Lesson 163

There is no death. The Son of God is free.

Death is a thought that takes on many forms, often unrecognized. It may appear as sadness, fear, anxiety or doubt; as anger, faithlessness and lack of trust; concern for bodies, envy, and all forms in which the wish to be as you are not may come to tempt you. All such thoughts are but reflections of the worshipping of death as savior and as giver of release.

Embodiment of fear, the host of sin, god of the guilty and the lord of all illusions and deceptions, does the thought of death seem mighty. For it seems to hold all living things within its withered hand; all hopes and wishes in its blighting grasp; all goals perceived but in its sightless eyes. The frail, the helpless and the sick bow down before its image, thinking it alone is real, inevitable, worthy of their trust. For it alone will surely come.

All things but death are seen to be unsure, too quickly lost however hard to gain, uncertain in their outcome, apt to fail the hopes they once engendered, and to leave the taste of dust and ashes in their wake, in place of aspirations and of dreams. But death is counted on. For it will come with certain footsteps when the time has come for its arrival. It will never fail to take all life as hostage to itself.

Would you bow down to idols such as this? Here is the strength and might of God Himself perceived within an idol made of dust. Here is the opposite of God proclaimed as lord of all creation, stronger than God’s Will for life, the endlessness of love and Heaven’s perfect, changeless constancy. Here is the Will of Father and of Son defeated finally, and laid to rest beneath the headstone death has placed upon the body of the holy Son of God.

Unholy in defeat, he has become what death would have him be. His epitaph, which death itself has written, gives no name to him, for he has passed to dust. It says but this: “Here lies a witness God is dead.” And this it writes again and still again, while all the while its worshippers agree, and kneeling down with foreheads to the ground, they whisper fearfully that it is so.

It is impossible to worship death in any form, and still select a few you would not cherish and would yet avoid, while still believing in the rest. For death is total. Either all things die, or else they live and cannot die. No compromise is possible. For here again we see an obvious position, which we must accept if we be sane; what contradicts one thought entirely can not be true, unless its opposite is proven false.

The idea of the death of God is so preposterous that even the insane have difficulty in believing it. For it implies that God was once alive and somehow perished; killed, apparently, by those who did not want Him to survive. Their stronger will could triumph over His, and so eternal life gave way to death. And with the Father died the Son as well.

Death’s worshippers may be afraid. And yet, can thoughts like these be fearful? If they saw that it is only this which they believe, they would be instantly released. And you will show them this today. There is no death, and we renounce it now in every form, for their salvation and our own as well. God made not death. Whatever form it takes must therefore be illusion. This the stand we take today. And it is given us to look past death, and see the life beyond.

Our Father, bless our eyes today. We are Your messengers, and we would look upon the glorious reflection of Your Love which shines in everything. We live and move in You alone. We are not separate from Your eternal life. There is no death, for death is not Your Will. And we abide where You have placed us, in the life we share with You and with all living things, to be like You and part of You forever. We accept Your Thoughts as ours, and our will is one with Yours eternally. Amen.

INITIAL INSIGHT: To the ego my death is the ultimate proof that it is real and God is not. It is the triumph over Life, and proof of its existence. Every negative feeling and thought is an expression of death, so every thought of judgment, anger, fear or guilt is proof that ego lives and God doesn’t. That I believe in death does not make it true. The body can only seem to die, but how could it since it has never lived?

Through the study of Manual for Teachers I have been given clarity about death. What I understand now (and this is something I feel to my core) is that Jesus meant what he said; there is no death. How can death exist if God does? It is not possible. God is Life, God is Love, and it is not possible that God could have an opposite.

The belief in an opposite of God is the ego at its essence and the ego is not real. It is the belief in the ego that we are here to undo. I will not be distracted by the imagined effects that we think of as our world and our life. The truth lies just beneath that, and the truth is, death has never occurred.

It’s funny because for such a long time I just could not grasp that death is not real. I would say that, yes, some part of me lived, but some part of me died with the body. I would try to hold onto the idea that there is no death, but I lived in dread of it in spite of my professed beliefs. Now, that has all changed. I see that there is no death and I wonder how I didn’t see it before.

I think that I understand the reason it was so hard to accept that death is not real. It is because so many of us believe in death and cherishes death as an escape, and the mind is so firmly rooted in this idea of death. This is why it is hard to pull away from the belief. But once accepted, it seems so apparent that I laugh that I ever believed in it.

Death of the story is the only thing that is happening and I am not my story. And, really, the story, like the body, has never lived so it cannot die. I just continue on and pick up another story or the same story and watch that until the belief in death pulls me back into its embrace. So not even the story dies, really, just this viewing of the story. The afterlife is not a solution, it is just more illusion, a way station where we make a choice for another story. We do not die, we simply change form, and if we have not made a clear choice for life, we fall back into another dream story.

There is no salvation in death. It is here, watching our story and making our choices that we have the chance to choose life. Each time we choose anger or fear or guilt, sadness or grief, sickness or suffering of any kind, we have chosen death. We do this over and over until we seek escape through what we hope is the final choice for death, and end the story through sickness or an accident or old age. But we accomplish nothing because death is nothing, and does nothing.

DAILY APPLICATION: The solution to this endless cycle of choosing between forms of death is simple. Here is an example of one time when I made a different choice. One week I spent the week working very hard to catch up at work. I was working outside and the heat was oppressive. It had been very stressful that week and the hard work in the first days of a long hot summer to come just wore me out. I woke up one morning feeling depressed at the thought of the months to come with more of the same.

But, though I felt these emotions, I also have practiced A Course in Miracles for a long time. I have accepted many of the principles, including the understanding of death. I recognized my emotions as the belief in death and I knew this was not what I want to believe anymore. I accepted responsibility for my story. I asked myself a question that has become so familiar to me as to be a mantra that I live by.

The question I asked myself was this. “Myron, whose story is this? Who writes the script?” Lesson 152 assures me that I am fully responsible for my world and that it represents my every wish. With that thought came a certain peace. I did it; I can undo it. The ego mind pulled me back into the story of my victimhood and for a moment I felt hopeless before the inevitable.

I wanted to beg for release, ask for a miracle. But I understand that this kind of death thinking is not the solution. I was saying that I am a victim of a cruel world and I need help getting out of this situation. The world is not the cause, and the story is not the cause. They are the effect. The solution does not lie in fixing the effect. I had to step away from my enthrallment with the story. With this thought, I had some small clarity.

I surrendered my desire to fix the story. I surrendered my desire to be a victim and to be saved from my own choices. I told the Holy Spirit that I don’t know how to un-believe what I have believed, but I know that I am wrong, that I am making a sick world with my sick thoughts and I want to be healed. I surrendered to His healing power. The ego kept trying to pull me back into the story, insisting something had to change. But I had reached the tipping point and it was over for the ego, at least in this situation.

This is the way I choose life. I choose life over death one dark thought at a time. I do this as long as I need to until I finally accept life and never look back. While all this was going on it felt deadly serious. Once I accepted the Atonement in that situation, it all fell away so completely that I was left vaguely confused about what the fuss had been about. It feels good to be at peace again.

INSIGHTS FROM HOLY SPIRIT:

GRATITUDE:

REGINA’S TIPS

Everything that is born, dies. This is the law of impermanence. Yet, today’s lesson says that death is a false belief. It says that we are mistaken when we believe that death holds “all living things within its withered hand; … it alone will surely come.”

So which is a statement of truth? Impermanence or ‘there is no death’?

Both. It is true that everything that is born, dies. If something has a beginning, it will also have an end. But it is also true that what has no beginning, has no end. The question becomes, which are you? Were you born? Or are you that which always existed and always will?

Today’s lesson says, “Either all things die, or else they live and cannot die. No compromise is possible.” Yet, you can watch a flower come into being, live a short time and then wither and die. What is this lesson talking about?

Today’s lesson is looking beyond form, which is temporary, to the spirit of all living things, which is eternal. Life itself, which is God and is all things, has no beginning and no end. For life, death is impossible. You can see that if you look beyond specifics.

For example, one flower may blossom and then wither and die, but if you look around, can you find life elsewhere once the flower dies? Is there life in the tree? In the insect? In you? Did life die when the flower died?

We all experience the death of loved ones in our lifetimes. This is a very sad event when it occurs. Yet, has life died when the loved one died? Or can we still find life living?

Temporary form comes and goes. That is the law of impermanence. But life lives. That is all it can do. That is its nature.

Awakening is the realization that you (and other living things) are not the temporary form. You are life itself.

It’s true that the temporary form of the body-personality that you experience now will end, but you cannot die. Life has no end.

Today we will continue to practice Self-inquiry by looking throughout the day to notice life-presence as what we are.

Today, when your mind thinks about a problem that you are facing, try this exercise:

Look at the problem that the mind is thinking about. Ask yourself, “Has this problem always been here? Will this problem, in one way or another, have an end?” And then notice that as an example of impermanence.

Next, shift attention to your Self. Ask, “What am I? What is aware of these thoughts about a problem?” Look carefully to notice the life-presence that is aware of thought. Notice that in your experience, you, as life-presence, has always been constant. You have experienced the coming and going of many problems, but this life-presence has remained the same. Reflect for a few moments on the continuous nature of life-presence, and then say to yourself, “There is no death. The son of God is free.”

For another effective method of noticing your free Self today, instead of being identified with thoughts about temporary problems, watch this 5-minute video by Loch Kelly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvEuWoRyD9Q&feature=emb_logo

MY THOUGHTS

Regina refers to God as Life and since we are in God and part of God, we are Life as well. Temporary forms come and go but Life continues unaffected by the temporary. What I like about her perspective of God as Life is that it is helping to shift my thinking from the personal. It can be hard to remember that there is no personal, that we are One in God and of God. Reflecting on the continuousness of life-presence of which I, too, am a part, I begin to perceive myself in a more impersonal way.