Lesson 148:

My mind holds only what I think with God… When I defend myself I am attacked… Sickness is a defense against the truth…

When read altogether, this reads like:

1. Here we have the truth about my state of being. We are the thoughts of creation God created as His Son. These thoughts have never left the mind that created like Himself. Therefore, this state of being has never left the source for which its healed whole perception can be found; forever one with the eternal and the changeless, the loving and complete. 2. Any thought which seems to have a cause and/or effect that has not these eternal characteristics therefore can only be imagination and not real, being foreign to the Mind of all that is in truth.

3. These foreign thoughts are dreams and when believed to be reality, one identifies oneself with the false effects of a false cause. This is mental illness.

The Course says that all illness is mental illness, and from the perspective of ‘One Cause’, its relatively simple to see that this must be so… All physical characteristics of what we call sickness are the next layer of the denial of Source, to believe instead the impossibility that what is not sourced by God could source a world of all the opposite characteristics to those inherent in Creation; which is changelessly eternal forever.

Here we have the authority problem; up-front and center. It is this desire to be special instead of everything that constitutes the run-down of countless reasons to take a defensive posture toward everything we have now made in our minds.

Coming out of nowhere, this world was sponsored. It is not the truth. It is therefore, impossible to ground in the truth of what one is, as long as the belief that the false is true remains a more real presence to the mind, than the truth. No wonder it always feels like problems such as viruses, cancer, disease, arguments, disagreements, anger and defeat, (ad infinitum) seem to come out of nowhere. I mean, did anyone ever get up one day and say “my plan for today is that everything will go wrong”, yet how often have we said at the end of the day, “ everything went wrong that could have possibly gone wrong. An unreal source sponsors an unpredictable outcome. No wonder constant defense is required to maintain the ‘special status’ this world of nothing promises. These are defenses against the truth.

As long as we constantly occupy our presence of mind with pain-in-the-ass illnesses (and it’s always something, yes) we aren’t available in presence, to remember the truth instead. If the ego can just keep everything in this world coming at us with the ‘last chance, life or death mentality’, and we believe it’s real, we operate from a hectic program of survival mode and are unconscious to the really laughable state of this dream figure’s trials ~we are identified with them instead.

As truth returns to presence of mind by our willingness to see the impossibility of the false, we feel ourselves dis-identifying with the dream figure and its trials. We recognize ourselves as the dreamer of the dream, instead. We laugh, as the course says, when its quaint absurdity is seen. The need for defense is seen as just another aspect of the program of the false-reality, which is meant to dupe the mind of God’s Son into staying asleep and on guard….

Ah, the constant oxymoron of this world… We realize that all defense of the false, attacks the presence of mind and limits what we allow available to know the truth. So why defend, eh? It is only playing a role that separates us from the awareness of our reality. As is sickness… the entire world was made to defend against the truth. And whenever we believe our life depends on defending our little ‘whatever-ness’, it is just a forgiveness opportunity and we are just a little willingness’s reach from total safety and peace, within the mind that already holds only what it thinks with God….