guilty because I have not been able to do anything about this. His pain triggers the belief in pain in my mind and I suffer with him. When I am away from him I get on with life and don’t think about him and his pain and then I feel guilty for that. I have had so much guilt and fear about his suffering that I project it onto him and resent him for this, and make the whole thing his fault which of course only increases the guilt.
As we have been learning in this section, sickness is caused by the belief that the body is for attack and the belief that I am the body. Everything that the ego says about this situation is that I am guilty. Guilt is an attack. I am using the body for the purpose of attack when I choose to believe in guilt. We are also learning that a sick body does not make any sense. Jesus says this:
Sickness is meaningful only if the two basic premises on which the ego’s interpretation of the body rests are true; that the body is for attack, and that you are a body. Without these premises sickness is inconceivable.
Here is what I have learned so far from this experience with my son.
Guilt is an attack whether it is directed inward or outward.
I am innocent and so is my son.
Sickness (pain, suffering, death) is inconceivable.
If I perceive sickness it is because I have mistaken myself for a body that is for attack.
Healing is of the mind.
When I notice my mind looking for solutions outside itself, and when I notice I believe the guilt thoughts in the mind, and when I notice the desire to project (attack), I realize my mind is sick and I need to be healed. I ask for healing and accept the Atonement to the degree I am able.
I am learning that healing that is requested is given. I am learning to disregard appearances and see with Christ Vision the answer that is before me, not the illusory effects of the mistaken thoughts.
I am learning to forgive myself for not doing this perfectly.
My mind is being healed and the more this happens the more I desire this healing above all else. The world is an accurate projection of the beliefs in my mind, so whatever I see in the world (including a sick son) is healed within my mind because that is where they originated. It is being reinforced in my mind that I need do nothing. I let go of the guilt which drives the fear which provokes the need to attack, and all that is left is peace.
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