Lesson 163: “There is no death.  The Son of God is free.”

The world’s version of our death is that it is final.  We hear all the time in the human realm that death is the last part of our lives because it is when we terminate our experience in the human form.

People have learned to be incredibly afraid about death because it is unknown.

Few people if any know what happens after we die in body.  That is why we people have felt quite tormented about it.

People want to feel safe and when we don’t it rocks our peace for sure.  

When we hear throughout our lives that in the end we can’t stop death from happening, and no one knows for sure that there is anything for our souls to do in the afterlife, this rocks our equanimity for sure.  We must have compassion for ourselves because this is very difficult when we don’t know how to face death.  No one knows if they will continue to be happy after we leave this form.

Our experience as a human has caused us cling to some hope of harmony in our existence in an afterlife because that prevents us from being anxious in the present about it. 

People often believe in some form of heaven because it appeases our hearts.

The Course asks us to simply have compassion for the stress of what it means to be human.  We don’t have any idea what comes in the afterlife and so being stressed and anxious about it is normal.

Unfortunately we have learned in the world to be paralyzed by this fear of death because we assign it much power to disturb us. 

This is terribly disquieting for humans and we all deal with this until we die.  This is a huge stressor.

Jesus is teaching us here to take the fear of death down a huge peg in the reality of living in the world.  We want to understand it in way that will not prevent us from feeling light and happy.  That is a big request since we currently see it as such a desperately avoided destiny for us.

Our human dilemma is that we try to prevent death in all sorts of ways and we get upset that we can not avoid death in the end.

Death and the body are not real.  That shifts everything. 

When we simply take out our attachment to the body and to what we think is death in our accepting them as unreal, this totally changes our experience of them as disasters.  We must see that whatever we are doing as a human is simply part of our learning process in becoming enlightened and awake.  That means that death in the worldly view is simply part of the life process.

Therefore, we can accept death as just another turn in the wheel of how our life progresses. 

Death is what the Course says it is unreal and so its impact is seriously reduced.

When we just let death be unreal then our bother about it is very little.  We may feel some fear about it.

What we need to do is forgive this when we still feel fear about it. 

Allow the Holy Spirit to take this from us and give it all the healing space it needs.  But otherwise, when we allow our minds to not give reality to death then we have a much gentler and easier time accepting it.  We may even have a hard time totally accepting this because we may not be used to the “unreal” terminology that the Course teaches.  The unreal quality of it allows this to be just hints of upset because we taken the power out of the idea they are real.

We lose the intensity of the fear about it.  

This is the best mind changing technique to use when learning to sit with death in a way that now becomes helpful and appropriate.  But we don’t get lost in our own fear about it or our sadness when it happens.