If Not a Body, What Are You?

Why should the body be ANYTHING to you? Certainly, what it is made of is not precious. And, just as certainly, it has no feeling. It transmits to you the feelings that YOU want.

Like any communication medium, the body receives and sends the messages that it is given. It has no feeling for them. All of the feelings with which they are invested is given by the sender and the receiver. The ego and the Holy Spirit both recognize this.  And both also recognize that here, the SENDER and RECEIVER are the SAME. The Holy Spirit tells you this with joy. The ego hides it, for it would keep you unaware of it.

Who would send messages of hatred and attack, if he but understood he sends them to himself?

Who would accuse, make guilty and condemn himself?

Not one should regard the body as himself, without which he would die, and yet within which is his, the ego’s death equally inevitable. Taken from “A Course in Miracles” by Jesus Christ. 

Do you want freedom of the body, or of the mind? Both you cannot have.

Which do you value? Which is your goal?

One you see as means; the other, end. And one must serve the other, and lead to its predominance, increasing its importance by diminishing its own.

Means serve the end and as the end is reached, the value of the means decreases, and is eclipsed entirely when they are recognized as functionless. No-one but yearns for freedom and tries to find it. But he will seek for it where he believes it is and can be found. He will believe it possible of mind or body, and he will make the other serve his choice, as means to find it.

Where freedom of the body has been chosen, the mind is used as the means, whose value lies in its ability to contrive ways to achieve the body’s freedom.

Yet freedom of the body HAS no meaning. 

And so, the mind is dedicated to serve illusions. This is a situation so contradictory and so impossible that anyone who chooses this has no idea of what is valuable.

Yet even in this confusion, so profound it cannot be described, the Holy Spirit waits in gentle patience, as certain of the outcome as He is sure of his creator’s love. He knows this mad decision was made by one as dear to his creator as love is to itself.  Taken from “A Course in Miracles” by Jesus Christ. 

It is God’s strength in you that is the light in which you see.

It is God’s mind with which you think. His strength denies your weakness.

It is your weakness that sees through the body’s eyes, peering about in darkness to behold the likeness of itself; the small, the weak, the sickly and the dying, those in need, the helpless and afraid, the sad, the poor, the starving and the joyless. These are seen through eyes which cannot see and cannot bless.

Strength overlooks these things by seeing past appearances. It keeps its steady gaze upon the light that lies beyond them. It unites with light, of which it is a part. It sees itself. It brings the light in which your “self” appears. In darkness you perceive a “self” that is not there.  Try to leave your weakness behind.  This is accomplished very simply, as you instruct yourself that you are not a body.

Faith goes to what you want, and you instruct your mind accordingly.

Your will remains your teacher, and your will has all the strength to do what it desires. You can escape the body if you choose. You can experience the strength in you.  Taken from “A Course in Miracles” by Jesus Christ.