Part 1 Undoing the Way We See Things Now
Lesson 167 There is One Life, and That I Share With God.
- There are not different kinds of life, for life is like the truth. It does not have degrees. It is the one condition in which all that God created share. Like all His thoughts, it has no opposite. There is no death because what created shares His life. There is no death because an opposite to God does not exist. There is no death because the Father and the Son are one.
- In this world, there appears to be a state that is life’s opposite. You call it death. Yet we have learned that the idea of death takes many forms. It is the one idea which underlies all feelings that are not supremely happy. It is the alarm to which you give response of any kind that is not perfect joy. All sorrow, loss, anxiety, and suffering, and pain, even a little sigh of weariness, a slight discomfort, or the merest frown, acknowledge death. And thus you deny life.
- You think that death is of the body. Yet it is but an idea, irrelevant to what is seen as physical. A thought is in the mind. It can be applied as mind directs it. But its origin is where it must be changed if change occurs. Ideas leave not their source. The emphasis this course has placed on that idea is due to its centrality in our attempts to change your mind about yourself. It is the reason you can heal. It is the cause of healing. It is why you cannot die. Its truth established you as one with God.
- Death is a thought that you are separate from your Creator. It is the belief conditions change, emotions alternate because of causes you cannot control, you did not make, and you can never change. It is the fixed belief ideas can leave their source, and take on qualities the source does not contain, becoming different from their own origin, apart from it in kind as well as distance, time, and form.
- Death cannot come from life. Ideas remain united to their source. They can extend all that their source contains. In that, they can go far beyond themselves. But they can not give birth to what was never given them. As they are made, so will their making be. As they were born, so will they then give birth. And where they come from, there will they return.
- The mind can think it sleeps, but that is all. It cannot change what is its waking state. It cannot make a body, nor abide within a body. What is alien to the mind does not exist, because it has no source. For mind creates all things that are, and cannot give them attributes it lacks, nor change its own eternal, mindful state. It cannot make the physical. What seems to die is but the sign of mind asleep.
- The opposite of life can only be another form of life. As such, it can be reconciled with what created it, because it is not opposite in truth. Its forms may change; it may appear to be what it is not. Yet mind is mind, awake or sleeping. It is not its opposites in anything created, nor in what it seems to make when it believes it sleeps.
- God creates only mind awake. He does not sleep, and His creations cannot share what He gives not, nor make conditions which He does not share with them. The thought of death is not the opposite to thoughts of life. Forever unopposed by opposites of any kind, the Thoughts of God remain forever changeless, with the power to extend forever changelessly, but yet within themselves, for they are everywhere.
- What seems to be the opposite of life is merely sleeping. When the mind elects to be what it is not, and to assume an alien power which it does not have, a foreign state it cannot enter, or a false condition not within its source, it merely seems to go to sleep awhile. It dreams of time; an interval in which what seems to happen never has occurred, the changes wrought are substanceless, and all events are nowhere. When the mind awakes, it but continues as it always was.
- Let us today be children of the truth, and not deny our holy heritage. Our life is not as we imagine it. Who changed his life because he shuts his eyes, or makes himself what he is not because he sleeps, and sees in dreams an opposite to what he is? We will not ask for death in any form today. Nor will we let imagined opposites to life abide even an instant where the thought of life eternal has been set by God himself.
- His holy home we strive to keep today as He established it, and wills it be forever and forever. He is Lord of what we think today. And in His Thoughts, which have no opposite, we understand there is one life, and that we share with Him, with all creation, with their thoughts as well, whom He created in a unity of life that cannot separate in death and leave the source of life from where it came.
- We share one life because we have one Source, a Source from which perfection comes to us, remaining always in the holy minds which He created perfect. As we were, so are we now and will forever be. A sleeping mind must waken, as it sees its own perfection mirroring the Lord of life so perfectly it fades into what is reflected there. And now it is no more a mere reflection. It becomes the thing reflected, and the light which makes reflection possible. No vision now is needed. For the awakened mind is one that knows its Source, its Self, its Holiness.[1]
Notes and Personal Application: Today’s lesson idea “There is one life that I share with God,” brings us out of the dream of separation and into the oneness of life. In this one life that we share with God there is no death. Since God is everything, He can have no opposite. Anything that looks like an opposite to life and to love is part of the dream of separation, the time we spend in the loopholes of time, a world where the Sons of God come to remember who and what they really are.
In this world, we have death and we have it most abundantly. We feast upon death. We gorge ourselves upon the flesh of what we call lesser forms of life. In God’s Kingdom there is no such thing as lesser forms of life, life has no degrees, but here in the realm of separation, we have no such qualms about looking upon our fellow creations and judging them in degrees of their importance to us – do we eat them, attack them, defend ourselves against them, or form alliances with them? Do they look like us, worship the same way we do, share the same values, and have something that they can offer us? Or are they different looking, godless, heathen, the great unsaved who will burn in hellfire because they do not worship the same way we do, share the same values, and have little to nothing to offer us?
We think that death is just something that happens to the body, but Jesus teaches us today that death is an idea in the mind. As we change our minds about who and what we really are, as we realize our oneness with God and with all of creation, we are no longer content to live in any other state than one of supreme happiness. To live in a such a state, we must be willing to give up our attachment, our addiction to and fondness for the world of sorrow, loss, sickness, and death.
In order to be healed from this magical realm which keeps up spellbound by its bloodthirsty dramas of all that is not of God, of life, of joy and eternal happiness, we must accept our Sonship with God. We must recognize the simple fact that death cannot come from life. Life is life – and it continues to be life and it can never die. Life is spirit, life is mind which creates all things that are and makes them like itself. Jesus tells us with no uncertainty that what seems to die is a mind that sleeps. Death then is part of the illusion of separation – not the opposite of life, but rather a demented dream held in time – a wrinkle of eternity where what seems to have happened has never really happened at all.
Our Course study is a curriculum in awakening from the dream, realizing that we are children of truth, no longer being the least bit willing to hide or be ashamed of the call of God within. What we experience in the flesh is imagined; when we open our eyes from this dream in time we are as we always were – dearly beloved, worthy of God’s trust, His love, and His devotion.
Today Jesus is asking us to keep this in our minds. We are to train our minds to disengage from thoughts of death in all its tempting forms. With today’s lesson I realize that I must bid so long to one of my new Netflix favorites, Hell on Wheels, where characters are savagely murdered, plotted against, and offered no rest for the weary one addictive episode after another. Training my mind to love life, to love truth, to love joy and happiness, peace and kindness is renewing my love and devotion to God and His Kingdom, understanding that there is one life that we share with God and with all of creation. Saying good riddance to bloodshed and bluster, plotting, and plunder as a means to entertain myself puts me in touch with the pure, wholesome, holy intelligence of the Source of life from where I came, where I belong, and where I will always be.
Jesus says that a sleeping mind must wake up as it sees its own perfection reflecting the Lord of life until finally it becomes what is in the mirror. Let this be our minds today – that we be the children of light, that we may know our Source, our Selves, and become one with God.
[1] A Course in Miracles. Workbook for Students. Lesson 167. Foundation for Inner Peace, Second Edition (1992).
Audio credit: http://www.eckiefriar.com
the friar patch 