If There Were No Fear, What Would There Be to Fear?
“All material means that you accept as remedies for bodily ills are restatements of magic principles. This is the first step in believing that the body makes its own illness. It is a second misstep to heal it through non-creative agents. It does not follow, however, that the use of such agents for corrective purposes is evil. Sometimes the illness has a sufficiently strong hold over the mind to render a person temporarily inaccessible to the Atonement. In this case it may be wise to utilise a compromise approach to mind and body, in which something from the outside is temporarily given healing belief. This is because the last thing that can help the non-right-minded, or the sick, is an increase in fear. They are already in a fear-weakened state. If they are prematurely exposed to a miracle, they may be precipitated into panic. This is likely to occur when upside-down perception has induced the belief that miracles are frightening.” A Course in Miracles, II-4
“Illness is a thought in your mind. If you had never heard of illness, the idea wouldn’t occur to you. Thoughts of illness have become epidemic. Illness is a thought picked up and learned. Don’t hold it to you. Even if you have been diagnosed, as best you are able, find a way to think about other aspects of life.
Remember, beloveds, there is no such thing as a death sentence. There is no death. The body can go poof, yes, it will. The body will fall down in abeyance to higher laws. How and when you drop off your body are yet to be determined. What is called death is perplexing to you. It’s so common, yet you cannot lie down and die at will. You cannot set the moment. And, yet, you look at the clock a lot. Don’t set the timer. Don’t devote yourself to attending to the moment of so-called death. Don’t honor the concept of death so much any more. The same for age and things like expectancy and statistics and all those predictions… Honor what you honor. Welcome what you welcome. As for the rest, let the preponderance slide away from you.” HL 4972
_________________________________________
Does the body make its own illness?
In the realm of applied sciences in general and of medicine in particular, it is easy to confuse the terms of the trilogy: principle, means, and result. A similar confusion that we have put into light in the previous blog (#59: The Ultimate Technology Is the Universe Itself) is the one between principle and process (of evolution, namely).
When medicine is searching for the ultimate cure to a disease, it is for sure looking for a means to obtain a result but the principle behind the means is far from being crystal clear. Hence without a clear and truthful principle at the source of the means, the result cannot have the clarity that the principle does not have.
Can the body be sick by itself? Can the body make an error by itself? That thoroughly unanswered question is the veil that covers the principle behind medicine’s idea of healing.
To answer that question we have to acknowledge that there can’t be two opposite principles that govern healing. Traditional western medicine certainly believes that the body can be sick by itself, hence that it can make errors by itself (genetic, metabolic, cytological, immunological, neurological…errors) without the mind’s intervention. It pertains to the same pattern of thinking that consciousness is simply the result of neurological processes. This is equivalent to say that the principle of illness of the body is equivalent to the process of illness. We find here the same tautological thinking that we found in the confusion of the principle of evolution with the process of evolution. The fact that the body eventually dies — which is equivalent to say that it commits the ultimate “error” — seems to affirm that the body is IMPERFECT by principle. Consequently, the aim of medicine is to correct the body’s imperfections (errors) with adjuvant or auxiliary technologies designed according to a quantified model of what a perfect, immortal body should look and behave like.
However if a principle is what “takes the first place or what comes first”, then how could imperfection be the principle sustaining physical life?
The “opposite” principle to the imperfect creation of physical life is the principle that we have been created — more precisely we are constantly, infinitely and eternally created in the now — PERFECT. Perfection is a real principle, not the absence of principle like im- or non-perfection. Hence, the principle that leads healing is not imperfection but PERFECTION. The means is to identify at what level the error is produced and apply the appropriate corrective to restore that perfection. And the healing or restoration is the result of that sequence: principle —> means —> result. How could we heal if we were not already perfect? This is a tremendous and massive rearrangement of our way of understanding the principle behind healing, the means of healing, and healing itself as a result.
In the world of standard medicine led by the non-principle of imperfection, the means is globally called the medication. In the world of Creation, the means is called the “miracle” (the very substance of ‘A Course in Miracles’) which is the experience of finding back our right-mindedness.
The magic thinking of conventional medicine
If perfection, against all appearances in the world, is the leading principle of healing and its means, then the body itself has no power of its own to fight or “behave” against the principle of perfection. The body has no meaning in itself, and it has no mind of itself. It has meaning only as a learning device for the mind. In that sense, the body is what makes possible our experience in the world and of the word, which includes ourselves. As a learning device, the body is not a lesson in itself and by itself but more of a device to facilitate learning. Just like a computer, the body does not possess any capability to input learning errors by itself. The input of errors in learning comes from the mind.
A body cannot behave against perfection, but a mind can and it effectively does. It is the mind that is capable of error, not the body. It is the split mind that has been fighting or resisting the principle of perfection by making itself believe that it created itself. That is where the confusion of the mind with the body comes from. Since perfection is the “perfect and One thought”, we can say that if the body behaves erratically it is because it is responding to erroneous thoughts coming from the mind.
Our noetic approach to the new medicine is still oscillating within the seeming contradiction between the body doing its own errors and the mind also doing its own errors. This is equivalent to say that we still believe the body and the mind are both real. Consequently we believe that the body has the power to affect the mind, and that the mind has the power to affect the body. This is to say that we are still dualistic even in our holistic approach.
We are facing three choices of belief:
1) only the body is real;
2) both the body and the mind are real, and
3) only the mind is real.
If we acknowledge that Perfection is the principle behind healing errors, then we can no longer confuse the mind with the body. Physical illness is the response of the body to what is not right-mindedness. When we are sick, we intrinsically believe that we cannot control the body we inhabit, that the body is sick on its own, that physical matter has the power to by-pass the mind. This is called magical thinking.
Two magical conventional medical thinking principles
The principle of imperfection of the body that leads the conventional medical thought process assumes tautologically that the fall down of the body (process) is caused by the fall down of the body (the principle of imperfection).
Two corollary principles derive from the principle of imperfection:
1) the body makes its own illness and the mind does not have control over this physical process;
2) medicine tries to heal the body through “non-creative agents” which are medications.
Both of these corollaries of the principle of imperfection express our scientific belief in magic.
At the opposite, God says: “The body will fall down in abeyance to higher laws.” All life forms are in constant change, transformation, and transmutation. Death of the body is in itself a process of life. Even if matter changes, it is not a sign that it has power over the mind. If it was so then God would lose control of His Creation. The “higher laws” God is referring to might concern the principle that the body, as the physical world, is not real. This is surely a higher law! Only the mind is real and illness comes from the belief in the conflicting reality of both of them. Then the body, as an expression of this kind of thought process, can manifest illness.
In illness, what links the mind to the body is FEAR
What is fear if not a thought pattern of dissociation between the body and the mind with the belief in the reality of both? It reminds the state of fear of God with the accompanying fear of retaliation through guilt and self-punishment.
A major step in healing is to remember that we did not create ourself. The idea of our imperfect creation comes precisely from the deep unconscious belief that we are the author of ourself. Imperfection means our fundamental belief in separation from our Real and Unique Creator. This means that the necessary and sufficient condition to ultimate healing (the ultimate cure) is to accept and surrender to the idea that we were created and that we were created perfect.
Through medication, medicine tries to correct the error in the body by assuming that the body has the power to commit errors by its very imperfect nature. But we now know that the error is in the mind. There is a confusion of levels here.
But is it to say that we have to abandon medication? Certainly not. Yet, it is sure that the belief in physical remedies (even so-called natural remedies in some cases) reinforce our fundamental belief in medical magic. In illness, there is a rupture in the communication between the mind and the body. And who can confuse the mind with the body if not the ego?
It follows that medication for a corrective purpose is a necessary compromise approach to mind and body when the not-right-minded or the sick is in a state of fear towards his or her illness. Medication acts as a temporary healing relief which remains, in fact, a temporary healing belief.
However the real medication is the miracle, that is, the experience of the mind teaching itself through the body what it wants to learn with its learning device. And what is the mind teaching itself to learn if not to be right-minded, to let go of magic, to be less concerned by making things happen through non-creative agents and more concerned about making space for the real and non-magical things to happen.
“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.” (Pierre Teilhard de Chardin)
(even so-called natural remedies in some cases) reinforce our fundamental belief in medical magic. In illness, there is a rupture in the communication between the mind and the body. And who can confuse the mind with the body if not the ego?
Be First to Comment