18.Death

 Death is a laughable thought that the ego made up to make us think the body and the illusion are real.  How can we, the Son of God, made in our Father’s image both spirit and eternal, die?  How ridiculous.  Talk about fantasy.  We cannot die.  We are eternal, created by God and with Him in Heaven now and forever.

The ego makes all bodies and stories of bodies.  It is the writer, the director, the costume designer, the set designer– it does it all.  Its purpose is to make us think the whole illusion is real and to keep us from listening to the Holy Spirit.  We are to experience it as is so real that we don’t realize we are actors in a play. We believe this is real life.  The ego uses many plot devices to keep us thinking the play is real including bodies, special relationships– love and hate, the possibility of obtaining more of something– like fame or wealth, problem/solution, war and peace, sickness and health.  But one of its most cherished plot devices is death.  How can your other Self, your eternal Self be real if you can die?  You must be a body, separate, special and temporal.

How does the ego keep us Course students believing in death?  There are plenty of us who accept the reasoning that death is not real but still the fear of it, which makes it seem real, lingers.  Why are we afraid of something that we have accepted as not being real?

Let’s go back to our first “death” to find the answer.  What was our first death?  The death of Heaven, God and our Christ Self after the first division.  When we had that first tiny mad idea about wanting to be special and separate from God, we fell asleep.  As we fell asleep we forgot about God, Heaven and our true Self.  This was our first experience of “death”.  Now we are terrified of being annihilated because that is what seemingly happened.  Our true Self in God was seeming annihilated as we fell asleep and forgot.  But who seemingly annihilated us, the Christ Self?  The ego would have us believe it was God.  But if we are honest, we can reason that it was our own mind that annihilated or forgot the Christ Self.  So now we are both guilty and terrified of our own thoughts and mind.  Welcome to crazy town.  How can we exist in a constant state of terror and guilt about what we are, a thought, and what we do, create more thoughts?  We are now guilt and terror, creating endless guilt and terror.

So our original “death” resulted in our being sentenced to what is unarguably HELL.  Death could be said to symbolize our terror, guilt and self-hated at having annihilated our Self and potentially God and the unfixable and unredeemable sin of the CRIME.  And perhaps, we hypothesize, our eternal burning in this hell is just punishment– oh boy, talk about forgetting to laugh.  It’s a good thing that none of this happened and that we are safely at home with God simply dreaming of exile.  Death is as unreal as anything the ego has made.  As we awaken, by forgiving everything not real, death too will fade away into the nothingness from whence it came.