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. 0 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.
The Following is Forwarded from Pathwaysoflight.org
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Lesson 167
"There is one life, and that I share with God."
The eternal Spirit of Love is What is true, now and forever. My job is to open to this eternal Spirit of Love. It will wake me up to Reality. It is the only Life. It will show me the meaninglessness of a pretend life within a world of time and space. This one Life is the truth of all that Is. It is changeless and eternal.
I can open to this Life any time I choose, but I must be willing to let go of my ideas of what is real. I must be willing to let go of the idea that separate bodies could ever be real or that individuality exists. I must be willing to let these false ideas go. I must have an open mind without preconceived ideas. I must open my mind to Holy Spirit's healing perceptions. I must let all these false ideas be gently washed away.
God is everyone's Source and This alone is real. This alone is eternal. This alone cannot die. The Father and the Son are one and no dreams can change that. My job now is to let go of trying to be different from God. My job now is to open to the truth and be willing to let go of illusions. God is One and cannot be separated.
Holy Spirit, today I give my mind to You. Heal it of all false ideas. I open to Your healing Light. This is my one goal, today and every day.
As I observe my thoughts, I am amazed at how much of the time my attention is given to thoughts of death as described in this lesson. It doesn't seem that I am thinking about death. But I'm aware that I'm often monitoring how my body is functioning. Is there a discomfort here, an ache there? Is it working like it should? These could only occur because I think the body is vulnerable and that I think I am the body. These thoughts are a defense against death and so proclaim that death is real and must be guarded against.
This is all occurring within a dream in which I have imagined myself as separate from God and therefore separate from Life. Only if this were true could death be possible. This body monitoring attests to the importance I place on it as proof of my existence. Yet this is merely an imagined existence in a dream where nothing is real. I am not a body. I am Love, created by Love and one with Love. That is unchangeable. Being unchangeable, I cannot die. This is the truth about me and all my brothers. Worry about the body simply reflects a belief that I have succeeded in separating from Life, my Source. But I remain as Love created me.
Holy Spirit, I offer you my thoughts of death, of weakness and vulnerability. I ask for your help and strength to let them go. I ask for your vision so that I may see the Life I am and see that Life in all my brothers. Only here is the certainty that I seek. Here is perfect health and infinite abundance because this Life I share with God. There is nothing else to share.
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