When I am healed I am not healed alone.
Lesson 137 suggests that sickness is a choice we make that emphasizes the appearance of separate states and interests. It locks us in a body that is unwell, and whose unwellness it a witness unto death. It is the separation embodied.
Therefore, healing must be joining, because it is founded on the law that salvation is mutual and cooperative. We suffer alone but we are saved together. Healing is the decision to join with our brothers and sisters at the level of the mind; it does not take the body into account at all. Thus, healing is accomplished when we see that “the body has no power to attack the universal Oneness of God’s Son” (W-pI.137.3:6).
We can say then that actual healing removes the illusion of separate interests and establishes in our mind the clear understanding that we are one with our brothers and sisters, in Creation, through the Will of our Creator. When this is our truth, then the body’s adventures and misadventures are beside the point. They are no longer real.
Just as forgiveness shines away all sin and the real world will occupy the place of what you made, so healing must replace the fantasies of sickness which you hold before the simple truth. When sickness has been seen to disappear in spite of all the laws that hold it cannot be but real, then . . . the laws can no longer be cherished nor obeyed (W-pI.137.7:1-3).
What does this mean for my cancer? My migraines? My anxiety?
The lesson suggests – in keeping with the overarching themes of A Course in Miracles – that those conditions are not actual problems. Rather, the way in which we see them – as causes of suffering which we alone must endure – is the problem. What A Course in Miracles offers as healing is the Holy Spirit’s quiet confidence that separation is not real and what we are in truth cannot suffer, let alone die.
Healing releases us from the illusion that our minds are contained by – are limited to bodies – and allows us to join with our brothers and sisters outside the constraints of time and space altogether. This is true freedom, and it is not ours alone.
And as you let yourself be healed, you see all those around you, or who cross your mind, or whom you touch or those who seem to have no contact with you, healed along with you . . . legions upon legions will receive the gift that you receive when you are healed (W-pI.137.10:1, 4).
Is it clear? Healing is not about the body. It’s about the mind that believes its limited to a body. That is the sickness ACIM is given to heal. And more than that, this healing is the liberation of other minds which are also deluded about what they are in truth. To be healed is to be an instrument of healing (W-pI.137.11:1). This, too, is a law.
It is this mutuality to which the lesson asks us to give attention, and to understand that in this new vision of healing in relationship, we are brought closer to our Source in Love. When sickness does not keep our attention on the body, that attention naturally turns towards Creation, and creating like unto our Creator. There is nothing else.
What is opposed to God does not exist, and who accepts it not within his mind becomes a haven where the weary can remain to rest. For here is truth bestowed, and here are all illusions brought to truth (W-pI.137.11:3-4).
In a sense, to be open to healing is simply to be willing to know the truth. What are we? Are we bodies that grow sick and die? Are we bodies that go to war with other bodies? Or are we minds – extensions of God’s Mind – given only to Creation in Love?
This is another way of asking: are we ready to remember oneness today? Are we ready to accept that “our function is to let our minds be healed, that we may carry healing to the world, exchanging curse for blessing, pain for joy, and separation for the Peace of God” (W-pI.137.13:1)?
Let us say yes together, and devote our quiet practice time today to allowing our minds to be healed, so that we might remember that the body’s journey is not our journey, and in remembering this, go with all our brothers and sisters home.
