Lesson 167

There is one life, and that I share with God.

p1. There are not different kinds of life, for life is like the
truth. 2 It does not have degrees. 3
It is the one condition in which all that God created share. 4
Like all His Thoughts, it has no opposite. 5
There is no death because what God created shares His life. 6
There is no death because an opposite to God does not exist. 7
There is no death because the Father and the Son are One.

p2. In this world, there appears to be a state that is life’s opposite.
2 You call it death. 3
Yet we have learned that the idea of death takes many forms. 4
It is the one idea which underlies all feelings that are not supremely happy.
5 It is the alarm to which you give response
of any kind that is not perfect joy. 6 All sorrow,
loss, anxiety and suffering and pain, even a little sigh of weariness, a
slight discomfort or the merest frown, acknowledge death. 7
And thus deny you live.

p3. You think that death is of the body. 2
Yet it is but an idea, irrelevant to what is seen as physical. 3
A thought is in the mind. 4 It can be then applied
as mind directs it. 5 But its origin is where
it must be changed, if change occurs. 6 Ideas
leave not their source. 7 The emphasis this
course has placed on that idea is due to its centrality in our attempts
to change your mind about yourself. 8 It is
the reason you can heal. 9 It is the cause of
healing. 10 It is why you cannot die. 11
Its truth established you as one with God.

p4. Death is the thought that you are separate from your Creator.
2 It is the belief conditions change, emotions
alternate because of causes you cannot control, you did not make, and you
can never change. 3 It is the fixed belief ideas
can leave their source, and take on qualities the source does not contain,
becoming different from their own origin, apart from it in kind as well
as distance, time and form.

p5. Death cannot come from life. 2
Ideas remain united to their source. 3 They
can extend all that their source contains. 4
In that, they can go far beyond themselves. 5
But they can not give birth to what was never given them. 6
As they are made, so will their making be. 7
As they were born, so will they then give birth. 8
And where they come from, there will they return.

p6. The mind can think it sleeps, but that is all. 2
It cannot change what is its waking state. 3
It cannot make a body, nor abide within a body. 4
What is alien to the mind does not exist, because it has no source. 5
For mind creates all things that are, and cannot give them attributes it
lacks, nor change its own eternal, mindful state. 6
It cannot make the physical. 7 What seems to
die is but the sign of mind asleep.

p7. The opposite of life can only be another form of life. 2
As such, it can be reconciled with what created it, because it is not opposite
in truth. 3 Its form may change; it may appear
to be what it is not. 4 Yet mind is mind, awake
or sleeping. 5 It is not its opposite in anything
created, nor in what it seems to make when it believes it sleeps.

p8. God creates only mind awake. 2
He does not sleep, and His creations cannot share what He gives not, nor
make conditions which He does not share with them. 3
The thought of death is not the opposite to thoughts of life. 4
Forever unopposed by opposites of any kind, the Thoughts of God remain forever
changeless, with the power to extend forever changelessly, but yet within
themselves, for they are everywhere.

p9. What seems to be the opposite of life is merely sleeping. 2
When the mind elects to be what it is not, and to assume an alien power
which it does not have, a foreign state it cannot enter, or a false condition
not within its Source, it merely seems to go to sleep a while. 3
It dreams of time; an interval in which what seems to happen never has occurred,
the changes wrought are substanceless, and all events are nowhere. 4
When the mind awakes, it but continues as it always was.

p10. Let us today be children of the truth, and not deny our holy
heritage. 2 Our life is not as we imagine it.
3 Who changes life because he shuts his eyes,
or makes himself what he is not because he sleeps, and sees in dreams an
opposite to what he is? 4 We will not ask for
death in any form today. 5 Nor will we let imagined
opposites to life abide even an instant where the Thought of life eternal
has been set by God Himself.

p11. His holy home we strive to keep today as He established it,
and wills it be forever and forever. 2 He is
Lord of what we think today. 3 And in His Thoughts,
which have no opposite, we understand there is one life, and that we share
with Him, with all creation, with their thoughts as well, whom He created
in a unity of life that cannot separate in death and leave the Source of
life from where it came.

p12. We share one life because we have one Source, a Source from
which perfection comes to us, remaining always in the holy minds which He
created perfect. 2 As we were, so are we now
and will forever be. 3 A sleeping mind must
waken, as it sees its own perfection mirroring the Lord of life so perfectly
it fades into what is reflected there. 4 And
now it is no more a mere reflection. 5 It becomes
the thing reflected, and the light which makes reflection possible. 6
No vision now is needed. 7 For the wakened mind
is one that knows its Source, its Self, its Holiness.

In the Course of a Year::A Course in Miracles Lessons online

Lesson 167

There is one life, and that I share with God.

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