One of the more challenging concepts students face in A Course in Miracles is the nature of physical healing. Given course assertions that the body isn’t real (e.g., T-2.V.1:9), and that all forms of healing its apparent ills are magic (e.g., T-2.IV.2:7, T-7.V.4:2), what is the status of physical healing in A Course in Miracles?
A Course in Miracles has clear roots in Christian Science, a nineteenth century religion that suggests sickness is an illusion that only prayer can heal. Both Helen Schucman and Bill Thetford had a relationship with that tradition in their childhoods. Thematic strains of Christian Science are evident throughout the text and workbook, particularly with respect to healing and atonement.
For example, in “Atonement and Eucharist” from Science and Health, Mary Baker Eddy sees atonement as an end to our separation from God.
Atonement is the exemplification of man’s unity with God, whereby man reflects divine Truth, Life, and Love. Jesus of Nazareth taught and demonstrated man’s oneness with the Father, and for this we owe him endless homage.
And later yet she discussed the relationship between truth and error, in terms that – with fairly minor semantic adjustments – should be familiar to students of A Course in Miracles.
Love and Truth are not at war with God’s image and likeness. Man cannot exceed divine Love, and so atone for himself. Even Christ cannot reconcile Truth to error, for Truth and error are irreconcilable. Jesus aided in reconciling man to God by giving man a truer sense of Love, the divine Principle of Jesus’ teachings, and this truer sense of Love redeems man from the law of matter, sin, and death by the law of Spirit, — the law of divine Love.
Eddy’s premise was that sickness was illusory and thus could be healed through prayer, through bringing one’s spirit into alignment with truth as God created it. Eddy contemplated specifically physical healing. Her own profound experience included healing from a fall.
Does A Course in Miracles make a similar case for that kind of healing?
It is true that some students of the course experience healing of this sort. I have heard and read testimony about skin cancer being healed, migraine headaches disappearing, addictions disappearing and more.
I have no reason to doubt testimony like this. It is entirely consistent with the release of guilt fostered by the course. Miracles heal the body because we are learning – through the undoing of guilt – that the mind, not the body, makes illness. What happens in the body merely reflects what is happening in the mind (T-28.II.11:4). This is as true of our sexual relationships as our relationships with food and eating.
The miracle is always about the shift in our thinking from ego to Christ, from little self to God. It has no other goal; and really, healing needs no other.
But – and this is critical – physical healing is not the ultimate goal of A Course in Miracles.
Yet half the lesson will not teach the whole. The miracle is useless if you learn but that the body can be healed, for this is not the lesson it was sent to teach. The lesson is the mind was sick that thought the body could be sick; projecting out its guilt caused nothing, and had no effects (T.28.II.11:5-7).
The real goal of A Course in Miracles is to restore cause and effect to its rightful place. Cause lies in the mind and the physical world – from our bodies to other bodies to the weather to the sea to the distant stars – are merely effects that witness to what is happening in the mind.
As our mind heals – which is to say as it accepts its responsibility as a decision-maker that is choosing to think either with or against God, or Love – the real fruit is inner peace. That might show up as a miraculous deliverance from a fatal cancer diagnosis. But it might also show up as the grace to simply accept the cancer because the cancer is not real. So there is nothing to get worked up about. There is never anything to get worked up about.
We can’t fake this insight. Most of us think of miracles in terms of what we can get materially. That’s what we do! But A Course in Miracles slowly and surely redirects our thinking, aligning it with something closer to Truth, or reality. At that level, sickness is impossible regardless of what appears to be happening in the world. We heal by realizing this. We heal by realizing that at that level, there is no sickness or harm.
In other words, we lose our attachment to the symbols of hate and guilt that show up in the world. Whatever shows up is okay. It can’t shake our inner peace because our inner peace is not caused by what is external. It is reflected there for learning purposes, but reflections are not causative.
In this sense, the course differentiates – subtly perhaps – from Christian Science. This is not to say that one path is “better” or more “right” than the other. Either can be a useful path to salvation, to the realization of our fundamental unity. It is a question of what is most helpful to us at a given time.
But in terms of miracles, the miracle is always about the shift in our thinking from ego to Christ, from little self to God. It has no other goal; and really, physical healing needs no other.
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I have always questioned the wisdom of explaining A Course in Miracles, given the implied premise of “explain” – to give an interpretation of some fact in order to make it easier to understand – and its Latin root – “explanare,” which means to smooth out and render intelligible.
If A Course in Miracles is your spiritual path, then there is no “explanation” – there is simply a relationship that shifts and evolves as our capacity to remember truth – and to discern the true from the false – deepens. It is like falling in love. You can’t explain it – you do it, and make sense of it as you go, as best you can.
Approaching the course in that spirit can be very helpful.
On the other hand, the inclination to “explain” A Course in Miracles – or to want such an explanation – is understandable. The course does not immediately present itself as being especially accessible or even comprehensible. One can feel drawn to it and yet still need assorted hands to hold while making it their practice and bringing it into application. That is simplifies and clarifies over time – not unlike a diamond emerging from carbon – is cold comfort to those still struggling to get some sort of manageable grip on it.
A Course in Miracles teaches that the separation from God is nothing more than the belief that our will and God’s will are not the same (T-9.I.7:9). If this is true, and if we are honest about the sometimes vicious and always shifting nature of what appears to our will, then it must follow that we are something other than what we think we are – these bodies with specific pasts and stories and dreams and all that. But what?
The answer to this question is actually less interesting and important than undoing that which blocks our awareness of what we are. Really, A Course in Miracles aims at undoing those blocks, first by giving us a Guide (the Holy Spirit) who can both see and see beyond those blocks, and second by teaching us how to give attention to those blocks, raising them into awareness where they are undone by our Guide.
The purpose of this Guide is merely to remind you of what you want. He is not attempting to force an alien will upon you. He is merely making every possible effort, within the limits you impose on Him, to re-establish your own will in your awareness (T-9.I.3:6-8).
What we are is not a mystery or a secret, but it is hidden. And we are the ones who hid it and who refuse to accept – through denial, through projection, through sheer stubbornness and so forth – responsibility for this decision. So in effect we are trying to solve a problem that we made, and trying to solve it without looking at ourselves.
So long as we still perceive a separate self who is acquiring some arcane knowledge or figuring out some obscure puzzle, then we are still confused.
David Bohm saw this very clearly in his essay The Observer and the Observed.
Somewhere “back in the back” is somebody who is observing what is wrong but he is not being looked at. The very “wrong” things which he should be looking at are in the one who is looking, because that is the safest place to hide them. Hide them in the looker, and the looker will never find them (On Dialogue 82).
It behooves us to be clear about this, because it is literally the end of our confusion and suffering. This is precisely what A Course in Miracles means when it teaches that the secret to salvation is simply that “you are doing this unto yourself” (T-27.VIII.10:1). This is why the course can assure us that all problems, no matter what their form, are solved in the same simple way.
Bring, then, all forms of suffering to Him Who knows that every one is like the rest. He sees no difference where none exists, and He will teach you how each one is caused. None has a different cause from all the rest, and all of them are easily undone by but a single lesson learned. Salvation is a secret you have kept but from yourself (T-27.VIII.12:1-4).
Thus, inner peace lies simply in remembering our decision to think apart from God and then making a different decision. This decision to be separate was made – and is made – internally, and if we cannot “find” it, it is because we are still intent on hiding it. We are still intent on blaming the world for our problems, and making God a remote and capricious taskmaster.
It is okay to do that – the offense is not against God – but it will hardly make us happy, joyous or free.
This is why A Course in Miracles places such emphasis on our relationship with the Holy Spirit, the still quiet Voice inside that remembers wholeness and aims only to lead us back to it. The Holy Spirit begins this process by reminding us always what we want: inner peace, love, joy, ecstatic union, Heavenly unity, oneness with God, nirvana, et cetera.
If we are clear that we want to be happy, and see that we are not happy, then we can begin to inquire into whether there is a way to be happy now. The answer is “yes,” but it hinges on our willingness to accept a new way of thinking, one which brooks no division between our will and God’s.
It is easy to intellectualize this. It is easy to say “I get it,” without actually making the change. There is not really a “self” that “gets” anything. So long as we still perceive a separate self who is acquiring some arcane knowledge or figuring out some obscure puzzle, then we are still confused.
I have written about this before. The oneness that we experience when we drop the egoic self, and empty our mind of all but the knowledge of God, always ends when we try to make that experience our own. That is, there is a moment when I see the experience as separate from me, a thing to be desired, or an accomplishment for which “I” deserve credit, and then it is gone. It is over.
When Bohm pointed out that the observer and the observer were not separate in a meaningful way, he was not trying to be religious or spiritual. Quite the opposite. It was simply a fact one could give attention to, see clearly as a problem, and then solve. Jungian analyst and writer James Hillman was looking at the same problem (and imagining a similar solution) in his beautiful and provocative essay The Thought of the Heart.
The first person singular, that little devil of an I – who, as psychoanalysis long ago has seen, is neither first, nor a person, nor singular – is the confessional voice, imagining itself to be the unifier of experience. But experience can also be unified by the style in which it is enacted, by the images which form it, by its repetitive thematics and by the relations amid which it unfolds. It does not have to be owned to be held (34, emphasis mine).
A Course in Miracles is a deeply Christian and Freudian expression of the perennial problem of the separated or dissociated or divided self. It also envisions a solution. Pick any of the course’s central ideas – study any of its lessons, any one of the sub-sections of the text – and give the whole of your attention to it and you will at last see the problem you have made and, because you are at last seeing the problem as it is and where it is, it will be undone.
If we can imagine letting go and being happy, then we can let go and be happy. That is the Holy Spirit reminding us what we want.
But we do not need to limit ourselves to the course, any more than we need limit ourselves to Zen Buddhism or Hinduism or psychotherapy or walking every day in the forest before it is light. The form in which we look at the problem does not matter. Our willingness to look in a sustained and open way – without deviating, without wandering – is what matters.
Krishnamurti said that when we perceive the limitations of our thought – what in A Course in Miracles we would call the egoic self, what Bohm would say makes and sustains the division between observer and observed – some space opens in which it is possible to discover something new.
Thought is limited and whatever it does will always be limited because in its very nature it is conditioned. When thought discovers for itself its limitation, and sees that its limitation is creating havoc in the world, then that very observation brings thought to an end . . . then there is space, and silence (This Light in Oneself 108-109).
People object sometimes when I bring in these other sources and suggest that, allowing for different mechanics and semantics (e.g., Jungian psychotherapy is a mechanically different approach to separation than the workbook of A Course in Miracles, and Krishnamurti’s linguistic premise is different from that of A Course in Miracles) they are really saying the same thing. But they are! They are all saying that we have made and sustained an internal division, that this division is manifest in our thought, that it plays out in what we call the world, and that it causes us grief and pain almost beyond measure. We are doing it! And so we can undo it.
But we need help. That is the state of things. So A Course in Miracles comes along and offers us a way to see the problem and suggests – rightly, in my experience – that to see it clearly is to undo it. It is not the only way, but for some of us it is a very helpful way. The question is, are we ready? And if we are not, okay, we are not but then why not? What blocks remain? Can we give attention to them now – bring them to the Holy Spirit – so that we might be reminded again of the only lesson we need to learn:
This is the obvious; a secret you kept from no one but yourself. And it is this that has maintained you separate from the world, and kept your brother separate from you (T-27.VIII.13:4-5).
Part of the deception is that this is difficult, requires expert external interventions and takes lifetimes. Those things may be part of the awakening process but they are hardly prerequisites. Life will awaken us now if we are ready to awaken. Why? Because we cannot truly be unawakened. We can only think we are – we can only insist that we are, and hide or ignore all the evidence to the contrary.
Look then at what insists is must not be looked at: give attention not only to what arises but to what you pretend is not arising. The truth hides in plain sight, right where we left it. There are no mysteries and no secrets – and there is nothing to do. We are playing an old game and we are tired of it. We are like gamblers bored with cards but unsure what will happen if we abandon our so-called winnings and leave the table.
Here is the hint: if we can imagine letting go and being happy, then we can let go and be happy. That is the Holy Spirit reminding us what we want. That dim sense that joy is possible and peace is not a dream is the Voice for God calling us to choose again: to think with God: to be at last the home we always sought.
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Given the premise of A Course in Miracles – the world is not real and we remain as God created us – the question often arises, “but what do I do?” We can only ask this question because we still identify with the world and bodies. The answer – “nothing” – is unsatisfying (as “nothing” always is to that which fears it is nothing) and so we seek out other answers and call that seeking “our life” or “our life’s purpose” or “our function in life.”
If we could see that the question of what to do is merely a form of resistance – and not a reasonable interrogatory about how to spend the interim period between sleep and wakefulness – then it would not be so hard to answer. There is no interim period between awakening and what awakening is not. It is one or the other. To suggest otherwise – and to make that otherwise our practice – is to choose hell in the midst of Heaven.
Much of what we call the ego is simply the habit of thinking – insisting, really – that unhappiness is joy, that pain is pleasure, and that tears of anguish are an unreserved blessing. Why else would we keep doing what doesn’t work? We must have persuaded ourselves that it does work, or that it will work someday, or that – at a minimum – it’s still better than the alternative, which is really really bad.
It is like bashing our head against a wooden wall and telling ourselves it’s okay, we like it, because the only other wall we can imagine is made of stone. That we could just stop doing this thing that hurts does not occur to us. Why? Why do we do this to ourselves?
All along we thought that inner peace was an accomplishment, and so we made it a goal, and now we learn that it is a gift, and we already have it, and so all our accomplishing and effort was simply a painful distraction.
Sometimes it’s good to ask – and answer – “why” questions. But sometimes we have to put them aside and give attention to the present moment. To do this is not to avoid answers but rather to step outside the framework – call it mental, neural, habitual, addictive, whatever you like – that is causing the problem in the first place.
If you are stuck in a loop, the answer does not lie in the loop, but in just stepping outside it. This is why A Course in Miracles teaches that “[w]hen you lay the ego aside, it will be gone” (T-8.VIII.8:6). It is that simple.
It would appear that I have perhaps contradicted myself here. In the first paragraph I said that the answer to “what to do” is “nothing,” and now I am talking about making decisions to stop hitting our heads or to step outside loops.
But you see, doing nothing is the end of the ego. The ego is a busybody, a chatterer, a planner, a doer. It is never still, never attentive, never just grateful. When we do nothing, we have laid the ego aside. Krishnamurti purportedly said once that his secret was that he didn’t mind what happened. That is a way of saying that he allowed reality to be what it was without interference or judgment. He did not pursue pleasure.
If we watch our thoughts closely, we will see that we do “mind” what is happening. We have opinions and ideas and judgments, and they translate in to plans for action, and then we act and react to whatever is thus set in motion, and then we have opinions and ideas and judgments about that and then . . . it is a cycle, an endless loop and we are doing it.
So instead we do nothing. For a minute or two at first, then more and more. It does not take long to see that life does not ask anything from us. It is a miracle, really. All along we thought that inner peace was an accomplishment, and so we made it a goal, and now we learn that it is a gift, and we already have it, and so all our accomplishing and effort was simply a painful distraction.
What joy there is in seeing this! And we forget it – or drop it for a little while – but then what joy to see that it is not diminished or compromised when we pick it back up. There are no mysteries and no secrets, just this quiet still happiness growing more so all the time.
Reason takes us so far; faith finishes the journey.
Faith is in the nature of assent, a quiet yes offered internally. It is like reason delivers us to the desert’s edge, but faith is what sustains our first steps into that apparently dangerous wilderness. This is why A Course in Miracles teaches us that “[w]here learning ends, God begins . . .” (T-18.IX.11:4)
Love is not learned. Its meaning lies within itself (T-18.IX.12:1-2).
What then are we learning? We are learning to offer to the Holy Spirit that which we would withhold from God, the fragment of reality we think we stole and now rule in shadows and uncertainty. That part of us which cherishes darkness and separation and its own will is all that must be brought to light.
This is the little part you think you stole from Heaven. Give it back to Heaven. Heaven has not lost it, but you have lost sight of Heaven (T-18.IX.1:6-8).
This giving back (or bringing to light) is a symbolic gesture. It s important to see this. We are not actually returning a stolen piece of Heaven to Heaven. God, like Heaven, is indivisible. What never happened need not be fixed or repaired. But because we believe it happened – and because this belief is the separation – we need to mimic the amends.
In this sense, healing is simply the recognition that sickness never was.
We heal in this way by offering all the apparent symptoms of separation to the Holy Spirit: our fear that our bodies are the wrong size or shape, our anger at our parents, our frustration with money, our dissatisfaction with work, the injustice of war and poverty, the crossword puzzle we can’t complete, our headaches, stubbed toes and cancerous lesions . . .
All of these are merely symptoms – or symbols – of our belief in separation. They are in the nature of idols whose sole purpose is to obscure the unchangeable fact of our oneness with God. They are illusions and thus bound to failure.
Beyond all idols is the Thought God holds of you. Completely unaffected by the turmoil and the terror of the world, the dreams of birth and death that here are dreamed, the myriad of forms that fear can take; quite undisturbed, the Thought of God holds of you remains exactly as it always was (T-30.III.10:1-2).
Yet the question is never will illusion prevail, but rather how long will we postpone our celebration in God that illusions are not real? For the separation from God continues only so long as we insist it must.
Reason is what guides us through the text and workbook of A Course in Miracles. Reason teaches us that the myriad forms of fear we perceive are not separate problems in need of separate solutions but rather symptoms of the only problem we have. Reason persuades us that we need a Teacher to show us the other, the better way, which is accomplished by showing us that “[y]our one central problem has been answered, and you have no other” (W-pI.80.1:2).
Faith is what allows us to accept that all our problems have been solved, that peace is inherent, and that joy is now. Faith stands on the foundation reason built and leaps. Its gratefulness is akin to wings. It is not afraid so much as eager. It is ready to learn that the final lesson was what we expected all along it would be: We remain as God created us and God’s Will is done. Perfect wholeness abounds.
Last year, somewhat like observing a large trout surface through shadowy depths of the lake at dawn, I realized that attention was a gift and because it was a gift, it could only be given away, and this “giving” was in the nature of true creativity. It was in the nature of love because it led only to choiceless awareness.
In the wake of this insight, I became sensitive to where my attention went. I noticed when it drifted and saw that it did not really drift but rather was abandoned, set aside, and like a stray dog attached itself to anything that offered it a little comfort and succor. This almost always led to disappointment, anxiety, grief – all the hallmarks of conflict.
The truth is, we have an inherent power to give our attention anywhere and to anything, and we can do this in loveless ways or in loving ways. That is the decision we make; that is the lesson to which we are brought by A Course in Miracles: it brings us to the point of seeing with clarity this point of decision and it places us with a Teacher who can help us make the choice for love.
How does this happen? Attention given in a sustained and loving way transcends itself and becomes awareness. The semantics are not essential – you may attach other words or concepts to this process and that is not a problem. There are many ways to see this and to share about it. If we are starving and someone offers us bread, we are not going to argue that the plate on which it is served is the wrong shade of blue.
We discern, then, that attention is capable of direction. It is subject to choice. It can go here or there. It can be ignored or cherished.
But awareness simply is. There is no good or bad in it, no becoming in it, no judgment in it. Awareness sees the fact and brings nothing to it. It puts nothing between it and the fact – no filters, no conclusions, no ideals. When we are aware in this way, we are discerning between what is real and what is illusory, and giving attention only to what is real because we see at last that there is nothing else to give attention to.
So awareness is what brings choice to an end: it undoes choice. The logic of this is impeccable: what is one cannot have many separate ones to choose between. But we want to be honest about what we know through experience and what we have learned by reading or hearing the words of others. We want to be in relationship with God, not ideas about God, and we don’t want to appropriate someone else’s relationship with God. It has to be authentic. It has to be real.
So awareness in the sense I am using it may not yet be the fullness of our experience. This is not a problem. For a while, we move back and forth between the disciplined yet malleable energy of attention and the boundless love of awareness. In time, the former is precedent to the latter. But in eternity, in infinitude, even attention is an illusion.
So giving attention – to thought, to thought’s movement, to thought’s origins, to thought’s agendas, to thought’s thoughts – is a way of fostering awareness. It is a way of entering the flow of God’s thoughts and leaving our miserly own behind. There is no way to rush this process and no way to force it. One simply offers the gift – over and over one gives – and awaits the moment of acceptance.
Relationship begins with seeing that duality is not inherent in life but is rather a mode of perception that one can choose to relinquish. It reflects an internal decision to no longer be regulated by ideas and opinions and beliefs – the clutter of a mind that has dissociated itself from God.
Relationship is what remains when our separation from God is ended, and we perceive only the truth that is eternal and unchanging. When we are of that state, we are resonating with all life, whatever its form, whatever its temporary appearance.
In this sense, relationship and atonement are the same.
We think of our relationships for the most part in terms of something other – a person, an object, a place, a belief system. Could be our spouse, could be A Course in Miracles, could be a diet, could be a landscape. But if the other is subject to change, subject to good and bad, subject to helpful or not helpful, then it is not a relationship but a bargain. We are negotiating in an effort to gain something – a good feeling, a sense of purpose, a moment of pleasure.
It is neither necessary nor helpful (nor possible, really) to arrange the external world to our satisfaction, but it is helpful and possible to arrange it in a way that facilitates our learning and the application of that learning.
But reality is not capable of negotiation. One cannot bargan with the truth. And what is perfect does not make deals.
So the suggestion, then, is that the healed relationship contemplated by A Course in Miracles (T-17.V.h) really has nothing to do with what is external. Rather, it is that which follows in the wake of our internal decision to align our thinking with truth as God created it.
Is it not certain that you will remember a goal unchanged throughout eternity? For you have chosen but the goal of God, from which your true intent was never absent (T-17.V.9:5-6).
Relationship and attention are intimately connected. Moment by moment we give attention to thought – are we thinking with God or against God? This can sound difficult or tedious until we realize that to give attention to thought is to think with God. By giving attention we enter that state of awareness which knows that it is not possible to be separate from God, only to think that it is possible.
In that moment, we are in relationship with love itself as love itself, and the question of “the other” naturally ends.
I think this requires effort at the beginning: I think it is in the nature of learning. One acquires a map and then studies it, and then ventures tentatively out into the territory, checking and rechecking the map. But gradually, one’s knowledge and experience begin to supplant the map. In a sense, they become the map. And so one ventures more readily into the territory, going deeper, taking less with them, and lingering longer and longer.
It is neither necessary nor helpful (nor possible, really) to arrange the external world to our satisfaction, but it is helpful and possible to arrange it in a way that facilitates our learning and the application of that learning.
This is why I wake up early. Our house is small, Chrisoula and I both work from home, our children our home-schooled, and so things get busy and vibrant quickly. It is more like a fast-paced country diner than a monastery. I love it – I am deeply grateful for it – but I am still learning how to be still in the midst of it.
So those quiet morning hours become the space in which I give attention to truth as God created it, through my practice of A Course in Miracles, and thus nurture my awareness of love which – I know you know this, too – inflects the day with gentleness and peace, ever offering itself to itself.
