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.