What is the Body?

The following series of posts 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.

“What is the Body?  As I mentioned earlier, Jesus makes some of the same points here that he made in “What is Sin?’ and “What Is the World?”  The body is purposive, the capstone of the ego’s strategy and final step in its plan to keep the Son of God [all of humanity] mindless.  This mindlessness ensures the ego will be forever safe from the Son’s mind choosing love over separation.

“The summary begins with the image of a fence we saw in ‘The Little Garden’: ‘The body is a tiny fence around a little part of a glorious and complete idea.  It draws a circle, infinitely small, around a very little segment of Heaven, splintered from the whole, proclaiming that within it is your kingdom, where God can enter not.’ 

“The body is a fence the Son of God imagines he has built, to separate parts of his Self from other parts.  It is within this fence he thinks he lives, to die as it decays and crumbles.

“This ‘fence’ – the body – keeps me separate from you.  You have your physical and psychological space, I have mine, and the two cannot coexist in the same place.  Being the embodiment of the ego, the body loudly proclaims that separation is the truth: We are not one, but separate, for bodies do not join.”