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131  No one can fail who seeks to reach the truth.
 
MT: Why this? Why now? Why here? We were studying getting close to God.
 
JC: God is Truth. You may think truth is the hardest to find, but it actually is the easiest thing. Your world is upside down, that's all.
 
MT: Truth should be self-evident.
 
JC: It is--and yet you deny it, avoid it, continue to behave in ways that run contrary to what you know. Does that not seem odd to you?
 
MT: I can know the truth, and still see myself as a failure in reaching it, castigate myself for my obtuseness, and place myself farther away still. St. Paul spoke to that.
 
JC: Do you want to reach the truth today?
 
MT: I guess so. . . I feel pretty dim this morning. Cat woke me up too soon. He wanted his food.
 
JC: He got it, didn't he? Do you want the truth as much as the cat wants his food?
 
MT: One thing that's happened, JC, is that the Course has made my life a whole lot easier, smoother, reduced or eliminated the anguish I labored under BC (before Course). So perhaps I'm not suffering enough to want to change any further.
 
JC: Walking with God should not be a crisis. I promised to smooth the path for you.
 
MT: Let's say I reach God within the year--I've got seven, almost eight months to do it. That's my goal. It's scary to put it down on the screen like this. I would like a more direct experience of God--although I've had them, briefly. I lose touch with my God-nature all too easily. I do not keep it in mind as a goal, as my purpose on this plane. I need help with that.
 
JC: Angels hover above and all about you. You can feel their wings brushing against your face. There is nothing to fear. Decisions have light and strength behind them. In making a decision, you summon help from higher spheres. You summon the miracle.
 
MT: I summon the miracle. I like that. It has the ring of truth to it. Thank you, JC.

132  I loose the world from all I thought it was.

MT: What did I think about the world I came into? I thought it was full of death, enemies, bickering and wars. I thought I could trust no one besides myself, and I had doubts about me too! I thought everybody was in pain all the time, especially women, cursed by the Scriptures. I thought I had to be careful with every step I took, with every word I spoke; careful not to laugh inappropriately, careful to look to others to find what "appropriate" was. I had to be careful of my sexuality because behind every man hid a rapist, and besides, my body was always a rat trap about to go off. I thought I was born defective and would never make it. The list goes on and on. Don't know how I managed to survive.

JC: Now you open yourself to a new vision, the one given by God.

MT: Now I let a new vision come to me by the grace of God.

133  I will not value what is valueless.
 
MT: How am I today? How does this lesson apply to my state today? I have gone a long way in disidentifying with the body. My fear of death, my panics about becoming a bag lady who digs for breakfast in trash cans, the constant looking for sickness lurking around the next corner, paranoia about getting ripped off by merchants and health professionals, the endless searching for new clothes or pretty jewelry--those manifestations of the error are gone. What remains feels like a small rock that stops the machinery: that I do the things I do not want to do, and do not do the things I want to do. It feels like a mysterious force holding me back. Or a puzzle. I am spending a great deal of money and time exercising my body--daily trips to the gym, hikes, dieting. . . in this way, I know I am valuing what is valueless: the body.
 
JC: The body will not last. Spirit goes on forever. You cannot not have eternal life.
 
MT: I need help with redirecting my life. It used to be directed by avoidance of pain, by paranoia, by random responses to anxiety. Tethering my mind to my husband's (I cringe to say I did that) gave me purpose and relative peace, as did raising the kids. I never questioned getting a higher education, and I did it very well. But now? I am freer than at any other time in my life, and I squander this freedom, day by day, hour by hour.
 
JC: What would be a good use of your life, in your opinion?
 
MT: To write a book? To work for political change in this troubled country? To agitate for more bike paths, more trees, more humane treatment of animals? It is difficult to say, and I expect therein lies the problem. There is no one thing that I can say: this I am destined to do. The certainty was there forty years ago, where did the certainty go?
 
JC: There is certainty in doing this daily posting, isn't there?
 
MT: Yes, you are right. This is one thing I definitely want to be doing. It is valuable to me, enough that I do not question it.
 
JC: God knows how to reach you. You do not need to find the way to Him.

134  Let me perceive forgiveness as it is.

MT: Good morning, JC. How did you sleep?

JC: I am no longer in a body, and so I do not sleep. Angels watch over you all through the night, and I along with them.

MT: So today we review forgiveness once again. Forgiveness as the realization that my brother is sinless like me.

JC: Well put. You cannot accept your own sinlessness and hold others guilty.

MT: To smite another becomes totally pointless, because then I smite myself. I have been known to do so! The self-hate this Course uncovered was scary at first.

JC: And then you realized how pointless the whole game was, and you became ready to give it up.

MT: It's been a strange trip, JC, but a delightful one as well. I discover hidden aspects of myself as I go. I would never want to descend back down into the well of despair and hopelessness.

JC: And you do not have to. The light has come.
 
MT: The light has come, and I thank my Father for His gifts to me.

135 If I defend myself I am attacked.

136  Sickness is a defense against the truth.
 
MT: Radical statement, JC! You are very bold. I feel so helpless when I am sick. This morning I woke up with a positional headache, and I immediately launched into a string of thought: I had slept with my head turned to the left, the position must have restricted flow of blood to my head, must go to a doctor check on that, I don't want to have a stroke and be in a wheelchair. . . so here I was, putting my body in a wheelchair already, while lying in bed at four am!
 
JC: The headache is a defense against the truth of who you really are: a sinless Son of God, created to create.
 
MT: That's startling. As you said that, I realized that people who are truly engaged in what they are doing have very few illnesses, if any. They are too busy. I've had the experience, myself, of starting a backpacking trip with a cold, and fearing not to be able to go, but one day into the wilderness and I think: where did the cold go? I couldn't afford to be sick, away from medical care, so I wasn't sick any more.
 
JC: Yes, so how real was the cold? But I caution you that being sick is not a sin. It's only a mistake, a failure in recognition, and very easily corrected. Please avoid judging yourself or anyone else as less than holy for being sick.
 
MT: We have all sorts of defenses, and sickness is only one of them, is what you're saying. I get it.

137  When I am healed I am not healed alone.
 
MT: Masterful, JC, the connection between the six billion of us humans through healing. Sickness, the great separator, the scourge of mankind--sickness spared no one, Beethoven went deaf from syphilis, Darwin died from Chagas' disease--and healing through the Great Connection. This is truly the way home. When I hurt my back fifteen years ago, I wanted nothing to do with anyone else. I was angry, depressed, morose, immersed in my separated self. Whenever I walk the world thinking how my body looks and how to make it healthier, or just more acceptable, more enviable, more representative of my status, I am separating myself and making hell of what could be Heaven. But I must say, sickness seems awfully real when it's there. It's easy to talk about it when I am feeling fine.
 
JC: It does have every appearance of reality. Your mind is very clever in service of the ego. I am asking it to join with God instead.
 
MT: Just to reinforce the concept of the mind as maker of illness--supposedly (I've only read about this) people with true multiple personalities can be healthy in one, diabetic in another, to suffer from allergies in one personality and not in another. It is totally unexplainable within the medical view of illness, so medicine chooses to ignore it.
 
JC: What a price men have paid to maintain the separation and make themselves powerless.
 
MT: Oh yes, a staggering price to pay for nothing.
 
JC: What about you, today, here?  How will you use this idea in your life today?
 
MT: Well, you tell us to share it. Not to buy into the prevailing view that we are helpless in the face of sickness, and to become miracle workers. But I'm afraid of miracles. In the not-so-remote past, women got burned to death as witches when they tried to be healers. Far easier to bend my neck for the yoke than to soar like an eagle.
 
JC: You do not have to work miracles by yourself--in fact, you cannot. Where the miracle is, there I am with you. Connection is the essential ingredient of the miracle.
 
MT: What a good thought. I would share my healing with the world, that sickness may be banished from the mind of God's one Son, Who is my Self.

138  Heaven is the decision I must make.
 
MT. Interesting lesson about decision, JC. Just yesterday I thought: I must decide to lose weight, it's only a matter of decision. But I see that there is a more important decision to make. I see that to focus on body weight is like focusing on a leaf when it's a forest I'm in.
 
JC: To continue with your analogy, the forest isn't even the constructive focus. The real decision is to step out of shadows of trees and walk out into the light. You do not have problems, you only have one problem. To scatter your energies on a thousand different problems and to ignore the real one would be a pity, besides being insane and driving you insane.
 
MT: I need to focus. I feel quite scattered, even as I understand perfectly well what you're saying. Will you help me focus, please.
 
JC: One-pointedness. . . it is a matter of experience rather than understanding. You can understand the darkness, you can bemoan it and hurt yourself walking into rocks, you can fear the darkness because you can't see in it, you can enlist others in studying it and become the world's expert on darkness--it is all to no avail if you don't turn on the light!
 
MT: Today I decide on Heaven. Today I walk into the light.

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