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Study of Manual for Teachers 4-30-12

Day 120
5 Living is joy, but death can only weep. You see in death escape from what you made. But this you do not see; that you made death, and it is but illusion of an end. Death cannot be escape, because it is not life in which the problem lies. Life has no opposite, for it is God. Life and death seem to be opposites because you have decided death ends life. Forgive the world, and you will understand that every thing that God created cannot have an end, and nothing He did not create is real. In this one sentence is our course explained. In this one sentence is our practicing given its one direction. And in this one sentence is the Holy Spirit’s whole curriculum specified exactly as it is.

Death is not an escape from life, but I used to think it was. Back in the bad old days when I suffered a lot of depression I held onto the possibility of death as if it were a lover coming to embrace me, my savior who would rescue me from this hellish life when it finally became too hateful to be borne any longer. I thought of death as my way out, and I never let it stray too far from my thoughts, lest I be left in hell for longer than I could bear.

I kept a bottle of pills within easy reach, and would often go to the closet shelf to reassure myself that I did not have to tolerate more than I wanted to, that release was always in easy reach. Then I would shiver in another kind of fear, because what if death were not my release from hell, but my portal to an even worse hell, an eternal punishment for usurping God’s role one time too many?

Even after I had done enough forgiveness work that I no longer suffered depression I still thought of death as an escape of sorts. I thought of it as at least a temporary respite. I could escape into death for a bit even if I had to return from death to take up the fight again. I would think that I would maybe come back stronger and would do better. But my secret fear was that maybe it would be worse because I would be guilty of failure once more.

But really there is no death. Death is just another illusion we made up, another layer of confusion to keep us involved in the story but forever without a solution, a way out. The death fable is just another “seek but do not find” set up so typical of ego. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t. But no one dies and there is nothing from which to escape because there is nothing holding us in the story of illusion except our desire to experience it, or maybe out fear of not experiencing it.

There is a way out of the confusion. Forgive the world rather than try to escape from it, or deeper into it. Forgive it. Forgive myself for my every error without regard to its seeming form. Forgive each person I see, each judgment I make, each situation I find myself embroiled in. I forgive whatever is in front in me in that moment, and eventually I start to see that while they all look different, really they are the same.

I was always forgiving an illusion, a belief; always forgiving the guilty thought that I could have separated from God. And now I see that I am not even forgiving anything personal. That too was an illusion. I am simply forgiving the one error of the one Self. And even that is accomplished and I suppose the only thing left to forgive is the belief it isn’t.

Forgive the world, and you will understand that every thing that God created cannot have an end, and nothing He did not create is real.

This is it. It is the whole way out. Only what God created is real and nothing else is real. I cannot lose, not even for a moment, what God created. This means I cannot be, even for a moment, anything less than my glorious, magnificent, and limitless self. Not even in my craziest dreams can this change. This means that if I seem to be experiencing something else, I can only be dreaming. I forgive the dream as I realize it is nothing and so I am innocent of wrong doing. I don’t need to pretend to die. I am safe and I can just wake up to God.

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