Corresponding Text Section

Chapter 8: The Journey Home

6. Reinterpreting the Purpose of the Body

Attack is always physical. This means that when attack in any form enters your mind, you are equating yourself with a body. Attack is the ego’s interpretation of the body. You do not have to attack physically to accept this interpretation. You accept it simply by the belief that attack can get you something you want, including protection. If you did not believe this, the idea of attack would have no appeal to you.

When you equate yourself with a body, you will always experience depression. When Children of the Divine think of themselves in this way, they are belittling themselves and perceiving their sisters and brothers as similarly belittled. Since they can find themselves only in their sisters and brothers, they have cut themselves off from awakening. Remember that the Holy Spirit interprets the body only as a means of communication. Being the Communication Link between the Divine and Its separated Children, Spirit interprets everything you have in the Light of what It is.

The ego separates by means of the body. The Holy Spirit reaches through the body to others. You do not yet perceive your sisters and brothers as the Holy Spirit does because you do not interpret their bodies and yours solely as a means of joining your minds and uniting them with mine. This new interpretation of the body will change your mind entirely about the body’s value. Of itself it has no value. If you use it for attack it will be harmful to you in your experience. But if you use it only to reach the minds of those who believe they are bodies, and teach them through the body that this is not so, you will begin to understand the Power of the mind that is in both of you. If you use the body for this, and only for this, you cannot use it for attack. In the service of uniting, the body becomes a beautiful lesson in deep connection with others, which has value until perfect Oneness with all simply is.

This is the Divine’s Way of rendering unlimited what Its separated Children have limited. Its Voice perceives the body not as you yet perceive it, because Spirit knows that the only reality anything can have is the Service it can render the Divine on behalf of the Function the Divine has given it.

Communication ends separation, while attack promotes it. The body is ugly or beautiful, savage or holy, harmful or helpful, according to the use to which it is put. And in the body of another you will perceive the use to which you put your own. If the body becomes for you a means that you give to the Holy Spirit to use on behalf of the Union of the Divine Family, you will perceive the physical only as what it is. Use it for Truth, and you will see it truly. Misuse it and you will misunderstand it, because you have already done so by misusing it. Interpret anything apart from the Holy Spirit and you will mistrust it. This will lead you to fear and attack and loss of peace.

But all loss comes only from your own misunderstanding. Actual loss of any kind is impossible because the Creation is Whole. When you perceive a brother or sister as a physical entity, their Power and Glory are lost to your awareness, and so are yours. You have belittled them, but you must have belittled yourself first. Do not perceive them this way for the sake of your own awakening, which must bring them theirs. Do not allow them to belittle themselves in your mind, but give them freedom from their belief in equating themselves with the littleness of the body, and release yourself from yours. As part of you, they are holy. As part of me and us, you and they are.

To communicate with Part of the Divine Itself is to reach through the Realm of Heaven to Its Creator, through Its Voice which It has established as Part of you. Rejoice, then, that of yourself you can do nothing, for you are not of yourself. And the Divine, of Whom you are, has willed your Power and Glory for you, with Which you can perfectly accomplish Its holy Will for you when you so will It yourself. It has not withdrawn Its Gifts from you, though by withdrawing yourself from your Wholeness, you withdrew Them from yourself. For Its Name’s Sake let no Child of the Divine remain hidden, because Its Name is yours.

The Bible states that the Divine Word (or Thought) was made flesh. Strictly speaking this is impossible, since that would involve the translation of one Order of Reality into another, and there is only one Order. Different levels or orders of reality merely seem to exist, just as different levels or orders of magnitude of miracles do. Thought cannot be made into flesh except by belief, because thought is not physical. But thought is communication, for which the body can be used. This is the only natural use to which the body can be put. To use the body unnaturally is to lose sight of the Holy Spirit’s Purpose, and thus to confuse the Goal of Its Curriculum.

There is nothing so frustrating to a learner as to place or find themself in a curriculum that they cannot learn. Their sense of adequacy suffers, and they must become depressed. Being faced with an impossible learning goal, regardless of why it is impossible, is the most depressing thing in the world. In fact, it is ultimately why the world is depressing. The Holy Spirit’s Curriculum is never depressing because it is a curriculum in Joy. Whenever the reaction to learning is depression, it is only because the Goal of the Holy Spirit’s Curriculum has been lost sight of.

In the world, not even the body is perceived as whole. Its purpose is seen as fragmented into many functions that bear little or no relationship to each other, so that the body appears to be ruled by chaos. Guided by the ego, it is. Guided by the Holy Spirit, it is not. Under Spirit’s Guidance the body becomes only a means by which the part of the mind that you have separated from your spirit can reach beyond its distortions and return to the spirit. The ego’s temple thus becomes the Temple of the Holy Spirit, where devotion to the Divine replaces devotion to the ego. In this sense the body does become a temple to the Divine, because the Divine’s Voice abides in it by directing the use to which you put it.

Healing is the result of using the body solely for communication as directed by Spirit. Since this is natural, it heals by making whole, which also is natural. All true mind is whole, and the belief that part of it can become physical, or “not mind,” is a fragmented (or sick) interpretation. Mind cannot be made physical, but it can become manifest through the physical if it uses the body to go beyond the body. By reaching out, the mind extends itself. It does not stop extending itself at the body, for if it does it becomes blocked in its Purpose. A mind that has become blocked has forgotten its Invulnerability because it has turned against itself.

The removal of blocks to true Purpose, then, is the only way to guarantee help and healing. Help and healing are the normal expressions of a mind that is working through the body but not confused by it or with it. If the mind believes that the body is its goal, it will distort its perception of the body, and by blocking its own extension beyond the body it will induce illness by fostering separation. Perceiving the body as a separate entity can only foster illness because it is not true. A medium of communication will lose its usefulness if it is used for anything other than communication. To use a medium of communication as a medium of attack is an obvious confusion in purpose. To communicate truly is to join, while to attack is to separate. How can you attempt to do both simultaneously, with the same medium, and not suffer? Perception of the body can be unified only by one unified Purpose. This releases the mind from the temptation to perceive the body in many lights, and gives it over entirely to the One Light in which it can be really understood at all.

To confuse a learning device with a curriculum goal is a fundamental confusion. Learning can hardly be stopped at its own aids and meaningfully hope to understand them or its real purpose. Learning must lead beyond the body to the reestablishment of the Power of the mind in it. This can be accomplished only if the mind extends to other minds, and does not stop or arrest itself in its extension. The arrest of the mind’s extension is the cause of all illness, because Extension is the whole mind’s only Function. Block this, and you have blocked health because you have blocked the mind’s Joy.

The opposite of Joy is depression. When your learning promotes depression instead of Joy, you cannot be listening to the Divine’s joyous Teacher, and you must be learning amiss, or wrongly. To perceive a body as anything except a means of the mind’s extension is to block your mind and hurt yourself. Health is therefore nothing more than united Purpose. If the body is brought under the Purpose of the whole mind, it becomes whole because the whole mind’s Purpose is One.

Attack can only be an assumed goal of the body, but the body apart from the mind has no purpose at all. You are not limited by the body, and thought cannot be made flesh. But mind can be manifested through the body if mind goes beyond it and does not interpret the body as limitation. Whenever you perceive another as limited to or by the body, you are imposing this limit on yourself. Are you willing to accept this, when your whole purpose for learning should be to release yourself from limitations?

To conceive of the body as a means of attack of any kind, and to entertain even the possibility that Joy could possibly result, is a clear indication of a poor learner who has accepted a learning goal in obvious contradiction to the unified Purpose of the Curriculum of awakening, and one which is interfering with their ability to accept this Purpose as their own.

Joy is unified Purpose, and unified Purpose is the Divine’s only. When your purpose is unified, it is the Divine’s. Interfere with the Divine’s Purpose and you will need awakening. You will have fallen asleep in a dream of judgment, but judgment is not of the Divine. Therefore it is not true, nor are any of its results.

When you perceive a brother or sister as a body, you are judging and condemning them through judging and condemning yourself. But if all judgment and condemnation are unreal, and they must be unreal because they are a form of attack, then they can have no results. This is the meaningless paradox of the world. Do not allow yourself to suffer from the results of what is not true. Free your mind from the belief that this is possible. In its complete impossibility and your full awareness of its complete impossibility rest your only hope for Release. But what other hope would you want? Freedom from illusions rests only in not believing them. There can be no attack in Reality, but there is unlimited Communication and therefore unlimited Power and Wholeness. The Power of Wholeness is Extension. Do not block or arrest your thought in this world, and you will open your mind to creation in the Divine.