Attack
is always physical. When attack in any form enters your mind you are equating yourself
with a body, since this is the ego’s interpretation of the body. You do not have to
attack physically to accept this interpretation. You are accepting it simply by the belief
that attack can get you something you want. If you did not believe this, the idea of
attack would have no appeal for you. When you equate yourself with a body you will always
experience depression. When a child of God thinks of himself in this way he is belittling
himself, and seeing his brothers as similarly belittled. Since he can find himself only in
them, he has cut himself off from salvation.
Remember
that the Holy Spirit interprets the body only as a means of communication. Being the
communication link between God and His separated Sons, the Holy Spirit interprets
everything you have made in the light of what He is. The ego separates through the body.
The Holy Spirit reaches through it to others. You do not perceive your brothers as the
Holy Spirit does, because you do not regard bodies solely as a means of joining minds and
uniting them with yours and mine. This interpretation of the body will change your mind
entirely about its value. Of itself it has none.
If
you use the body for attack, it is harmful to you. If you use it only to reach the minds
of those who believe they are bodies, and teach them through the
body that this is not so, you will understand the power of the mind that is in you. If you
use the body for this and only for this, you cannot use it for attack. In the service of
uniting it becomes a beautiful lesson in communion, which has value until communion is.
This is God’s way of making unlimited what you have limited. The Holy Spirit does
not see the body as you do, because He knows the only reality of anything is the service
it renders God on behalf of the function He gives it.
Communication
ends separation. Attack promotes it. The body is beautiful or ugly, peaceful or savage,
helpful or harmful, according to the use to which it is put. And in the body of another
you will see the use to which you have put yours. If the body becomes a means you give to
the Holy Spirit to use on behalf of union of the Sonship, you will not see anything
physical except as what it is. Use it for truth and you will see it truly. Misuse it and
you will misunderstand it, because you have already done so by
misusing it. Interpret anything apart from the Holy Spirit and you will mistrust it. This
will lead you to hatred and attack and loss of peace.
Yet
all loss comes only from your own misunderstanding. Loss of any kind is impossible. But
when you look upon a brother as a physical entity, his power and glory are
“lost” to you and so are yours. You have attacked him, but you must have
attacked yourself first. Do not see him this way for your own salvation, which must bring
him his. Do not allow him to belittle himself in your mind, but give him freedom from his
belief in littleness, and thus escape from yours. As part of you, he is holy. As part of
me, you are. To communicate with part of God Himself is to reach beyond the Kingdom to its
Creator, through His Voice Which He has established as part of you.
Rejoice,
then, that of yourself you can do nothing. You are not of
yourself. He of Whom you are has willed your power and glory for you, with which you can
perfectly accomplish His holy Will for you when you accept it for yourself. He has not
withdrawn His gifts from you, but you believe you have withdrawn them from Him. Let no Son
of God remain hidden for His Name’s sake, because His Name is yours.
The
Bible says, “The Word (or thought) was made flesh.” Strictly speaking this is
impossible, since it seems to involve the translation of one order of reality into
another. Different orders of reality merely appear to exist, just as different orders of
miracles do. Thought cannot be made into flesh except by belief, since thought is not
physical. Yet thought is communication, for which the body can be used. This is the only
natural use to which it can be put. To use the body unnaturally is to lose sight of the
Holy Spirit’s purpose, and thus to confuse the goal of His curriculum.
There
is nothing so frustrating to a learner as a curriculum he cannot learn. His sense of
adequacy suffers, and he must become depressed. Being faced with an impossible learning
situation is the most depressing thing in the world. In fact, it is ultimately why the
world itself is depressing. The Holy Spirit’s curriculum is never depressing, because
it is a curriculum of joy. Whenever the reaction to learning is depression, it is because
the true goal of the curriculum has been lost sight of.
In
this world, not even the body is perceived as whole. Its purpose is seen as fragmented
into many functions with little or no relationship to each other, so that it appears to be
ruled by chaos. Guided by the ego, it is. Guided by the Holy
Spirit, it is not. It becomes a means by which the part of the mind you tried to separate from
spirit can reach beyond its distortions and return to spirit. The
ego’s temple thus becomes the temple of the Holy Spirit, where devotion to Him
replaces devotion to the ego. In this sense the body does become a temple to God; His
Voice abides in it by directing the use to which it is put.
Healing
is the result of using the body solely for communication. Since this is natural it heals
by making whole, which is also natural. All mind is whole, and the belief that part of it
is physical, or not mind, is a fragmented or sick interpretation. Mind cannot be made
physical, but it can be made manifest through the physical if it
uses the body to go beyond itself. By reaching out, the mind extends itself. It does not
stop at the body, for if it does it is blocked in its purpose. A mind that has been
blocked has allowed itself to be vulnerable to attack, because it has turned against
itself.
The
removal of blocks, then, is the only way to guarantee help and healing. Help and healing
are the normal expressions of a mind that is working through the body, but not in
it. If the mind believes the body is its goal it will distort its perception of the body,
and by blocking its own extension beyond it, will induce illness by fostering separation.
Perceiving the body as a separate entity cannot but foster illness, because it is not
true. A medium of communication loses its usefulness if it is used for anything else. To
use a medium of communication as a medium of attack is an obvious confusion in purpose.
To
communicate is to join and to attack is to separate. How can you do both simultaneously
with the same thing and not suffer? Perception of the body can be unified only by one
purpose. This releases the mind from the temptation to see the body in many lights, and
gives it over entirely to the One Light in Which it can be really understood. To confuse a
learning device with a curriculum goal is a fundamental confusion that blocks the
understanding of both. Learning must lead beyond the body to the re-establishment of the
power of the mind in it. This can be accomplished only if the mind extends to other minds,
and does not arrest itself in its extension. This arrest is the cause of all illness,
because only extension is the mind’s function.
The
opposite of joy is depression. When your learning promotes depression instead of joy, you
cannot be listening to God’s joyous Teacher and learning His lessons. To see a body
as anything except a means of communication is to limit your mind and to hurt yourself.
Health is therefore nothing more than united purpose. If the body is brought under the
purpose of the mind, it becomes whole because the mind’s purpose is one. Attack can
only be an assumed purpose of the body, because apart from the mind the body has no
purpose at all.
You
are not limited by the body, and thought cannot be made flesh. Yet mind can be manifested
through the body if it goes beyond it and does not interpret it as limitation. Whenever
you see another as limited to or by the body, you are imposing this limit on yourself. Are
you willing to accept this, when your whole purpose for learning should be to escape from
limitations? To conceive of the body as a means of attack and to believe that joy could
possibly result, is a clear-cut indication of a poor learner. He has accepted a learning
goal in obvious contradiction to the unified purpose of the curriculum, and one that is
interfering with his ability to accept its purpose as his own.
Joy
is unified purpose, and unified purpose is only God’s. When yours is unified it is
His. Believe you can interfere with His purpose, and you need salvation. You have
condemned yourself, but condemnation is not of God. Therefore it is not true. No more are
any of its seeming results. When you see a brother as a body, you are condemning him
because you have condemned yourself. Yet if all condemnation is unreal, and it must be
unreal since it is a form of attack, then it can have no results.
Do
not allow yourself to suffer from imagined results of what is not true. Free your mind
from the belief that this is possible. In its complete impossibility lies your only hope
for release. But what other hope would you want? Freedom from illusions lies only in not
believing them. There is no attack, but there is unlimited
communication and therefore unlimited power and wholeness. The power of wholeness is
extension. Do not arrest your thought in this world, and you will open your mind to
creation in God.
A Course in Miracles
Chapter 8
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