The Insignificance of the Body and the Nature of Illness

...The insignificance of the body must be an acceptable idea...With this idea is pain forever gone.
-ACIM:TM:II:5.:3:12-4:1

Hmm!  Do you think the body is significant? 

I still must to some extent because I still have pain. lol  I am getting there though.  I am allowing the pain to some degree.  I am not struggling against it.  I am aware when my mind starts to attempt to wrap it up in a pretty package with a nice neat label on it to conceptualize the physical cause and treatment of it. I am aware when that tendency to want to create story with it, using the drama from my past experiences and the memories of so called "insults" from others, to come into play. Being aware helps me to step back from any mental fluff ego stuffs around the pain and to see it and experience it for it is. My mind and body are simply communicating...nothing more, nothing less.  My mind is responsible for the pain. The body listens.

So you foolishly think you just have to  suck up all pain?

No. I don't particularly like pain lol.  I take Tylenol ES when it gets bad.  I am watching it from a physiological perspective as well.  I know if it continues or gets any worse that I will have to "treat the body".  Though I don't focus on the cause, I have a good idea what it is. I will eventually  need to put aside any past painful health seeking memories and  get it looked after by some professional who focuses on bodies.  I know that.

Not there yet!

I am not that evolved where I can use my mind to cure myself.  I am not 100 % faithful in this line from A Course: A patient decides that this is so and he recovers. I am not yet where those people are when they are magically cured by "belief" and are able to get up out of their wheel chairs and walk across the  room after getting a bonk on the head from someone claiming to have the holy spirit flowing through them. I am not there.... yet!

On the conceptual level, I am a firm believer in the Placebo/Nocebo effect and believe all illness is psychosomatic .  I have yet, however,  to  fully internalize that belief on the experiential level. Though part of me knows that I have (well my ego mind has) chosen this pain, this condition, my physical ailments for some bizarre reason I have yet to understand, I still partially at least  operate under an old ingrained ideology that sickness or pain has chosen me.

Until I realize that I see value in pain I will not heal, I will have pain.

Healing is accomplished the instant the sufferer no longer sees any value in pain. ACIM:TM:5:I:1

Value in Pain?? Are you insane?

Yes there is egoic value in pain and yes we are all a little insane until we finally see that we, on some level ( not to be blamed for but to be forgiven for),  choose sickness.  The mind, according to ACIM,  uses sickness to keep us focused on the physical world rather than the deeper one. It tricks us into believing we are victims to the body and that the world, determined by the body's five senses, is all there is. We are at the mercy of that world surrounding us as well as the body's limitations.   The ego needs us to believe the body is more significant than the mind in our experience of life. As long as we are here in this mind-body frame of thinking and living...ego is safe.  It will not be lost to the power that generates the mind. So on some level of egoic thinking...pain has value.

For sickness is an election; a decision.  It is the choice of weakness, in the mistaken conviction that it is strength.  When this occurs, real strength [the mind and spirit] is seen as a threat and health as danger. -ACIM:TM:5:I:4-6

Healthy minds and healthy bodies are a threat to the ego because who we really are is a threat to the ego.  That's all.

How do we get rid of pain and illness once and for all then?

We wake up!  We see who we are and put ego and all its crazy control games to the side.  Without ego Life acts through us.  We heal.  Without ego you are a blessing to the world. (Tolle, What Really Matters, 2019). I am not saying our bodies  won't ever get sick or they won't die.  They will... as is the nature of all things in this physical world.  Our bodies are physical things. Every 'thing' is destined to dissolve. (Tolle, 2019) 

I am just saying the mind is stronger than the body.  The mind doesn't follow the body's lead...the body follows the mind's.  How freeing that could be for all of us to realize that.

I am not asking you to believe it though if you are not ready.  This idea that we create our own bodily ills is a hard pill to swallow.   I know , I myself, have a long way to go until I truly believe that, but recognizing that what happens to my body is not all that significant certainly makes accepting pain a lot easier. Maybe, for your own benefit you could try opening your mind to the possibility of it, just enough to know that you may have some power in getting better and healing yourself.

All is well in my world.

References

ACIM (2007) Manual for Teachers Section 5: How Healing is Accomplished. Mill Valley: Foundation for Inner Peace.

Lipton, Bruce (2005 ) The Biology of Belief. Author's Pub Core

Tolle, E. (Jan 2019) What Really Matters.  Eckhart Tolle 2019.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDU2bNN9ANM