A Course In Miracles Talk 11 - Why Choose Sickness?

This is the 11th A Course in Miracles talk and the subject today is Why Choose Sickness?

At first thought,

It seems an insane idea that we would want to choose to be sick.

The course states that the ego sees value in pain.

The pain makes the body,

And thus the ego,

Real.

The workbook states,

Sickness is isolation,

For it seems to keep oneself apart from all the rest,

To suffer what the others do not feel,

Gives the body final power to make the separation real,

And keeps the mind in solitary prison,

Split apart and held in pieces by a solid wall of sickened flesh which it cannot surmount.

Lesson 136 is entitled,

Sickness is a defence against the truth.

It describes how the ego seeks to protect itself,

By advising us to get sick if truth comes too close to us.

For example,

Perhaps the time has come in your life when you feel guided to end a relationship,

You feel you have learned the lessons it contains,

And you are at peace about parting.

And as this will be your highest good,

It must also be for your partner as well.

However,

Your partner may not agree with this at all,

And greatly fears losing you.

The opportunity to grow that is now being offered is seen as a threat,

And your partner may choose sickness as a,

Quotes,

A defence against the truth,

Unquote.

The focus is abruptly shifted to the effect,

The body,

And away from the cause,

The mind.

The problem is now seen elsewhere,

And the,

Quotes,

Threat of spiritual growth has been removed.

The ego of your partner would also counsel that sickness is caused by something or someone in the world.

In this example,

You will be the obvious first choice.

Our language is full of statements indicating that we are not guilty of creating our own pain,

As others are.

We are telling God that they deserve to be punished,

And not us.

For example,

You make me feel sick.

You get up my nose.

Get off my back.

You are a pain in the backside.

Are common statements designed to pin the guilt on someone else.

The following passage from the Course powerfully portrays our ego's need to appear an innocent victim of causes outside our mind.

The text states,

The sick and suffering you,

But represents your brother's guilt.

The witness that you send,

Lest he forget the injuries he gave,

From which you swear he never will escape.

This sick and sorry picture you accept,

If only it can serve to punish him.

The sick are merciless to everyone,

And in contagion do they seek to kill.

Death seems an easy price,

If they can say,

Behold me,

Brother,

At your hand I die.

The sickness is the witness to his guilt,

And death would prove his errors must be sins.

Sickness is but a,

Quotes,

Little death,

A form of vengeance not yet total.

The content of this paragraph is also related to a later section in the text,

Entitled,

Self-Concept vs Self,

Which describes the two faces we cultivate towards the world.

We create these faces as we grow up,

And they bear no resemblance to our Christ nature.

The first is the public face of innocence,

Which is easily upset by what it sees as injustice,

Pain and sickness in the world.

We identify strongly with this concept of our self,

For it conceals the guilt of what lies deeper within us.

This face,

The text states,

Believes that it is good within an evil world.

Though it does not believe in its right to attack another,

If the situation,

Quote,

Demands it,

Unquote,

The face of innocence will attack in self-defence.

This face fails to realise that situations cannot provoke attack,

But only uncover the hate that already resides in our mind.

The text states,

Beneath this face of the innocent victim is the hidden face of the victimiser.

We are careful not to look at this second face,

Which is hidden deeply within.

It proclaims,

I am the thing you made of me,

And as you look at me,

You stand condemned because of what I am.

This is the face that needs to find people and situations onto which it can project its guilt and thus maintain its innocence.

To the ego,

Anyone is suitable for projecting its hidden guilt onto.

While the cause of our guilt is looked for in the world,

We should never question the insanity of the ego's thought system.

This is why sickness is so useful to the ego,

Even though we are not consciously aware of it.

When we become sick,

The second face will always be pointing a finger at someone and accusing them of causing the sickness.

This face wants to see disasters,

Aggression,

Accidents in the world,

So it will feel justified in feeding an innocent victim.

A story related to me by a friend graphically illustrates this.

Sally had travelled wildly for many years.

Each time she flies by air,

She feels terrified when there is turbulence,

Even if the turbulence is minor.

She had sought counselling in a variety of ways to work with this problem over the years.

She felt as if she was at a point of desperation as her fear of air turbulence had steadily grown worse.

Sally studied the course,

And at this time during a flight when there was turbulence,

She turned deeply within herself and asked Jesus to help her to understand why she was so afraid.

The answer came instantly and very clearly.

You want this plane to crash.

That is how strong the victim part of you is.

Sally said the instant she heard this answer she knew it was true.

She still experiences fear when flying and says that she is aware she is not yet ready to let it go,

But she now understands that she is using this fear to keep the love of Jesus away from her.

This desire to be a victim only increases our guilt further and reinforces our belief in the ego.

The course tells us that we would wouldn't choose to die from an illness in the hope that we could make another feel guilty.

There are no lengths our ego will not go to so we may appear innocent at someone else's expense.

The Holy Spirit's response to this intensity is to ask,

As the text states,

Do you prefer to be right or happy?

To be right is to make the ego's thought of separation real and suffer the consequences of feeling alone and afraid.

To be wrong is to question our belief in being an innocent victim and start to look,

With the Holy Spirit's help,

At the illusions in our mind.

Although we try very hard to get rid of our sense of guilt by finding others on whom to project it,

Deep inside us we don't fully believe this will work.

Eventually God will find us an exact due and justified punishment for our sins.

Once again the ego tells us that there is an advantage in getting sick,

For we can use it to protect ourselves from God's full anger.

For as the course states,

The ego believes that by punishing itself,

It will mitigate the punishment of God.

We are telling God that we know we are sinners and we will punish ourselves by accepting only a little happiness into our lives and by getting sick.

In this way we hope God will be satisfied with our penance and seek not to punish us,

For his punishment would destroy us.

From the Holy Spirit's perspective,

All this is but the deluded thinking of people experiencing nightmares.

No sins have been committed,

For nothing has really happened in our silly dream of separation.

Although it all seems painfully real to us,

The Holy Spirit has another perspective to offer,

Which we shall explore in the following talks.

Any desire for spiritual growth must be attacked by our ego,

For it knows no other method of response.

It seeks to save itself by warning us that to go that way is dangerous and will eventually lead to our destruction.

We want to return home to God,

But the ego tells us this is impossible,

For we have destroyed our home and left an angry God behind.

Jesus' story of the prodigal son illustrates this well,

And it is the story of all of us.

We are tired of living in the pigsty,

The fear to go home.

When we do pluck up courage and return home,

We find a banquet awaiting us and a loving father.

The following story demonstrates the fear and resistance we experience as we walk along the spiritual path,

And the help that is always there for us.

It was David's first visit to the Fintorn Foundation in Scotland,

And he had enrolled for the Experience Week programme.

This programme introduces the Foundation to newcomers and includes an afternoon of group games and exercises.

In one of the exercises,

The group splits into pairs who take turns to slowly unfold their partner who lies tightly curled up on the floor.

It can be a very moving experience to allow someone to gently and lovingly unfold you from a protected and defensive posture.

In David's case,

He felt a sensation in his pelvic area,

As if some energy that had been locked away was being released.

When this force reached his stomach,

He decided to stop the process and the energy remained locked there.

Two weeks after this event,

David came to talk to me.

He told me he had felt stuck ever since that exercise.

He said it was like being constipated and he knew he had blocked something in himself at that moment.

It reminded him of a deeper feeling that he carried,

Where he felt blocked and inhibited in his life in general.

David was about 18 years old with a sensitive and caring nature.

As he talked,

I sensed that some part of him was holding back from living his life fully.

He was ambivalent about being here on the planet and living purposefully.

We moved into a healing session and,

As we worked with relaxation,

He spontaneously returned to the tight,

Curled-up fetal position he had adopted in the exercise two weeks before.

He told me he had regressed to his birth.

As he re-experienced the moment of birth,

He recognised an intense resistance to coming here.

He had decided there and then that he would resist this world and what it stood for.

David had not seen he had fallen into the trap of quote,

Making the error real,

Unquote,

And that he was listening to the voice of his ego.

He was willing to abandon the purpose of his new life and the lessons he had elected to learn in defiance of what he perceived as a hard and cruel world.

David was afraid of opening to this experience and decided to try and protect his sensitive nature by psychologically closing himself down.

I could readily understand his experience,

For I empathised with much of what he said.

The Psychotherapy Purpose Process and Practice pamphlet points out that the therapist draws the clients who are needed to heal the therapist,

For both will be working with the same issues,

Albeit in different forms.

David then said a presence had appeared which counselled him to change his mind and do what he had come to do.

He was told that just as he had blocked himself at his birth,

So too had he repeated this experience two weeks ago in the unfolding exercise.

Now David was ready to let go and trust God's will for him.

As he relaxed his tight control,

He immediately began to experience the blocked energy moving upwards through his body.

He experienced feeling very much looser in his body,

Especially in his legs.

At this point he began to cry.

After the session we went for a walk together.

We were both aware of a change in him.

He was a lot more alive,

Energised and unguarded.

The teacher's manual states,

The acceptance of sickness as a decision of the mind,

For a purpose for which it would use the body,

Is the basis of healing.

And this is so for healing in all forms.

A patient decides that this is so and he recovers.

If he decides against recovery,

He will not be healed.

Who is the physician?

Only the mind of the patient himself.

The outcome is what he decides that it is.

Special agents,

For example pills,

Doctors,

Remedies,

Seem to be ministering to him,

Yet they but give form to his desires.

And it is this they do and nothing else.

They are not actually needed at all.

The patient can merely rise up without their aid and say,

I have no use for this.

There is no form of sickness that would not be cured at once.