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 God 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 deny you live.

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 then 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 the 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 form may change; it may appear to be what it is not. Yet mind is mind, awake or sleeping. It is not its opposite 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 a while. 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 changes 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 wakened mind is one that knows its Source, its Self, its Holiness.

INITIAL INSIGHT: “There is no death because what God 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.”

There could be no death because God is Life and there is nothing that is not God. I am a Thought in God, and so will forever be in God. There is no death in God so there is no death in me. I cannot be anything God did not create.

“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 deny you live.”

These death thoughts are how we declare ourselves our own creator, different from God, and always separate. Since God is Life, we must embrace death if we are to maintain a separate self, unlike God.

“Death cannot come from life. Ideas remain united to their source.”

What all this is telling me so far is that death in all its forms cannot be real because I have not separated from my Source and I cannot be different than my Source. So, if I think I am sick or suffering in any way, I must be dreaming because it cannot happen. The solution to death and the effects of believing in death, is to recognize when I am dreaming so that I can accept correction and wake up. I must to this to remember who I am and where I exist. Once again, all ideas of suffering are the result of not believing that I am as I was created. God is Life and therefore so am I and Life cannot be death. As Jesus says, “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.”

This paragraph is very important. It is from reading this that I realized that not only am I not this body, I am not in this body. I am dreaming of bodies. This changes everything. It is the reason that very often now I can be at peace even when the dream has taken on a nightmarish quality. I can often watch while people I love seem to suffer and not be afraid for them. They are safe because they are among the Sons of God and danger does not exist in them.

In order to experience something that is not in God, I must dream. I can dream of death, and that dream is very realistic because I am as powerful a creator as is God. Even in my dreaming state, this power is reflected. Even though I cannot create unlike Creation and so none of this dream is rooted in reality, I suffer as if the dream was reality.

When I go to sleep at night, I have many dreams and some of them are clearly impossible but in my sleep, I believe them. This is what is happening all the time. What I think of as life is just a dream of the impossible. And just as when I woke up this morning from one of these impossible dreams and found myself unchanged, when I awaken from the dream of separation, I will find my Self unchanged.

“God creates only mind awake.”

What this means is that I cannot create a mind asleep because I can only create as God creates. He did not give me mind asleep and so I cannot create mind asleep. This means that even now as we dream of sleep, we are mind awake. This dream state and awake state occur simultaneously because what God created cannot be undone. Within our mind is the mind awake. Think of that!

He did not create death and so I cannot die or live death thoughts. I can only dream these things. And then Jesus says something else interesting. He says:

“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.”

This give me an inkling of what we are. I am among the Thoughts of God. I have the power to extend forever changelessly. I am everywhere. Holy cow! When something like this comes into my awareness I feel my heart expand and love overcome me. Sometimes it leaks out of me as tears of joy and I think I remember something of this though I cannot envision it. It used to scare me just a little and the fear closed off my heart. It was OK, though, because the truth always came back.

“It dreams of time; an interval in which what seems to happen never has occurred, the changes wrought are substance-less, and all events are nowhere. When the mind awakes, it but continues as it always was.”

And this passage evokes tears of relief and gratitude and I know this is true. I don’t remember it but I have absolutely no doubt that it is true and I long to return to that fully awakened state.

DAILY APPLICATION: This is a past entry from my journal.

Taken as a whole, this lesson touched me deeply. I cried as I read it, and this feeling of both gratitude and relief is a sign to me of an awakening mind. I actually understood and accepted what I was reading, and that was not always the case. I always understood it in the sense that I understood the words and the concepts, at least to a degree, but in the past, I also closed my mind to it.

This time what I noticed is that I am far more ready to know this is true, and I also noticed that the ego-mind kept intruding as I read it. I have been seeing a doctor in the last couple of weeks because I had an unexplained event that was centered around the heart. I stayed overnight in the hospital and was thoroughly tested. I went for a follow-up yesterday and I will have to go back again and do another test.

The upshot of this is that there has been a lot of attention given my body and the ego-mind really loves this. It wants to think about the body, and whatever I am doing or thinking about, the thinking mind strays back to body thoughts. So, while reading this lesson, the ego-mind kept returning to what the doctor said yesterday and what this might mean. The more affected I was as I read, the more insistent the ego became.

I didn’t fight this or feel frustrated or afraid that I was going to fall back down the rabbit hole as I have done in the past. I just noticed the thoughts and gently turned back to the lesson. I received some guidance while it was happening, and understood how the sleeping mind dreamed up this physical manifestation of sickness and made it seem perfectly explainable, perfectly in line with the laws of the world. I also saw that I am not bound to these laws.

Today, I will be aware of the thoughts that reflect the dream and be willing that I not be fooled by them. Just as this morning as I was inspired by this lesson and became open to see what was really happening with this body, this can happen all day long if that is my choice. This morning I saw that the body was simply the receptacle of the belief that sourced the thoughts of sickness.

I saw more clearly than ever that the body is a screen on which death is played out simply because this is what I want to see. I asked if I was ready to really know this. I asked if I was ready to let go of these beliefs and so experience healing directly rather than through the mechanism of medicine and doctors. I have been allowing my mind to be healed of the sick thoughts that have been the focus of my dream. This would be a perfect opportunity to continue that healing. I rested in that thought awhile and invited in healing.

I am the awakened mind that knows its Source, its Self, its holiness. I have been asleep but now I am awakening to the truth. Every day the dream becomes more lucid.

REGINA’S TIPS

Death is defined in the dictionary as, “the permanent ending of vital processes.”

Vital is defined as, “full of energy, lively.”

Process is defined as “a natural series of changes.”

This means that death would be the permanent end of life-energy in all of its forms. Anyone who is willing to look with reason can see that death has never occurred. Life-energy in all of its forms has never ceased. It is just as the old saying says, “Life keeps going.” It’s true that transitions occur. Change is always happening at the level of form. But life itself cannot end.

Awakening is realizing that all of life is life itself, ongoing, and not the temporary form.

Today’s workbook lesson defines death as an idea, and nothing more. It says this idea “underlies all feelings that are not supremely happy.” That is because happiness is a natural characteristic of life aware of itself. Whenever we are not supremely happy, our attention is distracted from our truth as life.

Let’s look at how this is experienced.

Imagine I am unhappy because my daughter prefers to stay in her room instead of joining the rest of the family for a day of activity. First, I look to see what I am feeling specifically. I notice that I feel a sense of loss, like something is missing from this day. In my perception, the day is not perfect because of my daughter’s decision.

I recognize that the idea “today is not perfect” is the wish for something different. I continue the practice from yesterday’s workbook lesson, and I pause to appreciate awareness-life-presence. I let go of all thoughts about my daughter’s decision, and I reflect deeply on the perfection of awareness-life-presence as it is.

After a few moments of appreciating awareness-life-presence, I look back at the idea that there is loss today. Is that true? Did I find loss in awareness-life-presence as I reflected on it? No, there was no loss in awareness-life-presence. It was exactly the same as it always is. The idea of loss was just a thought in my mind. I was able to experience it to the degree that I let my attention focus on it, but that idea has no affect on awareness-life-presence.

Let’s practice in this way today. Whenever you notice that you are not happy, take these steps:

1 – Look briefly to get some clarity regarding the specific feeling of unhappiness. (e.g., In the example above, the unhappiness was specifically a feeling of loss.)

2 – Look at the specific feeling, and notice it is a form of the wish for something different. You might ask yourself, “Do I think I would be happier if this was different than it is?” If the answer is yes, it is the wish for something different.

3 – Shift your attention to notice and appreciate awareness-life-presence for a few moments. During this time, let go of your thoughts about the situation related to your unhappiness. Give full, restful attention to noticing awareness-life-presence as it is.

4 – Next, look with reason to see if the specific feeling of unhappiness is a fact that was noticed in awareness-life-presence or just a thought in the mind. (For example, if the feeling is rejection, is there any rejection found in awareness-life-presence or is awareness-life-presence the same as it always is? If the specific feeling is guilt, is there any guilt found in awareness-life-presence? Etcetera.)

5 – With the recognition that there was no affect on awareness-life-presence, say to yourself, “There is one life, and that I share with God.”

Note: If you feel you do not have time to look at unhappiness fully during the day, you may go back to it with your journal at the end of the day.

MY THOUGHTS

The first time I went through a year of gentle healing, I resisted the idea of being awareness-life-presence. Even as I rejected it, I knew the reason was that it was so impersonal and I felt a sense of loss when I thought in terms of the impersonal. Still, I had a hard time accepting it. I did not come into acceptance through thinking about it and coming to a new conclusion. I just continued to do the gentle healing even as I resisted. Now the idea does not upset me.

My mind was healed as the ego fought it. This can happen because I am not the ego, and my truest desire was to awaken. I still prefer other terminology and I don’t actually know what Reality is like, but I don’t argue for my understanding anymore. I am just open and receptive without resistance. The ego on the other hand is not so receptive. Luckily, I have reached a level of acceptance that allows me to notice the ego without giving it a lot of attention.