The Body and Spirituality-True Healing

The reconciliation of the body and spirituality—true healing—is a topic that David Hoffmeister has shared a great deal of wisdom about.

In A Course in Miracles, Jesus advises us “do not ask the Holy Spirit to heal the body … Ask, rather, that the Holy Spirit teach you the right perception of the body, for perception alone can be distorted.” T-8.IX.1.5-6 Learning to perceive the body miraculously through the Holy Spirit’s vision, is what brings about true healing. The materials in this section of the website will be extremely helpful for anyone dealing with what appears to be physical sickness, pain, or other issues related to the body.

Watch the video below for clarity on the true source of sickness and how true healing is accomplished. Or scroll down below for a list of subcategories related to this topic that you can click on.

Spiritual Answers to Modern-Day Problems:

Body, Sickness, and Health: What Is True Healing?

Click on any of the topics below for a list of questions and answers and additional resources on this topic within our Q&A directory regarding the body and spirituality— true healing. You can click on the Q&A image above to explore this section of the Q&A directory in general.

Addiction
Death and Dying
Exercise, Fitness, and Sleep
Food, Diet, and Eating
Magic and Medicine
Pleasure and Pain
Sickness and Healing

Facing Bodily Sickness

In a very practical way, we can apply A Course in Miracles to what seem to be physical symptoms. As Jesus teaches in Workbook Lesson 136, “Sickness is a defense against the truth.” This teaching flies in the face of conventional thinking, but empowers the mind to accept responsibility for what it perceives. The real question to ponder is whether I want to experience the sickness, or whether I want to experience the Christ. It takes a very deep willingness to be shown by the Holy Spirit how it must be one or the other, and this kind of seeing is well worth it!

The video below begins with a few minutes of sharing from a participant in the audience, followed by a profound response from David.

Sickness and Spiritual Vision

The video below continues with the idea that all illness is mental illness and that health is inner peace. The sleeping/deceived mind reacts to the images of the world as if they are real, and the Holy Spirit’s job is, therefore, to convince this mind that it is dreaming. All perception of illness—whether in one’s own body, another body, a plant, animal, or the planet in general—is caused by the fragmented lens that is being looked through. As Jesus says in Workbook Lesson 132, “There is no world.” The world we perceive is a dream; our thoughts projected outward and being seen as real. With the Holy Spirit’s vision we begin to awaken from the dream and recognize that all healing is done on the level of the mind. For it is on this level alone that true healing can actually occur.

Affirmations, Organic Foods, Healing, and Recycling

There are many ways we try to heal ourselves or our world—through affirmations, eating organically, healing techniques, recycling, etc. While these magical attempts at healing may seem to work successfully in the short term, it will ultimately be seen that nothing in form can ever be “healed.” True healing is of the mind and can come only through a transcendence of false thinking, the cause of all projection. True healing leads to vision, which sees the false as false and that all forms of sickness are unreal. We still may be guided to practice specific modalities of what the Course would call “magic,” but in the end, we must be willing to accept the recognition that anything other than perfection (i.e., all of form) is an illusion, and therefore doesn’t need “fixing.”

Nutrition

The Holy Spirit works with the mind to help it be undone from whatever its current beliefs happen to be. Only by allowing the mind to be emptied of all cause and effect beliefs of this world can truth be known as an experience.

One of the basic “laws” invented by the ego as part of the dream of the world was that the food we eat has a causative effect on the body. We would call this “common sense,” and yet from the Holy Spirit perspective, it is seen that “I can be hurt by nothing but my thoughts.” W-281 Jesus even pokes fun at the power we give these types of “laws” in Workbook Lesson 76, the title of which is, “I am under no laws but God’s.”

Yet while it is ultimately true that food is not causative, it would not be wise to swing to the opposite extreme of just “eating whatever you want.” Only when the mind is extremely trained do the laws of nutrition start to lose power in one’s unconscious belief system, and it is this unconscious belief system that is causative in terms of one’s experience. Therefore it is helpful to be very intuitive in one’s eating, and to practice asking the Holy Spirit for guidance in these matters. The undoing of all false cause and effect beliefs is a very gradual process and one that we cannot orchestrate on our own. Everything that we currently believe in will be used in the undoing and orchestrated by the One Who knows our own best interests.

In the video below (which was filmed in China), David discusses these ideas in depth as they apply to nutrition, using the teachings of quantum physics as a helpful metaphor.

Health Is Inner Peace

Healing can only be accomplished by shifting one’s focus from bodily symptoms to what’s going on in the mind. The thoughts in one’s mind are the cause of what is being perceived in the body or the world, and so only by shifting one’s attention to the mind can the cause of the problem be released.

All illness is mental illness. Seek to dismantle the ego (the source of all perceived sickness) rather than being content with using temporary bits of magic alone. Magic (worldly methods of healing) may temporarily minimize one’s fear, and without doubt this can be a helpful first step. But we are worthy of healing the cause of the problem as well.