T. 27. VIII. 1 – 4. Jesus: “The body is the central figure in the dreaming of the world. There is no worldly dream without it, nor does it even exist without the dream in which it acts as if it were a person to be seen and be believed.
The body takes the central place in every dream you dream of worldly life, which includes the story of how it was made by other bodies, born into the world outside the body, lives a little while and dies, to be united only in the dust with other bodies dying like itself. In the brief time allotted it to live, it seeks for other bodies as its friends and enemies. Its safety is its main concern. Its comfort is its guiding rule. It tries to look for ‘pleasure,’ and avoid the things that would be hurtful to it. Above all, it tries to teach itself its pains and its joys are actually different and can be told apart!
In time the dreaming of the world takes many forms because, with a body, you seek in many ways to prove the body is autonomous and real. It puts things on itself that it has bought with little metal discs or paper strips the world proclaims as valuable and real. It works to get them, doing senseless things, and tosses them away for senseless things it does not need and does not even want. It hires other bodies, that they may protect it and collect more senseless things that it can call its own. And it looks about for ‘special’ bodies that can share its dream. Sometimes it dreams it is a conqueror of bodies weaker than itself. But in some phases of the dream, it is the slave of bodies that would hurt and torture it.
One’s serial adventures as a body, each from the time of birth to dying, are the theme of every dream the world has ever had. The ‘hero’ of this dream will never change, nor will its purpose. Though the dream itself takes many forms, and seems to show a great variety of places and events wherein its ‘hero’ finds itself, the dream has but one purpose, though taught in many ways.
This single lesson does the dream try to teach again, and still again, and yet once more; that it is cause and not effect. And you are its effect, and cannot be its cause. Thus would you seem not to be the dreamer, but the dream itself!
And so you wander idly in and out of times and places and events ‘the dream contrives.’ That this is all the body does is true, for it is but a figure in a dream! But who reacts to figures in a dream, unless he sees them as if they were real?
The instant that he sees them as they are, as merely figures in a dream, they have no more effects on him, because he understands he gave them their effects by causing them himself, and by his denial of it, making them seem real.”