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Chapter 2: The Psychological Foundation of Miracles ²

 

5. Healing as Release from Fear

Our emphasis will now be on healing. The Atonement is the principle, miracles are the means, and healing is the result. Those who speak of “the miracle of healing” are combining a cause-and-effect sequence that must be kept distinct and followed for the end to be achieved. Healing is not a miracle, rather, miracles lead to healing. The Atonement, or the final miracle, is the Remedy. As a miracle Itself – an Expression of Divine Love – the Atonement is purely a means, like all the miracles in Its service, while any type of healing that results from It and Its miracles is an end. The total healing of the mind is the final Goal or End both of miracles and of Atonement. Nothing beyond that is needed.

The magnitude of error or illness to which a miracle or the Atonement is applied is irrelevant. Essentially all healing is the release from fear. To undertake being an instrument or means of healing, i.e., of releasing from fear, you cannot be fearful yourself. In addition, you will feel a compelling impulse to offer healing to others when you are free from fear, as healing has been offered to you. Their healing merely witnesses or attests to your own.

A major step in the Atonement Plan is to undo error at all levels where it occurs or seems to have effects. Illness, which is really “not right-mindedness,” is the result of level confusion in the sense that it always entails the misbelief that what is amiss on one level – the mind – can adversely affect another – the body – though this sequence almost always appears reversed to the body’s senses. It has been clarified that miracles are the means of correcting level confusion. In reality, all mistakes must be corrected at the level at which they occur. Only the mind is capable of error. The body can act erroneously, but this is only because it has responded to misthought. The body itself can only bring about what the mind decides to manifest through it. The belief that it can bring about anything independently of mind, a fundamental error responsible for most of the fallacies already referred to, produces all physical symptoms of illness.

All physical illness represents a belief that the body can bring about something that isn’t in response to thought, or in this case, misthought. In fact illness is the belief that the body is completely unconnected to mind in any but a superficial way. This is the basis for the belief that the physical world itself contains a power that is not the result of thought, an autonomous force that can effect and even overwhelm the mind. Ultimately this becomes the belief in “magic” as enchantment, a phenomenon that in reality is simply the power of the mind manifesting mindlessly and therefore harmfully. The entire distortion that brings about such belief in “magic” rests on the belief that there is a creative ability in matter that can control the mind. This fallacy can work both ways, i.e., it can be falsely believed either that the mind can miscreate in the body or that the body can miscreate in the mind. When you become clear that the mind, which is the only level of creative activity, cannot create beyond itself, and therefore that the body is safe from miscreation and that the mind can be healed of its own, then neither confusion need occur.

The reason that the mind alone can create is more obvious than may be immediately apparent. The Creation has already been created perfect. The body, and indeed all that is perceived as an outer physical world, is a learning device for the mind, allowing it to perceive itself reflected outwardly. Learning devices are not lessons in themselves. Their purpose is merely to facilitate the learning of the learner. The most that a faulty use of a learning device can do is to fail to facilitate learning. It does not have the power in itself to introduce actual learning errors, though its wrong use can perpetuate them in the mind of those making them.

The body, if properly understood in service to the Atonement, shares the invulnerability of the Atonement to double-edged application. This is not because the body is a miracle (recalling that miracles are expressions of Love, and therefore of Limitlessness), but because it is not inherently open to misinterpretation unless it is moved to a symbolic level by the mind. The body, like the physical world of which it is a part, is merely a fact in the limited space-time experience. Its abilities can be, and frequently are, overestimated. However, it is almost impossible to deny its existence. Those who do are engaging in a particularly unnecessary and therefore unproductive form of denial.

Just as it isn’t necessary to protect the mind by denying that which isn’t the mind (the body), it is a wrong use of denial to doubt that the mind can think wrongly, or miscreate (though never in Reality, but only in a dream). If one denies this unfortunate aspect of its Power, one is also denying the Creative Power of Thought Itself.

All physical or material means that a person accepts as remedies for bodily ills are simply the repackaging of enchantment magic principles that attribute to the body or to matter creative abilities in itself. It was the first level of the error to believe that the body made its own illness, or that matter apart from mind caused it. Thereafter, it is a second misstep to attempt to heal it through non-creative, i.e., physical, agents. It does not follow, however, that the application of these very weak corrective devices is wrong or “evil.” Sometimes an illness has such an undeniably strong hold over an individual’s mind as to render the person temporarily inaccessible to Atonement and Its miracles, particularly when fear of the illness has taken hold of the mind. In this case, one may be wise to utilize a temporary releasing approach to mind and body in which something from the physical world is temporarily given healing belief. This is because the thing that can least help the non-right-minded (the sick) is an increase in fear. They are already in a fear-weakened state. If they are suddenly exposed to a complete healing through a miracle, without being prepared for such an experience, their mind may react in the opposite direction and be precipitated into panic. This is particularly likely to occur when upside-down perception resulting from a belief in enchantment magic has induced the idea that miracles, being associated with such “magic,” are frightening.

The value of the Atonement in healing is that the manner in which It is expressed doesn’t matter. In fact, if It is used truly It will inevitably be expressed in whatever way is most helpful to the receiver, not the giver. This means that a miracle, to attain its full efficacy, must be expressed in a language that the recipient can understand without fear. It does not follow by any means that this is the highest level of communication of which a person is capable. But it does mean that it is the highest level of communication of which a person is capable in the moment. In the healing experiences that I shared with others while walking on the Earth this is exactly what I strove to do, and now it is my privilege to help you learn to do the same.

A major aim of the miracle is to raise the level of communication, not to impose misdirected regression upon it through being improperly used, i.e., used outside of the Wholeness of Atonement. To safeguard against such regression it is essential that miracle workers understand fully the fear of Release their sisters and brothers may have. Otherwise, they may unwittingly foster the misbelief that Release is imprisonment, a belief that is very prevalent in the separated ones. This misperception arises from the attempted protection device – a misdirected defense – that the belief in harm can be limited to the body. This defense is attempted because of the much greater fear (which this belief counteracts) that the mind can actually hurt itself. Neither error is meaningful because the miscreations of the mind do not exist in Truth, as that was a limit put on the mind’s creative activity in its creation by the Divine. That recognition is a far better protection device than any form of level confusion because of the advantages of introducing correction at the level of the error.

It is essential to consistently remember that only mind can create at all. Implicit in this is the corollary that correction belongs at the thought level and not at either level to which creation is inapplicable—i.e., the Perfection of the Divine’s Creation already created and accomplished, or the neutrality of the physical world. To repeat an earlier statement, and also to extend it somewhat, the Creation is already perfect and therefore does not require correction. The body does not really exist except as a learning device for the mind. This learning device is not subject to errors of its own because it was brought into existence by the mind but doesn’t have creative Power itself. It should be obvious, then, that correcting the actual source of creative activity – the mind – by inducing it to give up miscreation is the only application of correction that is inherently meaningful at all.

It was said before that enchantment is essentially mindless, or the harmful (miscreative) use of mind. Physical medicines are a form of “spells” within this “magic” framework. In one way they are a more benign form of spells than others in that they do not entail the possession fallacy that enters when a mind believes that it can possess or be possessed by another. Since the medicine form of the belief in spells, though still incorrect, is considerably less dangerous, it has its advantages. It may be particularly helpful to those health practitioners or therapists who really want to heal but are still fearful themselves of the Power of the mind, and would therefore convey this fear to their patients were complete healing to occur through a miracle. By using physical means to induce or invite the acceptance of healing, they are not engaging in any form of enchantment or imprisonment, even though they are also not applying the Atonement. This means that though their minds may be dulled by fear, they are not actively engaged in distortion.

Those who are afraid of using the mind directly to heal are right in avoiding such healing, because the very fact that they are afraid has made them vulnerable to miscreation. They are therefore likely to misunderstand any healing they might induce or invite, and, because egocentricity and fear usually occur together, may be unable to accept the real Source of the healing. Under these conditions it is safer for them to rely temporarily on physical healing devices because at least they cannot misperceive these as their own creations. As long as their own vulnerability persists, it is best, given their positions as health practitioners, for them to refrain from even attempting miracles with regard to healing.

Of course, the dependence on physical agents as means for healing that occurs with health practitioners or therapists when their use becomes more than temporary, and the transference of this dependence and misuse to the minds of those in their care, becomes a matter more deeply embedded in the belief in enchantment magic, and therefore more prone to harmfulness.

This Course shared previously that the miracle is an expression of miracle-mindedness. Miracle-mindedness merely means consistent right-mindedness. Right-mindedness neither exalts nor depreciates the mind of the miracle worker or of the miracle receiver. However, as a creative act the miracle need not await the right-mindedness of the receiver. In fact, its purpose is to restore a person to their right mind. But it is essential that the miracle worker be in their right mind, i.e., at least temporarily free from judgment and fear, or they will be unable to help reestablish right-mindedness in someone else.

It is important to be clear that the healer who relies on their own readiness to heal is distorting their understanding. They are perfectly safe in performing miracles as long as they are completely unconcerned about their own readiness to heal, but maintain a consistent trust in mine. This trust is miracle-readiness. Errors in understanding about readiness inevitably introduce inefficiency into the miracle worker’s behavior, and temporarily disrupt their miracle-mindedness. We have established that, for all corrective processes, the first step is knowing that doubt is fear. Unless fear had entered the mind at some point, the procedure to correct fear would never have become necessary. If your miracle-working propensities are not working, it is always because fear has intruded on your right-mindedness, and has literally upset it, that is, turned it upside down through level confusion, in this case confusing what your function and responsibility are and what mine and Spirit’s are.

All forms of not-right-mindedness are the result of refusal to accept the Atonement for yourself. Miracle workers who do accept Atonement place themselves in the position to recognize that those who need to be healed are simply those who have not yet accepted Atonement for themselves, at least with regard to the situation at hand. If you feel the vast radiant Range of your own inner Illumination, it will be because you become aware that your right-mindedness is healing in itself.

The sole responsibility of miracle workers is to accept Atonement themselves. This means that they know that mind is the only creative level, and that its errors are healed by the Atonement. Once they accept this, their mind can only heal. By denying their mind any harmful or destructive potential outside itself, which is the right use of denial, and reinstating its purely constructive powers through knowing that the mind’s errors, or harmful potential, have already been healed and undone by the Atonement, they place themself in a position where they can help undo the level confusion of others. The message that they then give to others is the truth that their minds are really similarly creative, and that their own miscreations cannot hurt them. By affirming this, the miracle worker releases the mind from overestimating its own learning device – the body – and restores the mind to its true position as the learner in the process of awakening.

It should be reemphasized that the body does not learn, just as it has no creative function. As a learning device it merely follows the initiative of the learner, but if it is falsely endowed with self-initiative it becomes a serious obstruction to the learning it should facilitate.

In this world only the split mind is capable of becoming illuminated because only it has become dimmed. The spirit is already illuminated in its Oneness with the Divine, and the body in itself is too dense for the Light of Thought to radiate through it unobstructed as Illumination. The mind, however, can bring its own Illumination to the body by recognizing that the density of matter is the opposite of the Lightness of true Intelligence, and not conducive to independent learning. The body is, however, easily brought into accord with a mind that has learned to see beyond matter’s density to Light.

Corrective learning always begins with awakening the spiritual eye and turning away from belief in physical sight. This entails fear when people are afraid of what their spiritual eye will see, which was why they closed it in the first place. It was said before that the spiritual eye literally cannot perceive error, and is capable only of seeing beyond it to the Defense of Atonement. There is no doubt that in separated ones the spiritual eye does initially produce extreme discomfort by what it beholds. The thing that people forget is that the discomfort is not the final outcome of the spiritual eye’s seeing. When the spiritual eye is permitted to see the defilement of the inner Altar, it also immediately sees the Atonement, which has been placed where It is needed—on the Altar. In reality, nothing that the spiritual eye sees can induce fear. Everything that results from accurate spiritual awareness in this world is merely directed toward Correction. Discomfort is aroused only to bring the need for Correction unequivocally into awareness.

What the physical eyes look upon is not corrective, nor can it be corrected by any device that can be physically perceived. As long as people believe in what their physical sight tells them, all their corrective behavior will be misdirected. The reason that real vision is obscured is because people believe, at a level of consciousness not accessible to normal awareness, that they cannot endure perceiving their own defiled Altar. But since the Altar has been defiled, this fact becomes doubly dangerous unless it is perceived. This perception is totally non-threatening because of the Atonement. The fear of healing arises in the end from an unwillingness to accept the unequivocal fact that healing is necessary and to accept responsibility for the Power of one’s thought that has been misused in inducing the dream world of illusions. The fear arises because of the necessary willingness for a person to see what they have done to themself.

Healing is an ability that was bestowed upon humanity after the separation, before which it was completely unnecessary. Like all aspects of the space-time belief, healing ability is temporary. However, as long as time persists, healing remains among the stronger human protections. This is because healing always rests on charity, and charity is a way of perceiving the true Perfection of another, even if they cannot perceive it themself.

Most of the loftier concepts of which people are currently capable are time-dependent. Charity is really a weaker reflection of a much more powerful Love-Encompassment, which is far beyond any form of charity that people can conceive of as yet. Charity is essential to right-mindedness, in the limited sense to which right-mindedness can now be attained. Charity is a way of perceiving others as if they had already gone far beyond their actual accomplishment in time. Since their own thinking is temporarily faulty, they cannot see the Atonement themselves or they would have no need for charity at all. The charity that is accorded them is both an acknowledgment that they are yet weak, and a recognition that they can again be strong. The way in which both of these beliefs are stated clearly implies their dependence on time, making it quite apparent that charity rests within the framework of human limitations, though toward the higher levels.

It was said before that only revelation transcends time, having nothing to do with time at all. The miracle, as an expression of true human charity, can only at best shorten time. It must be understood, however, that whenever a person offers a miracle to another, they are shortening the suffering of both. This introduces a Correction into the Divine Record, which corrects retroactively as well as progressively.