“Only the mind can create because spirit has already been created, and the body is a learning device for the mind. Learning devices are not lessons in themselves. Their purpose is merely to facilitate learning. The worst a faulty learning device can do is fail to facilitate learning. It has no power in itself to introduce actual learning errors. The body, if properly understood, shares the invulnerability of the Atonement to two-edged application. This is not because the body is a miracle, but because it is not inherently open to misinterpretation. The body is merely part of your experience in the physical world. Its abilities can be and frequently are over-evaluated. However, it is almost impossible to deny its existence in this world. Those who do so are engaging in a particularly unworthy form of denial. The term ‘unworthy’ here implies only that it is not necessary to protect the mind by denying the unmindful. If one denies this unfortunate aspect of the mind’s power, one is also denying the power itself.” (ACIM txt pg 23)
To deny the body’s relevance in the physical world is to deny the projection of it from the Formless, and “protect” the mind from realizing what is unmindful. To embrace the body’s invulnerability to error is to realize that the body can “do” nothing to impact the Son of God’s “standing” in Formless Reality. To realize that the ego’s judgments against the activities of a “faulty learning tool” are all that the belief in karma stems from frees one from the idea of past or future lives. The lesson is that this is the only classroom, and the body is the only learning tool. When the learning tool is no longer needed, it is because the lesson was learned.
The lesson learned is ultimately this: no matter what the body seems to do as the mind is learning, the mind is Guiltless, and the ego cannot follow the Son of God Home.
Darcie French 