Q: Good morning, Abraham. I’ve got some notes in case I’m going to forget what I’m going to ask. So, my first question is from the Course in Miracles, which I’ve been studying and teaching for a while. And in one of the parts of the Course in Miracles, the author (or Jesus) was asked the question “Was there a physical resurrection?” And just let me read that part of his answer - “My body disappeared because I had no illusions about it. The last one had gone, it was late in the time, but there was nothing left to bury. I did not disintegrate because the unreal cannot die. It merely became what it always was, and that is what rolling the stone away means. The body disappears and no longer hides what lies beyond. It merely ceases to interfere with vision. To throw the stone away is to see beyond the time, beyond death, and to understand the body is nothingness. What is understood as nothing must disappear. I did assume my human form with human attributes afterward to speak to those who were to prove the body’s worthlessness to the world.”
And there is more, but my question is about physical and Nonphysical, because there is confusion along this Course in Miracles, especially students, like, why we’re in this physical and going through all these troubles - even you can go to ecstasy, then forking back and going back, and then you’re launching another desire, but…
A: You could call it trouble or you could call it what the dog calls it, exhilaration. You could call it an adventure. It feels like trouble if you’re not letting yourself be who You are, and it feels like adventure when you are letting yourself be who You are. It’s like if you were going on a vacation and you had all of these cities planned, so you laid it all out objectively, and you said “I’m going to go to this city and this city and this city and this city, and then I’m going to come back home.” And then you look at your itinerary and you say “Wait, I already am home - why go? I’ll just check vacation off my list.” Well, you weren’t going on the vacation to get it done, you weren’t going for the trouble of it, you were going for the joy of it.
Q: But if everything I perceive here is an illusion, then, and the body’s one of those illusions - and here the author is saying that I just put this body away like a lost illusion - so my question is, this other goal here is like a lesson to learn to put this away?
A: Not even close to that. It’s not about a lesson, it’s about the joy of expansion; it’s about the joy of experience.
Q: So, how do you see that, what I just read?
A: We will give you a very clear picture from our perspective of what you just read. First we want to say that whenever you address us from Nonphysical and we are talking about that which is your physical world, we are fully, consciously aware of your physical world. In one sense, this world is an illusion when you understand that it’s all Energy that has been manifested, but when you are standing in the midst of the manifestation with all the tactile, tangible evidence of it, to call it illusion is to distort what it has become. And yet, it is not inaccurate to call it an illusion because it is all vibration.
What you see with your eyes is an interpretation of vibration, and what you hear with your ears and smell with your nose and feel with your fingertips and taste with your tongue, these are vibrational interpreters. And with many consciousnesses like the likes of you - billions of you at any time upon your planet and those that have come before - the continuum of your consciousness is what makes all of this possible, because some of you are croaking and more of you are coming in, but there is always a body of you to pass on the platform or the continuum of your perspective. So, as you have evolved to these species who interpret vibration in the way that you do, this reality that you conjure is a reality.
In other words, whether you call it a tangible reality or a manifestational reality is really not so important, it is a very real experience. Whether you call it a real illusion or whether you call it a reality, you’re having exposure to these experiences. And when billions of you concur or have similar experiences, then the reality is that much more tangible.
Esther loves going back to the little town she grew up in, and finding the buildings still there and everything percolating along even though she has not been there to tend to it. She loves getting on an airplane and going back to the Hyatt Regency on the Kanapali shores of Maui and seeing this magnificent hotel with all of its beautiful statutes that she’s been visiting for 25 years, and she will walk right up and see the same mark that she saw on her first visit, and it gives her such a sense of continuity of this time and place. Now, there’s no way of getting around that - this continuity of consciousness exists no matter what words you want to give it.
Then human talks with Nonphysical and wants to make everything literal, even that which Nonphysical is trying to explain. So when someone from Nonphysical says that your bodies disappear, you could take it to mean the literal meaning. People say to us all the time “Abraham, I’m wanting to have this rapture; I’m wanting to have this experience where I do not die, where my physical body goes with me.” And we say, and what will you do with a physical body in a Nonphysical dimension? And they’ve never really thought about that because they’re not thinking it through. But then we say everyone experiences that which some are calling the rapture, because when you have your death experience, that’s exactly what happens: The you that you know as you reemerges into Nonphysical, and you don’t miss a beat about who you are.
All physical bodies disappear in the sense that they are Energy and they become that biological stuff that this time/space reality is made of. Nothing that is matter ever leaves this Universal sphere in which you are living, it just continues to reconstitute itself; it continues to take on new form as the Nonphysical Energy addresses it. And so there are so many ways of looking at this and so many efforts by so many of us, and so many questions by so many of you, to help you not only understand the platform upon which you are standing, but the relationship of the platform that you are standing upon with the relationship of the Nonphysical Energy that is us.
And we want you to begin to get a sense that there is never - there could never be and will never be - a separation between the Energy that is us (or that is your Source or that is your soul or that is your God) and that which is you in this physical body. You cannot separate that. But this physical body will one day have that which you call death, and it will remain - the matter of this physical body will remain for centuries for those who dig it up, who look at it. Even if you are ashes in a can, that physical body of yours will remain a part of the physical context of this time/space reality because you came forth from Nonphysical and you expanded into this physicality, and once something exists it does not cease to exist. But it constantly changes forms.
Q: So what we call awakening is just when I’m so integrated with exactly who I am, that’s what I’m in alignment with, my Source - we can call that awakening?
A: Yes, and when you are there, you don’t question your body - you don’t long for it to be different, you don’t wonder if you will die. When you have made that metamorphosis into that knowing, when you allow all that You are to be within you here, then you revel in every waking moment - you move your way continually up the Emotional Scale, you take delight in the new desires that are born within you, you enjoy your progress toward them, and you condemn yourself and others never. In other words, you live life in the way that which is your Source is living life.
And you just don’t sweat over the stuff as people are arguing endlessly about it. You may not know this, but people are digging up stuff that was written 2,000 years ago and trying to make it make sense in relationship to what they’re living today, when right here and now, they have access to all of that information funneled, poured, specifically, dramatically, emphatically into their right now moment. God is alive in you now, and you can tell when you close that gap. And when you do, life takes on all new meaning. Nothing in all of the Universe is more delicious than to be in this physical body and allowing the fullness that is You to be present in this moment.
Q: I agree with that. I’m complete, thank you.
A: Very good, yes.
~ Abraham-Hicks
Boca Raton, FL 11/5/2005