There are not different kinds of life, for life
is like the truth. It does not have degrees.
Life 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
where 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 source
of healing. It is why you cannot die.
Its truth established you as part of 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 were 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 placed 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 from 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 which cannot separate in death
and leave the Source of Life from where It came.
We share our 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 made
reflection possible. No vision now
is needed. For the wakened mind is one
that knows its Source, its Self, its Holiness
