Gentle Healing Lesson 163
There is no death. The Son of God is free.
“Death is a thought that takes on many forms, often unrecognized. It may appear as sadness, fear, anxiety or doubt; as anger, faithlessness and lack of trust; concern for bodies, envy, and all forms in which the wish to be as you are not may come to tempt you. All such thoughts are but reflections of the worshipping of death as savior and as giver of release.”
“For death is total. Either all things die, or else they live and cannot die. No compromise is possible.”
God is Life and God is all there is. There is nothing outside God and therefore death can only be an illusion. Temporary forms such as the body die, but what is of God cannot die even if it thought it wanted to. I was surprised when I learned that death takes many forms, but really, I shouldn’t have been. Anything that is not part of God, that is, part of Life, must be death. There is no opposite to God and God cannot be undone by an idea of an opposite so my belief in these ideas is a belief in nothing.
We experience these many forms of death leading to the inevitable “final” death of the body because we believe in death. I am pretty sure I don’t believe in death. I don’t seem to be afraid of the idea of dying to this world, not even a temporary death. But I still believe in sadness and anger and those other forms of death so I do believe in death. However, my desire for them is fading very quickly now as I look at these thoughts and beliefs without flinching and gladly drop them.
Regina’s Tips
Today’s lesson says, “Either all things die, or else they live and cannot die. No compromise is possible.” Yet, you can watch a flower come into being, live a short time and then wither and die.
What is this lesson talking about?
Today’s lesson is looking beyond form, which is temporary, to the spirit of all living things, which is eternal. Life itself, which is God and is all things, has no beginning and no end. For life, death is impossible. You can see that if you look beyond specifics.
For example, one flower may blossom and then wither and die, but if you look around, can you find life elsewhere once the flower dies? Is there life in the tree? In the insect? In you? Did life die when the flower died?
We all experience the death of loved ones in our lifetimes. This is a very sad event when it occurs. Yet, has life died when the loved one died? Or can we still find life living?
Temporary form comes and goes. That is the law of impermanence. But life lives. That is all it can do. That is its nature.
Awakening is the realization that you (and other living things) are not the temporary form. You are life itself.
My Thoughts
Regina refers to God as Life and since we are in God and part of God, we are Life as well. Temporary forms come and go but Life continues unaffected by the temporary. What I like about her perspective of God as Life is that it is helping to shift my thinking from the personal. It can be hard to remember that there is no personal, that we are One in God and of God. Reflecting on the continuousness of life-presence of which I, too, am a part, I begin to perceive myself in a more impersonal way.
Text
T-15.X. The Time of Rebirth, P 2
2 The holy instant is truly the time of Christ. For in this liberating instant no guilt is laid upon the Son of God, and his unlimited power is thus restored to him. What other gift can you offer me, when only this I choose to offer you? And to see me is to see me in everyone, and offer everyone the gift you offer me. I am as incapable of receiving sacrifice as God is, and every sacrifice you ask of yourself you ask of me. Learn now that sacrifice of any kind is nothing but a limitation imposed on giving. And by this limitation you have limited acceptance of the gift I offer you.
Journal
How do we regain our power as Sons of God? We do this by giving up guilt. We have to give up projecting it onto ourselves and onto others. Considering how destructive guilt is you would think this would be an easy choice. And yet, we cling to guilt as if it is our savior. I can remember being unwilling to give up making someone guilty because I thought I needed to remember not to trust them. This seemed like a way to defend myself from that person.
I also remember thinking that I had actually hurt others and that it wasn’t fair that I should be free of guilt while they remained damaged by my actions or words. It took me 70 years to finally see the insanity in my thinking and finally let go of the belief in guilt. The ego doesn’t give up and it still tries to entice me back to guilt but I am not interested anymore.
The moments that are free of guilt are holy instants and are the time of Christ. Jesus sees us free of guilt. That is his gift to us. He knows who we are and he is never confused about that. It is my deepest desire to know this for everyone as thoroughly as does Jesus, to never even for an instant, be distracted by the image they have projected.
We project onto the world our beliefs in the form of images that play out these beliefs. In this way, we can see the effects of those beliefs and make a decision to keep the belief or to release it. Either way is fine, we are never guilty for our choices but we do suffer as a result of keeping the ego beliefs. No worry, though. There is only so much pain we can tolerate and so eventually we will choose again. Why not avoid the pain and do it now?
Never be fooled by what the body’s eyes show you. Ask for Christ’s Vision so you can see that love is the only thing that is actually there. Giving up guilt is not a sacrifice no matter how stridently the ego argues that it is. You are never asked to sacrifice and to believe that guilt is a sacrifice is to limit the acceptance of Christ’s gifts to you.
Manual for Teachers
1 The role of teaching and learning is actually reversed in the thinking of the world. The reversal is characteristic. It seems as if the teacher and the learner are separated, the teacher giving something to the learner rather than to himself. Further, the act of teaching is regarded as a special activity, in which one engages only a relatively small proportion of one’s time. The course, on the other hand, emphasizes that to teach is to learn, so that teacher and learner are the same. It also emphasizes that teaching is a constant process; it goes on every moment of the day, and continues into sleeping thoughts as well.
We all teach all the time. We teach with our words, with our actions, with our thoughts. We teach to learn, and though we seekers study and study, it is really only through our practice (which is our teaching) that we learn. So, what we do every day, what thoughts we entertain are very important. They are teaching us what we are, or they are teaching us what we are not.
Because to teach is to learn, the teacher and student roles are fluid. Actually, when I teach, I learn, every time. This means that teacher and learner don’t actually switch roles but that they are the same. Because of the courses I offer and my writing, I am very fortunate. Not only do I teach through my life, but I teach in a more formal way and so I am offered so many opportunities to learn. I am very grateful for that.
Jesus says something very interesting in that last sentence. He says that teaching continues into sleeping thoughts as well. In another place in the Course he stresses that we should give our sleep to the Holy Spirit and in another place he says that we can tell who we gave our sleep to by how we feel when we wake up.
I have had a couple of interesting dreams in which I woke up with a fragment of the dream in my mind. In one, I was walking with someone who was teaching me. In another, I was clearly teaching someone. Neither of those dreams felt like dreams. I wonder how often this happens and I simply don’t have a waking memory of it.
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