Copyright Nouk Sanchez 2012

In the ego paradigm, we believe that we are sustained by everything but God. And because the ego has confused us into believing that the body is ‘who’ we are, nearly all we do in life is geared toward meeting its imagined needs. Or we are equally busied in defending the body against perceived attack, both emotionally and physically. And while we’re kept busily distracted, we avoid being present in the moment to accept the Truth within; that God’s Love is the only life that sustains who we are.

“Here is the answer to every problem that will confront you, today and tomorrow and throughout time. In this world, you believe you are sustained by everything but God. Your faith is placed in the most trivial and insane symbols; pills, money, “protective” clothing, influence, prestige, being liked, knowing the “right” people, and an endless list of forms of nothingness that you endow with magical powers.” W-50.1.

“All these things are your replacements for the Love of God. All these things are cherished to ensure a body identification. They are songs of praise to the ego. Do not put your faith in the worthless. It will not sustain you.” W-50.2.

Let’s look at the body. What do we believe sustains the body? The major organs seem to give the body life. So if the heart, liver or lungs are damaged, we become sick. If the damage is great enough, the body dies. We believe that the organs in the body sustain it. Yet the body and the organs that we believe sustain it, are all projections or ‘effects’. They are not causes in themselves.

The one Cause of all life… is God’s Love. We are God’s Effects and as such, we share in the majesty of His Loving Will. We are His Will and the Will that we share, is life without end; it remains forever uninterrupted and incorruptible. Yet it is only this Love that sustains our body and organs. This Love flows unimpeded, in all ways, eternally – if we don’t block it from fear. Our life is sustained by God’s Love. God’s Love and our life are one and the same. The problem for us is that the ego’s beliefs act as blocks to the awareness of Love’s presence. By giving the body autonomy through the ego, we give the body a purpose that will kill it.

The ego is obsessed with pursuing its goals through the body. While our priority remains with the ego; to get the body’s needs met, instead of meeting the one need we have which is to join through forgiveness, then we seek suffering. And when we believe that our life is dependent on the body’s state of health instead of God’s Love, we place ourselves under ego’s laws, and not under God’s immutable Laws. While we maintain allegiance to ego’s laws, we choose to deny ourselves immunity under God’s Laws. We decide unconsciously to stem the flow of God’s Love, and then we appear to suffer and to die as a result.

“Think of the freedom in the recognition that you are not bound by all the strange and twisted laws you have set up to save you. You really think that you would starve unless you have stacks of green paper strips and piles of metal discs. You really think a small round pellet or some fluid pushed into your veins through a sharpened needle will ward off disease and death. You really think you are alone unless another body is with you.” W-76.3. “It is insanity that thinks these things. You call them laws, and put them under different names in a long catalogue of rituals that have no use and serve no purpose. You think you must obey the “laws” of medicine, of economics and of health. Protect the body, and you will be saved.” W-76.4. “These would include, for example, the “laws” of nutrition, of immunization, of medication, and of the body’s protection in innumerable ways.” W-76.8:2. “These are not laws, but madness. The body is endangered by the mind that hurts itself. The body suffers just in order that the mind will fail to see it is the victim of itself. The body’s suffering is a mask the mind holds up to hide what really suffers. It would not understand it is its own enemy; that it attacks itself and wants to die. It is from this your “laws” would save the body. It is for this you think you are a body.” W-76.5.

A significant component that we incorporate into our experiential ‘Power of Power – Know Thyself’ Retreats, are exercises that expose the often hidden laws that we believe either sustain us or attack us. While these remain obscured in our unconscious, they serve to perpetuate the ego’s goal of suffering.

To share some personal examples, one of my beliefs until recently, was that food made us fat. Another belief was that my diagnosis of advanced osteoporosis almost 17 years ago, was irreversible. And that recent menopause would have contributed to more bone degeneration. Also, as a (prior) victim of celiac disease and lactose intolerance, I believed that certain foods upset the body’s condition. I had unknowingly bound myself to so many senseless laws that it made life so stressful to say the least. However Jesus shares the following:

“I am under no laws but God’s – We have observed before how many senseless things have seemed to you to be salvation. Each has imprisoned you with laws as senseless as itself. You are not bound by them. Yet to understand that this is so, you must first realize salvation lies not there. While you would seek for it in things that have no meaning, you bind yourself to laws that make no sense. Thus do you seek to prove salvation is where it is not.” W-76.1.

In the past 18 months I have undergone a remarkable re-ordering of perception since my soul-buddy Tomas passed in December, 2010. I exhumed many of my hidden ego dependencies, the ego laws that appeared to sustain this body and the ones that appeared to threaten it. All I did was to sincerely look at them with Spirit (no self judgment) and wholeheartedly ask to have every one of them totally and divinely reinterpreted.

Since then, this body can take any food I wish without gaining weight or experiencing any adverse reactions. I eat ice-cream or wheat products almost every day. And the advanced osteoporosis, post menopause, has been recently re-diagnosed as ‘osteopenia’ which is a pre-osteoporosis state. What happened? I changed nothing at the ‘effect’ level. But I changed much at the cause level in my mind. These are only just a few of my first little physical miracle experiences due to the transfer effect of trusting in Love over fear.

I think it’s important to note here that it’s not up to us to give up our magical dependencies such as medication, supplements, specific foods, diet, etc. If it was up to us to give up what the Course calls ‘magic’, then we’d be in a lot of trouble. If there is any guilt, concern or anxiety over a particular magic remedy or addiction that we depend upon, then the ego is judging it. And it will be the ego that attempts to give up our magic. Remember the ego’s mantra, “seek but do not find.”

Here is a very helpful excerpt on the topic of “magic” that you may enjoy. It’s titled “The Difference between Healing and Magic”:https://nouksanchez.com/nouks-blog/the-difference-between-magic-and-healing/

Food does not make us fat. Guilt does. Disease does not make us sick. Guilt does. Until we’re prepared to take a good honest look with Spirit, at all the hidden false beliefs that we hoard, we can’t expect to experience true forgiveness and enjoy its miraculous effects. These ego laws need to be seen first and then forgiven. Plus, remember that we can’t forgive something that we still believe is real. That’s why it’s so important to ask Spirit in to look at all the dark places that we have hidden our guilt.

“It is natural for the ego to try to protect itself once you have made it, but it is not natural for you to want to obey its laws unless [you] believe them. The ego cannot make this choice because of the nature of its origin. You can, because of the nature of yours.” T-4.I.5:5-7.

“There are no laws except the laws of God. This needs repeating, over and over, until you realize it applies to everything that you have made in opposition to God’s Will. Your magic has no meaning. What it is meant to save does not exist. Only what it is meant to hide will save you.” W-76.6.

My experience is that when we wholeheartedly relinquish our concerns and judgments to Spirit, asking for Spirit to take them all from us, then we become open to true Guidance from within. When we abdicate belief in our magical addictions, laws and remedies with and through Spirit, there is never any sense of sacrifice, control, struggle or loss. I recall having a great dependency on my calcium supplements for many years, then one morning, shortly after I’d seen the dependency and surrendered my perception to Spirit, I was about to swallow the pills, and I felt a strong but gentle inner nudge to cut my calcium intake by half. Just like that. I was very aware of something quite profound occurring. As I consciously and lovingly discovered and relinquished my beliefs in the false laws that I had mistakenly believed sustained and attacked my life…a profound sense of God’s Love flooded in to fill the vacuum.

In the ego’s paradigm we attempt to save the body from the ravages of time, disease and death. We try to save our life, yet it’s the split mind that projects all of what we defend ourselves against. As Jesus says,

“You make what you defend against, and by your own defense against it is it real and inescapable. Lay down your arms, and only then do you perceive it false.” W-170.2:6-7.

The ego is an unconscious and insatiable death wish. And as long as we continue to look to the body instead of the mind/heart for the cause of all adversity, we will suffer. The miracle is given us to reverse the laws that separate and attack us; the ones we made through the ego.

“Since the miracle aims at restoring the awareness of reality, it would not be useful if it were bound by laws that govern the error it aims to correct.” T-1.III.9:4.

Who we really are, is Love as life itself. This is the fundamental nature of God. God’s eternal Love is life with no opposite and no interruption. Sickness, scarcity and death are ego fabrications to delude us into perpetuating its cycle of separation, time and suffering. Think about this. As the Holy Self, we are the life… before, during and after the body. All suffering arises from mistaking the body as the source of our life; instead of knowing that God’s Love is the Source of all life. Thus, it is this eternal life that is the Source of the body!

Let’s look again at what we believe really sustains us. The body does not sustain our life. God’s Love as our Holy Self, is the eternal life that sustains the body. We are this eternal and uninterrupted expression of Love, as life itself. The body is purely a projected image; one that is given ‘animation’ according to whether we surrender it to the ego, or to God’s Love. Can a projected image, which is entirely neutral and devoid of any ability to change of itself, get sick, age, decay and die?

When we remember that God’s uninterruptible Love is the only Power that sustains us, and when we truly ‘live out from’ this belief, then sickness becomes impossible. We no longer have a need for sickness (or any other form of deprivation) as a defense against God’s Love. We know then that, “Sickness is a defense against the truth.” W-136.

While we mistakenly believe that our life is sustained by the body; and that the body is sustained by everything other than God’s Love, then we place the body under ego’s laws. And the ego has but one goal to which all its deception leads us and that, is death.

We can heal when we remember that we are the extensions of God’s Life, living through the body. The body is a projected image that has no power of its own. It needs no defenses once we recognize that it’s not the body that sustains us. It is God’s Love as life that sustains us because it’s ‘who’ we are. Jesus asks us to entrust our body and ego to him…

” I can be entrusted with your body and your ego only because this enables you not to be concerned with them, and lets me teach you their unimportance. I could not understand their importance to you if I had not once been tempted to believe in them myself. Let us undertake to learn this lesson together so we can be free of them together. I need devoted teachers who share my aim of healing the mind. Spirit is far beyond the need of your protection or mine. Remember this: In this world you need not have tribulation because I have overcome the world. That is why you should be of good cheer.” T-4.I.13.4-11

Jesus (as the Christ in all of us) has already overcome the world on behalf of us all through his resurrection and Atonement. And we partake of this miracle each time we recognize and release (forgive) our suffering. When we accept the Atonement, guilt is undone. When guilt is undone, we return to the awareness of innocence. In this innocence, all fear of attack falls away and we know ourselves to be the living expressions of Love itself. All fear is the fear of God. The return to innocence is the acceptance of God’s Love as our Holy Self.

Into this Love, this eternal Life of God, the body’s purpose is surrendered entirely. Innocence and surrender reveal that life is endless. Nothing can terminate life. Life is the extension of eternal and all-encompassing Love. When one realizes that life flows eternally from an infinite supply of God’s Love within, the concept of death is recognized as absurd. Death is an aberration; an insane and impossible thought that could never be made true. God’s Love expressed as life, is as God is – eternal. It has no opposite, no change, no pause and no end.

The body has no meaning and no purpose of its own. It has no ability of its own to change in anyway; it cannot become sick or healthy unless the mind so instructs it. As a projection, its ‘life’ is given, either by the ego or through God’s Love. The ego’s aim is to use the body to demonstrate separation, deprivation, suffering and death. And it projects changes in the body’s appearances to testify that sin, guilt and fear are real.

As a completely neutral ‘image’ only, and one that is not imbued with any creative ability of its own, the body cannot sicken, decay or die. When the purpose of this projected image, is wholly surrendered to God – it is wholly surrendered to life. This is God’s Essence expressed as an endless supply of Life. And it is here, into the Loving arms of God’s Life as Self, – that we surrender the body’s purpose. With life as its purpose, we no longer forfeit the body to the ego to be condemned in sin, guilt, fear and finally, death. Life, Love, joy, joining and peace become our purpose and the body is now gladly embodied and engaged to demonstrate that only the truth is true, and nothing else is true!