V. A. To Have, Give All to All, P 1
1 When your body and your ego and your dreams are gone, you will know that you will last forever. Perhaps you think this is accomplished through death, but nothing is accomplished through death, because death is nothing. Everything is accomplished through life, and life is of the mind and in the mind. The body neither lives nor dies, because it cannot contain you who are life. If we share the same mind, you can overcome death because I did. Death is an attempt to resolve conflict by not deciding at all. Like any other impossible solution the ego attempts, it will not work.
Journal
I really didn’t fully understand this until recently when I started reading excerpts from a new book by Nouk Sanchez, The End of Death, and attended her workshop. I don’t know why I didn’t really get it because Jesus is very clear. He says that death is not real, doesn’t help, certainly doesn’t wake us up. He says that death is an attempt to resolve conflict by not deciding at all. It is an ego attempt to solve a problem and he emphasizes that it will not work.
Back in the bad old days I used to suffer from depression and I held tightly to the idea of suicide as my way out when I couldn’t take it anymore. Obviously I never got that desperate but I got close. My mind was a huge knot of conflicted thinking, and I didn’t know what to do about it so I thought that dying would solve the problem without solving it. Then later I understood from doing the Course that suicide wouldn’t help anyway because death would not alleviate my problems and I would still have to face them.
Then as my mind was healed more and more, the depression fell away and I no longer looked for a way out. Without the suffering of depression driving my thoughts, I realized I was afraid of the death of the body and went through a period of healing until that was no longer an issue either. At that point I thought I had solved the whole death issue. I could die without fear, but could also stay here and do my work.
What I was left with was a desire to be here as long as I needed to complete my part in the Atonement and then the body would die and if I still had more to do I would come back in another body-story to work some more. But if I finished with my part and didn’t need to return, which was my plan, I would die and then I would work from the other side to help others.
The one thing all my plans had in common was death as a resolution, a solution to my pain and suffering. I don’t know how I overlooked the obvious for so long. Clearly, death is not a solution. Life is the solution. Now my focus is on awakening, not at death or after death, but now. I am still doing the same thing as far as being vigilant for ego thoughts and allowing my mind to be healed, but now I have withdrawn this false value in death as some kind of solution.
Another thought from this paragraph that caught my attention is that just as death is nothing, the body is nothing. The body doesn’t live, nor does it die. The belief that it does is just part of the illusion. When I am strongly identified with the ego and thus the body, I think that this story of Myron is my life. I think I am living it. This cannot be so, because as Jesus says, “it cannot contain you who are life.”
Sometimes in my writing I say that I am in this body, but that is not actually true. I cannot be in the body because that would require that I literally be separated, split off in some way from my vast and holy Self. I can imagine this, but I cannot be this. So once again I see that I am not what I seem; I am so much more. The body is simply an idea in the mind and nothing else. The life the body lives is simply an idea in the mind and nothing else. The death of the body is simply an idea in the mind and nothing else.