 We continue today with Chapter 8. The Body as Means or End. Attitudes toward the body are attitudes toward attack. To the ego, the body is to attack with. Equating you with the body, it teaches that you are to attack with. The body, then, is not the source of its own health. The body's condition lies solely in your interpretation of its function. Functions are part of being, since they arise from it, but the relationship is not reciprocal. The whole does define the part, but the part does not define the whole. Yet to know in part is to know entirely because of the fundamental difference between knowledge and perception. In perception, the whole is built up of parts that can separate and reassemble in different constellations. But knowledge never changes, so its constellation is permanent. The idea of part-whole relationships has meaning only at the level of perception where change is possible. Otherwise, there is no difference between the part and the whole. The body exists in a world that seems to contain two voices fighting for its possession. In this perceived constellation, the body is seen as capable of shifting its allegiance from one to the other, making the concepts of both health and sickness meaningful. The ego makes a fundamental confusion between means and end, as it always does. Regarding the body as an end, the ego has no real use for it because it is not an end. You must have noticed an outstanding characteristic of every end that the ego has accepted as its own. When you have achieved it, it has not satisfied you. This is why the ego is forced to shift ceaselessly from one goal to another so that you will continue to hope it can yet offer you something. It has been particularly difficult to overcome the ego's belief in the body as an end because it is synonymous with the belief in attack as an end. The ego has a profound investment in sickness. If you are sick, how can you object to the ego's firm belief that you are not invulnerable? This is an appealing argument from the ego's point of view because it obscures the obvious attack that underlies the sickness. If you recognize this and you also decided against attack, you could not give this false witness to the ego's stand. It is hard to perceive sickness as a false witness because you do not realize that it is entirely out of keeping with what you want. This witness then appears to be innocent and trustworthy because you have not seriously cross-examined him. If you had, you would not consider sickness such a strong witness on behalf of the ego's. A more honest statement would be that those who want the ego are predisposed to defend it. Therefore, their choice of witnesses should be suspect from the beginning. The ego does not call upon witnesses who would disagree with its case, nor does the Holy Spirit. I have said that judgment is the function of the Holy Spirit and one that he is perfectly equipped to fulfill. The ego, as a judge, gives anything but an impartial judgment. When the ego calls on a witness, it has already made the witness an ally. It is still true that the body has no function of itself because it is not an end. The ego, however, establishes it as an end because, as such, its true function is obscured. This is the purpose of everything the ego does. Its sole aim is to lose sight of the function of everything. A sick body does not make any sense. It could not make sense because sickness is not what the body is for. Sickness is meaningful only if the two basic premises on which the ego's interpretation of the body rests are true, that the body is for attack and that you are a body. Without these premises, sickness is inconceivable. Sickness is a way of demonstrating that you can be hurt. It is a witness to your frailty, your vulnerability and your extreme need to depend on external guidance. The ego uses this as its best argument for your need for its guidance. It dictates endless prescriptions for avoiding catastrophic outcomes. The Holy Spirit, perfectly aware of the same situation, does not bother to analyze it at all. If data are meaningless, there is no point in analyzing them. The function of truth is to collect information that is true. Any way you handle error results in nothing. The more complicated the results become, the harder it may be to recognize their nothingness. But it is not necessary to examine all possible outcomes to which premises give rise in order to judge them truly. A learning device is not a teacher. It cannot tell you how to feel. You do not know how you feel because you have accepted the ego's confusion and you therefore believe that a learning device can tell you how you feel. Sickness is merely another example of your insistence on asking guidance of a teacher who does not know the answer. The ego is incapable of knowing how you feel. When I said that the ego does not know anything, I said the one thing about the ego that is wholly true. But there is a corollary. If only knowledge has being and the ego has no knowledge, then the ego has no being. You might well ask how the voice of something that does not exist can be so insistent. Have you thought about the distorting power of something you want, even if it is not real? There are many instances of how what you want distorts perception. No one can doubt the ego's skill in building up false cases. Nor can anyone doubt your willingness to listen until you choose not to accept anything except truth. When you lay the ego aside, it will be gone. The Holy Spirit's voice is as loud as your willingness to listen. It cannot be louder without violating your freedom of choice, which the Holy Spirit seeks to restore, never to undermine. The Holy Spirit teaches you to use your body only to reach your brothers so he can teach his message through you. This will heal them and therefore heal you. Everything used in accordance with its function as the Holy Spirit sees it cannot be sick. Everything used otherwise is. Do not allow the body to be a mirror of a split mind. Do not let it be an image of your own making, perception of littleness. Do not let it reflect your decision to attack. Health is seen as the natural state of everything when interpretation is left to the Holy Spirit, who perceives no attack on anything. Health is the result of relinquishing all attempts to use the body lovelessly. Health is the beginning of the proper perspective on life under the guidance of the one teacher who knows what life is, being the voice for life itself. And from the workbook, Lesson 63. The light of the world brings peace to every mind through my forgiveness. How holy are you who have the power to bring peace to every mind? How blessed are you who can learn to recognize the means for letting this be done through you? What purpose could you have that would bring you greater happiness? You are indeed the light of the world with such a function. The Son of God looks to you for his redemption. It is yours to give him, for it belongs to you. Accept no trivial purpose or meaningless desire in its place, or you will forget your function and leave the Son of God in hell. This is no idle request that is being asked of you. You are being asked to accept salvation that it may be yours to give. Recognizing the importance of this function, we will be happy to remember it very often today. We will begin the day by acknowledging it and close the day with the thought of it in our awareness. And throughout the day, we will repeat this as often as we can. The light of the world brings peace to every mind through my forgiveness. I am the means God has appointed for the salvation of the world. If you close your eyes, you will probably find it easier to let the related thoughts come to you in the minute or two that you should devote to considering this. Do not, however, wait for such an opportunity. No chance should be lost for reinforcing today's idea. Remember that God's Son looks to you for His salvation, and who but yourself must be His Son. The light of the world brings peace to every mind through my forgiveness. So our teachings from the text and the lesson number 63 all point to a holographic universe, a holographic cosmos, that when you forgive in mind, you see everything as whole. In forgiveness, there is no difference between the whole and the part. Everything is all-encompassing, universal, without end. Everything is infinite, as mind is infinite. Today we make the connection between forgiveness and seeing a completely new world, the real world, the happy dream that leads us back to eternity. We honor the awareness that the body is a means for expanding perception and seeing the whole. The body is not an end. Nothing can be done for the body, but the mind that follows the Holy Spirit can use the body as a means for experiencing holistic perception, true perception, the real world. So today we open up to this function of forgiveness. We see that our function of forgiveness brings light to everyone and everything. We see that there is no mind apart from our mind, as long as we believe in people and in separate minds. We acknowledge that our function brings healing to all minds and to this healing awareness that everything is mind, that there is nothing outside of mind, nothing beyond mind. We practice at every opportunity today making the connection between our function and the salvation of the world. That forgiveness is the means that God has appointed for the salvation of the world. We practice in earnest the light of the world brings peace to every mind through my forgiveness. Amen.