What is the Body? 9

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 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.  For only love creates in truth, and truth can never fear.’

“We experience happiness when our special love objects work well for us, but we have learned that every dream is born of fear, including the cosmic dream of the physical universe.  When we choose to be in a state of love, however, fear is impossible, for ‘perfect love casts out fear.’  The opening of ‘The Gifts of God’ clearly articulates the dream’s fearful origin, and its undoing through acceptance of God’s gift of love.

“’Fear is the one emotion of the world.  Its forms are many…but it is one in content.  Never far, even in form, from what its purpose is, never with power to escape its cause, and never but a counterfeit of joy, it rests uncertainly upon a bed of lies.  Here it was born and sheltered by its seeming comfort.  Here it will remain where it was born, and where its end will come….  If you were certain…fear would be laid aside as easily as joy and peace unite on love’s behalf.  But first there must be certainty that there can be no love where fear exists, and that the world will never give a gift which is not made of fear, concealed perhaps, but which is truly present somewhere in the gift.  Accept it not, and you will understand a gift far greater has been given you.’”