What is the Body? 6

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.

“’And if he did not die, what proof is there that God’s eternal Son can be destroyed?  Despite its inherent insanity, the ego is fiendishly clever, for since we are not aware of its strategy, we cannot see its patent deception.  Jesus explains in the text that the ego tells us to leave the mind and go into a body where we will be safe, escape from God’s punishing wrath, and never die.

“If we stay in our minds, the ego warns, God will certainly annihilate us.  We, as God’s one Son, take the ego’s advice and hide in the body, only to find that the body does indeed perish.  As Jesus explains, the Son then confronts the ego and says: ‘What gives?  You told me I would be safe in my body and I believed you.  Yet now that I am here, my death is as certain as if I had remained in the mid.

“’You say this death is God’s punishment, which you promised I would escape.’ As Jesus explains, the ego’s response is to obliterate the question from our objecting mind.  In other words, we can no longer question the ego because we have totally forgotten [we have a] mind in which the ego’s strategy was planned and accomplished.”