16. Denying the Denial
The Course asserts that the only clear use of denial is to deny the denial. What does that mean? Well, let’s take an example. Sickness is the denial of health. In other words, our natural state in the right mind is health. In order to experience what we think of as sickness, we have to deny our natural state, health. More accurately the natural state of the body is neutral. It is a tool of communication. A tool cannot be sick. In our denial of the neutrality, toolness or nothingness of the body, we make the idea of sickness plausible. So a defense can be to deny the denial of health. I deny the denial of health. I deny the denial of reality. Health or wholeness is. Reality is. You can deny it, but you cannot really affect it. You can only pretend that you are sick or pretend that you are separate. But remember the pretense is at the level of mind. The level of form just reflects that pretense.
Sickness is being used by the wrong mind to deny health/wholeness. Why? Because it wants to be separate and special. The wrong mind wants sickness to be real. It wants you to believe you are a mortal body but more importantly that you are not the eternal Son of God who actually authored the dream and can undo the ego with a simple change of thought. When you try to address sickness from the level of form you are merely:
- Agreeing that you are a separate body
- Making the body and the world real
- Not admitting that sickness is in the mind
- Not taking responsibility that you dreamed that dream
- Giving the body autonomy
- Being a victim
- Not addressing the problem
- Assigning to the body the attributes of the mind – creating and communicating
Having said that, the way to deal with sickness at the level of form is to do what the Holy Spirit tells you to. You might do all the same things but you will be doing them with the Holy Spirit who can then use sickness and the body as an aid to help you reach the home where God abides instead of as a tool to keep you asleep and imprisoned. But at the level of the mind the real remedy is denying the denial. This means forgiving the idea of sickness and “getting” that it is not real. By getting that it is not real we invite the Holy Spirit’s undoing and effectively deny the denial.
Miracles are merely the translation of denial into truth. If to love oneself is to heal oneself, those who are sick do not love themselves. Therefore, they are asking for the love that would heal them, but which they are denying to themselves. If they knew the truth about themselves they could not be sick. The task of the miracle worker thus becomes to deny the denial of truth. The sick must heal themselves, for the truth is in them. Yet having obscured it, the light in another mind must shine into theirs because that light is theirs. (T12.II.1)