“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 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.
Britney Shawley added:
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.
