Corresponding Manual for Teachers Section

Chapter 3: How Is Healing Accomplished?

6. How Can the Perception of Levels and Orders of Magnitude of Difficulties in Healing Be Avoided?

The belief in levels and orders of magnitude is the basis for the world’s perception. It rests on differences, on uneven background and shifting foreground, on unequal heights and diverse sizes, on varying degrees of darkness and light, and thousands of contrasts in which each thing perceived competes with every other in order to be recognized. A larger object overshadows a smaller one. A brighter thing draws the attention from another with less intensity of appeal. And a more desirable idea, or one conceived of as more threatening by the world’s standards, completely upsets the mental balance. In reality, then, what the body’s senses perceive is only contrast and conflict—a colliding and striking together of impressions perceived as separate from one another and from the perceiver. Turn not to them for Peace and Understanding.

Illusions are always illusions of differences. How could it be otherwise? By definition, an illusion is an attempt to make real something recognized as being untrue but that is regarded by the mind as of importance. The mind therefore seeks to make something true that is not true out of its intensity of desire to have it for itself, or to keep it away from itself. As attempts to bring Truth to lies by trying to make lies different and separate from each other, with some of them more true than others, illusions are travesties of creation. Finding Truth unacceptable because of what It has been conceived to mean, the mind revolts against It and gives itself an illusion of victory. Finding the responsibility of true health a burden, the mind retreats into feverish dreams. And in these dreams the mind is separate, different from other minds, with different and conflicting interests of its own, and able to gratify its needs at the expense of others.

Where do all these differences come from? Certainly they seem to be in the world perceived to be outside the perceiver. Yet it is surely the mind that judges or assesses what the body’s senses perceive. It is the mind that interprets the senses’ messages and gives them “meaning.” And this meaning provided by the mind split from its Source does not exist in the world outside at all. What is perceived as the “reality” of an objective world “outside” of the mind is simply what the mind prefers. Its hierarchy of values is projected outward, and then it sends forth the body’s senses to find these contrasting values.

The body’s senses can never perceive except through differences. Yet it is not the messages the body’s senses bring back to the mind on which perception rests, it is the messages that were sent out to be found by the senses. The content and quality of perception was predetermined by the mind before it projected its values onto the world. Then only the mind itself assesses perception’s messages to complete the circle, so the mind alone is responsible for what it experiences. It alone decides, according to its hierarchy of meaning, whether what is perceived is real or illusory, pleasurable or painful, desirable or undesirable.

It is in the sorting out and categorizing activities of the mind that errors in perception enter. And it is here correction must be made. The mind classifies what the body’s senses bring to it according to its preconceived values, judging where each sense datum fits best. What basis could be faultier than this? Unrecognized by itself, the mind itself has asked to be given by its perceptions what will fit into these categories. And having “found” these as delivered by the body’s senses, it concludes that the categories must be true. On this the judgment of all differences in perception lies, because it is on this that the judgments of the world depend. Can this confused and senseless “reasoning” be depended on for anything other than chaos masquerading as order?

There can be no levels or orders of magnitude of difficulty in healing merely because all sickness is illusion. Is it harder to dispel the belief of a person experiencing insanity in a larger hallucination as opposed to a smaller one? Will they agree more quickly to the unreality of a louder voice they hear than to that of a softer one? Will they dismiss more easily a whispered demand to attack or hide in fear than a shout? And do the number of pitchforks the devils they perceive carrying affect their perception’s credibility for them? Their mind has categorized these perceptions as real, and so they are real to them.

These perceptions of differences, including the belief in a hierarchy of values and levels and orders of magnitude of difficulty, will only disappear when the person engaged in them realizes that they are all illusions, and chooses Truth instead, which is One and has no levels. This choosing is as simple as a “receiving device” – in this case the body’s senses, including its heart and brain – being tuned to a “higher frequency.” This “higher frequency” is the Real World, and entering into it is accomplished when a person chooses to forgive themself and others their illusions, and accept the miracle where the “lower frequency” of judgment was tuned to before.

And so it is with healing. The properties of the illusions of sickness that seem to make them different are really irrelevant, for their properties are as illusory as they are. The body’s senses will continue to perceive differences even after the Call to awakening has been answered by the Teacher of the Divine, but the mind that has let itself be healed will no longer give these differences any importance. There will be those who seem to be “sicker” than others, and the body’s eyes will report their changed appearances as before. But the healed mind will put them all in one category, which is that they are unreal.

This is the Gift of the Teacher Who heals the mind: the understanding that only two categories – Truth and illusion – are meaningful in sorting out the messages the mind receives from what appears to be outside of it. And of these two only one is real. Just as Reality is wholly real, apart from any appearances of size and shape and time and place, for differences cannot exist within It, so too are illusions without distinctions. The one Answer to sickness of any kind is healing. The one Answer to all illusions is Truth.