IV. The End of Sickness
- All magic is an attempt at reconciling the irreconcilable. All religion is the recognition that the irreconcilable cannot be reconciled. Sickness and perfection are irreconcilable. If God created you perfect, you are perfect. If you believe you can be sick you have placed other gods before him. God is not at war with the god of sickness you made, but you are. He is the symbol of deciding against God, and you are afraid of him because he cannot be reconciled with God’s Will. If you attack him, you will make him real to you. But if you refuse to worship him in whatever form he may appear to you, and wherever you think you see him, he will disappear into the nothingness out of which he was made.
- Reality can dawn upon only an unclouded mind. It is always there to be accepted, but its acceptance depends on your willingness to have it. To know reality must involve the willingness to judge unreality for what it is. To overlook nothingness is merely to judge it correctly, and because of your ability to evaluate it truly, to let it go. Knowledge cannot dawn on a mind full of illusions because truth and illusions are irreconcilable. Truth is whole and cannot be known by part of a mind.
- The Sonship cannot be perceived as partly sick, because to perceive it that way is not to perceive it at all. If the Sonship is one, it is one in all respects. One cannot be divided. If you perceive other gods your mind is split, and you will not be able to limit the split, because it is a sign that you have removed part of your mind from God’s Will. This means it is out of control. To be out of control is to be out of reason, and then the mind does become unreasonable. By defining the mind wrongly, you perceive it turning wrongly.
- God’s laws will keep your mind at peace because peace is His Will, and His laws are established to uphold it. His are the laws of freedom, but yours are the laws of bondage. Since freedom and bondage are irreconcilable, their laws cannot be understood together. The laws of God work only for your good, and there are no other laws beside His. Everything else is merely lawless and therefore chaotic. Yet God Himself has protected everything He created by His laws. Everything that is not under them does not exist. “Laws of chaos” is a meaningless term. Creation is perfectly lawful and the chaotic is without meaning because it is without God. You have “given” your peace to the gods you made, but they are not there to take it from you, and you cannot give it to them.
- You are not free to give up freedom, but only to deny it. You cannot do what God did not intend, because what He did not intend does not happen. Your gods do not bring chaos. You are endowing them with chaos and accepting it of them. All this has never been. Nothing but the laws of God has ever been and nothing but His Will will ever be. You were created through His laws and by His Will, and the manner of your creation established you a creator. What you have made is so unworthy of you that you could hardly want it if you were willing to see it as it is. You will see nothing at all. And your vision will automatically look beyond it, to what is in you and all around you. Reality cannot break through the obstructions you interpose, but it will envelope you completely when you let them go.
- When you have experienced the protection of God, the making of idols becomes inconceivable. There are no strange images in the mind of God, and what is not in His mind cannot be in yours, because you are of one mind and that mind belongs to Him. It is yours because it belongs to Him, for to Him ownership is sharing. And if it is so for Him, it is so for you. His definitions are His laws, for by them He established the universe as what it is. No false gods you attempt to interpose between yourself and your reality affect truth at all. Peace is yours because God created you. And He created nothing else.
- The miracle is the act of a Son of God who has laid aside all false gods and calls on his brothers to do likewise. It is an act of faith, because it is a recognition that his brother can do it. It is a call to the Holy Spirit in his mind, that is strengthened by joining. Because the miracle worker has heard God’s Voice, he strengthens it in a sick brother by weakening his belief in sickness, which he does not share. The power of one mind can shine into another, because all the lamps of God were lit by the same spark. It is everywhere and it is eternal.
- In many only the spark remains, for the Great Rays are obscured. Yet God has kept the spark alive so that the Rays can never be completely forgotten. If you but see the little spark you will learn of the greater light, for the Rays are there unseen. Perceiving the spark will heal but knowing the light will create. Yet in the returning the little light must be acknowledged first, for the separation was a descent from magnitude to littleness. But the spark is still as pure as the great light, it is the remaining call of creation. Put all your faith in it, and God Himself will answer you.[1]
Magic is not of God. Signs and wonders, omens and potions, incantations and prophesies are properties of magic which struggle to reconcile this realm with the Kingdom of Heaven. Flesh and Spirit cannot be reconciled anymore than sickness and wellness. God created us perfect, and nothing can change that. If we believe that God’s Son or any part of God’s Creation can be perverted, sick, dead, or dying we have placed idols of sickness before God. We have said that God and His creation is a bleak joke; there is no point in believing in such a God for He abandons His own creations and rejects them for their mistakes.
God is not at war with the perceptual world, but we are. We are mortified by our idols and our magic. There should be no surprise when our children choose atheism, agnosticism, or any of the other alternate forms of religion in place of the doctrines that we teach them. Who wants to place their trust, their minds, their everlasting spirits in servitude to a deity who plays favorites, curses us, pronounces war upon us, demands sacrifices, and craves praise? The idols of this world cannot be trusted to have our best interests at heart.
These conceptions of God that stand in place of His reality are fearful. They attract large numbers of people. They predict dire warnings and demand huge sacrifices. They devise curses and torments for all those who dare to defy them. To attack such beliefs is to arouse the ire of all who cherish idols of sickness and perversions. To be taken in by the magical properties that accompany idolatry, images, and the perceptual kingdom is to always be put in a position to defend its lies, its falsehoods, its meanness, and illogic. Reality can only dawn upon a mind unclouded by its deceptions. To know reality, we must be willing to judge unreality for what it is.
The only way to correctly respond to lies, to falsehood, to trickery is to refuse to sponsor it, to deny our endorsement. Declaring war against false reality is to fight an imaginary battle! To battle nothingness is to engage in senselessness. Jesus tells us to speak truth, but not to argue, get angry, or go on rants for this is to make something out of nothing and it not only wastes our time, but denies us knowledge.
When we perceive each other as perverts, as heathen, as ungodly and destined for hell we are not perceiving the Sonship, we are perceiving the ego’s version of creation. We are judging with our flesh eyes and our flesh perceptions. We have removed part of our mind from God’s Will. We will then be the ones that lose control and follow the whims of the world. We will take sides against each other. We will lose our sense of reason, we will go down needless paths of sorrow and despair, and we will endorse war rather than peace. Instead of upholding our brothers, we will take up arms against them.
To end sickness, we must keep our mind at rest in God. Resting in the peace of God upholds God’s law of freedom. Choose the newsreels of the perceptual world in place of the peace of God and we are under the laws of bondage. If we give our peace to the perceptual world, we are giving our peace to the idols of sickness, we are giving our peace to that which is a lie and an illusion. We are wasting ourselves on nothingness, we will spend time in suffering rather than in returning to God from whence we came. God’s laws center on peace. We cannot know our Sonship in God and our Brotherhood in Christ without peace.
Jesus tells us in paragraph four that we are not free to give up our freedom. Freedom is what we are, it is one of the attributes of God and is therefor one of our attributes. We cannot shake our freedom, but we can deny it. No matter what happens in a fictional realm, it has no bearing at all upon eternity. Lies cannot hurt the truth, but only substitute for truth and can therefore keep us engaged in a realm of never was and never will be. Jesus tells us that what we have made here is so unworthy of us that if we were willing to really look at it for what it is, we would see nothing at all. The more we accept the truth of God, the more our vision will automatically look beyond the perceptual world to what is in and all around us. The truth of God will not interfere with lies, with dreams, with vain imaginings, but the truth of God does envelope us completely when we cast aside all idols of sickness and false beliefs.
We cannot even conceive of idolatry when we know the protection of God. No mean thoughts against our neighbor, no hard feelings toward our bosses and coworkers, no aggression and resentment and ill will toward anything or anybody in the perceptual world will cloud our mind or obstruct the truth from us when we accept our oneness with God, when we know that our minds belong to us because they belong to Him. To God, ownership is sharing, not hoarding, not having it all and only giving us in part! As it is for God, so it is for us. Peace is ours because God is Peace, and God created us, and He did not create anything but that which is one with Him.
In this world a miracle is when we, as a Son of God, lay aside all allegiance to the gods of this world and calls on the Sonship to do the same. This is an incredible act of faith because it recognizes that not only have we seen the world for what it is but that our brothers are also recognizing this world as nothing more than a substitute for truth. Laying aside the false gods of this world is an answer to the call of Holy Spirit in our minds and we strengthen this call by joining it. A miracle worker has heard God’s Voice. He strengthens God’s Voice in others by diminishing their belief in perversions, which he has denied. Jesus says that the power of one mind shines into another because all the lamps of God were lit by the same spark which is everywhere and always!
In paragraph five Jesus tells us to take a good long look at what we have created and find it unworthy of the Sonship of God. When we put down our attraction for the perceptual world, when we realize our bondage to the chemicals, impulses, and drives of the flesh, when we are no longer the least bit interested in harming one another or any part of Creation, the Great Rays of Christ shines forth from within us. We know the power of the Universe is ours for we are Sons of God, made in His likeness. There will be nothing in the temporal world that we could want or need for we know God as our Father and as ourselves.
In your personal devotional today, ask Holy Spirit to teach you to seek peace instead of war; to cherish others rather than go to war with them; to ask for salvation and correction rather than punishment and doom.
[1] A Course in Miracles. Chapter 10 The idols of sickness. IV The end of sickness. Foundation for Inner Peace, Second Edition (1992).
For daily 2021 Workbook lessons visit www.i-choose-love.com courtesy of Linda R.
Audio credit: www.eckiefriar.com
the friar patch 