Handout
by Tom Baker
Lesson: Text: Chap. 30, VIII. Changeless Reality, pp. 642-644
Date: March 22, 2009
Essential to healing, in fact essential to even allowing the miracle to be applied to a situation of disease or dysfunction, is a loosening of our insistence that form constitutes reality. Even as young children we are taught not to judge by appearances, there is more to most things and most people than meets the eye: you can’t tell a book by its cover. This caveat of youth becomes one of the guiding principles in spirituality when it is given depth and breadth of application:
"Appearances deceive, but can be changed. Reality is changeless. It does not deceive at all, and if you fail to see beyond appearances you are deceived. For everything you see will change, and yet you thought it real before, and now you think it real again. Reality is thus reduced to form, and capable of change. Reality is changeless. It is this that makes it real, and keeps it separate from all appearances. It must transcend all form to be itself. It cannot change." (T. Chap. 30, VIII, p. 642).
Probing question: What forms, material and mental, to do want to stay the same? What forms, in other words, are you particularly reluctant to release? Notice the forms to which you cling may be mental as well as material and are probably a combination of the two.
The miracle shifts our perception away from form to what is real and universal. This is summed up in two miracles principles: "23 Miracles rearrange perception and place all levels in true perspective. This is healing because sickness comes from confusing the levels," and "#24 Miracles enable you to heal the sick and raise the dead because you made sickness and death yourself, and can therefore abolish both. You are a miracle, capable of creating in the likeness of your Creator. Everything else is your own nightmare, and does not exist. Only the creations of light are real." (T. Chap. 1, p. 4). The passage we are examining from the text emphasizes the changelessness in the person:
"The miracle is means to demonstrate that all appearances can change because they are appearances, and cannot have the changelessness reality entails. The miracle attests salvation from appearances by showing they can change. Your brother has a changelessness in him beyond appearance and deception, both. It is obscured by changing views of him that you perceive as his reality [judgments]. The happy dream about him [her] takes the form of the appearance of his perfect health, his perfect freedom from all forms of lack, and safety from disaster of all kinds. The miracle is proof he is not bound by loss or suffering in any form, because it can so easily be changed. This demonstrates that it was never real, and could not stem from his reality. For that is changeless, and has no effects that anything in Heaven or on earth could ever alter. But appearances are shown to be unreal because they change." (T. pp. 642 & 643, bold type is mine).
Probing application: Sit still and take a few deep breaths. Allow your mind to be still, like a pond in the morning light or a mountain or that moment when there is no wind and all sounds cease. Now ask if there is a miracle you are directed to perform. Go with it.
You may have found that you resisted the miracle for a particular person or situation. In the Course that’s called temptation:
"What is temptation but a wish to make illusions real? It does not seem to be the wish that no reality be so. Yet it is an assertion that some forms of idols have a powerful appeal that makes them harder to resist than those you would not want to have reality. Temptation, then, is nothing more than this; a prayer the miracle touch not some dreams, but keep their unreality obscure and give to them reality instead. And Heaven gives no answer to the prayer, nor can a miracle be given you to heal appearances you do not like. You have established limits. What you ask is given you, but not of God Who knows no limits. You have limited yourself." (Chap. 30, p. 643).
Notice that the miracle is given but is blocked in time by the teacher of God’s resistance.
© Copyright Tom Baker 2009