Our Bodies Are Our Friends

“While you have been taught that you are not your body, it is impossible for you to deny the body here. Yet you can change the function you have ascribed to it, and so its way of functioning. If you do not see it as the result of a fall, as a curse, as a punishment from God, or as your home, a dwelling place that keeps you separate, then you can begin to see it as what it is, a learning device given you by a loving creator.” (ACOL, C:18.6)

A Course in Miracles also calls the body a learning device, and so in this the two courses are identical. We are not meant to denigrate the body, see it as evidence of our separation from God. But this is what many of us may have done. Either denigrate or exalt—the latter of which is a mistake of the ego-oriented. We have sought to make of the physical body something to “catch” our mate, to cause admiration, or to glorify with clothes, jewelry, and makeup.

All of these ways of seeing the body are false to our better nature. We function best when our body does not feel either well nor ill, but just “is.” This “isness” is a function of seeing the body as a learning device, and at this early stage of learning ACOL, we are still caught in learning. (Later on, we will move beyond learning.) Our learning of what the body can teach will serve as well as we advance in the Course of Love curriculum. And give us a blessing as well. We have not been cursed by a body that sometimes causes us pain and suffering. We chose the body for a new experience, and this new experience of form, physical bodies, is not outside God’s will. Only our decision that there was something better than God’s creation caused our downfall. This was the separation, the “letting go” that God chose, along with us. We were too eager, too desirous of new experience when we had not learned all that was needful.

The new way of viewing the body, seeing it as a way of experience and a learning device, but no longer as a separating factor in our relationship to God, will serve us well. By the time that we are reading the Dialogues, we will learn that the elevated Self of form is a new choice for us on earth, a new choice for us in this world. We will create the new, a new reality.

And in this choice will all of our sadly lacking choices of the past be gone.

Prayer

Dear Father/Mother,

May this New Year’s Day be the start of a year in which as many of us as possible catch more than glimpses of enlightenment, but the real thing—maintained and then sustained Christ-consciousness. This is a tall order, but to ask for it is to remain within God’s will for us. And certainly Jesus wants the same for us.

May this day be the start of something grand.

Thank you for Your support and Your many blessings. May none of us ever forget to be grateful. Now and always.

Amen.