This morning we will discuss healing. Other themes that we've discussed that are similar
would be forgiveness and the miracle, and healing would also fall into that same category
as being a correction. One of the most important things to remember when we begin to discuss
healing is that despite what our experience might be, despite even what certain passages
in the Course might sound like, healing is not of the body. Healing can only be of the
mind because there is only the mind. Despite our experience of physical and/or psychological
symptoms, the only true symptom, the only true problem is the mind's decision for guilt.
There's a passage in Chapter 27 where Jesus says of all the many causes of our pain and
suffering that we never thought guilt was among them, that we are all very, very good
as individuals and societies as to seemingly identify the causes of our suffering: physical,
psychological, genetic, biological, physiological, political, economic, social, etc. But we never
recognize because we are so identified with the body that the problem always lies in the
mind and always lies in the mind's decision to make the ego thought system of guilt and
separation real. That is the sickness. In Chapter 2 where Jesus specifically talks about
healing, he cautions us against level confusion. And the level confusion he is speaking about,
which also is spoken about in the early miracle principles at the beginning of the text, that
the level confusion is the confusion of the level of mind and body where we think that
it's the body that's sick and therefore that means that it's the body that has to be healed.
The problem is that it is never the body that is sick because there is no body. At no single
instant, the Course says, does the body exist at all, meaning in the holy instant the body
does not exist because there is no thought of separation in the holy instant, which is
the correction for the unholy instant in which we do believe that the separation from God
has occurred. So that the ego very cleverly causes us to become mindless, projecting itself
which is a thought in the mind onto the body causing a veil of forgetfulness to fall across
the mind. So we have no memory that we are a mind and all we are aware of is that there
is a body. And the body has problems, and the body's problems have to be healed. And
obviously there are many religions and spiritualities that address the whole idea of healing. People
talk about healing words and healing books and healing properties of water, healing hands,
none of which is what the Course means by healing once again. The value of having a
disturbance on the level of the body, whether it's emotional or physical, is that it calls
our attention to there being a problem. And what Jesus helps us recognize is that the
world we see, the body we feel, the suffering we experience is an "outside picture of an
inward condition" In other words that we use the physical symptom as a means of returning
to the mind's symptom. The world is an "outside picture of an inward condition," the inward
condition being the mind's mistaken choice for the ego. That is the sickness. In the
Psychotherapy pamphlet, Jesus talks about sickness and he talks about that a sick body
mimics the deformity of the deformed thought which is guilt. When the mind chooses guilt,
we become deformed. We become unnatural. That is the problem and that is the symptom, but
the ego cleverly has us take that symptom, repress it, or deny it, and then project it
out so it now appears to be in the mindless body. And if we are mindless, then there is
no way we could exercise the mind's power to choose thereby choosing innocence over
guilt, the Holy Spirit over the ego, forgiveness over attack. So the healing always is of the
mind and there is only one healing. So just as we could say "There is no order of difficulty
in miracles," we could also say as the Course says, "there is no order of difficulty in
healing" because it is not the multitudinous symptoms that the body appears to have that
is the problem and that requires healing. It's always and only the single mistake that
we all made collectively and we continue to make individually of choosing the ego instead
of the Holy Spirit. Once we define the problem as the mind's decision for guilt, then the
solution is obvious. It's the mind's decision for forgiveness. But as long as we see the
problem on the level of the body, exercising the level confusion I just discussed, then
there is no hope and nothing will ever be healed. No sooner is one physical problem
healed than another rises to take its place. No wonder is one illness eradicated from the
earth, then another rises to take its place. There will always be problems in the world
as long as we hold on to our belief in guilt. We undo our belief in guilt and there is nothing
left to project and therefore as the Course says, the body is healed...not necessarily
because the symptoms disappear but because our experience of the illness disappears.
And if there is no guilt, there is no illness and there is only the peace of God.