1. I said before that the Holy Spirit is the Answer. 2He is the Answer to everything, because He knows what the answer to everything is. 3The ego does not know what a real question is, although it asks an endless number. 4Yet you can learn this as you learn to question the value of the ego, and thus establish your ability to evaluate its questions. 5When the ego tempts you to sickness do not ask the Holy Spirit to heal the body, for this would merely be to accept the ego’s belief that the body is the proper aim of healing. 6Ask, rather, that the Holy Spirit teach you the right perception of the body, for perception alone can be distorted. 7Only perception can be sick, because only perception can be wrong.
2. Wrong perception is the wish that things be as they are not. 2The reality of everything is totally harmless, because total harmlessness is the condition of its reality. 3It is also the condition of your awareness of its reality. 4You do not have to seek reality. 5It will seek you and find you when you meet its conditions. 6Its conditions are part of what it is. 7And this part only is up to you. 8The rest is of itself. 9You need do so little because your little part is so powerful that it will bring the whole to you. 10Accept, then, your little part, and let the whole be yours.
3. Wholeness heals because it is of the mind. 2All forms of sickness, even unto death, are physical expressions of the fear of awakening. 3They are attempts to reinforce sleeping out of fear of waking. 4This is a pathetic way of trying not to see by rendering the faculties for seeing ineffectual. 5“Rest in peace” is a blessing for the living, not the dead, because rest comes from waking, not from sleeping. 6Sleep is withdrawing; waking is joining. 7Dreams are illusions of joining, because they reflect the ego’s distorted notions about what joining is. 8Yet the Holy Spirit, too, has use for sleep, and can use dreams on behalf of waking if you will let Him.
4. How you wake is the sign of how you have used sleep. 2To whom did you give it? 3Under which teacher did you place it? 4Whenever you wake dispiritedly, it was not given to the Holy Spirit. 5Only when you awaken joyously have you utilized sleep according to His purpose. 6You can indeed be “drugged” by sleep, if you have misused it on behalf of sickness. 7Sleep is no more a form of death than death is a form of unconsciousness. 8Complete unconsciousness is impossible. 9You can rest in peace only because you are awake.
5. Healing is release from the fear of waking and the substitution of the decision to wake. 2The decision to wake is the reflection of the will to love, since all healing involves replacing fear with love. 3The Holy Spirit cannot distinguish among degrees of error, for if He taught that one form of sickness is more serious than another, He would be teaching that one error can be more real than another. 4His function is to distinguish only between the false and the true, replacing the false with the true.
6. The ego, which always wants to weaken the mind, tries to separate it from the body in an attempt to destroy it. 2Yet the ego actually believes that it is protecting it. 3This is because the ego believes that mind is dangerous, and that to make mindless is to heal. 4But to make mindless is impossible, since it would mean to make nothing out of what God created. 5The ego despises weakness, even though it makes every effort to induce it. 6The ego wants only what it hates. 7To the ego this is perfectly sensible. 8Believing in the power of attack, the ego wants attack.
7. The Bible enjoins you to be perfect, to heal all errors, to take no thought of the body as separate and to accomplish all things in my name. 2This is not my name alone, for ours is a shared identification. 3The Name of God’s Son is one, and you are enjoined to do the works of love because we share this Oneness. 4Our minds are whole because they are one. 5If you are sick you are withdrawing from me. 6Yet you cannot withdraw from me alone. 7You can only withdraw from yourself and me.
8. You have surely begun to realize that this is a very practical course, and one that means exactly what it says. 2I would not ask you to do things you cannot do, and it is impossible that I could do things you cannot do. 3Given this, and given this quite literally, nothing can prevent you from doing exactly what I ask, and everything argues for your doing it. 4I give you no limits because God lays none upon you. 5When you limit yourself we are not of one mind, and that is sickness. 6Yet sickness is not of the body, but of the mind. 7All forms of sickness are signs that the mind is split, and does not accept a unified purpose.
9. The unification of purpose, then, is the Holy Spirit’s only way of healing. 2This is because it is the only level at which healing means anything. 3The re-establishing of meaning in a chaotic thought system is the way to heal it. 4Your task is only to meet the conditions for meaning, since meaning itself is of God. 5Yet your return to meaning is essential to His, because your meaning is part of His. 6Your healing, then, is part of His health, since it is part of His Wholeness. 7He cannot lose this, but you can not know it. 8Yet it is still His Will for you, and His Will must stand forever and in all things.