The recently announced and rare public appearance of The Master Teacher of A Course in Miracles in San Jose, CA, at World Wellness Weekend, November 3-5, 2006, challenges us all to consider what constitutes wellness. Is it merely a condition that is the opposite of sickness or are we willing to entertain a larger perspective?
The seemingly impossible dilemma inherent to the human condition is that it appears always to perceive something outside itself. Whether that “something” is a deadly strain of virus, the cancer I am fighting, the spinach I am eating, the car I am driving, the randomness of terrorism, or the obnoxiousness of my next door neighbor—there is always something “out there” that can “get” me. The predicament is the defining characteristic of all human behavior.
Trying to find a reference point within the chaos of apparently opposing forces — social, physical, emotional, intellectual, and sexual — I react blindly to whatever I think I perceive. I stand as if within a mirrored ball, bouncing off my own reflection, always in a reaction, projecting onto my body, my family, my community, and my world my own fearful defense against my own perceptions. The human race, the Master Teacher reminds us, is “suffering from the disease of projected self-identity.”
Within the dilemma that is the human condition, we have sought for worldly ‘solutions,’ both political. And personal, that have led to either more problems or merely a change in the form of the problem. How quickly everything changes, however, when I take total responsibility for the reality I am experiencing. I am the perceiver of everything I see. I define it, interpret it, and react to it. If there is a problem, it must be mine. Now it is here where the Course is unique and clearly comes from outside the framework of reality as it is known to the human mind.
The Course does not seek to change the form of the problem, but to change the mind that thought the problem real. True healing is, as the Course in Miracles asserts, “corrected perception.” It is inclusive of the emotional, spiritual and physical. It is the recognition that no healing was ever necessary! Mankind’s dilemma of being a victim to its own perceived objective condition is solved miraculously in an instantaneous recognition of the Singular nature of reality.