My favorite teaching of all time is The Course in Miracles which I consider to be the greatest teaching ever sent to this level of consciousness. That teaching says that I am not this body because reality is eternal. Anything not eternal is not reality but is temporary and therefore illusion. This physical body is not eternal therefore it is not of reality.
This makes sense to me and fits with all the other esoteric philosophy I have studied all my life. The world is maya, an illusion, not real. God is real. I in my God-self beingness am real. In this framework ascension means leaving illusion behind and returning to my natural state of reality. This has been my urgent desire all of my life whether I knew it in any particular moment or not.
There have been times I have greatly enjoyed being in a physical body. When I was young and full of energy I was a professional ballet dancer. I love the theatre, I love music, I love movement and three-dimensional form, whether static as in sculpture or kinetic as in the bodies of dancers. This was a time in my life when I got along pretty well with my physical self.
After a stint in the Army Band (which is one place they put drafted conscientious-objector lightworkers who tell their draft boards that they can draft them but they won’t shoot anybody) and then 7 years of college I became a Chiropractor. My life became one of fixing bodies – relieving the stress-related pathologies of the various physiologies making up our bodies.
In this way I suppose I was challenging the physical universe to a duel. I spent 8-10 hours a day fighting with bodies attempting to make them serve their owners better. The treatment I gave was what you’d call heavy duty. I was in the trenches slugging it out with contracted muscles and immovable joints opening them up to allow freer flow of liquids and electrochemical energies. I loved medical school and I loved knowing all I could know about the anatomy and physiology of the physical body. I would have studied all that stuff even if I hadn’t wanted to be a doctor.
So, in a way, I guess I loved my body. But it was a thing I loved, like a beautiful car or a pet dog or cat or even my wife and children and friends. I loved them all but I wasn’t them. They were things separate from myself, like my own body. They were things apart from me that I loved. And through it all as much as I loved them I looked forward to the day when I could leave them all and return to something better, greater, and more magnificent. I had always hoped that one day I might join the ranks of the ascended masters that I had been reading about my whole life. I wasn’t sure exactly what it meant to be one of them but that’s what I wanted.
Ramtha taught his students that ascending with your physical body was a better deal than going without it. But I never got as close to that as I am right now so I was never confronted with the final challenges and tests. Apparently the process was to turn the physical body into light then pack it up and put it in your travel kit to be used whenever you wish. I accepted the teaching but, as I said, I never quite got to the point of actually doing it so I carried it in my head with all the other ideas and philosophies that I accept but are not yet the truth for me.
So here I am now in 2012. I totally believe what I hear and read about the coming ascension or dimensional shift. It makes perfect sense, fits with my esoteric beliefs, and feels right on. Now that I am at the open door preparing to walk through I am suddenly hit with a quandary and a conundrum and a few other big wordy things.
After 14,000 years of incarnating on this planet, so I am told, one of my greatest desires now is to give up the limitations of 3rd dimensional density. I want so badly to jump up in the air and fly off to new locations I can hardly stand it. Flying seems normal; walking or even riding in a car seems ridiculously slow and ponderous.
But I have a mission to fulfill and it is one I am honored and privileged to have and fully intend to carry it out to the end. To fulfill the destiny of this beautiful planet and be the best wayshower I can be for anyone needing his or her way shown, I must follow the plan of ascending with the physical body. It’s never been done with a large number of participants before and it will be way cool to see it happen not to mention it’s a divine plan. However I am suddenly beginning to realize that I don’t particularly want to take my body with me. It’s kind of like having to take your younger brother along on a date.
It no longer seems right to say to myself when I look in the mirror, “I am not this body. I am not what I am seeing in the mirror. I am not this personality. I am not this collection of likes and dislikes, fears, strengths and weaknesses. I am not my history of 68 years as Daniel (first Danny then Dan now mostly Daniel). I am the one who is thinking these thoughts about not being this person but I am not the person being thought about.”
I have spent years disassociating myself from this body. Now I am being told I must take it with me. I suppose I should stop saying I am not this body. But if it is an illusion why should I want it? I want to be free of illusions and the whole dimension of illusions. Please, no more lies – only the truth from now on.
This body represents limitation. This body represents struggling with sexuality – mastering it temporarily, ultimately giving in to it, occasionally getting in trouble because of it. This body represents a lot of work feeding it, cleaning it, keeping it respectable, making sure it doesn’t do something in public that would be inappropriate, protecting it, etc., etc.
So I am being asked to take all these things with me, or at least the major representative of those things. I don’t want to. I feel like a little child being told to take a big disgusting, smelly goat with him to the candy store and movies. How can I fly through the air with this albatross hanging from my neck?
This is where I am now – confronting my biggest obstacle. I thought I was packed and ready to go and now I have to buy another ticket and I don’t have enough money. In all the years of being a student I don’t recall anyone saying I was going to have to love my body as part of my “salvation.” And if anyone did say that I didn’t hear it because I wasn’t paying attention because that definitely didn’t fit my ideas of being spiritual.
I was treating a Catholic priest once for some back problems. He was very physically active. He liked to play tennis, volleyball, etc. He was not doing a very good job of caring for his body which is why he was seeing me. I told him, “You need to pay better attention to your body.” I’ll never forget what he said to me. He said, “We’re trained to not pay attention to our bodies. As a priest I’m not supposed to do that.” For 2,000 years good Christians weren’t supposed to do that.
I guess I’m in the same boat. I’ve trained myself for many years to see myself as not my body and now I must see that my body is part of me and I will have it for all eternity. Now when I look in the mirror I guess I’ll have to say, “Hi, old buddy. I guess we’re stuck with each other so we’d better learn to get along.” Then maybe I’ll say, “I love you,” and blush and look away.
What will God think when he sees that I love my body? Maybe He’ll approve. It feels strange but I guess I’ll get used to it. Just like having my younger brother hanging around. He’s not so bad really. I love him.