What is the Body?
Our special theme says, “The body is a dream. Like other dreams it sometimes seems to picture happiness, but can quite suddenly revert to fear, where every dream is born.”
Yesterday we looked at the duality of the body itself. (For example, health and sickness.)
However, that isn’t the only way the body “can quite suddenly revert to fear.” The body also reverts to fear when we become worried, angry, jealous, deceitful, violent, and so on. The body acts out fearfully when we believe the ego’s thoughts of fear.
Our special theme says, “But we can change the purpose that the body will obey by changing what we think that it is for. The body is the means by which God’s Son returns to sanity.”
In other words, we can use this experience of being a human in a body to wake up from the ego’s illusion. That is what we are doing when we decide to meditate instead of doing something else. That is what we are doing when we decide not to act out from worry or anger, but to inquire into our thoughts instead. As we change the purpose given to the body, the body behaves differently.
Creation’s gentleness is all I see.
Today’s lesson says, “I have indeed misunderstood the world, because I laid my sins on it and saw them looking back at me. How fierce they seemed! And how deceived was I to think that what I feared was in the world, instead of in my mind alone.”
This is reminiscent of our last special theme, “What is Sin?” Our ideas of what should be and should not be create a fearful world of duality. Duality is fearful, because it cannot be trusted. A lover can become an enemy. A leisurely drive can become a deadly automobile accident. A secure job can be lost. A smart and happy child can become addicted to drugs. And the examples continue.
For as long as we remain caught in the ego’s illusion by believing the ego’s thoughts, we experience duality, which includes all of the fear that comes with duality.
To become free of duality, we need to stop believing the ego’s judgments of what should be and should not be. We need to become gentle ourselves by abiding in love instead of in judgment.
Today we will continue to focus on love by practicing Loving Consciousness meditation and the Loving All Method.
If you have 30 minutes for meditation, I recommend this meditation:
