From a human perspective we might think of life as starting and birth and ending in death. This is typical ego self-interest of course.

The world itself is more of a cyclic, regurgitating, constant transformation and change, transitioning from birth to death and back to birth again.

There are things in this world which seem to be new, to be born, new babies, new leaves, new offspring, new mornings, etc. It's not all about endings.

There are foods which are technically dead foods, which are fed to babies. What do baby tigers eat other than the carcasses of dead animals?

The rotting corpses of humans become food for worms and bacterias and flies, which use it to manufacture newborn worms and bacterias and flies. And so death becomes life again.

Cells divide and produce what seems to be new life forms. And yet the very same division ensures their eventual breakdown and dysfunction. They are born in separation and end in separation.

Technically when a human body dies, the materials the body is made of do not vanish. They just change form and redistribute. If buried they become the soil from which flowers grow. The chemical compounds become fertiliser and the building blocks for new growths.

Even as the tree leaves die off, the leaves settle to the ground and rot, but thus turn into rich soil, which in turn becomes the fertile ground for the emergence of new trees.

Around and around it goes, cycling from starts to endings and back to starts again. Birth and death are just two sides of the same coin. We seem to prefer one over the other, celebrating births and hating deaths, but they're really part of the same system.

As science would say, nothing here can really be destroyed, it can only change form. It's all energy, moving around and turning into one thing then another. This is the world's way. It's not really just a world of what we'd call death, it's also a world of what we'd call life. Life from corpses.

"It holds an image of the Son of God in which he is "laid to rest" in devastation's arms, where worms await to greet him and to last a little while by his destruction."

Illusions back and forth, sometimes it seems alive, sometimes dead. A world of opposites. A world of contrasts. A world of changes. Where even death is not a final end, because the materials of the dead become the materials of the living.

The whole system is one of every possible form of change, every appearance, every shift and change and transformation. Every way possible that there is no permanence and no absolutes. Not even physical death is absolute. It's all relativity.

A birth is just as much an illusion as a death. A newborn flower is just as much dead as a wilted one. And so the world mixes life and death together without really differentiating them, and thus producing confusion. It's only us humans who keep segmenting it out and labelling some parts as one thing or another.

"This is regarded as "the way of nature," not to be raised to question, but to be accepted as the "natural" law of life. The cyclical, the changing and unsure; the undependable and the unsteady, waxing and waning in a certain way upon a certain path"

Yes ultimately all physical things lead to what we call death, but so too are the new things just as much a part of dreaming. Sunrises and sunsets. Births and deaths. A phoenix rising from the ashes. Ashes becoming bodies again. It's all a big soup of uncertainty and untruth.

"There IS no life outside of Heaven. Where God created life, there life must be. In ANY state apart from Heaven, life is illusion. At best, it SEEMS like life; at worst, like death. Yet both are judgments on what is NOT life, equal in their inaccuracy and lack of meaning."

The idea of separation from God MUST ALWAYS lead to a physical universe, bodies which suffer, and death.

Physical matter is the CONSEQUENCE of believing in separation, causing there to be illusions of separation, which gradually intensify and become more extreme and differentiated, to the point where it turns into what WE call physical matter.

Physical matter is the solidification of the idea of separation. It is the idea taken to its extreme, yet completely logical conclusion. If there is separation from God, there is sin. If there is sin, there must be death. Death will be expressed as the pursuit of making the illusions ever more heavy, dense, attacking, unlike each other, at war with each other, and eventually will produce an entire universe of physical matter.

The objects in this physical universe will also not have completed the ego's "thought" of separation, until they have coalesced further to produce physical bodies, which will then be used to bind the Son of God to the body, and to then attack the body to kill it to try to COMPLETELY DESTROY the Life of the Son of God. That was the purpose of the whole idea of separation to begin with, and death - physical death in a physical world - is the completion or enactment of that idea.

A physical universe HAD to arise from the tiny mad idea. Illusions HAD to continue to fight with each other, because the establishment of sin demanded that there be punishment. The conflict produced by the idea of separation was automatically a state of WAR, and this war HAD to play out, and in doing so it led to a huge fragmentation of the mind, a diversification of illusions, and eventually a THOUGHT FORM which we regard as physical matter. The entire physical universe is a NATURAL RESULT of the idea of separation, and is all that COULD come from it.

Physical matter is nothing more than a very strong illusion. It is a "thought form". It is a very BIG thought of separation appearing in the mind of the Son of God. In all its ways, it is designed to cover up awareness of God and to block sight of the truth. Bodies are a specific outcome of the logical conclusion of the ego thought system, demanding a concentrated target to receive punishment in the dream, and their destruction is the "success" or final statement that attempts to make the illusion COMPLETELY REAL. Or more succinctly, it is the nail in the coffin.

All of this is illusion. All of it is thought. It is just an IDEA. It's an idea of being separate, and therefore dead. As dead as death could ever possibly show up or seem to happen in illusions. The most intense, believable, seemingly real death possible. To use it seems very real, but it is not.

This is the metaphysical truth of A Course in Miracles. Separation from God results in the eventual, inevitable "manifestation" of a physical universe, a universe of death and destruction, simply as the most extreme expression of an illusion of being separate possible. Regardless of whether the Course text itself has used the term "physical universe", this is still the truth about this place we inhabit. It is the lower end of the dream of death, and physical matter is a death thought.

And yet, none of it is really happening because separation was never really possible to begin with.

The physical universe is an ILLUSION. God did not create it or make it. OUR idea of separation made it.