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 substance-less,
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 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.
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