Friday, June 12, 2015
Lesson 163: “There is no death. The Son of God is free.”
To hear that there is no death certainly sounds like insanity. This seems impossible and
blasphemous. A lot of us almost worship death as an idol. We get attached certainly to believing it is true. We think it is just crazy to even hint at the idea this is false. We can feel threatened or that our world is rocked from the slightest mention that death is any thing other than reality. We definitely believe that this is the one certainty in our human lives.
Everything else has more or less relativity, meaning everything else may or may not happen. People may have enough money, people may live a long life as healthy, we may have happy childhoods and loving parents, or none of these may be true. Life is filled with evermore possibility. It is to some extent entirely at the whim (or plan) of the Universe to give us some ease in life or not. This can be played out in every different way. We don’t know how things will turn out.
What we do know for certain is that we will die. This is such a definite part of our existence in human form. Our bodies do die without fail. This is why we get even more convinced that death is real because we have a whole lifetime of living in a body that dies and makes this seem impossible to avoid. Death even seems to take on a life of its own because it seems like an eventual certainty. Because we have such strong proof in worldly terms that we and everyone else will die, believing in anything else but this reality seems utterly insane.
We have deep, deep investment in making death real in our worldly life. Therefore, for us to hear otherwise causes a huge inner stir because we are rocking the boat. We have a rock of our inner beliefs inside that changes over time but is always part of what we stand on to function in the world. We need some core beliefs to give us help functioning adequately in the world. This rock is solid and provides us with some grounding when we are stepping off to the world’s activity. This rock of our beliefs has- “death is real”- in the center of the stepping stone because this belief gives everything else in our lives some context.
We know the projected timeline of a human’s life, so we make decisions from this viewpoint about when and how to get married and have children and also have careers. The projected span of our lives is the basis of much of how our society continues on generation after generation. Society is set up to take care of people in their times of nearing death because everybody identifies with this as everyone knows that our own individual time of dying will happen if not soon then sometime down the line. Death is part of every part of our lives and it is embedded in the norms of our society because people deal with it all the time. Very often this is not conscious, but there is never a moment when we are not facing death.
We just need to have compassion and forgive ourselves. Our insistence that death is real is simply part what is the particular deck we are dealing with. We have to just know that we don’t want to deny death in the world, because that would be irresponsible. We have to understand that it is something we have to face in our lives. However, also see that in the Course’s eyes, death is not real. The reason we want to see that death is not real is to simply and gently- but firmly- unhinge our rigidity about making death more powerful than our experience of God. We are asked to simply let go of our attachment to the experience of death.
We are invited to participate in the way we can make death a celebration of life and find lightness in moments even when we are dealing with heavy grief from the loss of our loved ones. And we simply need to understand that death has no power over us or God. We may find ourselves at death’s door at some time but God always has the power to heal our minds and bodies, no matter what it looks like. Know that we are never bound by this certainty that we will die. God is always more powerful than death or disease. Never spend a moment in the mind’s imprisoned thought that our minds are not instantly free from any of the body’s limitations. Hold the certainty of God’s infinite power.