I am not a body. I am free.
Few lessons pose a challenge to the ego’s framework than this one: every lie the ego tells, every story it convinces us is true, rests on the premise that we are bodies, that bodies are limits, and that we are subject to those limits. Only when we realize that we are minds will we experience the freedom and creativity and joy that are our inheritance in and as God’s Creation.
The mind that serves the Holy Spirit is unlimited forever, in all was, beyond the laws of time and space, unbound by any preconceptions, and with strength and power to do whatever is is asked . . . It rests in God. And who can be afraid who lives in Innocence, and only loves? (W-pI.199.2:1, 3-4).
Lesson 199 is the end of guilt, and the end of fear. It is a clear and unequivocal statement that reframes what we are in truth.
Here, we are free to look at the world in a new way, one that is informed by Love instead of fear, and which therefore reminds us that we are not separate from our brothers and sisters, and that we have no function but to remember this, which remembering is loving in a loveless place (T-14.IV.4:10).
To the ego – which is to say, to the world’s way of thinking to which we may yet be attached and invested – this idea is wrong (W-pI.199.3:2). It is dangerous even. We have to care for the body! We have to protect the body! If we don’t we will die. And sure as sin nobody else is looking out for us.
Here is the thing: A Course in Miracles does not deny the appearance of the body or its utility for communication purposes. It simply invites us to surrender our identity as a body, and to see what happens. And what happens is always healing.
The body disappears, because you have no need of it except the need the Holy Spirit sees. For this, the body will appear as a useful form for what the mind must do. It thus becomes a vehicle which helps forgiveness be extended to the all-inclusive goal that it must reach, according to God’s plan (W-pI.199.4:3-5).
Critically, this does not happen under our direction and intention, but the Holy Spirit’s. Our work is to accept the radical reorientation of identity away from the body and towards spirit.
Our goal is to cooperate with the Holy Spirit by consenting to be led by it away from fear.
The Holy Spirit is the home of minds that seek for freedom . . . The body’s purpose is now unambiguous . . . it is a worthy servant of the freedom which the mind within the Holy Spirit seeks (W-pI.199.6:1, 3, 6).
This is not a gift we receive alone, because it is not a gift that we receive save by giving it away. When we begin to intuit that we are not bodies, it becomes impossible to identify others as bodies. A new world appears in which the barriers to peace and happiness are no longer so apparently insurmountable.
. . . carry freedom as your gift to those who still believe they are enslaved within a body . . . Let love replace their fears through you. Accept salvation now, and give your mind to Him Who calls you to make this gift to Him (W-pI.199.7:2, 4-5).
This is our liberation – the ability to remember what we are in truth by being of service to our brothers and sisters, in order to awaken them with us to the Love and happiness that God Himself extends to us in Creation.
