Embodiment is a form of cross-dressing. Once skin is in, what does it matter what color are your stockings? Black, brown, white, red, yellow...what difference does it make? Spirit is your reality. It knows nothing of form. The mind that goes both ways will experience form always, and in all ways. Jesus
The lesson I was born to teach, and still would teach to all my brothers, is that sacrifice is nowhere and love is everywhere. For communication embraces everything, and in the peace it reestablishes, love comes of itself. You who believe that sacrifice is love must learn that sacrifice is separation from love. The "Prince of Peace" was born to reestablish the condition of love by teaching that communication remains unbroken even if the body is destroyed, provided that you see not the body as the necessary means of communication. And if you understand this lesson, you will realize that to sacrifice the body is to sacrifice nothing, and communication, which must be of the mind, cannot be sacrificed. Where, then, is sacrifice? Nowhere! As long as you perceive the body as your reality, so long will you perceive yourself as lonely and deprived. And so long will you perceive yourself a victim of sacrifice, justified in sacrificing others. For who could thrust Heaven and its Creator aside without a sense of sacrifice and loss? And who could suffer sacrifice and loss without attempting to restore himself? Yet how could you accomplish this yourself, when the basis of your attempts is the belief in the reality of deprivation? Deprivation breeds attack, being the belief that attack is justified. And as long as you would retain the deprivation, attack becomes salvation and sacrifice becomes love. So is it that, in all your seeking for love, you seek for sacrifice and find it. Yet you find not love. When the body ceases to attract you, and when you place no value on it as a means of getting anything, then there will be no interference in communication and your thoughts will be as free as God's. When you learn how to use the body only for purposes of communication, and renounce its use for separation and attack, you will learn you have no need of a body at all. In a single instant, you can replace the body in awareness with Great Rays of light. In this instant, it is given you to recognize relationships without limits. But in order to see this, it is necessary to give up every use the ego has for the body, and to accept the fact that the ego has no purpose you would share with it. For the ego would limit everyone to a body for its own purposes. Limits are demanded by the ego, and represent its demands to make little and ineffectual. Limit your sight of a brother to his body, which you will do as long as you would not release him from it, and you have denied his gift to you. His body cannot give it. And seek it not through yours. Yet your minds are already continuous, and their union need only be accepted and the loneliness in Heaven is gone. The body is little and limited, and only those whom you would see without the limits the ego would impose on them can offer you the gift of freedom. You have no conception of the limits you have placed on your perception, and no idea of all the loveliness that you could see. But your attraction to guilt opposes the attraction of God. His attraction for you remains unlimited, but because your power, being His, is as great as His, you can turn away from love. What you invest in guilt you withdraw from God...and your sight grows weak and dim and limited, for you have attempted to separate the Father and the Son, and limit their communication. The body interferes with the release of God's Son. His belief - your belief - in limits has imprisoned him. Therefore you do not really want to limit your vision to bodies. God does not understand your problem in communication for he does not share it with you. The Holy Spirit is God's attempt to free you of what He does not understand. The Holy Spirit knows that it is not understandable, and yet He understands it because you made it. In the Holy Spirit alone lies the awareness of what God cannot know, and what you do not understand. As the ego would limit your perception of your brothers to the body, so would the Holy Spirit release your vision and let you see the Great Rays shining from them, so unlimited that they reach to God. This shift to vision is accomplished in a single instant. Yet it is needful for you to learn just what this shift entails, so you will become willing to make it permanent. Given this willingness it will not leave you for it is permanent. Once you have accepted it as the only perception you want, it is translated into knowledge. That is the only part of the restoration process that God Himself understands. There will be no delay when you are ready for it. God is ready now, but you are not. Our task is but to continue, as fast as possible, the necessary process of looking straight at all the interferences and seeing it exactly as it is. For it is impossible to recognize as wholly without gratification what you think you want. The body is the symbol of the ego, as the ego is the symbol of the separation. And both are nothing more than attempts to limit communication, and thereby make it impossible. For communication must be unlimited in order to have meaning, and deprived of meaning, it will not satisfy you completely. It is impossible to divide your strength between Heaven and hell, God and the ego, and release your power to creation. To create like God is the only purpose you have for the power he gave you. Dividing this strength, you reach a stalemate, and reach for a stale mate for strength. Relate only with what will never leave you, and what you can never leave. Accept your sense of failure as nothing more than a mistake in who you are. Who you really are is forever in a relationship so holy that it calls to every to escape from loneliness, and join you in your love. You have no need of special relationships at all. You but seek in them what you have thrown away. And through them, you will never learn the value of what you have cast aside, but still desire with all your heart. Let us then join together in making the instant your vision shifts all that there is, by desiring that it be all that there is. God's Son has such great need of your willingness to strive for this instant that you cannot conceive of need so great. Behold the only need that God and His Son share, and will meet together. You are not alone in this. You have creations already. And while you wander in this illusionary - not created - world, you are like a "dead-beat dad". The will of your creations calls to you, to share you will with them. Turn, then, in peace from guilt to God and them. They will never leave you. Think but an instant on this: God gave the Sonship to you, to ensure your perfect creation. There is nothing that ever was created that is not yours. Your relationships are with the universe. And this universe, being of God, is far beyond the petty sum of all the separate bodies you perceive. It would be an understatement to say that it is better than sex. Whenever you are angry, you can be sure you have formed a special relationship the ego has "blessed". All anger is nothing more than an attempt to make someone feel guilty, and this attempt is the only basis the ego accepts for special relationships. Guilt is the only need the ego has, and as long as you identify with the ego, guilt will remain attractive to you. Yet remember this; to be with a body is not communication. And if you think it is, you will feel guilty about communication and will be afraid to hear the Holy Spirit, recognizing in His Voice your own need to communicate. The Holy Spirit cannot teach through fear. And how can He communicate with you, while you believe that to communicate is to make yourself alone? It is clearly insane to believe that by communicating you will be abandoned. And yet many believe it. For they think their minds must be kept private or they will lose them, but if their bodies are together their minds remain their own. The union of bodies thus becomes the way in which they would keep their minds apart. The illusion of the autonomy of the body and its ability to overcome loneliness is but the working of the ego's plan to establish its own autonomy. As long as you believe that to be with a body is companionship, you will be compelled to attempt to keep your brother in his body, held there by guilt. The ego will always teach that loneliness is solved by guilt, and that communication is the cause of loneliness. And despite the insanity of this lesson, many have learned it. It is the Holy Spirits teaching function to instruct those who believe communication to be damnation that communication is salvation. In a single instant, what seemed impossible is accomplished. And guilt, whose only purpose is to disrupt communication, has no more function and holds no attraction. In an instant there is no more concealment, no more private thoughts. The willingness to communicate attracts communication to it, and overcomes loneliness completely. In an instant, there is no desire to exclude anyone from your completion as you suddenly recognize each one's value in your completion. In the protection of your wholeness, all are invited and made welcome. And you understand that your completion is God's, Whose only need is to have you be complete. And here it is that you experience yourself as you were created, and as you are. Jesus