Day 136: Sickness is a defense against the truth.

Today's lesson in A Course in Miracles was tough for me to accept.  Here is an excerpt from the workbook further explaining today's idea:

Sickness is a decision.  It is not a thing that happens to you, quite unsought, which makes you weak and brings you suffering.  It is a choice you make, a plan you lay, when for an instant truth arises in your own deluded mind, and all your world appears to totter and prepare to fall.  Now are you sick, that truth may go away and threaten your establishments no more.

How do you think that sickness can succeed in shielding you from the truth?  Because it proves the body is not separate from you, and so you must be separate from the truth.  You suffer pain because the body does, and in this pain you made one with it.

So sickness is a decision?  (This is what spun my head around.)  So that means my grandmother's stroke was a decision?  My uncle's fatal heart-attack was a decision?  My cousin's breast cancer was a decision?  Disease of any kind certainly does not appear to be a choice to me.  Why would anyone choose illness over health?

"But let's try to understand what the Course is saying," I thought.  Perhaps we unconsciously choose to be sick, as the excerpt above suggests, in order to protect what we know - our bodies - by identifying with them and the pain we feel when we are ill.  It's ironic that in trying to protect ourselves we would shield ourselves from the Real Truth (which is so different from the world we live in that it frightens us) by deciding to invite disease into our bodies.  What a backwards way of thinking.  And that's precisely what the Course is trying to tell us.

At the same time I questioned the validity of today's lesson, it had an eerie ring of truth for me.  The first paragraph from the excerpt above says, "[Sickness] is a choice you make, a plan you lay, when for an instant truth arises in your own deluded mind, and all your world appears to totter and prepare to fall."  This statement in particular was very timely, for over the last week I've commented on how the world was beginning to feel shaky for me.  Then on Day 130 I had the realization that I needed to relinquish all control in order for the Truth to come through.  Yet I have not quite learned how to do this.  So what happens a few days ago?  I catch a cold, of course.  For an instant, Truth arose in my mind, and when I closed up to hold onto my false sense of control, I became sick a few days later.  Perhaps the Course is right, after all.  Perhaps sickness, whether we are aware of it or not, is a choice.

If this is so, then healing really does begin in the mind.  Now this concept I have no trouble believing, and it's one the Course emphasizes often.  Yet when put into the context of a real life situation (whether its catching a cold or suffering a heart attack), it's a tough one to fully understand.  The meditation for today's lesson follows this idea:

Sickness is a defense against the truth.  I will accept the truth of what I am, and let my mind be wholly healed today.

The Course goes on to explain the state of our bodies once the mind has been healed in whole:

The body should not feel at all.  If you have been successful, there will be no sense of feeling ill or feeling well, of pain or pleasure.  No response at all is in the mind to what the body does.  Its usefulness remains and nothing more.

Perhaps you do not realize that this removes the limits you had placed upon the body by the purposes you gave to it.  As these are laid aside, the strength the body has will always be enough to serve all truly useful purposes.  The body's health is fully guaranteed, because it is not limited by time, by weather or fatigue, by food and drink, or any laws you made it serve before.  You need do nothing now to make it well, for sickness has become impossible.

This is another one that threw me for a loop.  Does this mean we can survive without food or drink or sleep?  After all, those are the laws which we prescribe to the body.  And perhaps what the Course says here is so, but only a fully enlightened soul could have such power over their mind that their body would not need these things to survive.  Biology tells us that our bodies will decay, that we need nourishment and rest to keep them healthy.  It seems here that A Course in Miracles is saying the opposite, that a True Awareness of Who We Really Are is all the nourishment we need.  Indeed, we have heard that Jesus and Gandhi and many spiritual leaders in our history went long periods of time without food or water or sleep, so perhaps there is truth in this.  Maybe I just have a difficult time grappling it because I love food and sleep so much :-)

In all seriousness, I do not doubt the power of mind over matter.  That is what today's lesson is ultimately about.  It all comes back to the basic principle that We are All One.  All minds are joined, and it is their connection to one another and to our Source which heals them all.  In healing the mind, we heal the body, for we recognize that sickness cannot be.  It has no Real existence.  If we can learn to fully accept Truth into our lives instead of holding onto our false sense of control, the lines we've drawn between one another will begin to dissipate, and we will no longer believe that we are separate.  This takes courage, no doubt, for it involves accepting what is unfamiliar to us in this world.  But in exchange we will inherit so much more.  We will be reunited with our Remembrance of what we always knew and what in the Core of our Being is more familiar than this world could ever be.  Perhaps then we will see all illness - no matter how severe it may seem - vanish under the Light of Truth.

I pray that Blessed Day comes for us all very soon.

Until tomorrow,
Journeyman