Step 1: Understanding The Perceived Purpose of Sickness
Healing involves an understanding of what the illusion of sickness is for. Healing is impossible without this.
Application
Let’s apply this to an illness or some other health condition of yours, ideally in the present but it could also be in the past. Please ask yourself the following questions as sincerely and searchingly as you can.
Could it be that on some deep level you chose this illness?
Is it possible that at that deep level you feel that you deserve God’s punishment?
Is it possible that on that level you decided to give youe body an illness in order to punish yourself before God could punish you?
And is it possible that in doing that you werre trying to usurp His function as you perceived it and thus replace Him on His throne?
Finally, can you imagine that if you can overturn that decision in that hidden place in your mind, your illness will simply go away?
Step 2: Understanding the fear of release
The “fear of release” is the fear that a miracle worker will come along and take our shield away, thus leaving us face to face with the damage we believe we have done to our minds—or in normal parlance, to our souls. It’s better, we believe, to live with a sick body than to face a (supposedly) sinful mind.
Now undo this fear. Say the following affirmations;
Your mind is part of God’s. It is very holy.
What God creates is eternal and changeless.
Therefore, your mind is forever holy.
Step 3: Achieving a shift in perception
First, sickness is not physically caused. It is entirely a decision of the mind.
Second and more specifically, sickness is “a decision of the mind, for a purpose for which it alone would use the body”. We saw above that sickness was a strategy for winning our presumed war with God. By giving ourselves the punishment we believe it’s God’s function to give us (sickness), we have apparently “entirely usurped” His throne and thus defeated Him.
Third, to reverse our sickness, then, we need to understand that 1) we decided to be sick 2) for a purpose we no longer want, for we realize it holds no value for us. When you think a decision brings you precious gains, you will naturally keep it in place. But if you suddenly realize “There is no gain at all to me in this”, how can you not instantly undo the decision?
Application
Like yesterday, choose an illness or some other health condition. (You may even want to choose the same one as yesterday.) First, reflect on the idea that, according to this section, you have chosen this health problem on some level of your mind because it serves a purpose of your ego. Yet because the ego is insane, it serves no useful purpose. It is a twisted purpose that is so irrational that you would instantly let it go if it was ever exposed to the light of day.
Now say to yourself, slowly and sincerely,
You have no use for this.
Repeat it again, this time trying to mean it even more.
You have no use for this.
Say it as many times as you feel you need to, until you feel a sense of completion.
Step 4: Perform the Function of the Teacher of God
The teacher of God is a walking appeal to the patient’s mind to make a different choice. Notice just how many ways in which this is said. God’s teachers “represent another choice” (2:1). They are a “reminder” (2:2) of this choice. They are “symbols” of it (2:4). They “stand for” it (2:6). To represent, remind, symbolize, and stand for is to call something to mind, to bring something into awareness that was not there before.
Imagine that you so embody a different choice that your “simple presence” reminds people that they can make it too (2:2). Imagine that your “thoughts” reach into their minds and ask them to question the “truths” they have unquestioningly assumed (2:3). Imagine that merely by being around them, you awaken in their minds a “choice which they had forgotten” (2:1).
The healers offer the patients blessing (“they come in benediction”—2:7). They “call to” them (2:11). The truth in them “reaches out” to that same truth in their patients (3:6). So something is indeed going forth from the healers.
They have made the choice for healing and healing has thereby come to them. And now “They merely give what has been given them” (2:10). They extend the light they have already accepted into their own minds.
At the center of what they give is their perception of the patient. They realize that the form his sickness takes, no matter how extreme, is irrelevant, for all sicknesses are equally unreal (3:1-2). They see the Holy Spirit in him (3:3). They recognize that he did not make himself, but “must remain as God created him” (3:4), and that his illusions to the contrary have literally no effect (3:5). They understand that his will is not separate from theirs (3:9).
Yet again, they cannot “change the patient’s mind for him” (1:2). And so all these things are merely an appeal to the patient’s mind to make its own different choice.
“The truth in their minds reaches out to the truth in the minds of their brothers, so that illusions are not reinforced” (3:6). By reaching into the patient’s mind, the truth in the healer’s mind is undermining the patient’s hold on illusions, encouraging him to loosen his grip.
The patient’s illusions are dispelled “not by the will of another, but by the union of the one will with itself”
Application
Choose someone you know of who is dealing with an illness.
Now begin by getting in touch with the truth in you.
Get in touch with the light of healing in you, which knows that no illness has any reality.
Feel that radiant truth in yourself.
Now feel the truth in you reaching out to the mind of the other person.
Feel it reaching right past her false beliefs and the choice she has made to be sick.
Feel it contacting the truth in her.
And in that truth is the presence of the Holy Spirit in her.
See the fullness of healing that shines in her, waiting to give her unshakable peace and heal her body.
Speak these words directly to that place in her that made the choice to be sick but that can choose differently:
Behold, you Son of God, what life can offer you.
Would you choose sickness in the place of this?
See the light of healing in her grow brighter, until it shines away all that is not itself.
See it specifically shine away the dark spot in her mind that is her choice for sickness.
Relax and trust that the work has been done and leave the rest in the Holy Spirit’s hands.
Step 5: Understand healing is certain and do not repeat the healing work.
Should healing work be repeated? The basic answer is that the teacher of God must trust what the previous section said, that healing is certain. If it has been offered, it will be received. The teacher should trust this even in the face of “the appearance of continuing symptoms” (4:1). The teacher, in other words, should trust the invisible reality of healing more than the visible appearance of remaining symptoms.
[1]
If you doubt the healing because the symptoms still remain, you need to realize that you have fallen into error. You now must regard your own mind as the patient and deal with your mind accordingly (1:8). First, you must use your reason to tell yourself that you have “given the problem to One Who cannot fail” (2:4). Your previous effort doesn’t need to be repeated, since it “was already maximal, because the Holy Spirit so accepted it and so used it” (2:3). Instead, you must remember that it was God Who gave the gift through you and God Who received the gift for the patient (3:7). If God was just handing a gift to Himself, how could it possibly be lost?
To reinforce this trust, Jesus leaves us with a final image. In this image, it is the Holy Spirit in us Who really gives the healing and it is the Holy Spirit in the patient Who accepts the gift on the patient’s behalf (4:4), since healing is the very change that the Holy Spirit has been “seeking for him” (4:3). All that’s happening, then, is that the Holy Spirit is handing a gift from His right hand to His left. And since God works through the Holy Spirit, the gift is being “given by God to God” (4:12).
In light of this, let’s honestly ask ourselves Jesus’ series of questions about our gift: “How can it be lost? How can it be ineffectual? How can it be wasted?” (4:5-7).
[2]
Second, you must use your reason to tell yourself that your doubt is lack of trust, that mistrust is lack of love, and that lack of love is hate. Your “continued concern” (4:4), therefore, as caring as it may seem to be (4:5), is actually “attack” (4:4). This might sound extreme, yet if someone said to you “I just don’t trust you to receive the wonderful gift I’m giving you,” wouldn’t you feel attacked? As the doubting healer, you are therefore in the untenable position of “offering hate to one to whom [you] offered love” (2:5). This is strong medicine—Jesus knows it’s hard to swallow (4:1)—but it’s exactly what he wants you to take in.
[3]
Indeed, Jesus not only returns to these themes repeatedly, he offers us an analysis of their underlying source in paragraphs 5 and 6. Why do we really doubt that the patient did her part and that the Holy Spirit did His part? Because we doubt the trueness and fullness of the gift we gave due to underlying doubts about ourselves (5:1).
Our crippling self-concern assumes we are just this small self, when our concern should be for the patient in the recognition that he is part of us: “The mistake is always some form of concern with the self to the exclusion of the patient. It is a failure to recognize him as part of the self, and thus represents a confusion in identity” (6:1-2). These lines finger all of us. The phrase “concern with the self to the exclusion of the patient” captures the strange contradiction of all of us who try to set ourselves aside and be there for someone else, yet get caught up in looking in the mirror.
We need, therefore, to widen our identification to include the patient and elevate our identification to include our true Self. And we need to have an overpowering confidence in what happens when a problem has truly been placed in God’s hands. This confidence is a power of its own. “This is the certainty,” Jesus says, “that gives God’s teachers the power to be miracle workers, for they have put their trust in Him” (4:9).
Application
Think of a time you offered a gift to someone and that person did not appear to receive it. Then say to yourself:
I should not feel disappointed if I offered a gift and it did not appear to be received.
I can be certain that it was received.
And I can trust that it will be accepted when it is recognized as the blessing that it is.
Then picture that gift as a treasure, sitting neatly on a shelf in that person’s treasure house. Realize that that gift will stay on that shelf as long as needed. Angels come by daily and dust it off, making sure it remains in perfect condition, as perfect as the moment you gave it. Share now the angels’ trust that the day is coming when that person will claim his or her gift.