IV. The Only Answer, Paragraph 5
5 The ego uses the body to conspire against your mind, and because the ego realizes that its “enemy” can end them both merely by recognizing they are not part of you, they join in the attack together. This is perhaps the strangest perception of all, if you consider what it really involves. The ego, which is not real, attempts to persuade the mind, which is real, that the mind is the ego’s learning device; and further, that the body is more real than the mind is. No one in his right mind could possibly believe this, and no one in his right mind does believe it.
When I look at this situation with Jesus it is very clear. The mind is real, the body and the ego are not. The ego uses the body to try to convince me it is the other way around. Amazingly, this was news to me as it probably was to you the first time you read this or at least before you started your spiritual path. I have certainly spent most of my life firmly fixed on the body as who I am.
I felt like a body and acted like a body. I took care of the body and carefully clothed and decorated it. I exercised it and tried to make up for the way I often misused it. I tried to make it feel better and I used it to both attract and attack other bodies. Even now, a part of my day is spent worrying about and regretting body stuff. The only difference is I notice this behavior and ask for the Atonement. All of this concern and activity around the body occurs because I identified (and to a lesser extent still identify) with the body as self.
I also knew that I had a soul and that the soul was eternal. But that didn’t seem as real to me as the body did. And really, I thought of it like this: I am a body with a soul. Because I had that belief it was easy for the ego to use the body to keep me engrossed in the story and distracted from the Holy Spirit’s Voice. The body needs so much attention! And the body is so vulnerable, so fragile. How could I be God’s Son if I was so unlike God.
Understanding that the body I am most closely associated with, the body I think of as Myron, is only a vehicle to use in this story helps me see more clearly what Jesus is telling us through A Course in Miracles. I am not a body. I am still, in spite of my fantasies, just as God created me. I am spirit, not body.
The term mind is used to represent the activating agent of spirit, supplying its creative energy, and when capitalized, Mind is Spirit or Christ or can refer to the Mind of God. How could mind be schooled by ego or body? Our attempts to do so are laughable, really. Actually we only use the brain as a device to gather and organize information that we have ourselves projected in order to prove our point. The most we can do with the mind is to cloud it with our separation ideas. Once those are released, the mind returns to its true vocation and we see that nothing is lost.
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