A Course in Miracles Lesson 148

My mind holds only what I think with God.

If I defend myself I am attacked (Lesson 135).
Sickness is a defense against the truth (Lesson 136).

The reason that self-defense is a form of attack is because we are not bodies (W-pI.199.8:7) and the world is not real (W-pI.132.6:2). What is one with God, one without another, cannot be attacked – there is nobody and nothing to do the attacking. Nor is there any separate entity to be attacked.

Thus, there is no such thing as attack unless the mind believes there is, in which case it violates its own wholeness, which is infinite and eternal, by believing it is something it is not, i.e., a body.

That is what we call the separation, and its effects are painful indeed. And there is a better way.

It is interesting to consider how these two lessons – 135 and 136 – fit together. The first teaches us that we can only attack our own self and the second makes the curious argument that sickness is a form of attack. What does this mean? What are we supposed to learn here?

Sickness is a form of attack because it reflects the underlying belief that the body is real and that what happens to it has value for its own sake. Its only value is the extent to which it can be used to wake you up from the dream of separation. In and of itself it is neutral.

But the sickness – and the body apparently afflicted – do not exist in the real world. Therefore, we have to let go of our attachment to preferential narratives and narrative structures. We have to be willing to see what happens when we do not insist that reality must be this or that, have this meaning or that.

We are the ones hurting our self! That’s the bad news. The good news is, since we are the ones doing it we can also be the ones who stop doing it.

Our minds holds only what we think with God, which is another way of saying that God’s Mind is what our mind is. This is not comprehensible to those who still believe in separation, because it seems to involve to separate levels (spirit and matter) interacting in ways that inform both.

But the level of spirit has no form, and the level of form has no meaning, other than the illusory meaning we give it. Today then, let us let God direct our minds, using them to create as the Infinite creates, and to extend love as Love extends. Let us discover what the world shows us when God – not you and I – are accepted as Author without qualification or condition.

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