A Course in Miracles workbook lesson #140:
“Only salvation can be said to cure.”
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"Bryce Canyon"
photo by Aaron Springston |
Today's lesson is a culmination of what we've been studying for the last few days. No matter what "ills" appear to be in our lives, there is no law which says we are condemned to suffer. There is no reason for us to pick ourselves apart and try to figure out what's wrong in our thought. We needn't place blame or experience guilt for having transgressed some material law. We only need realize Truth. This truth is that we're one with God. We are spiritual and reflect only Spirit. It's a mistaken belief that we are victims of heredity, or subject to communicable disease, or any of the myriad problems which seem to be so real in our collective and individual thought. It can be very difficult to take ourselves out of the perpetual loop of dis-ease. We have commercials in various media telling us what's wrong with us, friends and strangers love to relate their maladies, and we're taught through our educational system that we must beware almost everything we encounter. So it can seem impossible to realize this Truth in our life, while living amongst this constant flow of erroneous thought. So everytime we turn away from material illusion into the shining perfection of ourselves, as seen through the spiritual sense we're developing, we should celebrate! Each revelation is a step toward salvation from this trap of victimhood. Only the understanding of what is truth and what is illusion can lift us past the thoughts which hold us trapped in sickness and the disharmony of our existence. And it's not by trying to rid ourselves of illusion that we are freed; it's by knowing what Truth is. Knowing what it is and allowing it to be first in our thought -- no, the only reality in our thought. And by filling ourselves with Truth, error has no room in thought and disappears into the nothingness which is its only reality. Now that's something to celebrate!
Mary Baker Eddy quote:
“Many imagine that the phenomena of physical healing in Christian Science present only a phase of the action of the human mind, which action in some unexplained way results in the cure of disease. On the contrary, Christian Science rationally explains that all other pathological methods are the fruits of human faith in matter,--faith in the workings, not of Spirit, but of the fleshly mind which must yield to [the] Science [of the Christ]. The physical healing of Christian Science results now, as in Jesus' time, from the operation of divine Principle, before which sin and disease lose their reality in human consciousness and disappear as naturally and as necessarily as darkness gives place to light and sin to reformation. Now, as then, these mighty works are not supernatural, but supremely natural. They are the sign of Immanuel, or 'God with us,'--a divine influence ever present in human consciousness and repeating itself, coming now as was promised aforetime, ‘To preach deliverance to the captives [of sense], And recovering of sight to the blind, To set at liberty them that are bruised.’"
Science & Health Page xi:9-21
