ACIM Chapter 6. V. A. To Have, Give All to All, P 1, 2 

ACIM Chapter 6. V. A. To Have, Give All to All, P 1, 2. When your body and your ego and your dreams are gone, you will know that you will last forever.

 A. To Have, Give All to All, 1

¹ When your body and your ego and your dreams are gone, you will know that you will last forever. Perhaps you think this is accomplished through death, but nothing is accomplished through death, because death is nothing. Everything is accomplished through life, and life is of the mind and in the mind. The body neither lives nor dies, because it cannot contain you who are life. If we share the same mind, you can overcome death because I did. Death is an attempt to resolve conflict by not deciding at all. Like any other impossible solution the ego attempts, it will not work.

I didn’t fully understand this for a long time. I don’t know why I didn’t really get it because Jesus is very clear. He says that death is not real, doesn’t help, and certainly doesn’t wake us up. He says that death is an attempt to resolve conflict by not deciding at all. It is an ego attempt to solve a problem, and he emphasizes that it will not work.

Back in the bad old days, I used to suffer from depression.

I held tightly to the idea of suicide as my way out when I couldn’t take it anymore. Obviously, I never got that desperate, but I got close. My mind was a huge knot of conflicted thinking, and I didn’t know what to do about it, so I thought that dying would end the suffering. Later, I understood from doing the Course that suicide wouldn’t help anyway because death would not alleviate my problems, and I would still have to face them.

Then, as my mind was healed more and more, the depression fell away, and I no longer looked for a way out. Without the suffering of depression driving my thoughts, I realized I was afraid of the body’s death and went through a period of healing from this belief until that was no longer an issue either. At that point, I thought I had solved the whole death issue. I could die without fear, but I could also stay here and do my work.

What I was left with was a desire to be here as long as I needed to complete my part in the Atonement, and then the body would die. And if I still had more to do, I would return to another body-story to do more work. But if I finished with my part and didn’t need to return, which was my plan, I would die, and then I would work from the other side to help others.

The one thing all my plans had in common was death as a resolution.

I saw it as a solution to my pain and suffering. I don’t know how I overlooked the obvious for so long. Clearly, death is not a solution. Life is the solution. Now, my focus is on awakening, not at death or after death, but now. I am still doing the same thing as far as being vigilant for ego thoughts and allowing my mind to be healed. But now I have withdrawn this false value in death as some kind of solution.

Another thought from this paragraph that caught my attention is that just as death is nothing, the body is nothing. The body doesn’t live, nor does it die. The belief that it does is just part of the illusion. When I am strongly identified with the ego and thus the body, I think that this story of Myron is my life. I think I am living it. This cannot be so because, as Jesus says, “it cannot contain you who are life.”

Sometimes in my writing, I say that I am in this body, but that is not actually true. I cannot be in the body because that would require that I literally be separated, split off in some way from my vast and holy Self. This body cannot contain what I am. I can imagine this, but I cannot be this. So once again, I see that I am not what I seem; I am so much more. The body is simply an idea in the mind and nothing else. The life the body lives is simply an idea in the mind and nothing else. And the death of the body is simply an idea in the mind and nothing else.

A. To Have, Give All to All, P 2

² God did not make the body, because it is destructible, and therefore not of the Kingdom. The body is the symbol of what you think you are. It is clearly a separation device, and therefore does not exist. The Holy Spirit, as always, takes what you have made and translates it into a learning device. Again as always, He reinterprets what the ego uses as an argument for separation into a demonstration against it. If the mind can heal the body, but the body cannot heal the mind, then the mind must be stronger than the body. Every miracle demonstrates this.

The body is not a creation of God, and so it is not real. We made the body to prove separation. Obviously, we do not share one body and so we can say, “I am separate from you, and therefore separation is real.” As long as I believe I am the body, I am living proof that I made something unlike God. This is the way the ego establishes itself as our god and keeps us enthralled to it.

It is also the reason for the deep well of unconscious guilt that makes us afraid to face God, whom we believe we dethroned when we made bodies and identified with them as self. But all this is undone with the simple realization that the body does not exist. It cannot exist because God did not create it. If it does not exist, we cannot be guilty of making it, which means we are, after all, still as God created us and so innocent of any wrongdoing.

We made the body to prove separation.

But as with anything we make, the Holy Spirit can reinterpret it and use it to demonstrate against separation. Here is how this works. I become sick, and it seems that germs or environmental factors caused it. My brother is not sick, so I have used the body to prove I am separate from him. I have also proven that the body is stronger than the mind because it can be affected by something outside the mind, and the mind cannot do anything about it.

If we are ready to know the truth, we can ask the Holy Spirit for correction. We can ask Him to reinterpret what we made and undo what we have done. As the mind is healed of the belief in sickness, pain, suffering, and death, the body (which is just a projection of the mind) begins to reflect the healed thoughts. And so the mind proves to be stronger than the body. As the healed mind projects a healed body, we begin to remember that mind is cause and body is simply an effect.

Because Jesus knew the body was nothing, just a thought in the mind, he was able to heal many and just as easily brought bodies back from the dead and resurrected his own body. He showed us that it is the mind that causes everything we see. If we see suffering and death, the mind must be sick and need healing (forgiveness) rather than the body. The body must follow along because, without the mind, it is nothing and doesn’t even exist.

This is good news because while we cannot be one body, we absolutely can be, and are, one mind.

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