ACIM Lesson 136 Contemplation

"Sickness is a defense against the truth". The purpose of the workbook is to train your mind in a systematic way to a different perception of everyone and everything in the world. The exercises are planned to help you generalize the lessons, so that you will understand that each of them is equally applicable to everyone and everything you see. Nothing real can be threatened... Nothing unreal exists.

Transcript

A Course in Miracles Lesson 136 Sickness is a defense against the truth.

No one can heal unless they understand what purpose sickness seems to serve.

For then,

They understand as well,

The purpose of sickness has no meaning.

Being causeless and without a meaningful intent of any kind,

Sickness cannot be at all.

When this is seen,

Healing is automatic.

Healing dispels this meaningless illusion by the same approach that carries all illusions to truth.

It merely leaves them there to disappear.

Sickness is not an accident.

Like all defenses,

It is an insane device for self-deception.

And like all the rest,

The purpose of sickness is to hide reality,

To attack reality,

To change it,

Renter it inept,

Distort it,

Twist it,

Or reduce reality to a little pile of unassembled parts.

The aim of all defenses is to keep the truth from being whole.

The parts are seen as if each one were whole within itself.

Defenses are not unintentional,

Nor are they made without awareness.

Defenses are secret magic wands you wave when truth appears to threaten what you would believe.

Defenses seem to be unconscious because of the rapidity with which you choose to use them.

In that second,

Even less,

In which the choice is made,

You recognize exactly what you would attempt to do,

And then proceed to think that it is done.

Who,

But yourself,

Evaluates a threat,

Decides escape is necessary,

And sets up a series of defenses to reduce the threat that has been judged as real.

All this cannot be done unconsciously,

But afterwards your plan requires that you must forget you made it.

So it seems to be external to your own intent,

A happening beyond your state of mind,

An outcome with a real effect on you instead of one effected by yourself.

It is this quick forgetting of the part you play in making your reality that makes defenses seem to be beyond your own control.

But what you have forgot can be remembered,

Given willingness to reconsider the decision which is doubly shielded by oblivion.

Your not remembering is but the sign that this decision still remains in force as far as your desires are concerned.

Mistake not this for fact.

Defenses must make facts unrecognizable.

They aim at doing this,

And it is this they do.

Every defense takes fragments of the whole,

Assembles them without regard to all their true relationships,

And thus constructs illusions of a whole that is not there.

It is this process that imposes threat and not whatever outcome may result.

When parts are wrested from the whole and seen as separate and wholes within themselves,

They become symbols,

Standing for attack upon the whole.

Successful in effect,

And never to be seen as whole again.

And yet,

You have forgotten that parts stand but for your own decision of what should be real,

To take the place of what is real.

Say to yourself,

Say in your mind,

Sickness is a defense against the truth.

Repeat after me,

Sickness is a defense against the truth.

Sickness is a decision.

Sickness is not a thing that happens to you quite unsought.

Sickness does not make you weak.

Sickness does not bring you suffering.

Sickness is a choice you make,

A plan you lay,

When,

For an instant,

Truth arises in your own deluded mind,

And all your world appears to totter and prepare to fall.

Now,

Are you sick that truth may go away,

And threaten your establishments no more?

How do you think that sickness can succeed in shielding you from the truth?

Because sickness proves the body is not separate from you,

And so you must be separate from the truth.

You suffer pain because the body does,

And in this pain are you made one with it.

Thus is your true identity preserved.

Also preserved is the strange haunting thought that you might be something beyond this little pile of dust.

Thus is your true identity silenced and stilled.

For see,

This dust can make you suffer,

Twist your limbs,

And stop your heart,

Commanding you to die and cease to be.

Thus does the body become stronger than the truth.

The truth asks you to live,

But cannot overcome your choice to die.

And so the body becomes more powerful than everlasting life,

Heaven more frail than hell,

And God's design for the salvation of his child opposed by a decision stronger than God's will.

God's child is dust,

God is incomplete,

And chaos sits in triumph on God's throne.

Such is your planning for your own defense,

And you believe that heaven quails before such mad attacks as these.

With God made blind by your illusions,

Truth turned into lies,

And all the universe made slave to laws which your defenses would impose on it.

Yet,

Who believes illusions but the one who made them up?

Who else can see them and react to them as if they were the truth?

God knows not of your plans to change God's will.

The universe remains unheeding of the laws by which you thought to govern it,

And heaven has not bowed to hell,

Nor life to death.

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.

Defenses are plans to defeat what cannot be attacked.

What is unalterable cannot change,

And what is wholly sinless cannot sin.

Say again to yourself,

In your mind,

Sickness is a defense against the truth.

Repeat again,

Sickness is a defense against the truth.

Such is the simple truth.

Truth does not make appeal to might nor triumph.

Truth does not command obedience.

Truth does not seek to prove how pitiful and futile are your attempts to plan defenses that would alter it.

Truth merely wants to give you happiness,

For happiness is its purpose.

Perhaps truth sighs a little when you throw away its gifts.

Truth knows with perfect certainty that what God wills for you must be received.

It is this fact that demonstrates time is an illusion,

For time lets you think that what God has given you is not the truth right now,

As it must be.

The thoughts of God are quite apart from time,

For time is but another meaningless defense you made against the truth.

Yet,

What God wills is here,

And you remain as God created you.

Truth has a power far beyond defense,

For no illusions can remain where truth has been allowed to enter.

Truth comes to any mind that would lay down its arms and cease to play with folly.

Truth is found at any time today,

If you will choose to practice giving welcome to the truth.

This is our aim today.

We will give a quarter of an hour,

Twice,

To ask the truth to come to us and set us free.

And the truth will come,

For it has never been apart from us.

Truth merely waits for just this invitation which we give today.

We introduce truth with a healing prayer to help us rise above defensiveness and let the truth be as it has always been.

Say this prayer in your mind.

Repeat after me.

Sickness is a defense against the truth.

I will accept the truth of what I am.

And let my mind be wholly healed today.

As you repeat this prayer,

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.

There will be no dark corners to keep defended from the light of truth.

There will be no dim figures from your dreams,

Nor their obscure and meaningless pursuits with double purposes insanely sought,

Remaining in your mind.

Your mind will be healed of all the sickly wishes that it tried to authorize the body to obey.

Now is the body healed because the source of sickness has been opened to relief.

You will recognize you practiced well by this.

The body should not feel at all.

If you have been successful,

There will be no sense of feeling ill or feeling well.

There will be no sense of pain or pleasure.

No response at all is in the mind to what the body does.

The body's usefulness remains and nothing more.

Repeat this prayer after me again.

Sickness is a defense against the truth.

I will accept the truth of what I am.

I will let my mind be wholly healed today.

Perhaps you do not realize that this removes the limits you had placed upon the body by the purposes you gave to it.

As these are laid aside,

The strength the body has will always be enough to serve all truly useful purposes.

The body's health is fully guaranteed because it is not limited by time,

By weather,

Or fatigue.

The body's health is not limited by food and drink or any laws you made it serve before.

You need do nothing now to make your body well,

For sickness has become impossible.

This protection needs to be preserved by careful watching.

If you let your mind harbor attack thoughts,

If you let your mind yield to judgment,

If you let your mind make plans against uncertainties to come,

You have again misplaced yourself and made a bodily identity which will attack the body,

For the mind is sick.

Give instant remedy should this occur by not allowing your defensiveness to hurt you longer.

Do not be confused about what must be healed,

But tell yourself,

Repeat this after me,

I have forgotten what I really am.

I mistook my body for myself.

Sickness is a defense against the truth,

And my mind cannot attack.

So,

I cannot be sick.

Ponder on this.

I have forgotten what I really am.

I mistook my body for myself.

Sickness is a defense against the truth,

And my mind cannot attack.

So,

I cannot be sick.

Sickness is a defense against the truth.

Therein lies the peace of God.