T. 18. VIII. 1 – 8. Jesus: “It is only the limiting awareness of the body that makes love seem limited to you. For the body is intended as a limit on love! The belief in limited love was its origin, thus it was made to ‘limit the unlimited!’
Think not that this is merely allegorical, for it was made to limit you! Can you, who see yourself as a body, know yourself as a formless, limitless idea? Everything you recognize, you identify with ‘externals,’ something that appears to be outside itself and separate. You cannot even think of God without giving Him a body, or seeing Him in some limiting ‘form’ you seem to recognize.
Yet the body cannot know! And while you habitually limit your awareness to its tiny senses, you will not see the grandeur that surrounds you. God cannot come into a body, even a world of bodies, nor can you join Him there! The limits you have imposed on love will always seem to shut Him out, and seem to keep you apart from Him.
The body is but a tiny fence around a little part of a glorious and complete idea. It draws a circle, infinitely small, around a very little segment of Heaven, splintered from the whole, proclaiming that within it is your special kingdom, where God can enter not! Within this kingdom the ego rules, and cruelly! And to defend this little speck of dust, it bids you fight against the universe. This fragment of your mind is such a tiny part of it that, could you but appreciate the whole, you would see instantly that it is like the smallest sunbeam to the sun, or like the faintest ripple on the surface of the ocean. In its amazing arrogance, this tiny sunbeam has decided it is the sun; this almost imperceptible ripple hails itself as the entire ocean. Think how alone and frightened is this little thought, this infinitesimal illusion, holding itself apart against the universe. The sun becomes the sunbeam’s ‘enemy,’ one that would devour it, and the ocean terrifies the little ripple and wants to swallow it.
Yet neither sun nor ocean is even aware of all this strange and meaningless activity. They merely continue, unaware that they are feared and hated by a tiny segment of themselves. Even that segment is not lost to them, for it could not survive apart from them. And what it thinks it is in no way changes its total dependence on them for its being. Its whole existence still remains in them. Without the sun the sunbeam would be gone; the ripple without the ocean is inconceivable.
Such is the strange position in which those in a world inhabited by bodies seem to be. Each body seems to house a separate mind, a disconnected thought, living alone and in no way joined to the Thought by which it was created. Each tiny fragment seems to be self-contained, needing another for some things, but by no means totally dependent on its one Creator for everything; needing the whole to give it any meaning, for by itself it does mean nothing. Nor has it any life apart and by itself.
Like to the sun and ocean, your greater Self continues, unmindful that this tiny part regards itself as you. It is not missing; it could not exist if it were separate, nor would the whole be whole without it. It is not a separate kingdom, ruled by an idea of separation from the rest. Nor does an actual fence surround it, preventing it from joining with the rest, keeping it apart from its Creator! This little aspect is no different from the whole, being continuous with it and at one with it. It leads no separate life, because its life is the oneness in which its being was created.
Do not accept this little, fenced-off aspect as yourself! The sun and ocean are as nothing beside what you are. The sunbeam sparkles only in the sunlight, and the ripple dances as it rests upon the ocean. Yet in neither sun nor ocean is the power that rests in you!”