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ACIM Workbook - Lesson 167 (view source)
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<center>'''There is one life, and that I share with God.'''</center>
There is one life, and that I share with God.
There are not different kinds of life, for life is like the truth. It does not have
degrees. It is the one condition in which all that God created share. Like all
His Thoughts, it has no opposite. There is no death because what God
created shares His life. There is no death because an opposite to God does
not exist. There is no death because the Father and the Son are One.
In this world, there appears to be a state that is life's opposite. You call it
death. Yet we have learned that the idea of death takes many forms. It is the
one idea which underlies all feelings that are not supremely happy. It is the
alarm to which you give response of any kind that is not perfect joy. All
sorrow, loss, anxiety and suffering and pain, even a little sigh of weariness,
a slight discomfort or the merest frown, acknowledge death. And thus deny
you live.
You think that death is of the body. Yet it is but an idea, irrelevant to what
is seen as physical. A thought is in the mind. It can be then applied as mind
directs it. But its origin is where it must be changed, if change occurs. Ideas
leave not their source. The emphasis this course has placed on that idea is
due to its centrality in our attempts to change your mind about yourself. It is
the reason you can heal. It is the cause of healing. It is why you cannot die.
Its truth established you as one with God.
Death is the thought that you are separate from your Creator. It is the belief
conditions change, emotions alternate because of causes you cannot control,
you did not make, and you can never change. 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.
Death cannot come from life. Ideas remain united to their source. They can
extend all that their source contains. In that, they can go far beyond
themselves. But they can not give birth to what was never given them. As
they are made, so will their making be. As they were born, so will they then
give birth. And where they come from, there will they return.
The mind can think it sleeps, but that is all. It cannot change what is its
waking state. It cannot make a body, nor abide within a body. What is alien
to the mind does not exist, because it has no source. For mind creates all
things that are, and cannot give them attributes it lacks, nor change its own
eternal, mindful state. It cannot make the physical. What seems to die is but
the sign of mind asleep.
The opposite of life can only be another form of life. As such, it can be
reconciled with what created it, because it is not opposite in truth. Its form
may change; it may appear to be what it is not. Yet mind is mind, awake or
sleeping. It is not its opposite in anything created, nor in what it seems to
make when it believes it sleeps.
God creates only mind awake. He does not sleep, and His creations cannot
share what He gives not, nor make conditions which He does not share with
them. The thought of death is not the opposite to thoughts of life. 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.
What seems to be the opposite of life is merely sleeping. 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. 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. When the mind awakes, it but
continues as it always was.
Let us today be children of the truth, and not deny our holy heritage. Our
life is not as we imagine it. 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? We will not ask for death in any form today. Nor
will we let imagined opposites to life abide even an instant where the
Thought of life eternal has been set by God Himself.
His holy home we strive to keep today as He established it, and wills it be
forever and forever. He is Lord of what we think today. 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.
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. As we were, so are we now and will forever be. 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. And now it is no more a mere
reflection. It becomes the thing reflected, and the light which makes
reflection possible. No vision now is needed. For the wakened mind is one
that knows its Source, its Self, its Holiness.
[[Category: Workbook I]]
<center>'''There is one life, and that I share with God.'''</center>
There is one life, and that I share with God.
There are not different kinds of life, for life is like the truth. It does not have
degrees. It is the one condition in which all that God created share. Like all
His Thoughts, it has no opposite. There is no death because what God
created shares His life. There is no death because an opposite to God does
not exist. There is no death because the Father and the Son are One.
In this world, there appears to be a state that is life's opposite. You call it
death. Yet we have learned that the idea of death takes many forms. It is the
one idea which underlies all feelings that are not supremely happy. It is the
alarm to which you give response of any kind that is not perfect joy. All
sorrow, loss, anxiety and suffering and pain, even a little sigh of weariness,
a slight discomfort or the merest frown, acknowledge death. And thus deny
you live.
You think that death is of the body. Yet it is but an idea, irrelevant to what
is seen as physical. A thought is in the mind. It can be then applied as mind
directs it. But its origin is where it must be changed, if change occurs. Ideas
leave not their source. The emphasis this course has placed on that idea is
due to its centrality in our attempts to change your mind about yourself. It is
the reason you can heal. It is the cause of healing. It is why you cannot die.
Its truth established you as one with God.
Death is the thought that you are separate from your Creator. It is the belief
conditions change, emotions alternate because of causes you cannot control,
you did not make, and you can never change. 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.
Death cannot come from life. Ideas remain united to their source. They can
extend all that their source contains. In that, they can go far beyond
themselves. But they can not give birth to what was never given them. As
they are made, so will their making be. As they were born, so will they then
give birth. And where they come from, there will they return.
The mind can think it sleeps, but that is all. It cannot change what is its
waking state. It cannot make a body, nor abide within a body. What is alien
to the mind does not exist, because it has no source. For mind creates all
things that are, and cannot give them attributes it lacks, nor change its own
eternal, mindful state. It cannot make the physical. What seems to die is but
the sign of mind asleep.
The opposite of life can only be another form of life. As such, it can be
reconciled with what created it, because it is not opposite in truth. Its form
may change; it may appear to be what it is not. Yet mind is mind, awake or
sleeping. It is not its opposite in anything created, nor in what it seems to
make when it believes it sleeps.
God creates only mind awake. He does not sleep, and His creations cannot
share what He gives not, nor make conditions which He does not share with
them. The thought of death is not the opposite to thoughts of life. 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.
What seems to be the opposite of life is merely sleeping. 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. 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. When the mind awakes, it but
continues as it always was.
Let us today be children of the truth, and not deny our holy heritage. Our
life is not as we imagine it. 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? We will not ask for death in any form today. Nor
will we let imagined opposites to life abide even an instant where the
Thought of life eternal has been set by God Himself.
His holy home we strive to keep today as He established it, and wills it be
forever and forever. He is Lord of what we think today. 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.
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. As we were, so are we now and will forever be. 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. And now it is no more a mere
reflection. It becomes the thing reflected, and the light which makes
reflection possible. No vision now is needed. For the wakened mind is one
that knows its Source, its Self, its Holiness.
[[Category: Workbook I]]