 We continue today with chapter 8, Healing as Corrected Perception. I said before that the Holy Spirit is the answer. He is the answer to everything because He knows what the answer to everything is. The ego does not know what a real question is, although it asks an endless number. Yet you can learn this as you learn to question the value of the ego and thus establish your ability to evaluate its questions. When the ego tempts you to sickness, do not ask the Holy Spirit to heal the body. For this would it merely be to accept the ego's belief that the body is the proper aim of healing. Ask rather that the Holy Spirit teach you the right perception of the body, for perception alone can be distorted. Only perception can be sick because only perception can be wrong. Wrong perception is the wish that things be as they are not. The reality of everything is totally harmless because total harmlessness is the condition of its reality. It is also the condition of your awareness of its reality. You do not have to seek reality. It will seek you and find you when you meet its conditions. Its conditions are part of what it is, and this part only is up to you. The rest is of itself. You need do so little because your little part is so powerful that it will bring the whole to you. Except then, your little part and let the whole be yours. Wholeness heals because it is of the mind. All forms of sickness, even unto death, are physical expressions of the fear of awakening. They are attempts to reinforce sleeping out of fear of waking. This is a pathetic way of trying not to see by rendering the faculties foreseeing ineffectual. Rest in peace is a blessing for the living, not the dead, because rest comes from waking, not from sleeping. Sleep is withdrawing. Waking is joining. Dreams are illusions of joining because they reflect the ego's distorted notions about what joining is. Yet the Holy Spirit too has used for sleep and can use dreams on behalf of waking if you will let him. How you wake is the sign of how you have used sleep. To whom did you give it to? Under which teacher did you place it? Whenever you wake, dispiritedly, it was not given to the Holy Spirit. Only when you awaken joyously have you utilized sleep according to his purpose. You can indeed be, quote, drugged by sleep if you have misused it on behalf of sickness. Sleep is no more a form of death than death is a form of unconsciousness. Complete unconsciousness is impossible. You can rest in peace only because you are awake. Healing is released from the fear of waking and the substitution of the decision to wake. The decision to wake is the realization of the will to love, since all healing involves replacing fear with love. The 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. His function is to distinguish only between the false and the true, replacing the false with the true. The ego, which always wants to weaken the mind, tries to separate it from the body in an attempt to destroy it. Yet the ego actually believes that it is protecting it. This is because the ego believes that mind is dangerous and that to make mindless is to heal. But to make mindless is impossible, since it would mean to make nothing out of what God created. The ego despises weakness, even though it makes every effort to induce it. The ego wants only what it hates. To the ego, this is perfectly sensible. Believing in the power of attack, the ego wants attack. 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. This is not my name alone, for ours is a shared identification. The name of God's Son is one, and you are enjoined to do the works of love because we share this oneness. Our minds are whole because they are one. If you are sick, you are withdrawing from me, yet you cannot withdraw from me alone. You can only withdraw from yourself and me. You have surely begun to realize that this is a very practical course, and one that means exactly what it says. I would not ask you to do things you cannot do, and it is impossible that I could do things you cannot do. Given this, and given this quite literally, nothing can prevent you from doing exactly what I ask, and everything argues for you are doing it. I give you no limits because God lays not upon you. When you limit yourself, we are not of one mind, and that is sickness. Yet sickness is not of the body, but of the mind. All forms of sickness are signs that the mind is split and does not accept a unified purpose. The unification of purpose, then, is the Holy Spirit's only way of healing. This is because it is the only level at which healing means anything. The reestablishment of meaning in a chaotic thought system is the way to heal it. Your task is only to meet the conditions for meaning, since meaning itself is of God. Yet your return to meaning is essential to His, because your meaning is part of His. Your healing, then, is part of His health, since it is part of His wholeness. He cannot lose this, but you can not know it. Yet it is still His will for you, and His will must stand forever, and in all things. And from the workbook, let me not forget my function, Lesson 64. Today's idea is merely another way of saying, Let me not wander into temptation. The purpose of the world you see is to obscure your function of forgiveness and provide you with a justification for forgetting it. It is the temptation to abandon God and His Son by taking on a physical appearance. It is this the body's eyes look upon. Nothing the body's eyes seem to see can be anything but a form of temptation, since this was the purpose of the body itself. Yet we have learned that the Holy Spirit has another use for all the illusions you have made, and therefore He sees another purpose in them. To the Holy Spirit, the world is a place where you learn to forgive yourself what you think of as your sins. In this perception, the physical appearance of temptation becomes the spiritual recognition of salvation. To review our last few lessons, your function here is to be the light of the world, a function given you by God. It is only arrogance of the ego that leads you to question this, and only the fear of the ego that induces you to regard yourself as unworthy of the task assigned to you by God Himself. The world's salvation awaits your forgiveness, because through it does the Son of God escape from all illusions and thus from all temptation. The Son of God is you, only by fulfilling the function given you by God will you be happy. That is because your function is to be happy by using the means by which happiness becomes inevitable. There is no other way. Therefore, every time you choose whether or not to fulfill your function, you are really choosing whether or not to be happy. Let us remember this today. Let us remind ourselves of it in the morning and again at night and all through the day as well. Prepare yourself in advance for all the decisions you will make today by remembering they are all really very simple. Each one will lead to happiness or unhappiness. Can such a simple decision really be difficult to make? Let not the form of the decision deceive you. Complexity of form does not imply complexity of content. It is impossible that any decision on earth can have a content different from just this one simple choice. That is the only choice the Holy Spirit sees. Therefore, it is the only choice there is. Today then, let us practice with these thoughts. Let me not forget my function. Let me not try to substitute mine for God's. Let me forgive and be happy. At least once devote 10 or 15 minutes today to reflecting on this with closed eyes. Related thoughts will come to help you if you remember the crucial importance of your function to you and to the world. And the frequent applications of today's idea throughout the day devote several minutes to reviewing these thoughts and then thinking about them and about nothing else. This will be difficult at first, particularly since you are not proficient in the mind discipline that it requires. You may need to repeat. Let me not forget my function quite often to help you concentrate. Two forms of shorter practice periods are required. At times do the exercises with your eyes closed trying to concentrate on the thoughts you are using. At other times keep your eyes open after reviewing the thoughts and then look slowly and unselectively around you telling yourself this is the world, it is my function to save. Let me not forget my function. So today from the text we are reminded that our healing is corrected perception, unified awareness. We are reminded that healing is not of the body, that only perception can be healed. The body is not the proper aim of healing. The mind is the proper aim of healing. And so we ask the Holy Spirit teach us the right perception of the body. We are willing to release all distorted perception and to experience healed or whole perception. To live from a holistic perspective of the world, to release linear time and open to healed perception and onward to eternity reality. Today we would meet the conditions of healing. That is our small part. Jesus tells us this part is only is up to you. The rest is of itself. You need do so little because your little part is so powerful that it will bring the whole to you. Except then your little part and let the whole be yours. We would let our dreams be used for healing and wholeness. Today we will remember our function. We will use the idea for today as frequently as necessary many many many times throughout the day. Letting go of everything the body's eyes seem to see. Letting go of all forms of temptation. Opening to the new purpose that the Holy Spirit offers. Purpose of forgiveness. We say the idea of today as often as is necessary. Let me not forget my function.