Sickness is a defense against the truth.
* To be honest with you I go about this entirely different! I feel this lesson falsely says Jesus permits us to be upset with illness or to see illness and that is bogus!
* It also puts the carriage before the horse by suggesting that the body be well before the spirit resolves the issue of God’s Existence as the Course has been taught for fifty years. THIS is also a FALSE interpretation of Jesus’ teachings.
* Bear in mind that this lesson is pertaining to the ideal world that God has given His Son and not the one that we reside in with the ego=god mentality.
1. No one can heal unless he understands what purpose sickness seems to serve. ²For then he understands as well its purpose has no meaning. ³Being causeless and without a meaningful intent of any kind, it cannot be at all. ⁴When this is seen, healing is automatic. ⁵It dispels this meaningless illusion by the same approach that carries all of them to truth, and merely leaves them there to disappear.
* I have received the witness of the Holy Spirit that the stories of suffering are the confusion of the Son of God from the original belief in the possibility of separation from God. I also know that the Holy Spirit can use that confusion as symbols and guideposts out of the confusion so I do not get stirred up by illness but ask what Spirit is trying to show me and have compassion for those who find themselves there.
2. Sickness is not an accident. ²Like all defenses, it is an insane device for self-deception. ³And 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. ⁴The aim of all defenses is to keep the truth from being whole. ⁵The parts are seen as if each one were whole within itself.
* The Holy Spirit bears witness of our unity from within the Atonement.
3. Defenses are not unintentional, nor are they made without awareness. ²They are secret, magic wands you wave when truth appears to threaten what you would believe. ³They seem to be unconscious but because of the rapidity with which you choose to use them. ⁴In 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.
* This is a powerful statement because it holds US ACCOUNTABLE for the tricks that we play on ourselves to convince us that God does not exist. Then we allow the mental games of our ego=god mind to gaslight us into believing that what we KNOW BEYOND DOUBT is false and we are at the mercy of chance, fate, or curse.
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? ²All this cannot be done unconsciously. ³But 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 yourself.
* This is where the gaslighting ourselves comes in.
5. It is this quick forgetting of the part you play in making your “reality” that makes defenses seem to be beyond your own control. ²But what you have forgot can be remembered, given willingness to reconsider the decision which is doubly shielded by oblivion. ³Your not remembering is but the sign that this decision still remains in force, as far as your desires are concerned. ⁴Mistake not this for fact. ⁵Defenses must make facts unrecognizable. ⁶They aim at doing this, and it is this they do.
* This is HUGE for anyone who would still deny the existence of God and our lack of personal power in the world.
6. Every defense takes fragments of the whole, assembles them without regard to all their true relationships, and thus constructs illusions of a whole that is not there. ²It is this process that imposes threat, and not whatever outcome may result. ³When 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. ⁴And 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.
* Holding a grudge, or even a criminal act, as real will LOCK us within this paradigm of self-imposed forgetfulness and suffering.
7. Sickness is a decision. ²It is not a thing that happens to you, quite unsought, which makes you weak and brings you suffering. ³It 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. ⁴Now are you sick, that truth may go away and threaten your establishments no more.
* Think of this “SICKNESS” not only as what happens to the body but what may be happening in our relationships and societies. These are ‘tricks of the mind’ that seek to deny our truth and locks us into turmoil.
* If you wish to demonstrate or protest against an established error or inequality one needs only to hold the truth within their own mind and being. Correction does not require putting oneself or others in harm’s way or forcing an issue. It requires only saying “NO” to the reality that any falsehood is real. Please be AWARE that you have the POWER to ALTER the state of affairs in your own community, nation, or around the world, and beyond through the courage of standing in your own personal witness that God IS despite what is offered you anywhere in your mind or in the physical world.
* Note the word ‘own’ in that last comment. We ‘own’ or are responsible for our mind and being, our community, nation and world and beyond, as well as our personal witness of God. THIS is the REALITY of OUR VERY EXISTENCE and declares our FREEDOM as SANCTIFIED by the Grace of God.
* (That is not to say that if you are in a dangerous situation you should not step out of it as you are able. Some things have gotten out of hand and if we can bring ourselves into a safe space physically we need to do so.)
8. How do you think that sickness can succeed in shielding you from truth? ²Because it proves the body is not separate from you, and so you must be separate from the truth. ³You suffer pain because the body does, and in this pain are you made one with it.
* Here we understand that we are not our emotions, feelings, or bodies but that they may be used as signposts by the Holy Spirit to see who we truly are.
⁴Thus is your “true” identity preserved, and the strange, haunting thought that you might be something beyond this little pile of dust silenced and stilled. ⁵For see, this dust can make you suffer, twist your limbs and stop your heart, commanding you to die and cease to be.
9. Thus is the body stronger than the truth, which asks you live, but cannot overcome your choice to die. ²And 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. ³His Son is dust, the Father incomplete, and chaos sits in triumph on His throne.
* These statements are NOT given to us to cause us to feel guilty but to motivate us to choose the truth that is within us.
10. Such is your planning for your own defense. ²And 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. ³Yet who believes illusions but the one who made them up? ⁴Who else can see them and react to them as if they were the truth?
11. God knows not of your plans to change His Will.
* Do not take this literally. God KNOWS ALL. Period. It means that He is NOT MOVED BY IT. It DOES NOT CHANGE WHO HE IS. THIS is what we want to emulate or be like when we engage with those who insist for the moment on being in ego=god mentality.
²The universe remains unheeding of the laws by which you thought to govern it. ³And Heaven has not bowed to hell, nor life to death. ⁴You can but choose to think you die, or suffer sickness or distort the truth in any way. ⁵What is created is apart from all of this. ⁶Defenses are plans to defeat what cannot be attacked. ⁷What is unalterable cannot change. ⁸And what is wholly sinless cannot sin.
* This describes how simple the “undoing” affects of the Atonement ARE. It simply UNDOES the belief in what never could have been.
12. Such is the simple truth. ²It does not make appeal to might nor triumph. ³It does not command obedience, nor seek to prove how pitiful and futile your attempts to plan defenses that would alter it.
* That sounds like what every church, ideology, or philosophy, religion, or person seeks to do with me. My sovereignty (freedom) is within my own mind in how I view my own existence. God granted me that at my creation.
⁴Truth merely wants to give you happiness, for such its purpose is. ⁵Perhaps 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.
13. It is this fact that demonstrates that time is an illusion. ²For time lets you think what God has given you is not the truth right now, as it must be. ³The Thoughts of God are quite apart from time. ⁴For time is but another meaningless defense you made against the truth. ⁵Yet what He wills is here, and you remain as He created you.
14. Truth has a power far beyond defense, for no illusions can remain where truth has been allowed to enter. ²And it comes to any mind that would lay down its arms, and cease to play with folly. ³It is found at any time; today, if you will choose to practice giving welcome to the truth.
15. This is our aim today. ²And we will give a quarter of an hour twice to ask the truth to come to us and set us free. ³And truth will come, for it has never been apart from us. ⁴It merely waits for just this invitation which we give today. ⁵We introduce it with a healing prayer, to help us rise above defensiveness, and let truth be as it has always been:
⁶Sickness is a defense against the truth.
⁷I will accept the truth of what I am, and let my mind be wholly healed today.
* MY surroundings do not need to alter for this to be so.
16. Healing will flash across your open mind, as peace and truth arise to take the place of war and vain imaginings. ²There will be no dark corners sickness can conceal, and keep defended from the light of truth. ³There will be no dim figures from your dreams, nor their obscure and meaningless pursuits with double purposes insanely sought, remaining in your mind. ⁴It will be healed of all the sickly wishes that it tried to authorize the body to obey.
* Knowing that God IS allows this to be so without any confirmation from the physical world. This is where joy, peace, and happiness that cannot be touched by the world of the ego-god mentality resides.
17. Now is the body healed, because the source of sickness has been opened to relief. ²And you will recognize you practiced well by this: The body should not feel at all. ³If you have been successful, there will be no sense of feeling ill or feeling well, of pain or pleasure. ⁴No response at all is in the mind to what the body does. ⁵Its usefulness remains and nothing more.
* Hear that. “If you have been successful, there will be no sense of feeling ill or feeling well, of pain or pleasure.” What this is implying is that YOUR sense of reality will no longer be wrapped up in the body. YOU will see the body as a tool of the Spirit to allow you to exist in form to bring the light of the truth that God exists into the world of ego=god mentality.
18. Perhaps you do not realize that this removes the limits you had placed upon the body by the purposes you gave to it. ²As these are laid aside, the strength the body has will always be enough to serve all truly useful purposes. ³The 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. ⁴You need do nothing now to make it well, for sickness has become impossible.
* I cannot express how much these statements irritate me because of the way that they will be understood. It has long been a witness to the ‘righteous’ that a sick person is a sinner and that is NOT TRUE.
* Once you KNOW the truth that God IS you still get to remain within the context of the ego=god physicality for some time, maybe for many lifetimes. This lesson seems to be speaking of form at the same time it is speaking of your mental understanding when in fact it can only be speaking to your mental understanding because this is what orchestrates what appears in form—though, at this point in our existence it may NOT BE IMMEDIATE at this lesson seems to suggest. THAT does NOT mean that the Course is wrong but our understanding of it is confused.
19. Yet this protection needs to be preserved by careful watching. ²If 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.
20. Give instant remedy, should this occur, by not allowing your defensiveness to hurt you longer. ²Do not be confused about what must be healed, but tell yourself:
³I have forgotten what I really am, for I mistook my body for myself.
⁴Sickness is a defense against the truth.
⁵But I am not a body.
⁶And my mind cannot attack.
⁷So I can not be sick.
* No, I cannot be sick, but the body will be laid down while the spirit/soul goes on and THAT WILL APPEAR AS SICKNESS. So, something in the translation of what Jesus was trying to say here was misunderstood and written askew. It will take the witness of the Holy Spirit to speak of the truth that is herein.
* This is how I relate to it at this time:
• These things have already been completely forgiven by me in the acceptance of the Atonement.
• I know that I exist in a world where ego=god mentality is currently accepted and appears to be manifest even though it has NO BEARING on reality.
• Regardless, I will know that all is perfect because God IS IN CHARGE, and trust that I will be guided moment by moment to the fulfillment of His Will according to the needs and wants of the Son of God in all of Creation and that I do not need to know the particulars of how that comes together.
• I may well be asked to simply, and quietly express contentment and gratitude for all that is and show respect and dignity to those who may feel worthless or forgotten within my sphere of expression.
(ACIM, W-136.1:1–20:7)
Till next time, God bless, debi.
Freedom Principles; At-One-Meant Now 
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