Lesson 136 Sickness is a defense against the truth
No one can heal unless he understands what purpose sickness seems to serve. ²For then he understands as well its purpose has no meaning. ³Being causeless and without a meaningful intent of any kind, it cannot be at all. ⁴When this is seen, healing is automatic. ⁵It dispels this meaningless illusion by the same approach that carries all of them to truth, and merely leaves them there to disappear. Sickness is not an accident. ²Like all defenses, it is an insane device for self-deception. ³And like all the rest, its purpose is to hide reality, attack it, change it, render it inept, distort it, twist it, or reduce it to a little pile of unassembled parts. ⁴The aim of all defenses is to keep the truth from being whole. ⁵The parts are seen as if each one were whole within itself. Defenses are not unintentional, nor are they made without awareness. ²They are secret, magic wands you wave when truth appears to threaten what you would believe. ³They seem to be unconscious but because of the rapidity with which you choose to use them. ⁴In that second, even less, in which the choice is made, you recognize exactly what you would attempt to do, and then proceed to think that it is done. Who but yourself evaluates a threat, decides escape is necessary, and sets up a series of defenses to reduce the threat that has been judged as real? ²All this cannot be done unconsciously. ³But afterwards, your plan requires that you must forget you made it, so it seems to be external to your own intent; a happening beyond your state of mind, an outcome with a real effect on you, instead of one effected by yourself. It is this quick forgetting of the part you play in making your “reality” that makes defenses seem to be beyond your own control. ²But what you have forgot can be remembered, given willingness to reconsider the decision which is doubly shielded by oblivion. ³Your not remembering is but the sign that this decision still remains in force, as far as your desires are concerned. ⁴Mistake not this for fact. ⁵Defenses must make facts unrecognizable. ⁶They aim at doing this, and it is this they do.