LESSON ONE HUNDRED-THIRTY-SIX

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE: The Course text is in bold face. The Guidance is in normal type In His Guidance, He has asked Me to capitalize the pronouns You and We as an acknowledgement of the Divinity of All of Us, an acknowledgement of Equality, an expression of His Love and respect for You. When You see the word ‘YOU’ capitalized in the Guidance, know that He is not just speaking to YOU, He is honoring YOU.

L e s s o n  136

Sickness is a defense against the truth.

It is a statement that the body is real, can act independently from Your mind, and do You in without Your consent.  This is why it is so popular: it does reinforce the ego point of view.

And if anyone should suggest that illness is but self-created, the denials would come thick and fast as in the childhood game Who Stole the Cookies from the Cookie Jar?   Not Me!  Yes You!  Couldn’t be! Then Who?

Must be My Father or My Mother, My Sister or My Brother, or My significant Other.  My Boss, My job, the economy.  What else could it be?  Surely it cannot be Me.

Technically it isn’t, for the Me You think You are – as well as all the Others – are but characters in Your dream,, and are surely not the Reality of You.

¹ No one can heal unless he understands what purpose sickness seems to serve. – The purpose is the root of all illness, and if the purpose isn’t healed, no matter the treatment, the root will sprout again. – For then he understands as well its purpose has no meaning. Being causeless and without a meaningful intent of any kind, – There is nothing meaningful about living as an ego. – it cannot be at all. When this is seen, healing is automatic. It dispels this meaningless illusion by the same approach that carries all of them to truth and merely leaves them there to disappear.

Bring darkness to the Light, bring Light to darkness, either way, the darkness disappears.

² Sickness is not an accident. Like all defenses, it is an insane device for self-deception. And like all the rest, its purpose is to hide reality, attack it, change it, render it inept, distort it, twist it, or reduce it to a little pile of unassembled parts. The aim of all defenses is to keep the truth from being whole. The parts are seen as if each one were whole within itself.

What Truth is being hidden?  What Reality must not be known under any conditions?  That the separation isn’t real, and this illusion can be over in an instant.  Our Oneness is intact.  We are not separate from One Another.  Sickness is an attack on YourSelf, by Yourself.

³ Defenses are not unintentional nor are they made without awareness. They are secret magic wands you wave when truth appears to threaten what you would believe. They seem to be unconscious but because of the rapidity with which you choose to use them. In that second, even less, in which the choice is made, you recognize exactly what you would attempt to do and then proceed to think that it is done.

⁴ Who but yourself evaluates a threat, decides escape is necessary, and sets up a series of defenses to reduce the threat that has been judged as real? All this cannot be done unconsciously. But afterwards your plan requires that you must forget you made it, so it seems to be external to your own intent-a happening beyond your state of mind, an outcome with a real effect on you instead of one effected by your self.

Indeed!  It’s like My analogy of the boulder I gave You years ago, which We will be glad to share with Every One.

[The Boulder: You are wandering through life on a curving twisting road.  Suddenly You dart off the road into the bush, taking a shortcut to the road ahead, where You find an enormous boulder and push it into the road, then race through the bush back to where You were and continue sauntering along the road, not paying attention until You walk smack into the boulder.  At which point You begin cursing the boulder and Whoever pushed it onto the road.]

⁵ It is this quick forgetting of the part you play in making your “reality” which makes defenses seem to be beyond your own control. But what you have forgot can be remembered, given willingness to reconsider the decision which is doubly shielded by oblivion. Your not remembering is but the sign that this decision still remains in force as far as your desires are concerned.

You state that You are not responsible for what happens to You.  God is the villain in every situation, for to Him this whole charade, this bizarre farce, is attributed.  An angry population must needs have a very angry god.

⁶ Mistake this not for fact. Defenses must make facts unrecognizable. They aim at doing this, and this they seem to do. Every defense takes fragments of the whole, assembles them without regard to all their true relationships, and thus constructs illusions of a whole which is not there. It is this process which imposes threat, and not whatever outcome may result.

It’s not just each situation which is unreal, but the entire dream in which they’ve been occurring.

⁷ When parts are wrested from the whole and seen as separate and wholes within themselves, they become symbols standing for attack upon the whole, successful in effect, and never to be seen as whole again. And yet you have forgotten that they stand but for your own decision of what should be real, to take the place of what is real.

Let Me say this with brevity.  When You think You are a separate Individual, standing apart from All Your Brothers then You do not understand the Sonship or Reality at All.  There is no separation!  It never happened but as a dream, and, therefore, it isn’t happening right now!  Your freedom does depend on nothing but Your state of consciousness.

⁸ 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.

Is this hard to grasp?  Let Me make it easier.  Remember when You were a child and were not prepared to a hard test that the teacher was giving, or You just plain didn’t want to go to school?  Where did that stomach ache come from?

⁹ How do you think that sickness can succeed in shielding you from 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 are you made one with it. Thus is your “true” identity preserved and the strange, haunting thought that you might be something beyond this little pile of dust silenced and stilled. For see, this dust can make you suffer, twist your limbs, and stop your heart, commanding you to die and cease to be.

Is this confusing?  Does it seem like I am saying that Your thoughts – Your intentions – make You sick on one hand, and on the other that there is no body to be sick?

Let Me clarify:  Your thoughts seem to create an experience for You – within a dream – that the body is a separate thing that controls Your ‘life’.  What I am saying is that the body – as You think it is – is not separate nor apart from consciousness, and identifies You, just not as You think it does.

It is not an object.  It is Light and Music and Fragrance, the Taste of Joy, the Feel of Happiness, and quite unique to every One of Us.

¹⁰ Thus is the body stronger than the truth, which asks you live but cannot overcome your choice to die. And so the body is more powerful than everlasting life, Heaven more frail than hell, and God’s design for the salvation of His Son opposed by a decision stronger than His Will. His Son is dust, the Father incomplete, and chaos sits in triumph on His throne.

This is the belief of the dream.  Now do You see why I have been with You two thousand years and will stay till You Awaken, and Wholeness be experienced again?

I would that You will stay with what I have just given You and let it sink in.  Let the rest of the Lesson be read in the light of these ideas.

¹¹ Such is your planning for your own defense. And you believe that Heaven quails before such mad attacks as these, with God made blind by your illusions, truth turned into lies, and all the universe made slave to laws which your defenses would impose on it. Yet who believes illusions but the one who made them up? Who else can see them and react to them as if they were the truth?

You are just dreaming.

¹² God knows not of your plans to change His Will. The universe remains unheeding of the laws by which you thought to govern it. And Heaven has not bowed to hell, nor life to death. You can but choose to think you die or suffer sickness or distort the truth in any way. What is created is apart from all of this. Defenses are plans to defeat what cannot be attacked. What is unalterable cannot change. And what is wholly sinless cannot sin.

The dream has not changed Reality, just Your experience, which is subjective.

¹³Such is the simple truth. It does not make appeal to might nor triumph. It does not command obedience nor seek to prove how pitiful and futile are your attempts to plan defenses which would alter it. It merely wants to give you happiness, for such its purpose is. Perhaps it sighs a little when you throw away its gifts, and yet it knows with perfect certainty that what God wills for you must be received.

Will You keep Truth awaiting while You stave off Your happiness?  And for a nightmare?

¹⁴ It is this fact which demonstrates that time is an illusion. For it lets you think what God has given you is not the truth right now, as it must be. The Thoughts of God are quite apart from time. For time is but another meaningless defense you made against the truth. Yet what God wills is here, and you remain as He created you.

‘Time’ claims something really happened: i.e. the separation.  This is but a dream.

¹⁵ Truth has a power far beyond defense, for no illusions can remain where it has been allowed to enter. And it comes to any mind that would lay down its arms and cease to play with folly. It is found at any time-today, if you will choose to practice giving welcome to the truth. This is our aim today. And we will give a quarter of an hour twice to ask the truth to come to us and set us free.

Here do I ask You for Your willingness.

¹⁶ And truth will come, for it has never been apart from us. It merely waits for just this invitation which we give today. We introduce it with a healing prayer to help us rise above defensiveness and let the truth be as it has always been:

¹⁷ Sickness is a defense against the truth.
I will accept the truth of what I am
And let my mind be wholly healed today.

Let Your mind and heart be open to this happiness and Truth.

¹⁸ Healing will flash across your open mind as peace and truth arise to take the place of war and vain imaginings. There will be no dark corners sickness can conceal and keep defended from the light of truth. There will be no dim figures from your dreams nor their obscure and meaningless pursuits with double purposes insanely sought, remaining in your mind. It will be healed of all the sickly wishes that it tried to authorize the body to obey.

Your eyes of Love will open with such Joy!

¹⁹ Now is the body healed because the source of sickness has been opened to relief. And you will recognize you practiced well by this-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.

And Your Identity is wonderful!

²⁰ 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.

All My words are Truth.

²¹ Yet this protection needs to be preserved by careful watching. If you let your mind harbor attack thoughts, yield to judgment, or make plans against uncertainties to come, you have again misplaced yourself, and made a bodily identity which will attack the body, for the mind is sick. Give instant remedy should this occur by not allowing your defensiveness to hurt you longer. Do not be confused about what must be healed, but tell yourself:

²² I have forgotten what I really am,
For I mistook my body for myself.
Sickness is a defense against the truth,
But I am not a body. And my mind
Cannot attack. So I can not be sick.

Jesus Loves Me, and His words are healing.

[Thank you Dear Brother]

*Sun~Rose is the scribe of the recently published book, “YOU ARE LOVED AND SAFE: PREP NOTES FOR EXPERIENCING GOD’S LOVE“, Jesus’ Guidance on the Miracle Principles

She is also author of, “RADIANT LIFE: RAW FOOD AND THE PRESENCE OF LOVE”

BOTH now available on amazon.com