"A Course in Miracles" talks a great deal about suffering and pain, and I thought we could
spend this afternoon talking about that.
And specifically what I wanted to address is a situation that confronts almost everybody
at some point in their lives (in fact, I would say everybody at some point in their lives),
and that is not so much how they deal with the suffering in the world or how they deal
with their own particular suffering or distress, but how they deal with the distress of loved
ones, when—people in one’s family, circle of friends, colleagues at work; people whom
we love, whom we care about, who in one way or another are dependent on: what happens
when these people become ill?
What happens when these people become catastrophically ill?
What happens when these people eventually die?
How do we deal with this?
How do we deal with our anxiety?
How do I deal with our resentment?
How do we deal with our fear?
How do we deal with the idea, “What’s going to happen to me if this person is incapacitated?
What happens to me if this person dies?”
How do we deal with illness?
How do we deal with our anxiety?
How do we, as Course in Miracles’ students knowing that the cause of our distress is
only and solely within our decision-making minds, how do we deal nonetheless with what
is a very human and seemingly natural emotion to be anxious, to be upset when, again, a
loved one has an illness, when a loved one is about to undergo a procedure and we’re
not sure how it will end up?
Something that can be potentially life-threatening or something which ends up to be relatively
insignificant: how do we deal with this?
And here, as in every other place in the Course, the solution ends up to be quite simple.
What makes it difficult is the ego reactions that we bring to it and that we then become
much too tolerant of, and there’s always a fine line that we have to walk with this
Course and that is that we certainly do not want to deny what our experiences are.
We’re told early on in the text that to deny, to deny our physical experiences in
this world is “a particularly unworthy form of denial,” (T-2.IV.3:11), which is Jesus’
nice way of saying, “Don’t deny what you’re experiencing."
Yes, it’s all an illusion.
Yes, the body is not real.
Yes, there’s nobody out there, but don’t deny what you are feeling because if you
deny what you’re feeling you would never be able to get to the mind that is the ultimate
source of these bodily feelings, whether they’re physical experiences or the psychological ones.
So that we have to be able to feel something in order to then move beyond the feeling to
its ultimate cause, which is always the mind’sdecision to be with the ego instead of the Holy Spirit.
And so we don’t want to deny our feelings at the same time we don’t want to indulge them.
That’s the fine line that you want to stay with the feelings long enough that you’re
able to identify them, number one, and then, number two, be able to identify their source.
So we’re told at the beginning of Chapter 21, that the world we see, which means the
world we experience, the world that we believe is impinging on us and causing us to have
certain feelings, the world we see is an “outside picture of an inward condition,” (T-21.in.1:5).
So the point of any feeling no matter how justified it would be from the point of view
of the world, of any feeling, any reaction at all on a bodily level, by which we also
mean emotional level, is to cause our attention to first be rooted outside so that our inner
Teacher (which we now choose) guides us back through the pathway of the miracle to understand
that the world we experience, once again, is an “outside picture of an inward condition,”
(T-21.in.1:5), and the “inward condition” is the mind’s decision-making power.
It’s the mind’s decision to be an ego that is the cause of our distress.
So again, we don’t want to deny what our anxiety is, but we also don’t want to indulge it.
Again, we don’t want to be tolerant of our mind wanderings.
When Jesus tells us that we’re passively condoning our mind’s miscreations (T-2.VI.4:6)
he’s talking about what the ego has done with the world and with our body, giving it
power to affect us.
So if you truly want to be helpful to your loved one you have to do a number of things.
You first have to really be clear about what you’re feeling in the face of a loved one’s
sickness, illness, surgery, and ultimate death.
That you want to, you want to be true to what you’re feeling in the sense of not denying it
or pushing it away or doing "A Course in Miracles’" number on it by which I mean just
denying it under this kind of veil of metaphysics that, “Well, it’s all an illusion anyway.”
But, so that’s the first step (excuse me).
Then we—then as serious students of this Course, that we want to see the situation
as an opportunity for us to take these bodily feelings and reactions and use them to go
back to the mind and choose again.
So if I truly want to be of help to a loved one who is suffering, I want to be an example.
I want to be a demonstration of someone who could be peaceful regardless of what’s happening to the body.
So then I do this not only for my peace of mind but for the peace of mind of this person
that I love, that I care about.
That it’s not only their body that I care about, that I want to be healthy and to live,
I really (if I’m really being true to myself and my own spiritual path) I want to be—
I want to also love their mind and be concerned with their mind, that their mind make another choice.
So I want to be an example for them.
I want to make it about them but making it about me in the sense that I want to realize
this is an opportunity for me to learn the lesson that I could be peaceful regardless
of what goes on in the world.
And to the extent that I could learn that, to that extent I could teach it, or even better,
let the Holy Spirit’s Love teach through me through my demonstration of someone who
in the face of potential calamity can still be peaceful.
So I change this from an event that is occurring to the body of my loved one to now an event
that is an opportunity for his or her mind to be healed as well as mine.
So by “shifting teachers” we’re really talking about a shift in how we perceive what
seems to be outside, allowing ourselves to be led back by our Teacher to what is inside
and to truly not only look at the problem, but then make a decision to solve the problem by choosing again.