In earlier times, when things were not as easy as they are now for us in terms of comforts and technology, humans were more about survival and propagation. You can see that by the large families of the past. The preoccupation was still with the body, but in another way.
Yet when immediate survival was no longer that relevant, like survival against natural disasters, famine or animals, humans became preoccupied with other aspects of their bodies, such as to keep them young, beautiful, as healthy as possible, and to live for as long as possible.
You can see that in those countries where the struggle for survival is still real, appearance is not as important. For example, spouses are preferred for their fitness, sturdiness, and the ability to work hard. Women were preferred for being stronger and bigger – for their work capacity, and not for their beauty. Or women are expected to be fertile to bear children to assure the continuance of the family line.
But as survival becomes more and more taken for granted because of improving living conditions, this concern is replaced by the concern for perfect health, beauty and longevity. So the preoccupations with bodies never finish, they just change their nature.
Any kind of work or occupation to do with the body is very well paid. Look at models, sports people, or those working with beautifying bodies like plastic surgeons or making them function again, like surgeons.
This is because the body is our most prized possession; we think we are our bodies. It’s our home after the seeming separation from God. And no matter how feeble and short lasting they are, we believe that that’s who we are or that it’s our home, so we work hard to earn money to shelter it, feed it and keep it healthy and happy.
What this preoccupation does, unfortunately, is obscures our true identity – that of spirit.
I recently received a comment criticizing my take on the body. The commenter said something along the lines that I don’t have to vilify it, that it can be part of a beautiful mind-body-spirit whole.
I understand this take and I subscribed to this philosophy before, and it’s very easy to fall back into it. But the body obscures our true identity. When we identify with our bodies we lose our true identity and don’t know who we are anymore. Do you know who you are? If you don’t, that’s the effect of body identification.
So either we identify with the bodies and lose our understanding of who we are, or we get our true identity restored back to us, as spirit, and then the body becomes just a dream, as it actually is. Yet it doesn’t disappear as long as any of us remain asleep dreaming of this physical universe, but it becomes an excellent tool to reach other sleeping ones and to wake them up.
The other problem with body identification is that if you think yourself to be the body, your spirit is as though asleep, acting as a battery for the body. There’s literally your true spirit self with you now, dormant until you wake up.
Being born again means being born of spirit, when your identity shifts from body to spirit identity, and shifting your point of operation from this world to the Spirit realm, the Kingdom of God in Christian terms. From there, you save those still trapped souls through communicating information to them through your mind and this dream body.
You’ll notice that the more preoccupied you are with the body, the emptier you feel. And the less you think about the body, the happier you become. That’s because the body doesn’t actually exist – it’s part of this dream realm we call physical existence. When we focus on illusions, we naturally feel unsatisfied.
What’s more, if you keep yourself preoccupied with the body, that means you are involving your mind into matter, and that is, according to ACIM, level confusion. It prevents Christ control. It creates fear because you feel responsible for effects you can’t actually control. But you can always change the cause, which is the mind.
So the less involved you are with your body and the more you focus on keeping your mind clean of anything that’s not of God, such as hatred, envy, judgment, negative thinking and so forth, the more you will assure that all will go well in your life. If you take care not to plant weeds in the garden of your mind, the reality cannot look threatening. And that’s the only place you have power to make changes.
Let me share a relevant quote from ACIM:
The body can act wrongly only when it is responding to misthought. ⁶The body cannot create, and the belief that it can, a fundamental error, produces all physical symptoms. ⁷Physical illness represents a belief in magic. ⁸The whole distortion that made magic rests on the belief that there is a creative ability in matter which the mind cannot control. (ACIM, T-2.IV.2:5-8)
No disease can plague a body if the mind is restored to its natural function, and that is called right-mindedness in ACIM. So if the body doesn’t function well, the main concern should be to establish order and harmony of the mind, and the effects will take care of themselves. In fact, the attempts to heal the body in any other way is called magic in ACIM, and it never works permanently, because if the cause is not addressed, a negative effect will continue manifesting in one way or another.
Here’s another relevant quote:
Help and healing are the normal expressions of a mind that is working through the body, but not in it. ³If 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. ⁴Perceiving the body as a separate entity cannot but foster illness, because it is not true. ⁵A medium of communication loses its usefulness if it is used for anything else. ⁶To use a medium of communication as a medium of attack is an obvious confusion in purpose. (ACIM, T-8.VII.11:2-6)
The body tends to be endowed with creative powers, when these powers only belong to the mind. Again, thinking the body to be creative is level confusion, it’s an error which results in problems and diseases. What maintains health and well-being is denying your mind any destructive potential. Once your mind is purely constructive, you are then able to restore the minds of others as well.
The body is simply a learning device, a communication medium. Overemphasizing its importance overburdens and eventually breaks it down. If it’s left free of such burdens and simply functions in accordance with the restored mind, it will be in good condition for the entire incarnation.
The body cannot learn and it cannot create. It’s simply a medium through which the mind expresses. And either it expresses the ego, or the Spirit, depending on what the mind is identified with.
Let me quote from ACIM again:
It is essential to remember that only the mind can create, and that correction belongs at the thought level. ⁸(…) spirit is already perfect and therefore does not require correction. ⁹The body does not exist except as a learning device for the mind. ¹⁰This learning device is not subject to errors of its own, because it cannot create. ¹¹It is obvious, then, that inducing the mind to give up its miscreations is the only application of creative ability that is truly meaningful. (ACIM, T-2.V.1:7-11)
So it is emphasized here again that your only concern should be with keeping the mind clean of distortions. Then everything will fall into harmony.
The less you think about the body, the happier you become. Paying attention to the dream instead of working to undo it by correcting your mind is a recipe for depression. This dream is made of the substance of fear that was born of the seeming separation from God. Paying your full attention to that only sustains the dream.
So the way to realize your true identity is to stop paying attention to the effects and to focus on the cause – the mind. Apart from making sure it’s clean of judgments, hatred, anger, irritation and other disharmonies, it’s also very useful to contemplate divine attributes such as Love, Limitlessness, Spirit, and to affirm your true identity of Spirit. That’s what we often do in the meditative sessions of my Spiritual Support Group.
Also, ACIM provides a one-year course of daily lessons to re-member yourself. Daily work is a must, because we are under heavy self-induced separation hypnosis that is being enforced by countless thoughts about the body, some of which we are not even conscious of, and because of our mental habits and the ways of acting as a result.
So some of the lessons in the course require you to focus on your true identity in one way or another on an hourly basis – because of the depth of our self-hypnosis. We literally have to brainwash ourselves of all the sick ideas about who we are – until we can wake up. So yes, ACIM is a kind of mind-programming course, but we really need that to get out of the trap we set for ourselves.
And yes, some people won’t be interested in doing anything about their identification with bodies. Some of them enjoy being in bodies, because their bodies are young, beautiful, and healthy. But what if things go wrong? Or you aren’t born blessed with the good attributes of the body? Well then things don’t look as sunny anymore, unless you do the lessons to get yourself out of this trap.
In this changing illusion, things will go wrong – it’s just a matter of time. So it’s wise to be prepared when they do. If you shift your point of operation from the dream into that which is unchanging and limitless – your true home – that of spirit – then what’s there to be concerned about when this dream reality changes? It no longer affects you, because you know it’s not you. This world is not your home, this body is not you, and the people close to you – who will get sick or die eventually – are not real. The only reality is the spirit that powers these characters for a while.
The most useful way to make use of time, therefore, is to learn to transcend this dream. Otherwise, time will eventually start working to your disadvantage – by corrupting your body, first slowly, then faster, until it’s no more. Why wait for this to happen if you can leave the sinking boat before anything is wrong with it. And if the boat is already not functioning perfectly, that can be used as great motivation to get away from it.