Kindaconundrum continued

Shortly after my previous blog post, I decided to send an abbreviated version of the question I raised in that blog to the Foundation for A Course In Miracles. Here’s the question that I submitted, followed by the answer that they provided:

Question:  Please can you advise whether Kenneth has ever commented on the matter of life-between lives, and specifically on the work of people like Michael Newton? Briefly, I would have thought that there is greater spiritual clarity in the non-bodily state, in which case the councils of elders (etc), as described in many of the LBL reports, should surely be more aware that incarnation into bodies does not truly result in evolution of the soul. Yet they seem to effectively be encouraging ‘less-advanced’ souls to perpetuate the almost endless cycle of life-and-death.

Reply:  Kenneth has not spoken in depth on [this matter]…. He has many times, though, spoken about the Course’s views on death and what happens after the body dies. This past March, in fact, he gave a 5-day class on the topic, which will be published in audio, video and book form shortly.

 

The key principle in the Course’s view is that the death of the body has no effect on the mind: in itself it changes nothing in terms of the spiritual journey of the mind. The decision to identify with the ego or the Holy Spirit is the source of all change. Life-between-lives could be thought of, thus, as symbolic of the decision-making capacity of the mind. In the Course’s theory, the body is never the problem because it is simply the projection of the mind seeking to escape from the pain of believing that it has rejected God and that God will inflict eternal punishment for that “sin”. The body’s life and death reflect the mind’s continued choice to believe this, so nothing really happens in the mind when the body dies. If the mind is still steeped in sin and guilt, it will go on projecting that in form in some way. In that sense, there is no greater spiritual clarity after the body dies. The body is in the mind, not the other way around, according to the Course.

So, from this it would appear that my assumption about souls always experiencing greater spiritual clarity when they’re out of the body is not necessarily true.  On the contrary, if we understand that both the physical and ethereal states, in their entirety, are projections of the split mind, it follows that souls who are out of the body, whether in the LBL or post-incarnation states, may be just as deluded about their roles and purpose as those who are still incarnate, and that what ‘happens’ in the ethereal realms may be as full of error as anything that ‘happens’ in the physical. This may sound like a simple and obvious observation, but I think it’s quite important, because the ‘conventional wisdom’ in regard to spirituality appears to be that the out-of-body state is not only free from pain and conflict, but also more ‘conscious’ than the physical state. The vast majority of people with a modern spiritual perspective believe this.

I'm still not clear about why Pursah says that enlightenment only happens in the body, but will hopefully be in a position to follow up on that specific issue shortly.