The purpose of sickness

Saturday February 9^th 2013: The Happy Learner, Workshop 6. 

Sickness is a defence against the truth (W136)

It is a fact of the world we live in that our bodies repeatedly fail us, and eventually will stop working altogether. Few people are as well as they might be, and 'health' and 'sickness' represent opposite ends of the same scale, with most of us swinging somewhere between the two. But we like to perceive average health as normal and sickness as a collapse from the condition our bodies should be in. In other words, we take sickness personally.

Sickness can feel like a failure, a punishment, or an attack. We want to know why, or why me, how to stop it, how to fix it. It is a time when we want - even more than usual - comfort, kindness and some kind of outside help that will do for us what we are frightened or ashamed or angry to find we cannot do for ourselves. And yet it is when we are sick that often others cannot or will not understand, when they become frightened or ashamed or angry themselves. In a world which glorifies a healthy body, sickness is an embarrassment, a nuisance, a burden, a cause for pity at best, and at worst actual hostility: like animals who turn on the weak and wounded of their own species.

In this workshop we will consider the many disorders and forms of distress that make us sick. We will be looking at what the course says about suffering, healing, helping ourselves and others, and what it calls magic: the many means we use to make ourselves better. To understand healing, the course teaches, we must recognize that sickness - and health too - are purposeful. Well or unwell, the question is, who does the body serve?

10.30 am to 2.30 pm. If you would like to come and join us, I look forward to seeing you.

I am not I

Yo no soy yo.
Soy este
que va a mi lado sin yo verlo;
que, a veces, voy a ver,
y que, a veces, olvido.
El que calla, sereno, cuando hablo,
el que perdona, dulce, cuando odio,
el que pasea por donde no estoy,
el que quedara en pie cuando yo muero.

(Juan Ramón Jiménez)

[approximate translation:

I am not I.
I am the one
Who walks invisibly by my side;
Whom sometimes I make an effort to see,
And whom sometimes I forget.
One who stays silent while I talk,
One who is forgiving, gentle, while I hate,
One who can get to where I am not,
One who will still be standing when I die.]

 

The course teaches that we are not what we think we are. We live according to an internal image of ourselves, acting and reacting, liking and disliking, succeeding and failing in accordance with a self concept that is learned, constructed and reshaped minute by minute, year by year. The body we inhabit - which we believe we are - embodies the unique personality, the story-so-far, the sense of a separate self that we believe is the hub of our reality.

 

As long as we think this physical, emotional, intellectual, multifaceted self is really who we are, we must suffer from its frailties and frustrations. Its understanding of reality is selective, variable, relative to what seems to be so at any one minute: this little self can never be entirely sure of anything. The cost of being an individual is that you can only see through a minutely limited point of view. The cost of believing you are a body is that you feel constantly vulnerable to attack from both within and without, motivated by need and by fear of loss.

 

All this is no more than a construct in the mind, the course reminds us. It is like the character or avatar that you assume when you play a computer game. You choose it, adopt its special characteristics and goals, and thereafter see through its eyes, advance as if in its body through an external environment, deal with the situations in which it finds itself, negotiate or fight with the other figures it perceives. And for the duration of the game, you really may imagine that this is who you are.

 

But it is not who you are. Like the player of the game, you can pretend for a while, knowing you are pretending, and free to stop at any moment; or you can become so enthralled - in thrall, enslaved - that you no longer remember who you really are, and neglect real life for the sake of a virtual one. But even then, the real you does not disappear. It is only temporarily forgotten.

 

This is analogous to what the course teaches about our real nature. It would have us first only be willing to suspend disbelief long enough to consider what it says as a theoretical possibility. Then it shows us how to try out the idea as if it were true. For we can only be convinced by discovering for ourselves that it is true. But long before we are convinced, most of us have already experienced some feeling of unreality, or some sense that we are faking it, putting on an act; or the fearful insecurity of not knowing who we are or what we are doing, or why, or whom we can trust. No wonder, the course tells us, and quite right: we are fooling ourselves, and nothing and no one in the game is real.

 

But beyond this fluctuating idea of the self there is also an unchanging part in each of us that knows what is true and who we really are. There are always two of us, one imaginary self and one real. The problem - any problem - is that we are convinced that the fabricated version is who we really are, while the real Self barely impinges on our awareness at all. As the poem puts it, I am not myself, yet I am always with me.

 

Knowledge, as the course uses the word, is nothing to do with information, or with anything the body’s senses can perceive or brain can rationalize. This part-that-knows does not know about something: it is what it knows. It is like consciousness, but not the consciousness of being anything or anyone in particular, not the consciousness of ‘self’ as distinct from ‘other’. It is a state of mind such as Krishnamurti meant when he said ‘the observer and the observed are one;’ or what the course calls a oneness joined as one (T25 I 7). From the perspective of the true Self, there is no inner and outer, no here and there, no you and me. There is only what is.

 

There is a part of our mind, then, that remains for ever in touch with infinite reality, while the part that perceives and lives in the world of form is entirely preoccupied with what only seems real. They are mutually exclusive. The moment you give your mind over to one or the other and experience its effects, the other vanishes from your awareness. While you are busily identifying with your physical and psychological self and its apparent needs and interests, you think you or someone else is the one who knows, and the deeper part of your mind is switched off: your Self seems to sleep, while the part of your mind that weaves illusions in its sleep appears to be awake (W68). But when we let the ego and its elaborate fantasies fade away, what remains is our reality: selflessness is Self (S1 V 2).

 

This emphasis on a mind that is divided, not between good and evil, but between reality and illusions, helps us to move on from the idea of supernatural beings in an endless tussle for our souls between Hell and Heaven, like the little angel and devil we picture in cartoons. It also frees us from the limiting concept of ourselves as merely physical bodies, or brain-directed organisms. You are responsible for what you think (T2 VI 2), and what you think makes up the reality you see. There are no idle thoughts. All thinking produces form at some level (T2 VI 13).

 

There is a technique in psychotherapy which helps you to better understand aspects of your personality or your problems by imagining them as ‘sub-personalities’ or ‘parts’ of yourself. In much the same way, the course personifies the ego as if it were an obstructive or undermining force, and the Self as if it were a loving presence that reliably heals even as the ego harms, and knits back whatever the ego unravels. But the ego and the Self, or Christ, or Holy Spirit, or whatever words you prefer, are only symbols that express how we choose to use our minds: to dream, or to wake up. To believe in a false concept of the self, or know yourself as mind, not body; one, not separate. The Self or 'One Who knows', by any name or symbol is not an entity but a choice that we make.

 

You know not where you go. But One Who knows goes with you (W155 10)

 

…there is a Child in you Who… knows that He is alien here (W182 4

 

…there is One Who knows all that is best for me (W242)

 

…let the darkness be dispelled by Him Who knows the light (T22 VI 9)

 

It does not matter what name or form or symbol you give this ‘One Who knows’, this Self in you that is not your physical or psychological self. But it stands for love that is not of this world (M23 4). It walks with us, whether we acknowledge it or not. As Jung put it: 'Called or not called, the god is present.'