Lesson 211
I am not a body. I am free.
For I am still as God created me.
1. (191) I am the holy Son of God Himself.
²In silence and in true humility I seek God’s glory, to behold it in the Son whom He created as my Self.
³I am not a body. ⁴I am free.
⁵For I am still as God created me.
First, I am not this body that appears so very real and relevant. I am not this body because this body is an image that represents a thought in the mind. It is an image that allows me to experience separation and to see myself as special. It does not, in reality, exist. So, when Jesus tells us that we are the holy Son of God Himself, he is not speaking of this image. He is speaking of our Self, and this Self has no body. It is not an image and is not the effect of a personal desire. It is real. It is creation.
When I first started studying the Course, and for a long time, I mostly identified with the image. I felt like the body and its stories. It felt like me. Slowly, that began to change and I felt less like the image, and I began to identify more closely with spirit. Now, generally, when I say me or I, my feeling is that I am referring to my Self rather than my self.
This is by no means a total shift. I know that it is not because evidently, I still desire to see specialness sometimes. But that will fall away, too, as I keep releasing those thoughts. I can say in all honesty that I do seek God’s glory, to behold it in the Son whom He created as my Self. I seek it in everyone and when I find an ego perception instead, I go in silence and true humility to the Holy Spirit for correction and another way to see.
I am sharing with someone a Pathways of Light course that emphasizes releasing the belief in specialness. It has been extremely valuable to me to do the exercises it suggests and to share them with a mind healing partner. It asks us to look at the many ways we want to see specialness. In one of the processes, it asks us to recognize specialness thinking by thinking of ways we see differences and ‘orders of reality’ in the people in our life. ⁸Look fairly at whatever makes you give your brother only partial welcome, or would let you think that you are better off apart. (ACIM, T-24.I.7:8)
Here is how I did this particular process.
How I see specialness in my thinking
First special love
I have friends I prefer to spend time with more than others. This makes love special and makes love personal. Love is universal and unconditional. If my mind were completely healed, I would love the one in front of me and then the next one when she/he showed up. There would not be a difference to me. Love might be experienced differently because of the nature of the relationship, but the love itself would be the same and would not lessen depending on the person.
Then special hate
Another way this can show up is if I think I am better than someone else. This makes me special at the expense of another person. Or even if I think we are both special in our lack as compared to others. I used to have people I hated for their personalities or for their actions. All of this is just a way of making separate and different. Anyone I would hold a grievance against.
I don’t do this nearly as much as I used to so I had to dig deep to find specific circumstances. I thought about someone I know who is mentally ill. I see us as different. I discovered that someone I know well has gone over the deep end with conspiracy theories. I see her as different than me and want to avoid socializing with her. Sometimes on FB, I run into people who think they have all the answers and everyone else is wrong. I think they are wrong. LOL.
I want to let all of this go. I want to know Love as it is, not as I would make it. I want to know Oneness and there cannot be exceptions to oneness. I can imagine this so I know that I can have it.
In doing this process and others like it, and in reading sections of the Course that focus on this error, I have discovered some hidden and not so hidden ways it comes up in my beliefs. This has helped me to release more ego thinking. As I do so, I find I am aware of what is the same in each of us, the Love of God that we are, rather than focusing my awareness on the illusion of differences. This, in turn, reinforces the desire to know my Self, to know that I am God’s holy Son.