Friday, May 4, 2012

What is the Body? III




The following series of posts, begun on May first, are taken from Ken Wapnick’s, Journey Through the Workbook of a Course in Miracles, Vol. Seven, pages 69-72.  They represent a radical alternative to our ‘normal’, everyday view of the human body and our traditional views of spirituality.  This view is both horrifying and exhilarating.  See what you think.   It’s best not to swallow these ideas whole, nor reject them out of hand.  What’s best is to chew them over, mull them and reflect upon the rare occasions when the ideas seem to explain your experience.  The Course itself is believed to be channeled by Jesus as a correction to what’s been done with his ideas.



The ego strategy, “therefore, culminating in the body, is to keep itself safe – not from love, but from the decision making power of the Son’s mind.  Thus the ego wants to keep us mindless, for if we do not know we have a mind, how can we ever change it?  And if we cannot change our minds, we can never choose God’s Love over the ego’s hate; His Oneness over the ego’s separation.  Therefore, once we choose the mindless body we become the body.



“This is the ego-body equation of which the early chapters of the text [the Course is divided into three books: Text, Workbook, and Teachers’ Manual] speak; for example: ‘the body is the ego’s home by its own election.  It is the only identification with which the ego feels safe….’  Before we choose the body, however, our safety is the ego’s thought system, with which the Son of God first identifies.  Thus we are no longer Christ, not even a decision maker, but the individual selves that have become the thought system of individuality.  Once projected, this thought system becomes the body, and we are now individual, separated, and physical selves, with no memory that our bodily existence is a defense. We have forgotten what we split off from – the mind; and remember only what we have split off to – the body.”

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