20 Mind, Body, and Ego

“You made neither yourself nor your function. You made only the decision to be unworthy of both. Yet you cannot make yourself unworthy because you are the treasure of God, and what He values is valuable… Your function is to add to God’s treasure by creating yours. His Will to you is His Will for you. You cannot find joy except as God does. His joy lay in creating you, and He extends His Fatherhood to you so that you can extend yourself as He did.” ACIM VIII-149

“God said: You have been scammed. You have been led to believe that you can’t live without your body. You focus on the existence of your body and what vitamin to take next, what cure will ensure the long existence of your body. I, too, wish good health to your body. It is a magnificent structure, and you can take photos of it, and you can look at yourself and know that you exist. You existed before this particular body, and you will exist after this body. We can say that your current body is a symbol of you. It is like a V for Victory. It is a B for Body. It is a B for Buddy, for you are long associated with this fleeting body. You don’t like to see it change…

You appear in the world as a body. Your body is like a bottle that holds the perfume. The bottle is not the perfume. It is the container of it. It is only a bottle. Ah, but what the body encloses, the essence of you is far, far more than a body.” HL 3748

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So far, through our three blogs on the Laws of Illusions, we came to realize that even in what we call the outside, concrete reality, there is a part of that reality that is not localized in space and time. It is everywhere or simply “not there”. Yet this no-space no-time function, probability, potentiality, or wavefunction is what creates, through the act of observation, the physical, concrete, seemingly tangible world with its localization within space-time coordinates. This might give us a clue to the strange relation that exists between the mind and the body.

How can a mind reside in a body?

How can a mind, which is immaterial, dimensionless, which is of the essence of thought, be imprisoned or confined within a physical body defined by gravity and inertia? Being timeless and spaceless, should not the mind contain the body rather than being contained by the body? It is like asking how we can grasp and retain air in the palm of our hand, keeping it from escaping. And yet, it seems almost impossible to physically separate the mind from the body unless by death (I won’t consider here the topic of extra-sensory perceptions, travels outside the body or near-death experiences). And even through death, is the mind really leaving the body or just ceasing to see and identify with an image that it projected itself from itself? In the seeming physical world, witnesses will say that the body/the corpse is still there while the mind is gone somewhere or nowhere. But it is similar to our quantum enigma in the previous blog: the body seems to be there because it is observed and expected to be localized in space and time. So it is with the relative life in the world. We feel we have to be somewhere in a specific space-time frame because we identify with a body that has to be in a space-time frame to be perceived as an object. But in reality, it can be or not be there like an atom that can exist in different potential locations at the same time until it is observed.  In fact, ubiquity is not a physical, dualistic concept. To be everywhere or nowhere at the same time means that there is no space and no time hence no localization. In our body, we seem to be somewhere but in reality, our mind is nowhere or everywhere at the same time. This is the magic of the mind: it is timeless and spaceless but it has lost the memory of it. It is ubiquitous, yet it thinks it is bounded or confined by the time-bound and space-bound of the body.

It is therefore impossible to understand the intimate relation between the mind and the body within a dualistic perspective. It cannot be understood by looking at the relation from the outside because the relation is within the mind itself, the quantum mind could we say. A relation, as stated earlier, is basically made of two seemingly unlike elements (here the mind and the body) to relate and a mediator to connect or translate or convert the two unlike elements into their likeness through the mediation process (an equation like 6=2×3).  The mediator establishes that there is a connection, a communication, a likeness, a sharing between the seemingly unlike elements to relate and it is the job of the mediator to show the likeness of unlikeness. A relation is thus a trinity and its essence is communication. So a relation aims at establishing a connection between things that don’t seem to communicate together by themselves probably because they have been in a state of unity before being separated.

We suggest that this mediator is bi-directional, that is, it can translate back-and-forth from one element to the other like a good bilingual dictionary. This mediator or operator could be called the Holy Spirit.

But we still don’t know yet how a mind can relate to a body, both mind and body seeming so far apart from each other in essence. Where is their likeness? Yet we know that the relation has to be seen within the mind itself. If we assume that light exists outside the space-time frame (even as an electromagnetic continuum or zero-point field), that light is everywhere and at the same time nowhere, in particular,  the only way that a body can be created is through an act or decision of the mind: the decision to deny or negate light, to negate unity or oneness which obviously produces the illusion of darkness or nothingness. It is like 1 seemingly separating from itself and creating a void of darkness around the separate part of itself. 1 becomes 0 (zero) and a particle of mind is created: the mind becomes multiple minds like the unified electromagnetic field as a wave creates a particle: a quark, a boson, an atom, a cell, etc. This means that localization is created with its space-time coordinates. Yet the real mind behind stays indivisible.  And if we ask what has the power to negate or deny the light, the answer is the mind and only the mind.

Darkness is based on the will to be different, to be unlike the other, hence it has to prevent from communicating or sharing something: this something is a likeness or named otherwise it is love. It is then to say that negation is of the nature of the divided mind in its divided will and that the physical is also of the nature of the divided mind. Or we could say that mind and body share an absence, a zero which is the generator of forms ad infinitum.  And since darkness is the absence of relation, we could say that the body, by definition, is also what defines the reality or separateness of a form: the absence of a trine relation with the mind which is called duality. Duality is NOT a relation, it is the negation of the relation. More precisely, duality is the negation of the mediator in the trine relation.  The negation of the mediator is also called isolation, solitude. The appearance of time and space must correspond to the collapsing or disappearing of the mediator in the trine relation.

No form can exist without surrounding darkness or subtraction from light. Duality works only with contrasts which enable us to distinguish forms between each other. Darkness or negation is the limit or the boundary that separates the forms or the bodies.  A part that isolates itself from the whole must surround itself with darkness. If light is supreme Presence in the Now, darkness is an absence in space and time which is also the past. What is a self-created identity (ego) if not an absence predictively located in a specific time and a specific place? To the infinity and vastness of light corresponds by negation the extreme reverse of infinity and vastness which is a black hole, corresponding to the extreme limit of localization in space and time, where time and space collapse in an extremely dense gravitational dot. Forms exist between those two extremes of Pure Light and seemingly pure darkness. Therefore gravity or inertia is also of the essence of darkness as the basic tissue of forms or bodies. Gravity can also be defined as the obliterated memory of light. It is light that inverted itself in the form of an absence. After all, absence is just inverted Totality.

Between light and gravity, the relation-by-negation (or duality or collapsed relation) is made by the projection of the ego. Ego is the new mediator replacing the Holy Spirit, the mediator of the trine relation. But the Holy Spirit is always 1 because it shares the Truth with Its source. Ego is 0, so it has to identify with its projection, the body, without mediation. No relation to the other bodies is possible except through conquest, copulation, possession, attack by fear of loss. It is the seemingly dualistic counterpart to light but in reality, it is a simple projection of the split mind.  We could say that the Mind of light is not the body but the split mind is what projects the illusion of the body.

What seems to confine or hold the mind in the body is the veil of darkness, of the lost memory of light and love which plays the role of the force of gravity on earth. Separation cannot exist without darkness because separation is darkness and it is only virtual because light cannot create darkness it can only shine it away.

It is the obliterated memory of who we really are that apparently allows and keeps the mind tied to the body because the split mind through the ego has to hold to an identity that it must constantly fabricate with elements external to itself (while its real identity was totally given and eternally changeless, secure, peaceful, in joy). It is the mind resisting itself, denying what it really is to enact what it is not. We have to remember that only the mind has the power to negate and create darkness around itself. It has the power to veil itself and imprison itself.

So it is not really the body that is holding the mind prisoner but the mind that imprisons itself in a projection of itself called the body. The body is the expression of the will of the Mind to separate. As such, the body is the embodiment of the mind that has separated from itself.

What is the purpose of a body without a mind?

In the darkness of the body, the ego creates its home and works out its identity, an identity that it can only fabricate. Cut from its source by a veil, the split mind becomes an ego that desperately tries to teach us what we are without knowing what we really are because the ego doesn’t even know what it is.

By cutting itself from light, which is the negative essence of darkness equivalent to absence (0), the ego or personal self must make the mind believe that love is impossible in the world. The ego has to substitute itself to the mediator (Holy Spirit or love). Since the split mind negated or denied the mediator, it negated love as the fulcrum of a trine relation. Because if our split mind believed that love was possible on Earth, the ego could not justify its own existence. Not believing in love is equivalent to believing in loss, fear, guilt, anger, pain, illness, attachment which can only be resolved by attack in all possible forms imaginable.

The way the ego tries to build a coherent fabricated self is through PERCEPTION. Since the split mind has been separated from love and knowledge by negation, darkness, the Truth or Knowledge is replaced by the mechanism of perception. Truth is the total, complete generalization of Oneness to all Its Creation in its trine relation. It extends to each part because each part is a whole in the likeness or sameness of light and love. The subject, the object, and the mediator between the object and the subject are One and the same in the trine relation.  But in the mechanism of perception, the only way the ego can build a pseudo-knowledge or a pseudo-truth of the world it believes it is in is to generalize by establishing an equation between what it sees and the function it assigns to what it sees. Since what the ego sees is fragmented, the function it assigns to what it sees is also fragmented. Without wholeness and sameness of the parts, no real knowledge is possible. Fragmentation can only lead to inconsistency, incoherence. Summing the knowledge of all the parts does not lead to the knowledge of the whole. This applies immediately to the body. The ego equates what it sees of the body with what it believes the function of the body is.

The only way the ego can have a seemingly existence and control over our split mind is through our identification with the body. This identification is essential to create the illusion of separateness. To be personal, hence conditional, all relations have to be negated. A relation being essentially a communication, a sharing, ego’s worst enemy is a relation, hence love. Since a relation is a trinity, ego’s unity is based on duality so it cannot stabilize its unity and coherence without attacking which is a sick way of reducing two to one.  Love is the enemy of the ego because communication and sharing is a threat to the ego.

“The body is a device or a means but not a teacher”. (ACIM)

The body has no function of itself nor does it have any end in itself. The ego can pretend to use the body as an end because it thinks that it can control other minds through their own identification with their bodies. Isn’t physical violence the illustration of this misinterpretation of ego in equating the bodies it sees with what it believes the function of the body is: an instrument to control, attack, and survive?

Is sickness itself a problem of the body or of the mind? What is the meaning of a sick body by itself? But the ego aims at establishing the body as an end through identification because it can conceal to the split mind what the real function of the body is.

And what is the real function of the body? We would dare to answer that the body is the device that made the experience of separation possible. Only a physical body seems to allow the mind to experience what it feels like to live without love and light, the lost relation, and the collapsing of the mediator in duality. The body has no end in itself. It is only instrumental. It is what made the descent into gravity possible. It made possible the experiencing of the multiplicity of forms. But the body also has the potential, as a device, to bring the split mind back to health or sanity. It is not by condemnation from God that our mind was imprisoned in a body. It was a decision of the mind.

One will argue that sickness is a fact of the body. But is it really? Is it not more of the mind? Is it not through the ego that we are taught that our body can be hurt? Or is it that our mind can be hurt? Sickness implies that we identify with the body and that the body is what the ego uses to attack and survive. Without those two premises, would sickness be conceivable? And when we really think about it, is not attachment to the primary source of all sickness? Isn’t the fear of loss that is called attachment having its image projected in the force of gravity or inertia of the physical world? Perhaps attachment is the only health problem to solve.

Before becoming a fact, illness as a specifically localized disease must be related to an interpretation or observation originating from the self-created self. Can our real identity be hurt or destroyed? Only a self-made identity can be destroyed. In fact, it cannot be really destroyed because it has no reality. It simply vanishes with light.

If we equate interpretation with the decision of the mind to interpret or choose its beliefs, it seems that sickness is a choice made by the split mind to leave the decision to interpret reality to the ego. Sickness is a form of resistance to our real self and it can take multiple disguises. In that sense, health would consist of leaving the decision to interpret Truth to the real mediator, love. Then the body could be restored to be a real instrument to communicate, not to attack or dominate or attach.

Written by Normand Bourque on Mar 27, 2013