This morning we will talk about Lesson 76, "I am under no laws but God's." This is another
of those places in the Course which is so easily misunderstood and leads to such horrific
applications or misapplications of what the Course is teaching. Jesus' point in that lesson,
as he does in so many other places, is to give us a glimpse of what life is like as
we make our way up the ladder, when we reach the upper rungs of the ladder. He's giving
us a glimpse of what it means to live in this world as a body, as an advanced teacher of
God. He's giving us a glimpse of where this course is leading us and then what will be
beyond it. The point of the lesson in terms of what Jesus is teaching is how once we have
decided to be an ego, which means once we have decided to be a guilty Son of God instead
of a guiltless Son of God, is that we then identify with the ego's strategy, its means
of saving itself by projecting our self out of the mind into the body. And the purpose
of this is to keep us, as I always reiterate, is to keep us in a perpetual state of mindlessness.
If I am not a mind, how could I change my mind? And if I don't change my mind, how could
I correct my mistaken decision for the ego? So once I find myself in the world as a body
and a heavy veil or iron curtain falls across my mind so I have no recollection of the fact
that my mind has chosen this, I now have no recourse but to identify with the body that
I believe I am in. And once I do that, I'm under the body's laws. So what do we mean
by the body's laws? There are the obvious laws of development that I have to...before
I could run I have to walk, before I walk I have to crawl, before I crawl I have to
sit up. Before I talk I have to say different sounds like alalia. I just have to be able
to emit sounds and then over time I learn how to form these sounds into words. So there
are developmental stages. There are stages that we reach as we grow up from infancy to
childhood and later childhood to adolescence, late adolescence, maturity, old age, and death.
And there are laws that govern this roughly. There are laws of disease and sickness. There
are laws of gravity. There are laws of relationships. There are laws of reciprocity and on and on
and on. And these are all laws that we adhere to. If we don't breathe a certain way, every
fifteen or twenty seconds, we will die. If we don't have water to drink after several
days, if we don't have food to eat, after awhile our bodies will really suffer and will
eventually die and on and on. There are definite laws that govern how we live, both as individuals
as well as species, as well as any living thing on earth, and these laws hold as long
as we make the decision to be an ego which means we make a decision to be a body. And
certainly there is nothing in this course that would ever suggest that we should flagrantly
ignore these laws just because we're trying to prove we are not a body when we still believe
we are. The laws of God, on the other hand, are the laws, ultimately the laws of love,
the laws of eternal life, the laws of oneness, etc., all of which are different ways of talking
about the one Will of God or the One God Which has no form. So there are no laws in Heaven
as such. But to say we are under the laws of God means that we are under the law of
the right mind that is the reflection of Heaven's laws. So the vision of the right mind is that
we are all the same that is the reflection of Heaven's law of Oneness. Forgiveness which
is the central teaching of the Course which occurs when our mind chooses the Holy Spirit
as our teacher instead of the ego, that's a reflection of Heaven's law of love. What
the point of that lesson is is to have us recognize what we are doing. So when we are
sick, for example physically ill, we believe that certain things will help us and it doesn't
matter whether one practices traditional medicine or alternative medicine or no medicine. There
are specific things we think are wrong with us that certain things in the world that the
Course would call magic can help us. That's following the laws of the world and it doesn't
matter what laws they are or what camp you are in, there are certain laws. And what Jesus
would say is not that we should not avail ourselves of these laws but rather what we
should do is recognize that the real cause of our physical distress, the real cause of
our symptom, is the mind's decision to be guilty. That's where the distress comes from.
There is a line in Chapter 27 that says of all the many causes of our suffering we never
thought guilt was among them which really should actually mean our decision for guilt
because that's the cause of our suffering. So by placing ourselves under God's laws as
reflected through the Holy Spirit, what we are really saying is that the law of forgiveness
supersedes all the world's laws. My mind could be at peace. I could be in that quiet center,
I could be in that stately calm within regardless of what's happening to my body or the bodies
of my loved ones. The forms of what I call my illness may or may not disappear. That's
not the healing or the lack of healing. The lack of healing or the healing is my mind's
decision for guilt or for forgiveness. That's what places me under the laws of the Holy
Spirit which those laws are the reflection of God's laws. That's the point of that lesson,
that we be aware that we are following the world's laws because we want to remain as
a body and the most loving way to undo that is not to deny these laws when we still on
some level believe in them, but to look at what we are doing and have the full awareness
that we are still choosing to be under the world's laws or the body's laws as a defense
against God's laws. And if I could look at that in myself without judgment, that is the
healing because the sickness is my judgment, first of myself and then of my body, and the
healing is being able to finally look through my mind's right-minded eye and say this means
nothing. Whether I am practicing it or not, part of me knows I am under the laws of God
and not the laws of the world.