 |
"Drumming in Eureka Springs"
photo by Richard Quick |
A Course in Miracles Lesson #219 (review)
Central Theme:
“I am not a body. I am free.
For I am still as God created me.”
Specific review: (#199) “I am not a body. I am free.”
We all have heard of instances where people have bypassed material laws of physical possibilities and performed some heroic act, such as lifting a car off of a loved one. While today's lesson is telling us that our true being is not this body, that we are actually Spirit and all that implies, most people balk at the thought that the physical body should conform to spiritual laws. As today's lesson tells us, the body's purpose now is unambiguous. Once we have freed thought from the enslavement of the limitations of the body, then it is free to perform its function as your servant. These words, "I am not a body, I am free", were beautifully demonstrated during a drumming in Basin Park on Saturday evening. This drumming goes on for two hours, as does the dancing and other freedom-from-limitation activities such as hula-hooping. In the 100-degree heat, a large group of people vigorously played hand drums, danced, and joyfully expressed themselves with no thought of anything other than the primal energy surging through their bodies. The illusion of age plays no factor in this timeless activity, with small children and so-called senior citizens keeping pace with Angelo, the beautiful African man who leads these love-ins. The joy spreads much farther than we can see! Let's all find activities which raise our level of happiness in this way and practice them regularly! Sing and dance while doing housework! Find the joy in every activity. As Wayne Dyer tells us, "If you drop a pen and don't enjoy picking it up, drop it again." (For a taste of the spirit of Eureka, do a search on drumming in Eureka Springs on youTube)
Mary Baker Eddy quote:
"The inharmonious belief does not create an inharmonious condition. The belief of lack is the lack. The belief of disease is the disease. That is why the body seems to change as man's thinking changes. It is simply as beliefs of disease and imperfections fall away, and our thinking is corrected and held true to Truth, so that mental chaos and confusion no longer cloud our vision, we see the body as God sees it, as it eternally is. Then it stands revealed to us in its beauty and its glory, the temple, not made with hands. All that our ignorance does is to affect our vision, or view of things. It does not change anything that God has made.
'We do not handle substance through our personal thought to change it. We only see according to our thought, our degree of enlightenment. Walt Whitman said, "The world is jagged and broken, to him who is jagged and broken," to him whose mental realm is dark. If one's thought is ignorant and unenlightened, it changes his vision as a cloud of mist. As he looks through the cloud he sees this world, the body, all things, distorted, abnormal and wrong.
'If the mental atmosphere is dark and dense, we see but dimly and are not able to perceive the perfection that is. Man does not by mental effort bring God into manifestation, neither does he through wrong thinking prevent God's manifestation. God IS and God is manifest, and it is not in the power of unenlightened personal thought or mental effort to obstruct or hinder the activity of God, or to mar or to deface the perfection of God's creation."
From a statement copyrighted by Mrs. Mary Baker G. Eddy at the Congressional Library in Washington, D.C. January 19, 1886
