Corresponding Text Section
Chapter 8: The Journey Home
8. Healing as Corrected Perception
This Course has said that the Holy Spirit is the Answer. It is the Answer to everything, because It knows what the answer to everything is, and It offers this.
The ego does not know what a real question is, although it asks an endless number of them. But you can learn what a real question is, as you learn to question the value of the ego and thus establish your ability to assess its questions.
When the ego tempts you to choose sickness, do not ask the Holy Spirit to heal the body. For this would merely be to accept the ego’s belief that the body is the proper aim for healing, when it is only the symptom of thoughts of health or illness. Ask rather that the Holy Spirit teach you in that moment of choice the right framing or perspective of the body, for framing or perspective alone can be distorted, a result of wrong thinking. Only thought that causes distortion can be sick, because it can be wrong.
Wrong thought becomes distorted willing, which wants things to be as they are not. The Reality of Everything is totally harmless, because total Harmlessness is the Condition of Everything’s Reality. It is also the Condition of your awareness of Its Reality. You do not have to seek Reality. It will seek you and find you when you meet Its Conditions. Reality’s Conditions are Part of what It is. And this part only – meeting Its Conditions – is up to you. The rest is of Itself. You need do so little, because Reality is so powerful that your little part will bring the Whole to you. Accept, then, your little part, and let the Whole be yours.
Wholeness heals because it is of mind. All forms of sickness, even those causing death, are physical expressions of a fear of awakening to your true Power, which in this world includes the Power to heal. They are thus attempts to reinforce unconsciousness out of fear of consciousness. This is a way of trying not to know by rendering the faculties for knowing ineffectual.
“Rest in peace” is a blessing for the living, not the dead, because true Rest comes from awakening to Reality, not from sleeping or dying. Sleep and death are a temporary withdrawal; awakening is an eternal Joining. In the physical act of sleeping under the ego’s guidance, dreams may present illusions of joining, taking on the ego’s distortions about what joining means. But the Holy Spirit, too, has use for sleep in addition to its restorative function, and can use dreams on behalf of awakening if you will let It guide you.
How you wake each day is a sign of how you have allowed sleep to be used. To which guide did you give it? Whenever you wake dis-spiritedly or uninspired, even if physically restored, you can be sure that your sleep experience was not wholly of Spirit. You can indeed wake feeling “drugged by sleep,” but this will always be because you have misused it on behalf of sickness. Only when you wake joyously and inspired can you be sure you have fully utilized sleep according to the Holy Spirit’s Purpose for both body and mind.
Attuning your mind in the transition from the miracle and blessing of sleep well used to the consciousness of the new day, and the awakening lessons it holds, of course also depends on the guide and teacher you invite to assist you. But beginning the new day inspired has obvious advantages for this transition from sleeping to waking.
Sleep is no more a form of death than death is a form of unconsciousness. Un-consciousness or non-consciousness is impossible, as is death. You can rest in Peace only when you are awake to Life. Healing is release from the fear of awakening, and substitutes temporarily for the will to awaken. The will to awaken is the will to love, since all healing involves replacing fear with Love. The Holy Spirit cannot distinguish among degrees of error, for if It taught that one form of sickness is more serious than another, It would be teaching that one error can be more real than another. But Its Function is to distinguish only between the false and the true, replacing the false with the true.
The ego – the perspective of which always weakens the will – wants to separate the body from its connection with the mind, though the body is merely a projection of the mind. This is an attempt to weaken the body. But the ego actually believes that it is protecting the body. This is because the ego believes that mind is dangerous, and that to make mindless is to heal. But to make mindless is impossible, since it would mean to make un-conscious or non-conscious—to make nothing out of what the Divine created. In its confusion the ego despises weakness even though it makes every effort to induce it. It wants only what repulses it. To the ego this is perfectly sensible. Believing in the power of attack, this is what it wants.
You have begun to realize that this is a very practical course because it means exactly what it says. So do all sacred scriptures, if they are properly understood. There has been a marked tendency on the part of many of the Christian Bible’s followers, and also its translators, to be entirely literal about fear and its effects, but not about Love and Its Results. In this approach to understanding, “hellfire” literally means burning, but raising the dead becomes allegorical. Actually, it is particularly the references to the outcomes of Love that should be taken literally, because sacred scriptures from all traditions properly understood are about Love, being about the Divine.
The Bible enjoins you to be perfect like your Creator, to heal all errors of sickness, to take no thought of the body as separate, and to accomplish all things in my name. This is not to be understood as my name alone, for ours is a shared Identification. The Name of the Divine’s Children is One, and you are enjoined to do the works of Love because we share this Oneness. Our minds are whole because they are One. If you choose sickness in place of healing, and withdrawing in place of awakening and joining, you are temporarily withdrawing from me. But you cannot withdraw from me alone. You can only withdraw from yourself and your sisters and brothers, including me.
I would not ask you to do things that you cannot do, and it is impossible that I could do things you cannot learn to do. Given this, and given this quite literally, there can be nothing that prevents you from doing exactly what I ask. In fact, everything that is real helps you in this. I give you no limits because the Divine lays none upon you. When you limit yourself, we are not of one mind, and that is sickness. Yet sickness is not of the body, but of the mind. All forms of dysfunction are merely signs that the mind has split and has not yet accepted its unified Purpose to become whole again.
The Unification of Purpose, then, is the Holy Spirit’s only Way of Healing. This is because It is the only level at which healing means anything. The reestablishing of Meaning in a chaotic thought system is the only way to heal it.
This Course said earlier that your task is only to meet the Conditions for Reality, which means for Meaning, since Meaning Itself is of the Divine. Your Return to Meaning is essential to Divine Meaning, because your Meaning is Part of Its. Your healing, then, is Part of Its Health, because it is Part of Its Wholeness. The Divine cannot lose this, but you can forget that you know it. Yet this Wholeness and health are still Its Will for you, and Its Will must stand forever and in all things.
