Sean Reagan

Sickness is a defense against the truth.

Here we are invited to take a close look at what sickness is, and in doing so begin a critical discernment: what is the body and what is the mind? And what am I that I should be able to choose how to see myself?

What am I truth? This is the question A Course in Miracles is given to help us answer.

To be healed is to know oneself in truth. Therefore, the only sickness is the split mind – the mind which is divided against itself, insisting it is limited to a body, and subject to the body’s vulnerability and frailty. All the body’s ills – from a headache to cancer – are merely symptoms of the only problem we actually have: the problem of separation.

Sickness is not an accident . . . 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. The aim of all defenses is to keep the truth from being whole (W-pI.136.2:1, 3-4).

When we remember that we are whole, and remember that we are not bodies, then the body’s sickness is no longer sickness, and all that remains is the body’s usefulness in communication. It becomes a means of communion with our brothers and sisters, and the communion is always a remembrance of wholeness.

More practically, we are asked in this lesson to be open to the truth. We are asked to make a specific space for the truth to be revealed to us in all its fullness. The truth is that you are mind; you are not a body. The truth is that your mind is an extension of God’s mind, not the activity of a single brain.

God knows not of your plans to change His Will . . . You can but choose to think you die, or suffer sickness or distort the truth in any way. What is created is apart from all of this (W-pI.136.11:1, 4-5).

The lesson is an invitation not to understand this conceptually – although that is not a bad thing – but rather to know it, to experience it. If I say the river is cold, you know what I mean, but if you want to know yourself its coldness, then you must enter the river.

Lesson 136 invites us to step into the river – or, more accurately, to consent to have the river enter us.

When we remember that we are minds, then we see instantly the sickness of separation. We understand perfectly at once the problem we face with all our brothers and sisters. By identifying as what we are not, we have forced both body and mind to be what they are not. Mind becomes unaware of its creative power, and the body grows terrified of its very nature.

That is how we live right now: forgetful and fearful. To see this clearly is the beginning of the end of suffering. It is the beginning of remembering what we are and how we are called to create in our Creator’s likeness. And that is the end of fear, because the wholly innocent cannot be fearful. They can only be quietly naturally happy, and happiness is their gift to the world.

Healing will flash across your open mind, as peace and truth arise to take the place of war and vain imaginings. There will be no dark corners sickness can conceal, and keep defended from the light of truth. There will be no dim figures from your dreams, nor their obscure and meaningless pursuits with double puposes insanely sought, remaining in your mind (W-pI.136.16:1-3).

This lesson is not about physical healing. Physical healing is not the miracle A Course in Miracles teaches us. The body does what bodies do. The miracle is to understand we are neither contained in nor limited by the body. It is, for a while, a means of communication with others who believe they are separated from God. This is an insight that we have at the level of the mind. And it is an invitation to lean deeply into that mind, and to realize that it – not the body to which it seems so irrevocably yoked – is what is real.

When we are sick in the world – with a cold, with Covid, with cancer – the problem is not the phhysical sickness. The problem is our identification with the body that appears sick. That is the actual sickness ACIM is given to heal. When we no longer identify with the body, then its apparent sickness is neutral. It is merely an opportunity to share with our brothers and sisters the good news of salvation: we are not bodies!

Perhaps the cold allows us to let somebody else care for us for a day. Or it gives us a day to rest and read at home, deepening our understanding of ACIM metaphysics. Perhaps our cancer allows us to teach nurses and doctors that true healing is always at the level of mind, not the body to which they so carefully and responsibly attend.

The form the healing of separation takes is never the point, because we are not bodies, and nobody else is either. And there is no world! Yet in the context of separation, both appear to exist and be real, and so our work is to learn that this is an illusion and then – by example – to teach others to see it as an illusion as well.

Teaching others is simply a function of our happiness. If we are unaffected by the body’s adventures, if we are content despite its apparent adverse circumstances, then maybe our brothers and sisters can be, too.

Therefore, focus not on the body but on the mind which decides what it is and how to see itself. Let truth dawn in your mind, and let its dawning teach you how to be happy, and how to teach this happiness to all the world. You have no other function. You couldn’t ask for another function. You are here to save the world from the mad idea that it is separate from God and from love.

Indeed, thirty minutes of joyful openness to this truth is a small price to pay for the salvation of all life, no?

←Lesson 135
Lesson 137→

Let me perceive forgiveness as it is.

Forgiveness is the end of illusions, for it sees through them to reality, and thus releases us from bondage and suffering. It is a way of seeing, rather than a response to wrongdoing.

Lesson 134 offers us an interesting correction: when we see a brother or sister as sinful, we simply ask if we would accuse ourselves of the same sin. If we are honest, the answer is no. Why else have we projected it onto a brother or sister?

And as we refuse to burden our brothers and sisters with projection, and as we refuse to accept that burden in our own mind, we begin at last to perceive the truth as God created it. We begin to understand that none of the wrongs and ills in the world are real; we don’t need to solve them or deal with them in any way. We don’t even have to let them go. We can simply look past them to the truth which radiates God’s love (W-pI.134.2:5).

Forgiveness in A Course in Miracles is actually unrelated to wrongdoing of any kind. In bodies in the world, forgiveness is a gift we give another who has harmed us – it reflects our large-heartedness, our patience, our kindness, our Christ-like nature.

But that kind of forgiveness is a lie, because it reinforces the underlying error that sin is real. Therefore, it actually condemns our brother and sister by asserting they have actually done something wrong. And since we cannot lay a burden on another without experiencing it ourself, forgiveness is the world is simply another form of condemnation and lovelessness (W-pI.134.4:2).

There is another way.

It is sin’s unreality that makes forgiveness naturally and wholly sane, a deep relief to those who offer it; a quiet blessing where it is received. It does not countenance illusions, but collects them lightly, with a little laugh, and gently lays them at the feet of truth. And there they disappear entirely (W-pI.134.6:1-3).

Thinking this way – and allowing this thinking to inform our living – becomes our new spiritual practice (W-pI.134.13:1). And it is a practice. This is not how the world sees forgiveness; it is not how ego counsels us to respond to apparent harms and ills. We have to remember, and when we forget, we begin again.

Forgiveness belongs in this complex sequence of lessons addressing the world’s unreality because it is forgiveness that sees past the world entirely, dismissing it as no more than a wisp of smoke to be blown away in a light breeze. Forgiveness is the practice by which our belief in the reality of the world is undone.

This happens by giving attention to the supposedly awful things others have done. Imagine the worst sin and picture the worst sinner and ask: would you accuse yourself of doing this? Your answer releases them from the bondage of projection and it releases you at the same time. Who does not see the world as sinful, sees what instead?

A world in which no longer have to fight imaginary enemies in order to be safe (W-pI.134.12:1-2). A world in which we do not need to wall others in or out, nor practice other forms of defense and attack (W-pI.134.3-4). We walk gently, inviting others to walk with us as we leave behind suffering and pain.

That this is not easy is understood. Simple perhaps, but not easy. That is why it is a practice. Forgiveness as ACIM teaches it is “as alien to the world” as is our own reality (W-pI.134.13:2). We need to be clear about this: we are being asked to look at the world in a way that is foreign, that may even feel dangerous.

This is why we say that A Course in Miracles is a spiritual practice that is rigorous and demanding. Its promise of peace is real, but the change of mind required to undo the blocks to that peace is daunting. Why else would we be here?

←Lesson 133
Lesson 135→

I will not value what is valueless.

Today’s lesson takes the abstract intensity of “there is no world” and seeks to make it practical. It wants to give us a means by which to approach the truth of their is no world here in the world. In a sense, this is a hand-holding lesson, a baby steps lesson. But their impact remains far-reaching.

Understanding and practicing today’s lesson rests on a thorough understanding of ego’s motives and agend and, critically, its dishonesty.

Ego is that aspect of thinking which emphasizes that we are bodies. It uses the association of self and body as the measure of value. It wants us to be “drawn to bodily concerns, to things you buy, to eminence as valued by the world” even though these things bring us only sorrow (W-pI.133.2:2).

The sorrow is the point; the sense of loss is the point. When we are sad and lonely, when we feel unfulfilled, when we are fearful and desperate, we are mostly likely to turn to ego and ask it for help. Ego lives on this attention: it has to keep us unsatisfied because only then will we turn to it.

The way ego does this is keeping us focused on the body in the world.

A Course in Miracles – through its Teacher, the Holy Spirit – offers us an alternative. There are no satisfactions in the world. Period. There is literally nothing there.

Therefore, attention given to it is attention given to illusion which can only lead to confusion and suffering. To what shall we give attention instead?

Lesson 133 offers some practical considerations in answer to that question.

First, if the thing to which we are giving attention, and holding as a solution to a problem – if it has any value for a body in the world – will not last forever, then it has no value (W-pI.133.6:1). If it is subject in any way to time, then it has no value.

What fades and ies was never there, and makes no offering to him who chooses it. He is deceived by nothing in a form he thinks he likes (W-pI.133.6:4-5).

Second, if the thing we believe is valuable – if it can be taken from someone else – then we are denying our brother or sister’s right to have everything. We are acting as if limits are real, and we are not exempt from the power of our own thought. Therefore, if we deny anyone anything, we are denying our own self everything.

Both of these examples make clear that if what we value is subject to the laws of time and space, as they appear to us in these bodies, then they are not real and do not actually have value.

Why then do we value them? Because we are decieved by ego, which cannot tell us the truth about it wants, and thus locks us into a deranged fantasy of life-long suffering that ends in death (W-pI.133.8:7). But understand: we only fall for its lies because we want to fall for them. We want to be deceived.

However, a point comes in our lives when we no longer accept ego’s distortions. We cannot sustain the ego’s illusions any longer because our sorrow is too great and the idea that there is another way too pervasive. At that point, we can ask the fundamental question, the answer to which begins to align our will with God’s: do I feel guilty about this choice?

If you feel any guilt about your choice, you have allowed the ego’s goals to come between the real alternatives. And thus you do not realize there are but two, and the alternative you think you chose seems fearful, and too dangerous to be the nothingness it actually is (W-pI.133.11:2-3).

Remember: the ego’s goals are those that keep you focused on the body in the world. They cannot work. If we believe they can, then we are making the ego’s world real: we are living out the separation from God, for which we can only feel guilty.

“Guilt” here may well be experienced as guilt but it can also be experienced as shame, greed, righteous indignation, judgment of others for not working as hard as we do, self-satisfaction with diet, exercise, spiritual practice, intellectual justifications et cetera.

Guilt is always an argument with God, because it is always the absence of natural sustainable happiness. So another way to evaluate your choice is: does this make you happy in a way that cannot be affected if the choice is undone? Does this choice set up any conflict with a brother or sister? Can anybody lose?

A Course in Miracles argues that choice is easy because we are either choosing love or fear – everybody wins or nobody wins. How hard is the choice when those are the options? Choice in the world is an illusion. Choice at the level of Spirit is easy.

The challenge arises when we don’t see those two choices – we see a veritable smorgasbord of bodies and objects and ideas between which we can choose. Complexity is of the ego, not the Holy Spirit.

Complexity is nothing but a screen of smoke, which hides the very simple fact that no decision can be difficult. What is the gain to you in learning this? It is far more than merely leting you make choices easily and without pain (W-pI.133.12: 3-5).

In fact, learning that there is only one choice is what allows us to let go of the world and the body, and all the senseless choices that seem to go along with them. We give up everything and what remains? Perfect peace and happiness are what remains. “Heaven itself is reached with open hands and open minds, which come with nothing to find everything and claim it as their own” (W-pI.133.13:1).

Thus, this lesson advices us to give careful attention to what we are choosing and why we find it valuable. Are we following the ego’s lead or the Holy Spirit’s? Who is teaching what to value and why?

←Lesson 132
Lesson 134→

I loose the world from all I thought it was.

A Course in Miracles invites us to investigate not the world – which is an effect of our thoughts – but rather the source of thought, in order that we might realize that salvation is as easy as changing our mind (W-pI.132.2:1).

You free the past from what you thought before. You free the future from all ancient thoughts of seeking what you do not want to find (W-pI.132.2:3-4).

The world itself is neutral; it is how we see it that gives it meaning and determines its function. Its value lies in the decision we make to see it as either cause or effect. In separation, we mistake the world as the cause of our beliefs and their effects, those we deem good and those we deem bad.

In salvation, we remember that there is no world apart from what we wish (W-pI.132.5:1). Indeed, remembering this is salvation because it restores to our mind its power of decision and reminds it that projection is an illusion. When we cast “out” what we fear to see within, what we fear remains with us because “ideas leave not their source” (W-pI.132:5:3).

This is one of the foundation of healing in ACIM: an idea can be shared but it does not leave its source. It cannot be disowned or severed. If there is one glass of water and I give it to you, then there is no more pie. But if I share with you the location of the spring, then we both know the location. I have not forgotten it. And when you share it with someone else, it remains with you as well.

The world is not real, and thus our sense of being at risk in it, suffering its assaults and indignities, grieving its many losses, enduring endless sacrifice is also not real.

Healing is the gift of those who are prepared to learn there is no world, and can accept the lesson now. Their readiness will bring the lesson to them in some form which they can understand and recognize (W-pI.132.7:1-2).

Note that the course does not insist that the form the lesson takes is uniform. Instead, it recognizes that the form of the lesson will vary from student to student. The world is not real, but the way in which you learn this will not be the same as it was for me, and vice-versa.

A Course in Miracles teaches the lesson by reminding us that we remain as God created us and thus exist beyond the reach of suffering that the world – i.e., time and space – would impose on us. We are not bodies and there is no world. To know this is to be saved, and to know it is to will to remember it.

To free the world from every kid of pain is but to change your mind about yourself. There is no world apart from your ideas because ideas leave not their source, and you maintain the world within your mind in thought (W-pI.132.2-3).

And to change our mind about what we are – to solve our spiritual identity crisis – is simply to remember that we are always God’s Creation, incapable of change or harm. To remember this is to create like our creator, extending only love and freedom. This is what it means to “loose the world” – we stop insisting on seeing it from the perspective of ego, and adopt instead the Holy Spirit’s frame of God’s “timelessness and Love” (W-pI.132.11:1).

Deny illusions, but accept the truth. Deny you are a shadow briefly laid upon a dying world. Release your mind and you will look upon a world released (W-pI.132.13:4-6).

Our healing is not ours alone. This lesson emphasizes that we are healed by our brothers and sisters as they remember who they are in truth, and as we remember as well, we heal them. Together we “bless the world” because we “could never be released alone” (W-pI.132.16:1, 2).

We go together in healing because healing is going together. This sequence of lessons presents a critical and often deeply-challenging concept (there is no world, which is closely linked to “ideas leave not their source). Let us look at these ideas gently, with an open mind, and be grateful for those whose practice and study buttresses our own and makes our shared healing possible.

←Lesson 131
Lesson 133→

No one can fail who seeks to reach the truth.

The confidence inherent in today’s lesson rests upon a subtle fact: what we seek is up to us. If we seek peace where peace is not, then we cannot find peace. It’s like going to the desert and wondering where the ocean is.

To bodies, other bodies and the world will always be real. To ego, its thoughts and beliefs will always be the only option. We cannot search for the end of conflict in what is inherently conflict.

Goals that are meaningless are not attained. There is no way to reach them, for the means by which you strive for them are as meaningless as they are. Who can use such senseless means, and hope through them to gain in anything (W-pI.131.2:1-3)?

Bodies grow old and die. Therefore, the body cannot know eternal life. Egoic thought divides and judges and tries always to control. Therefore, there is no peace but only conflict in it. This is why ego exists. It is why the world was made – to obscure truth and keep us from remembering God.

If we want peace – if we want to remember Heaven, which is the unity of Creator and Creation – then it will have to come from something other than what we are and what the world is. Hence the importance of the little prayer that precedes our practice today:

I ask to see a different world, and think a different kind of thought from those I made. The world I seek I did not make, the thoughts I want to think are not my own (W-pI.131.11:3-4).

We are turning away from the familiar today. We are letting go rather than remaking or reconstructing. We are becoming empty, in order that God’s peace might reveal itself to us as it is – not as we would have it. We are opening to the possibility that our lives – even at their apparently holiest and most purely-intentioned – impose “an alien will upon God’s single purpose” (W-pI.131.8:5).

There is another way and in order to remember it, we have to let go of our insistence that we can find it in the world via our own thinking and effort.

What happens when you let go? You might notice that the one “letting go” cannot be let go of. There is always some sense of self deciding to “let go.” And that sense of self cannot itself be released. This is a paradox – a problem that cannot be solved, dissolved or resolved. It has vexed human beings for centuries.

A Course in Miracles teaches us that it’s a distracting sideshow, and thus wholly unworthy of our attention.

Today we will not choose a paradox in place of truth. How could the Son of God make time to take away the Will of God? He thus denies himself, and contracts what has no opposite (W-pI.131.9:1-2).

We become still today. We refuse to indulge the ego’s attempts to judge the course and judge our practice and dictate the outcome. This is a radical experiment! Truth is given to us, but we have clouded it and the cloud is the world, which includes our bodies, and the dense tangle of self-imposed, self-centered thinking.

Imaginge you are flailing in violent seas. You are struggling to stay afloat, fighting to survive. And Jesus comes and says, “stop fighting. Let go. Go down.” It would sound insane, right? You would say, “yeah, thanks but no thanks, pal.”

Yet that is exactly what we are asked to do today: to stop struggling and become still and find out what is beneath the world and the thoughts that make it. It sounds abstract, idealistic, naive, impossible . . .

Okay! But still. Just try.

Angels light the way, so that all darkness vanishes, and you are standing in a light so bright and clear that you can understand all things you see . . . you realize the world you see before you in the light reflects the truth you knew, and did not quite forget in wandering away in dreams (W-pI.131.13:2-3).

Therefore, let us seek only this understanding. Let us have a goal only this peace. When we hold this single goal, our will naturally aligns with the will of creation, and we naturally remember the fullness of God’s “ancient promise to his holy Son” (W-pI.131.14:4).

When that is our goal, we cannot fail, for we are merely seeking what is real, and what is real is all that can be found, because it is all there is. Today – together and with all our brothers and sisters – let us make it so.

←Lesson 130
Lesson 132→

It is impossible to see two worlds.

A Course in Miracles is simple because it offers us only two choices: reality or unreality, love or fear, innocence or guilt. It is hard – sometimes brutally so – because choosing the reality of our innocence manifest in our inheritance of love means the end of suffering.

And we are very very interested in – very very committed to – suffering. We like to be victims, especially innocent victims. We like the world to be cruel, indifferent and unfair. If it were easy to choose peace, we would have done so a long time ago. We would not need A Course in Miracles, nor any other help.

Today’s lesson helps us see more clearly the totality of the choice we make with respect to the world we see. We can only see one world, and when we see it, the other is disappeared entirely. There is no such thing as a little bit of reality, or a little bit of fear. It is all or nothing.

As a simple example, you could look around you right now and notice the space you are in. I am in the hayloft/office writing and reading. While I am here doing this, I am not throwing a frisbee at the beach with my kids. I am not drinking tea in the kitchen.

Just as our body can only be in one place at one time, our mind can only choose to see one world – the world made by fear and ego or the world interpreted by love and the Holy Spirit. The one I choose renders the other invisible.

You and I do not want to suffer anymore. Nor do we want the world to suffer. Our desire for the end of suffering is still weak, but it cannot be denied. Our goal, then, is to strengthen our willingness to accept Christ’s Vision, in which we perceive only what is shared and thus serves the function of “loving in a loveless place” (T-14.IV.4:10).

In doing this, we actively refuse to see the ego’s world of differences, competition, sacrifice and loss. Critically, in doing this, we learn that we are not actually choosing between reality and unreality because what is not real does not exist.

Fear has made everything you think you see. All separation, all distinctions, and the multitude of differences you believe make up the world. They are not there. Love’s enemy has made them up. Yet love can have no enemy, and so they have no cause, no being and no consequence (W-pI.130.4:1-5).

We are liberated when we realize there is nothing to choose between; there is only the Love of God endlessly creating, and taking joy in what is created.

The power of mind is such that it can make the impossible appear very real. Indeed, lifetimes can pass in dreams of suffering and pain. When we choose suffering, the world we see produces suffering. The external world always reflects our thinking (W-pI.130.1:2) and our thinking always reflects “our choice of what we want to see” (W-pI.130.1:3).

Accepting this, our work today involves regular attempts to see not the illusion of a world constructed of fear and suffering but rather a world lit up with God’s grace, which is the Vision of Christ.

You will not doubt what you look upon, for though it is perception, it is not the kind of seeing that your eyes alone have ever seen before. And you will know God’s strength upheld you as made this choice (W-pI.130.9:4-5).

Our faithfulness to the daily lesson matters more than what we think of it. It seems too fantastic or supernatural, it violates common sense, it’s too hard or too abstract. The decision to practice reflects the underlying decision to refuse illusion in favor of truth. At that level, we cannot make a mistake.

Without expectation, without a lot of drama, simply understand that a mind which chooses fear cannot simultaneously choose love and then choose love. If you cannot do this, don’t worry about it. The fact that you tried means that you are ready to succeed. Dreams of pain cannot long survive in a mind which does not want them. We are nearer than we know to unending peace and joy.

←Lesson 129
Lesson 131→