There Is No Gain In Sickness
by Tom Baker
Lesson: Manual for Teachers: 5. HOW IS HEALING ACCOMPLISHED?
Date: March 1, 2009
A Course In Miracles has a way of bringing all of our problems back to our choice to have them. God did not make the world; we did and continue to make the world of form through our consciousness. We can make a world of war or one of peace. And the same is true of sickness. God did not decree you catch a head cold, have diabetes, or contract cancer. We decide. This is ultimate responsibility. But if it is our choice to be sick, it is also our choice to be well, or better said, not sick; to be simply our natural, healthy selves. Oddly enough, like peace on earth, good health is not easy to choose. I know this from my own experience.
When I am sick, whether it be insomnia, arthritis, kidney stones (three of my favorite hiding places), I am cutting myself off from all other people and the universe; I see myself as a victim of my body and my body as a victim of forces beyond my control. I think that my condition cannot fully be understood by the providers I seek out for treatment and that my condition is so unique that even my fellow sufferers cannot really know how it feels to me. No one understands. Sometimes I say that I am living out my karma. Other times I don't know. But if I am to be completely honest, I must confess there is a secret relief in being sick, a painful security in having a condition I can name and treat and conquer. I am intimidated by the idea that I have made up this sickness myself as a defense against God's truth, but I cannot quite deny it. The analogy that comes to mind is the active alcoholic who claims that it not his choice to drink, that in fact he would not drink were it not for his nagging wife, misbehaving children, stressful job, rude neighbors, and corrupt government. Finally it is his decision to drink and it is his decision to stop. Finally it is my decision, although I conveniently forget making it, to be sick and my decision to lay sickness aside and open to the truth which, to use a popular phrase, will rock my world. (From "Healing and Sickness are my Choice" archived on my website).
"Sickness is a decision. It is not a thing that happens to you, quite unsought, which makes you weak and brings you suffering. It 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." (W. Lesson 136, p. 258)
The Manual for Teachers puts it this way: "Sickness is a method, conceived in madness, for placing God’s Son on his Father’s throne." (M. P. 17). In a round about way the Course says in effect that we secretly make ourselves sick then blame it on God, thus taking the power of God for our own purposes but giving God the responsibility. In my marriage I do the same thing in a radically different form when I stub my toe and blame it on my wife, "If you hadn’t been looking at me I would have been watching where I was going." What if we stopped blaming others for what is really our own choice and responsibility. It would always be my choice, for instance, to be angry. You would not make me angry, I would choose to be angry. You would not make me sick, I would choose to be sick. You see how it all fits together? Our ego driven consciousness sees our selves being acted upon continuously by forces outside of us: people, germs, and stress making me angry and sick. To be logically consistent I must say that I make myself angry and sick, that I am always the real cause, although it certainly does not feel that way. What it feels like is that almost everything outside of myself causes me to think and feel and even do things: donuts make me eat them, rude drivers make me enraged, my liberal college professors made me think like them. Well, now it’s not so clear. I really do choose to eat the donut, I am really more in charge of myself driving than it seems, and I often disagreed with my liberal professors. But notice, food, passing emotions, and undergraduate notions are not closely connected to fear. But deep anger, sickness, pain, and death are central to fear. Can we conclude then that the closer something comes to fear the less we think we choose it?
We are getting to a spiritual principle, one implied by Edgar Cayce when he said that all sickness could be cured by hypnosis but that few were ready for the cure. The spiritual principle is that all forms are our choice, but in fear (over identification with form) we forget and see everything happening to us. In short, in fear we go from co-creators with God to victims of what only God created. This fear dynamic constitutes the main power play of the ego.
The long term solution is to stop identifying with form. Much of the workbook is about practicing being spirit, re- identifying self with Self. This is more simply said in a phrase often used in the Unity Church: "Let me know myself as a spiritual being having a human experience." In Lesson 97 (I am spirit) we are asked to practice our being as spirit with the prayer/affirmation:
Spirit am I, a holy Son of God, free of all limits, safe and healed and whole, free to forgive, and free to save the world. (W. p.173)
Notice that the healing choice we make is to see ourselves as holy, free of all limits, as safe, as healthy, as forgiving and as saving the world through those choices. Will that get rid of your cold? Probably not. We must address the willingness part. As long as I’m sick or vulnerable to sickness I’m holding out on God. In other words, sickness gets me something. What in this section is called The Shift in Perception is the willingness to say about sickness: "There is no gain at all to me in this." (M. p.17) In order to really embrace what we are, we must release what we do not really want. When we do this we become healers by example: "To them [the sick] God’s teachers come, to represent another choice which they had forgotten. The simple presence of a teacher of God is a reminder. His thoughts ask for the right to question what the patient has accepted as true." (M. p.19) This is a mental conversation, not a verbal confrontation. We hold very tight to sickness. Note that in the Gospels Jesus only heals at someone’s request. Thus the teacher of God never intrudes upon what seems to make someone safe. However, by example and in blessing the teacher of God offers a healing choice.
© Copyright Tom Baker 2009