Take two aspirin and go help someone
Date: May 21, 2007
Last week in our Workbook class in Sedona, we did Lesson 136, "Sickness is a defense against the truth." This is a challenging lesson, for it states unequivocally that all sickness, without exception, is caused by our own attack, our own decision to defend ourselves against the truth of who we really are. Our exploration of this lesson naturally led us to consider the question of how to deal with sickness when it comes up in our lives.
I used the mundane example of a headache to illustrate what people often do with a teaching like this. A person gets a headache, and then immediately goes on a frantic archeological expedition into her mind to uncover the root cause of the headache. (Alas, all too often, other people will join in the dig.) "What did I do to create that? What particular attack thought did I have which caused this headache? Was it my irritation at my husband for leaving the toilet seat up this morning? Was it when I yelled at the kids on Wednesday? I must find whatever wrong thought caused this headache, so I can make it go away."
The Course, however, never uses this approach. I see at least a couple of problems with it. First, according to the Course, our anger, attack, guilt, and ego-identification are very pervasive and very deep. We have countless attack thoughts every day, many of which we don't recognize. Our minds are filled with potential causes of illness, most of them buried very deep in the unconscious. Therefore, for all practical purposes, the precise thought that caused any particular illness is virtually impossible to track down. It might be some recent thought you had, but it might just as easily be something that has been buried in your mind for eons. Searching for it is trying to find the proverbial needle in a haystack.
The second problem is that searching frantically for the wrong thought in order to make the headache go away places our focus on the body, which is the ego's very purpose for sickness. Lesson 136 tells us that sickness serves to convince us that we are bodies:
How do you think that sickness can succeed in shielding you from truth? Because it 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, and the strange, haunting thought that you might be something beyond this little pile of dust silenced and stilled. For see, this dust can make you suffer. (W-pI.136.8:1-5)
Ironically, then, the focus on making the headache go away actually teaches the ego's lesson, because focusing on the physical symptom reinforces our belief that the body is our "true" identity.
What should we do instead? There is a well-known quote from the Text that counsels a very different focus:
When the ego tempts you to sickness do not ask the Holy Spirit to heal the body, for this would merely be to accept the ego's belief that the body is the proper aim of healing. Ask, rather, that the Holy Spirit teach you the right perception of the body, for perception alone can be distorted. Only perception can be sick, because only perception can be wrong. (T-8.IX.1:5-7)
Instead of focusing on the healing of the body, we should focus on acquiring the right perception of the body. What is that right perception? Part of it is seeing the body as an illusion, of course, but there is more to it than that: A major part of perceiving the body correctly is also seeing the proper purpose of the body. Again and again, the Course tells us that the body's health depends on what we use it for. As long as we see it as something to "attack with" (T-8.VIII.1:5), we will feel guilty, and our guilt will cause sickness, which is "guilt's shadow" (P-2.IV.2:6). But if we see it as a communication device, a means of extending to others, it will become "a healthy, serviceable instrument through which the mind can operate until its usefulness is over" (W-pI.135.8:2).
Therefore, with our headache example, we need to abandon the archeological expedition and try a more useful approach. Without making it a major focus, we can go ahead and do whatever is needed physically to alleviate the headache, since the Course has nothing against using "magic" for this purpose. At the same time, we can tell ourselves that we refuse to let this headache teach us the ego's lesson that we are a body. Instead, we can allow the Holy Spirit to teach us the proper perception of the body: It is an illusion whose only purpose is to extend love, forgiveness, and helpfulness to others as He directs. In short: "Take two aspirin and go help someone."
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