10. The Purpose of the Body and the World

 If you see the body and the world as a prison, that is the way you will experience them because that is the purpose you have assigned to them.  They, the body and the world,  will provide you with all of the evidence you need to prove you are right and you will engage in all of the “evidence” as if it were real.  If you do not want to experience the body and the world as a prison, you must assign another purpose to them.

In the Course it says, do not ask the Holy Spirit for help with physical symptoms because He cannot make you give up something you have made and cherish.  Your thoughts caused sickness and its symptoms for the purpose of making the body and therefore the separation seem real.  He cannot change what you value.  Ask instead, the Course counsels, to have the Holy Spirit help you to “rightly perceive of the body”.  What does that mean?  It means that you have a “fact”- a body.  Remember that misinterpretation of facts causes all negative emotions including pain.  So you must be misinterpreting or misperceiving the body if you are in pain.  If you are misinterpreting or misperceiving a “fact” you must have assigned it the purpose of separation.  So let’s assign the body and the world a new purpose.  The body and the world will no longer witness to separation and sin but will be aids to help us reach the home where god abides.  If we do that we will no longer have the experience of being children trapped in these bodies and the world, but we will be Teachers of God who will use what we have made, the body and the world, to free our brother and ourselves.

Say this often and mean it:

I will not use the body and the world to imprison myself and my brothers.

I will use the body and the world as an aid to help us reach the home where God abides.

And yet, because it does, it can be seen as not your home, but merely as an aid to help you reach the home where God abides.  With this as purpose is the body healed.  It is not used to witness to the dream of separation and disease.  Nor is it idly blamed for what it did not do.  It serves to help the healing of God’s Son, and for this purpose it cannot be sick. (T-28.VII.3:6)

God did not create this excuse for a world, but they (the gnostics) made the same error that almost everybody else does: They made the miscreated world psychologically real for themselves. They (the gnostics) saw it as an evil to be despised. J, on the other hand, viewed the world as the Holy Spirit sees it: a perfect opportunity for forgiveness and salvation. (DU10)

This world will bind your feet and tie your hands and kill your body only if you think that it was made to crucify God’s Son.  For even though it was a dream of death, you need not let it stand for this to you. Let this be changed, and nothing in the world but must be changed as well.  For nothing here but is defined as what you see it for.

 How lovely is the world whose purpose is forgiveness of God’s Son!  How free from fear, how filled with blessing and with happiness!  And what a joyous thing it is to dwell a little while in such a happy place!  Nor can it be forgot, in such a world, it is a little while till timelessness comes quietly to take the place of time. (T29.VI.5)