What is the significance of Jesus and healing? Whether you subscribe to a particular theology or not, I would like to share a thought on the impact that various spiritual messengers have on our ability to heal and love.
The book from which I draw a lot of my teaching material, A Course in Miracles, has several different lessons and sections to pull from. Usually each month, I select a lesson to teach from but today this article will focus on a section from the Manual for Teachers section of the book. This section roughly paraphrases that if you finish the workbook, completing it in the way it's informed one to do it, then you can call yourself a teacher within the system. It's not a formal certification with any formal certificate awarded, but if you've done the work to go through the workbook the way it's prescribed to do it, at the end of that you become a teacher. Then metaphysically and experientially students start to show up for you so you can teach them.
Part of the journey with the text, is a theoretical, very detailed, 31 chapters to deepen one's knowledge of all the different related topics. The Manual for Teachers give very specific guidance about how to sharpen one's abilities as a teacher of the course and there's a glossary of terms. There are two other pamphlets, smaller pamphlets that have been added later on: a song of prayer, which is really about true prayer and one last section on psychotherapy.
From the manual, Section #23 asks, “Does Jesus have a special place in healing?” This passage goes into kind of the nuances of the name of Jesus in terms of healing. To get us oriented, let’s begin with the first paragraph. It says, “God's gifts can rarely be received directly. Even the most advanced of God's teachers will give way to temptation in this world. Would it be fair if their pupils were denied healing because of this? The Bible says, ask in the name of Jesus Christ. Is this merely an appeal to magic?” We'll come back to this idea of magic in just a moment. Continuing in the passage, “A name does not heal, nor does an invocation call forth any special power. What does it mean to call in Jesus Christ? What does calling on his name confer? Why is the appeal to Him part of healing?”
The first thing I want to highlight is actually the last paragraph of this section. (As a reminder, there are many different approaches to the divine and we don't want to alienate people with our very specific, somewhat Christian language.) “This course has come from Him [Jesus] because his words have reached you in a language you can love and understand. Are other teachers possible to lead the way to those who speak in different tongues and appeal to different symbols? Certainly there are. Would God leave anyone without a very present health in time of trouble, a savior who can symbolize Himself? Yet do we need a many faceted curriculum, not because of content differences, but because symbols must shift and change to suit the need Jesus has come to answer yours. In him you find God's answer. Do you then teach with Him or he is with you? He is always here.”
The beautiful passage that highlights this idea that even though Jesus is a very specific symbol for a certain group of people or students, that there are many different symbols in different cultures and different languages, kinds of places. All of the lessons we've done are the actual words of Jesus. So when he says, “I am sustained by the love of God,” for instance, in Lesson 50, that whole lesson is Jesus teaching the lesson from beginning to end. So that's a very important piece of the manual is just through Jesus's guidance, talking about Jesus as one teacher from 2,000+ years ago. This is the new and improved version of what he was teaching. So he's trying to make the point that he came and what the Bible says about him is one thing. He can connect the dots between the two, but he's not the only one.
For anyone unfamiliar with the origin story of the book A Course in Miracles, the whole course was “downloaded” to a woman by the name of Helen Shipman in the mid sixties. It was channeled through her and as she described, she was just writing down what Jesus and the Spirit was saying to her. So if this was the Bible, almost all of the text would be in the red writing to signify that Jesus is speaking. Now, it's not required that one believe all of that in order to get anything out of the course.
Instead, one can think of it as the inner Buddha who's teaching, or the inner Allah, or the inner whatever most high or the inner quantum field, or the highest mind. You can give it whatever label you want without offending the teacher. He's saying that people in different places get different symbols of the same thing because it wouldn't be fair to all of existence for them to have only heard the one story from this one section of history.
This is contradictory from some of the mission and evangelizing work that traditional, conventional Christians might do. Some will say that you have to take the message of Jesus in the Bible literally to people who haven't heard it yet. They believe that one must hear the literal saving message of Jesus from the Bible to be saved. Jesus here is saying something very different.
Going back to the passage at the beginning, there's this question, “Is this merely an appeal to magic?” So it's important at this point to clarify what the course means by magic. So magic is like kind of an illusory counterpart to miracle. So miracles are sourced from the love of God within. Magic would be an attempt to make lasting true change by holding onto something from the illusion. So I usually refer to that approach using magic as the reliance on God's substitutes. This is anything that people have as a God substitute: my partner, my looks, my business, my money, my connections, my educational background, whatever it is. That would be something that was in “the movie” and external, such as people, places, things, or situations. Anything that's used and sort of that we insist on as being a source of salvation or healing is what the course is referring to as “magic.” So that would be all of our symbols, too, even the very name of Jesus. It's critiquing itself right away and saying that's just an attempt to rely on or evoke something that's empty in and of itself. It has nothing there's nothing powerful in it. It's just an illusion.
So it says in paragraph two, “Jesus is the perfect teacher because he accepted atonement for himself, atonement being the thing, the gift from God that purifies us from all error and sort of deficit that we carry into the world with us.” So he's the perfect teacher because he's accepted the way that God lay down for us as humans. Furthermore, he's overcome death in this process. In other words, he knows how to defeat death.
And then finally in this section, “There is no limit on Jesus power because it is the power of God. So has his name become the name of God, for he no longer sees Himself as separate from Him.” So the thing that makes this contradiction OK, according to Jesus, explaining it here, is that because Jesus sort of entered into the fullness of his connection with God more than anyone has done, he has this downloading power into him. There's this power that he's receiving that makes him limitless the same way that God is limitless. Then his main function is then to help us learn this, how to enter more fully into the same limitlessness.
Moving forward, “What does this mean for you? It means that in remembering Jesus, you are remembering God.” So that's the bottom line here is that in using the name of Jesus, we are then using it as a portal into the fullness of everything that Jesus accomplished. But we can't do that same thing by devoting to an apple, a beautiful mansion, a nice car, or a multibillion dollar business. Those things are part of the illusion; they're not portals in the full way, that Jesus in Jesus’ name is a portal to God's unlimited power.
In paragraph five it says, “Jesus has led the way. Why would you not be grateful to Him? He has asked for love.” This is the love theme here, “but only that he might give it to you. You do not really love yourself, but in his eyes your loveliness is so complete and flawless that he sees in it an image of His Father. You become the symbol of his father here on Earth. To you he looks for hope, because in you he sees no limits and no stain to mar your beautiful perfection. In his eyes, Christ's vision shines in perfect constancy. He has remained with you. Would you not learn the lesson of salvation through his learning? Why would you choose to start again when he has made the journey for you?” So the beauty of this section here, and it wouldn't be a call with us on it if we didn't refer to the prodigal son story, right?
So this is like the prodigal child because what Jesus is saying is that by having learned from the father and connected with the limitlessness of the father, he understands what it's like to look at us who are part in the illusion and part in heaven and perfection and to only see the part of us that's perfect and to not see the other part, which is essentially what the father does. When the wayward child comes back, he does not see the mistakes and the errors. He just sees the child reinstated to all the full and complete prerogatives of being his son or daughter. We don't earn our perfection, we cannot destroy our perfection. It's always there.
So in terms of application, a big part of the way I like to do my coaching is that I like to support my very accomplished and influential clients at all levels of human endeavor to really, over time, explore how to shift the emphasis from an obsession with the external practical results as the first indicator of success and to shift the focus to connection with the divine inside. Whether it's through Jesus or Buddha or any of the other symbols we've talked about or portals we've talked about. Then to have that connection support the manifestation of the external. So it's an inversion of how most people do it because that's where the difficulties in life start. Allow me to provide a concrete example:
Let’s take Big Pharma for example, and in particular, the Sackler family and Purdue Pharma in relation to opioid abuse. (I don't know a lot about it and I don't mean any of those leaders any disrespect. And by saying that, I don't mean any harm to the people who were devastated and destroyed by opioid addiction.) But sort of in a typical example, somebody has a real accident, they're working in a mine, a coal mine, they hurt their back. (This is all referenced in the limited series, Dopesick, you can see on Hulu). So let’s say somebody hurts their back or experiences some other serious injury. Purdue Pharma is pushing an approach to Opioid delayed release of the medication, over time, the doctors are on board since they are the primary salespeople selling it to their patients essentially. There is an initial honeymoon period with the drug, then they need more and more and more, and then they become addicted, and then their lives are spiraling out of control.
Meanwhile Purdue would continue to lobby for increased the doses, and they're coming up with all kinds of fancy ways with the FDA and all these other regulatory agencies to legitimize it. Richard Sackler is the CEO, so he would be my example client. As a CEO he is trying to reach one billion dollars in sale, and the whole motive for him is driven by sales, sale, sales, and he won't listen to anything else. So this is like an approach to magic. Somehow he feels like if he hits these targets and he mobilizes his whole business to hit these targets internationally, expanding into Europe and beyond, that he'll reach a certain benchmark which will make him greater than his predecessors in the family who started this business. And he's single-mindedly obsessed with his goal at nearly any cost. So with all due respect to him and all the other stakeholders around this problem, we must consider, how can we get somebody like that to go from what's called magic in what we just looked at and through some kind of a portal to connect with inner source, to do something that will really transform people rather than create a nightmare?
So that would be a typical sort of case study of a problem that I'm very often trying to support a leader to fix or address. It's also the case, for instance, with my clients, for whom it may not be the whole enterprise and then being the CEO of it, but it might be somebody who's looking for their soulmate. They're obsessed with the idea of finding their soulmate, thinking once they find that person, their life will be set.
In short, if you're obsessed with the external or an outcome, that's a form of magic. It's like any addiction. It'll eventually hurt you if you don't find a way to route it through spirit first. Whatever person is obsessively pursuing, if they just pursue that thing, it will become an addiction that will become harmful and painful and destructive and will lead to a nightmare.
Trusting, surrendering, and having the faith that your steps are ordered in a way that's going to be for your benefit through this connection to Source is at the root of recovery from addiction. It's letting go of the thing we're addicted to and letting Higher Power become the source of a healthy connection and obsession. Not only seemingly selfish obsessions, but even an obsession with service or trying to help people can become disruptive. Anything at all that we deify as a God substitute without an actual connection to source will become part of a nightmare sooner or later in my humble opinion. So as a practice in love and healing, consider what messenger helps you channel a portal to the unlimited and infinite love of Source.
