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Chapter 28: The Two Dreams

1. The Holy Spirit’s Picture of the Body

It is not Will for Life but wish for death that is the hidden motivation for the world of illusions. Its only purpose is to prove guilt real. No worldly thought or feeling or act has a motivation other than this one. These are the witnesses that are called forth to be believed, and lend conviction to the system they speak for and represent. And each system has many voices speaking to you and to your sisters and brothers in different tongues. And yet to all the message is the same. Concerns about the body demonstrate how frail and vulnerable is your “life;” how easily destroyed is what you treasure. Adornment of the body seeks to show how lovely are the witnesses for guilt. Depression speaks of death and the futility of having real concern with anything at all.

The strongest witness to futility, which bolsters all the rest and helps them paint the picture in which the belief in separation is justified, is sickness in whatever form it takes. The sick have reasons for each one of their particular desires and peculiar needs. For who could live a life so soon to be cut short, and not esteem the worth of passing joys? What real pleasures could there be that will endure? Are not the frail entitled to believe that every pilfered scrap of pleasure is their righteous payment for their little lives? Their death will pay the price for all of them, whether they enjoy the benefits or not. The end of life must come whatever way a life be spent, so take pleasure in the swiftly passing and ephemeral while it is available.

These ideas are not sins, but witnesses unto the strange belief that sin and death are real, and that innocence and sin will end alike within the termination of the grave. If this were true, there would be reason to remain content to seek for passing joys, and cherish little pleasures where you can. But in this picture is the body perceived as being not neutral, with a goal inherent in itself. And thus the body becomes the symbol of reproach, the sign of guilt whose consequences as sickness still are there to look upon, so that the cause – the body – can never be denied.

Your function now is to demonstrate to your sisters and brothers that guilt can have no cause. How futile must it then be to perceive yourself as a picture of the proof that what your function is can never be.

The Holy Spirit’s Picture of the body doesn’t change it into something it is not. It only takes away from it all signs of accusation and of assigned blame. Pictured as neutral, the body is seen as neither sick nor well, bad nor good. No grounds are offered that it may be judged in any way at all. It has no real life, but neither does it die. It stands apart from all experience of fear or Love. For then its purpose is open, and the mind made free again to choose what it is for and what it will be witness to. Now it is freed from condemnation, and simply waits for a purpose to be given it, that it may fulfill the function that it will receive.

Into this empty space, from which the goal of guilt has been removed, is Heaven free to be remembered. Here Its Peace can come, and perfect healing take the place of death. The body can become a sign of Life, a promise of Redemption, and a breath of Immortality to those grown sick of breathing in the fetid scent of death. Let it have the healing of the mind as its purpose. Then will it send forth the message it received, and by its health and loveliness proclaim the reality and value of what it now truly represents. Let it receive the power to represent an endless Life, forever safe from attack. And to your sisters and brothers let the body’s message be, “Behold me, sisters and brothers, through the Love we share, I live.”

The simple way to let this be achieved is merely this: to let the body have no purpose from the past, when you were secretly sure you knew its purpose was to foster guilt. For this past purpose insists that your warped picture is a lasting sign of what it represents. This leaves no space in which a different view, another purpose, can be given the body.

You did not know the body’s real purpose. You merely gave an illusion of a purpose to a thing you made to hide your true function on Earth from yourself. This thing without a purpose cannot hide the function of forgiveness and awakening that the Holy Spirit has given you. Let, then, the body’s purpose and your function both be reconciled at last, and seen as one.