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SearchCan you speak on the subject of death for those dying of a terminal illness?
Question:
If you have the time could you expand on one of your articles on the subject of death? When we are young, death seems so far away. When we are old we just give into it as something inevitable. The situation changes somewhat when we face death or the threat of death due to illness such as cancer. It is most important for people battling with this sickness to unlearn and learn what reality is. Can you help?
Answer:
Lessons 163 and 167 in the ACIM Workbook are excellent for exposing the belief in death, just as Lesson 136 is a gem for exposing the belief in sickness. Death and sickness are different names for the same belief: the belief in separation from God. The perceived world was made by the ego as a cover to protect and maintain this belief. The Holy Spirit uses the symbols of the world to undo this belief. Though sickness and death seem to involve symptoms and bodies, the symptoms and bodies are but effects of the false belief in separation. Yet what is not a real cause cannot have real effects, for only that which proceeds forth from God has Reality. Christ, Divine Love, is reality, for the Christ idea has not left its Source (God). Love remains eternal, and nothing can change eternal love.
The deceived mind appears to "battle" and "struggle" to maintain a tiny illusory identity apart from the whole of reality. It makes up a world of duality, of birth and death, of sickness and health, of pleasure and pain, to maintain a belief in private minds with private thoughts. Yet Divine Mind is One unified mind and cannot be divided or separated into parts. The whole transcends "the sum of the parts,” for the whole is a state of mind Which has no parts. The concept of parts dissolves in forgiveness, which sees that illusions are one. Forgiveness is the last concept, being the gateway to an experience of oneness that transcends all concepts.
As you proceed with the mind training ACIM offers (the unlearning of everything you think you think and believe you believe), you will begin to recognize that in every moment how you feel is life or death, health or sickness, love or fear. Every miracle is a moment of life and health and love, and every grievance or specific judgment is a moment of sickness and death and fear. The joy and freedom and happiness of the miracle will be the necessary incentive to allow the Holy Spirit to decide for God for you with everything. And as you learn to think with God consistently, you become consistently miracle-minded. You open to acceptance of the Atonement or correction. You see that you are God-dependent and always will be, for God is our only source. The belief in separation is an impossibility, for God wills that Christ be one forever. Thy will is done.
Life is a state of mind. And what is unlearning but the peeling away of the onion of false belief so that the light of love may be recognized as all there is to behold? There is no death. God's child is life eternal.
Love & Blessings,
David