QUESTION: For many years now, I've had a serious life-threatening illness that has come in and out of my life, and in the last couple of years it has been particularly intense. I've been a student of the Course for a good many years, and I understand pretty much what the material in the Course says about this. And although I've tried to work with it, and although I know that it's purely my own thoughts and my own mind, and that I'm in total control of it, for some reason or another I have not been able to let go of it. And I need some help in being able to let go of it.

RAJ: Are you aware that you're not in control of your health?

QUESTION: In what way?

RAJ: In any way.

QUESTION: Who is?

RAJ: So, what is it you are in control of?

QUESTION: I'm in control of my thoughts, which affect my health...

RAJ: ...which block your experience of your health and seem to “create” blocks to the experience of your health.

Your health is a birthright. Your perfection is a birthright. I do not mean “the process of birth.” I would put it this way: It is your inheritance. If you are the son of a king, you have an inheritance. It is in that sense that I am using the word “birthright.” It is your birthright to experience what you Are as God's expression in Its absolute perfection.

Now, all of you do seem to be in control of not your health, but your illnesses. You are in control of the blocks to your experience of your perfection. But none of you can control your body into health. Why? Because its perfection is beyond your control. You have nothing to do with its perfection. God does! You have no more control over its perfection than you have over your Individuality or your existence, because God does. But, by virtue of your thoughts, you can make your existence miserable. That is the only thing you can do by means of your thoughts—create disturbances, causing you to have distorted perceptions of the one and only thing going on, which is the Kingdom of Heaven and the Sons and Daughters of God.

Why is this important? Why am I bringing this out? Because what you are not responsible for—in other words, what God is responsible for—has ascendancy over anything you think. It has authority over anything you think. Therefore, because God's Self-expression is an expression of God's Will, then your perfection, right here and right now, is constantly insisting upon being what you experience.

It is very easy, from the metaphysics of the Course, or the metaphysics of any other metaphysical systems that are present, to begin to say, “I'm creating my experience.” Well, no, you aren't creating all of it. You're only creating a distorted perception of something, a distorted perception of your experience. Your experience, God is in charge of. Your body, God is in charge of. Your world, God is responsible for. That means that what God has made insists on being recognized for what It is.

Why is this important? Because, first of all, it relieves you of any personal sense of responsibility for your health. Secondly, it helps you to see that your ideas can create tensions and tightnesses and blockages that distort the actually undistortable presence of God—they distort your perception of the undistortable presence of God. So, the only thing you have control over is whether or not you are going to employ the thoughts, the judgments, the conclusions that haven't arisen from a connectedness with God.

Now, you did not create your body. None of you created your body. None of you, in other words, created the visibility and tangibility of the presence of your Individuality. God unidentified is God nonexistent. God and God's expression—God's extension—constitute the Wholeness of God. God identified constitutes God. You are that which identifies God.

Conscious human Individuality is the visibility and tangibility, the experienceable presence of God. God individualized, but not separated into many, constitutes your Individuality, and It cannot be invisible! It cannot be unexperienceable! And so there is that which you call “body” which is the visibility and tangibility of the presence of your Individuality, which is the presence of God expressed. Therefore, your body and everything you see, if seen truly, would be recognized as the presence of God, incapable of functioning in Its infinity in a conflicted way.

What you can choose to do is to not engage in any of the justifications you are employing for the ongoingness of this physical “problem.” You are not responsible for your health. You are not responsible for the existence of your body. You are responsible for any judgments you have toward your body, any misperceptions you have about your body. You are responsible for any negative thoughts about your body. You are responsible for any line of reasoning that causes you to say, “I deserve this because...,” followed by a long list of reasons.

All of these things, which you and everyone else are responsible for, create disturbance because they are conflicted. And that disturbance stands between you and your experience of the perfection of God which is the only thing going on. It seems to distort the Presence of That which is really dominant, which really insists on being all there is because It really is All There Is.

Therefore—and here is the reason I am spending this time bringing this out—the moment any of you begin to reduce your investment in your problem, reduce your investment in the thinking that seems to justify the problem and causes you to say, “I deserve it,” to the degree that you release the thinking that says, “I have no choice about this because my body is just a physical organism which arose out of the primordial ooze, which has nothing to do with God, and therefore I've just got to 'go with the program,’” as you release, as you abandon, as you refuse to indulge in practicing these thoughts, you will experience healing. Why? Because you are reducing the resistance you are bringing to experiencing what is truly dominant. You are reducing the resistance to seeing what is Really going on right here as the visibility and tangibility or expression of God, which is absolutely indivisible and therefore expresses utter harmony, not conflict.

What I want you to walk away from this Gathering being aware of is that what is Real right there where you see a body—the presence of God that is there—is insisting upon being your conscious experience. That means you are not responsible for creating health as though you are going against the tide of a physical body which doesn’t want to cooperate with the divine You. I want you to leave here, aware in very simple terms that your body is your ally. Why? Because it's there to identify the presence of your Individuality perfectly! It is intent upon it, and has no other function. And that function is divine!

The moment you really begin to invalidate your judgments and your concepts about your body which leave it outside the presence of God, you will find your body identifying your perfection, because its divine purpose is to express nothing else, and the Will of the Father lies underneath that insistence. The Will of the Father is the motivation of that insistence. That insistence of what? Of that body which is sitting right there!

It is really very dangerous to your Sanity to believe that your body is an illusion. It is also dangerous to Your Sanity to believe that your body is real but it has nothing to do with God. What is unreal about your body are all of the conclusions you have come to about it which have not held it in the context of the Allness of God—all the fears you have about it, all of the distrust you have about it, coupled with the ego's ongoing insistence that you don’t deserve unreasonable good, and that you do, for one reason or another, deserve what you're experiencing. These things are, as it says on the pack of cigarettes, “dangerous to your health!”

You are here at this very moment with a divine ally, rather than “a hunk of flesh that really has no inclination whatsoever to cooperate with the divine Individuality you are because it's really a physical evolutionary process that has nothing to do with God.” Your false beliefs are the illusory aspect of your experience of your body.

If you truly want to experience your health, I encourage you to walk out of here at the end of the Gathering rejoicing that you are experiencing the presence of God, Whose Will it is to be expressed perfectly, flawlessly, without conflict—that your body means something divine.

The Course states that all it takes is a little willingness. Not a strong conviction, just a little willingness to be open to the possibility that everything exists in the context of God. And that anything about the world you are seeing, or the body you are seeing, which seems not to reflect the perfection of God, is necessarily a distorted perception caused by thinking, reasoning, and coming to conclusions, all of which is based upon the belief that none of this has anything to do with God. When you are denying God where God is, you will experience dissonance. It's that simple.

Do you know what? Because God is omnipotent, any denial of God that you engage in means that God will win...and you will win! You are bound to get well. You are bound to experience your perfection...here or hereafter...because what is Real is the only thing that can endure. And because one way or the other you are going to win with God, you might as well begin to win today by not denying God right where God is, and becoming curious to see God where you didn’t think God was. If your body isn't real, how can you really expect healing? Why would you heal or make better something that doesn’t exist anyway? It becomes confusing. If the man with the withered arm...Well, let me put it this way: If his withered arm was an illusion, why would I make it look like the other one? Why not make both of them disappear so there was no suggestion of an illusion there? Why not make him disappear? Indeed, this line of thinking becomes very much like the earlier question, where the ego eventually proves you don’t exist!

If you want to know what the truth is, and if you want to experience your health, and if you want to experience harmony, and if you have any shred of hope whatsoever for experiencing peace on earth, all of you had better begin to acknowledge that the earth is God expressed—not that it and the universe are just some chance result of some physical interactions and that somehow, speckled throughout the universe, are these souls, little bright divine lights, sort of embedded in bits and pieces of the “material world.”

It may not look like God. It might look like earthquakes, and it might look like horrendous fires, and it might look like floods, and on and on and on. What do you think healing is if it isn’t transformed vision of everything you're already aware of, so that you can begin to see God there because you have abandoned your investment in all of the definitions you have given everything, including your body?

You didn’t create your body. You can’t create your health. You didn’t create the world. And you can’t create the infinite perfection of it. But you can stop creating the arguments against it and the convictions you have as to the “fact” that the Kingdom of Heaven is not here to be perceived, and the convictions, for whatever reason you have decided, that you cannot experience your health, or you don’t deserve to experience it. You can abandon those things, and in abandoning them watch the assertion of God, watch the Intent of everything, of every visibility and tangibility, to register with you, so that the wholeness of it is there—not just the perfection not seen because everyone is too busy having a different perspective and gaining a sense of being “the creator.”

So, you have an ally which has a divine intent to register with you as it truly is, so that you come back into your right Mind about your body in this instance, about your mind in your instance [indicating an earlier questioner], about your relationships, et cetera. In other words, you have a powerful ally, not passive or wimpy. You could almost say it cares that you recognize it.

In order for you to be whole and experience your wholeness, you must recognize it. And so, that is its Intent—for you to recognize it. Your body is not misfunctioning because it has a will of its own. It doesn’t. It has an Intent. That Intent was set into motion by the movement of God called Creation—Creation of Himself expressed and looking like you. But how on earth can you ever arrive at the experience of what you really look like if you are saying that God can’t be in the “look”—that the ego created the “look”? No. The ego created the misperception of the visibility and tangibility of God. And when one is caught up in one's misperceptions and ignoring what's really there, one is...what? Mentally unbalanced, insane, experiencing a form of insanity.

It's the valuing of the misperception, which is the insanity. And the thing that's being misperceived remains forever the presence of God perfectly expressed and intent upon being recognized for what It is. And that Intent is asserted with utter Love. It cannot force itself upon you, but the moment you dare to begin to let It in by conceiving that It possibly exists, It most gently and lovingly fills you up. And It fills you up because it expresses a Will—the Will of the Father, which is Love.

I want you, if you leave here with nothing else in your mind, to be aware that you have a powerful ally, and the power of it is God's Love and perfection. Feel yourself being companioned with in the most intimate way as the very presence of your body and its Intent to identify your presence flawlessly, immaculately.

And, boy, the ego is a bastard, isn’t it? It says, [as though it were your voice] “Well, its only supposed to take a little willingness. Boy! I must not even have that! And I, therefore, haven’t much hope.” Well, when that suggests itself to you, I want you to remember the degree to which I have gone to share with you that you companion with a powerful Presence. And I said it wasn’t wimpy.

Do you know what? The suggestion that you don’t have what it takes, that you can’t even muster up the little bit of willingness that the Course says is all it takes...well, I'm going to tell you that there's a wonderful lesson in failure—failing to have even the little willingness, failing to be a success. Do you want to know why? It's the Father's good pleasure to give you the Kingdom, and you don’t have to deserve it! Trying is willful.

“A little willingness” really means embracing failure at being a successful ego, or even a successful Son or Daughter of God, because your successes as the Sons and Daughters of God are not experienced by virtue of anything you do as Sons or Daughters of God. Your successes at being the Sons and Daughters of God are a result of being the expression of God, which God is responsible for.

So, I have not set up a challenge here for you to have a little bit of willingness so that you might experience the powerful Presence of That which you companion with. I haven’t set up a challenge at all. If you are not responsible for your health, if you cannot create your health, then you cannot fail at creating it, can you? It was never in your hands to do anything about. So, what I have been describing here in your abandoning the exercise of false perceptions and false conclusions and judgments and doubts, et cetera, really does constitute “becoming a failure as an ego.”

Do you see what I am saying? I’m saying that absolutely nothing is called for on your part except failing. That's how little is called for from you. And when, as a result of negligence, you succeed at failing at being an ego—in other words, when you really let go—this powerful Presence, this ally that you're companioning with, which is Actually what is present and called the “visibility and tangibility” of you which is your body—this will assert Itself. It will, you might say, emerge. That's not the best word. It sounds like it came from somewhere. But, transformation will be experienced. And it will be experienced because something Real is right there where you say your body is.

Willingness to see it is Love. Willingness to see what is Real in your world is Love. It's a willingness to see beyond your present sense of sight and acknowledge the Presence of God. And mind you, again, all of you, what blocks you from perceiving the Presence of God in Its absolutely unconflicted Wholeness are the thoughts, the reasonings, the judgments, the conclusions that have been arrived at without feeling into the Presence of God first!

Maharishi says, “Doing less and accomplishing more.” And I am saying, “Do nothing and be all.” Discover your wholeness.

We can pursue this further as we go into the next two days. But let's let that jell for now. And I want to say to everyone, do not hesitate to challenge if you experience a great disbelief about something that I say. What I mean is, be willing to ask for further clarification and express what your perception is which doesn’t allow you to embrace what I'm saying. And when you are listening for Guidance within, do the same thing until you can come to a place where it makes sense and you can let go of the last little bit of resistance to experiencing the truth, or experiencing your healing. Thank you for your question.

QUESTION: Thank you. May I ask something in relevance to something you just said?

RAJ: Indeed.

QUESTION: You mentioned something about God creating the body. I'm confused on this point. My understanding was that we created the body as an illusion.

RAJ: Indeed that is one of the reasons that I am speaking at some length here. You are the expression of God. God expressed is not intangible, invisible, unrecognizable, unexperienceable. Therefore, your Individuality has visibility and tangibility. My words are somewhat of an accommodation, but they say what needs to be said so that you will treat the body as though it is Real.

You, your essential Individuality is recognizable. It is recognizable! I could say: “That, there [motioning to the questioner's body], is its recognizableness. This, here [motioning to Paul's body], is Paul's recognizableness.” It is Mind's ability to recognize Paul. Now, all that I just said lies in the context of the Allness of God. But, if Paul makes a decision to think for himself and says, “Father, I'd rather do it myself,” “I'd rather perceive everything with my own quirky bias,” “I'd like to add a little bit of something that You didn’t include, but since its inviolable, the only thing I can really add is a quirky way of perceiving it, so I'm going to perceive it a little bit differently, Father,” this “creates” what the Course calls perception, and from the “vantage point” of perception, Paul says, “Oh. This is my body and...Let's see. If it isn’t what it was the way God made it...well, wait a minute now...uh, I'm feeling uncomfortable here. I don’t exactly know what it is, but the Peace I experienced when I was with my Father's point of view is absent, and I'm feeling uncomfortable. Oh-h...um-m...where can I hide? I've got to protect myself.”

Well, what is happening right there? The first stages of identifying the body as “vulnerable” and as “something that needs to be protected”…and the definitions keep flowing.

Now, the visibility and tangibility of Paul as the Son of God, as the expression of God, was there before Paul had a sense of it as being “himself that he must protect and hide.” And it's still the body there—the visibility and tangibility—after he begins to have this distorted sense of what it is and what its purpose is. That sense of it—as something to protect and as something that can be perceived separate and apart from what the Father is being right there—that is the illusion which you create, which you all create. But it is a delusion about Something. You cannot have a delusion about nothing.

You have created, conceptualized, you have literally conceived your body in a manner, which is totally inconsistent with the visibility and tangibility of what the Father is being right there where you are, right there where everyone experiences you. But the Father is still the only thing there, even though you describe it as a body which is experiencing a disease that is life-threatening. Tain’t so. The only thing that is there is the Presence of God and, maybe, an imaginative misperception of It which you are believing and reinforcing. And the latter is what I am talking about abandoning.

Remember that I said God unexpressed is nonexistent God. Or, in Course terminology, God not extended is nonexistent God.

The only world and body you have created is an independent assessment of the Kingdom of Heaven. Do you get that? The only illusory body and world that you have created has been a false assessment of the Kingdom of Heaven. But the Kingdom of Heaven continues uninterruptedly to be the only thing going on. And the Sons of God that you are, and the Daughters of God that you are, continue to be the only thing present.

So, you create a false perception, and all of you get together and you agree on your misperceptions and you develop codes of behavior and agreements as to how things work. And by virtue of your agreements with each other about how all of your definitions work, you seem to function with some harmony. But all of this has happened after that point where you said, “Father, I want to add a little of my own ‘english’ to Your creation, a little of my own bias or...well...slightly different creative perception of it.” And in doing that, you stepped into your sense of separation and vulnerability and all of the definitions of everything, which are colored by that separation and vulnerability. That doesn’t cause another world to come into existence, but it causes you to see the Kingdom of Heaven whacko! Insanely!

So, indeed, when you look, what you are seeing for the most part is illusion, in the sense that what you are seeing is what you are convinced is there rather than what is Really there. Love is the willingness to recognize that which is Really there, and the abandonment of your convictions about what you think is there, and the abandonment of the mutual agreements you have with each other about what you think is there.

You see, this is important, because if you really remain convinced that you have created your body, then it must be an illusion, and ultimately “healing” would have to mean that your body would disappear—the illusion would no longer even be presenting itself. That's insanity. And that is not Love. And it is not appropriate to indulge in it. As the Course says, there is a different way to look at this.

Do you know what? Looking out here [motioning to the view of Kauai through the glass walls of the meeting room] and saying, “There is a different way to look at this,” and meaning, “It doesn’t exist at all. Wow! What a different way to look at it! My goodness, it doesn't even exist!”—that's not a different way of looking at it. That's engaging in or indulging in a very wild, imaginative idea, and thinking that having that idea constitutes a different way of looking. It's not a “way of looking.” It's just a different thought bias.

But, if you're willing to look out here and say, “There is another way to look at this,” or if you look at your body and say, “There is another way to look at this,” and you mean, “There is another vantage point from which I can look at it [motioning to the view],” “There is another vantage point from which I can look at this [motioning to the body], I can look at it from a place of having no confidence about what it is, there is a place where I can go in the Silence and in my peace and ask God what's Really going on,” then you are available for having God or the Holy Spirit share with you God's point of view, so that you look at it from a different place, and you see it in a different way—not as a result of a different way of conceptualizing it, but of a different vantage point entirely. A different way of seeing it.

I will share with you that at the end of the last workshop which was held here on Kauai, Paul was very much with me, and I was thanking everyone for their presence and their participation. And as I did that, Paul opened his eyes because, in effect, that expressed what was happening. I was looking. And he had a new experience of “seeing.” He's used to looking with his eyes to gather information. But he experienced me seeing for the purpose of giving acknowledgment. It was for the purpose of embracing, extending, acknowledging, instead of gathering data, which one really does for the purpose of self-protection. That gives you an idea of what it means: There is another way to look at this. Not a different way to conceptualize it, no. There's a different place from which you can look. Instead of being from your tiny, limited viewpoint, you can look with God through God's eyes. You see?

Waking up is not a head trip. The Course is not a head trip, even though many people intellectualize it.

QUESTION: Would it be fair to say, then, that one should love one's body?

RAJ: Amen! What is your alternative? If Love is the willingness to recognize that which is Real in each and every thing, and if Love illuminates what is Real, then actively loving your body is going to uncover what is Real. If there really isn't anything Real about your body, it will disappear and that will constitute a revelation and a healing. However, it will not disappear.

What I am meaning to say is that to love anything will cause it to be seen more truly as it is. And it will cause that which is not true about it to fade from sight. You want what is illusory to fade from sight, and if indeed your body is an illusion, then it will fade from sight, and that will be good news. So, yes! Love your body, because you really only have one alternative, and that is to hate it. In other words, either you are embracing it with a desire to experience what is divinely Real right there, or you are actively engaged in denying that there is anything there.

Denial, especially if you are denying something which is Real, is an act of aggression. It's an attack. Do you see? Love is never an attack, and it's always healing. Hate, or denial, is an attack, and it is never loving. It is therefore never healing. So, you tell me what occasion there might legitimately be to ever do anything but love everything?

Understand that I am not saying “Love an illusion.” I'm saying, “Withdraw the judgment, or the assessment, that what you're looking at is an illusion, and be willing to love whatever is there that might be Real.” It is that act of faith that there is something Real there, divinely Real and therefore unconflicted, which allows for, in Biblical terms, the scales to fall from your eyes—from your eyes, not from the thing you are looking at—so that you can see what is true and Real there, so that you can see whatever of God is there.

Now, just as an interesting point, if God is infinite, if God is omnipresent, then, as the saying goes, “There is no spot where God is not.” Even physically speaking, since probes have been sent out into space where it was assumed that there was probably a perfect vacuum, they have found no perfect vacuum, no place where absolutely nothing is. Of course that's what they found, because they are exploring the Kingdom of Heaven, and there is no spot where something Real doesn’t exist!