"There is a Light in you Which cannot die, Whose Presence is so holy that the world is sanctified because of you. All things that live bring gifts to you, and offer them in gratitude and gladness at your feet."

"I am in the likeness of my Creator. I cannot suffer, I cannot experience loss, and I cannot die. I am not a body. I would recognize my reality today. I will worship no idols, nor raise my own self-concepts to replace my Self. I am in the likeness of my Creator. Love created me like Itself."

"You sacrifice YOUR innocence with his, and die each time you see in him a sin deserving death. Yet every instant can you be reborn, and given life again. His holiness gives life to you, who CANNOT die because his sinlessness is known to God, and can no more be sacrificed by you than can the light in you be blotted out because he sees it not."

"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."

"Now do we live, for now we cannot die. The wish for death is answered, and the sight that looked upon it now has been replaced by vision which perceives that you are not what you pretend to be."

"You have nailed YOURSELF to a cross and placed a crown of thorns upon your own head. Yet you CANNOT crucify God's Son, for the Will of God cannot die. His Son HAS BEEN redeemed from his own crucifixion, and you cannot assign to death whom God has given eternal life. The dream of crucifixion still lies heavy on your eyes, but what you see in dreams is not reality. While you perceive the Son of God as crucified you are asleep. And as long as you believe that YOU can crucify him you are only having nightmares. You who are beginning to wake are still aware of dreams and have not yet forgotten them."

"Your will is His Life, which He has GIVEN to you. Even in time you cannot live apart from Him, for sleep is not death. What He created can sleep, but it CANNOT die. Immortality is His Will for His Son, and His Son's will for HIMSELF. Yet God's Son cannot will death for himself, because His Father is Life, and HIS SON IS LIKE HIM."

"You are not sick, and you cannot die. But you CAN confuse your self with things that do."

In God, you are eternal life. You are immortal. You are given life by God, and you are made of life. Your gift of life allows you to give life. And so you can create life just as God gave life to you. And so on Earth you also can give life, to resurrect the lifeless and raise the dead, to restore minds to life and to re-empower those who are trying not to live.

To perform a miracle is to express life, which is also love and power and light. You provide life to those who lack life and they return to life. Miracle working is life-giving. Miracles give life to the dead and resurrect the sonship. As a miracle worker you are a life worker. You work on behalf of life and on behalf of all that lives in God.

"ALL miracles mean Life, and God is the giver of Life."

"As fear is witness unto death, so is the miracle the witness unto Life. It is a witness no-one can deny, for it is the EFFECTS of life it brings. The dying live, the dead arise, and pain has vanished."

"The miracle of life is ageless, born in time, but nourished in eternity. Behold this infant, to whom you gave a resting place by your forgiveness of EACH OTHER, and see in it the Will of God. Here is the babe of Bethlehem reborn. And everyone who gives him shelter will follow him, NOT to the cross, but to the Resurrection and the Life."

"The sick are healed as you let go all thoughts of sickness, and the dead arise when you let thoughts of life replace all thoughts you ever held of death."

"The gift of life IS yours to give, because it was given YOU."

"Thus does the miracle undo all things the world attests can never BE undone. And hopelessness and death MUST disappear before the ancient clarion call of life."

"Miracles fall like drops of healing rain from Heaven on a dry and dusty world, where starved and thirsty creatures came to die. Now they have water. Now the world is green. And everywhere the signs of life spring up, to show that what is born can never die, for what has life has immortality."

"He sends a witness to your Life in Him Who knows no death. Each miracle He brings is witness that the body is NOT real. Its pains and pleasures does He heal alike, for ALL sin's witnesses do His replace."

"Its life and power are its believer's gift, and this is what the miracle restores to what HAS life and power worthy of the gift of Heaven and eternal peace."

"Life is given you, to give the dying world."

"And we see it in the dying and the dead as well, restoring them to life."

"EVERYTHING is accomplished through life, and life is of the mind and in the Mind. If we share the same mind, YOU CAN OVERCOME DEATH BECAUSE I DID."

"he can effect miracles as creative energizers, which they are."

"Very simply, the resurrection is the overcoming or surmounting of death."

"The resurrection is the denial of death, being the assertion of life. Thus is all the thinking of the world reversed entirely."

"I am YOUR resurrection and YOUR life. You live in me because you live in God. And everyone lives in YOU, as YOU live in everyone."

"But let the whiteness of your shining gift of lilies speed him on his way to Resurrection."

"Let us give redemption to each other, and SHARE in it, that we may rise as one in resurrection, and not SEPARATE in death."

"So will we prepare TOGETHER the way unto the Resurrection of God's Son."

"God has one Son, and he is the resurrection and the life. His will is done because all power is given him in Heaven and on earth."

"YOUR resurrection is your re-awakening."

"It has also promised that there is no death; that resurrection must occur, and that rebirth is man's inheritance."

Anyone believing in death or thinks death is inevitable or irreversible needs to read this.

Here is a *FANTASTIC* section of the Course which explicitly details why death is not normal, natural, inevitable, or irreversible. And in fact, that the body can become completely incorruptible when it is free of YOUR attempt to kill it.

It hardly paints a picture of a body which suffers and dies against your will. In fact, it tells us the body can be IMMORTAL AND INVULNERABLE and remain so while it is useful.

I love the opening paragraph about funerals especially!

"The Incorruptible Body

One thing is sure; God, Who created neither sin nor death, wills not that you be bound by them. He knows of neither sin NOR its result. The shrouded figures in the funeral procession march not in honor of their Creator, Whose Will it is they LIVE. They are not FOLLOWING it; they are OPPOSING it. And what is the black-draped body they would bury? A body THEY dedicated to death, a symbol of corruption, a sacrifice to sin, OFFERED to sin to feed upon, and keep ITSELF alive. A thing condemned, damned by its maker, and lamented by every mourner who looks upon it as himself.

You who believe you can condemn the Son of God to this ARE arrogant. But you who would RELEASE him are but honoring the Will of his Creator. The arrogance of sin, the pride of guilt, the sepulchre of separation, all are part of your unrecognized dedication to death. The glitter of guilt you laid upon the body would KILL it. For what the ego loves, it kills for its obedience. But what obeys it not, it CANNOT kill. You have ANOTHER dedication which would keep the body incorruptible and perfect as long as it is useful for your holy purpose.

The body no more dies than it can feel. IT DOES NOTHING. Of itself, it is neither corruptible nor incorruptible. IT IS NOTHING. It is the result of a tiny, mad IDEA of corruption, WHICH CAN BE CORRECTED. For God has ANSWERED this insane idea with His Own, an Answer that left Him not, and therefore brings the Creator to the awareness of every mind which heard His Answer, and ACCEPTED it. You who are dedicated to the incorruptible, have been given, through YOUR acceptance, the power to RELEASE from corruption. What better way to teach the first and fundamental principle in a course on miracles than by showing you the one that SEEMS to be the hardest can be accomplished FIRST?

The body can but serve your purpose. As you look upon it, so will it seem to be. Death, were it true, would be the final and complete disruption of communication, which IS the ego’s goal. Those who fear death see not how often and how loudly they CALL to it, and bid it come to SAVE them from communication. For death is seen as SAFETY, the great dark savior from the light of truth, the answer to the Answer, the silencer of the Voice that speaks for God. Yet the retreat to death is NOT the end of conflict. Only God’s Answer is its end.

The obstacle of your seeming love for death, which peace must flow across, SEEMS to be very great. For in it lies hidden all the ego’s secrets, all its strange devices for deception, all its sick ideas and weird imaginings. Here is the final end of union, the triumph of the ego’s making over creation, the victory of lifelessness on life Itself. Under the dusty edge of its distorted world, the ego would lay the Son of God, slain by its orders, proof in his decay that God Himself is powerless before the ego’s might, unable to protect the life that He created, against the ego’s savage wish to kill.

My brothers, children of our Father, this is a DREAM of death. There is no funeral, no dark altars, no grim commandments, nor twisted rituals of condemnation, to which the BODY leads you. Ask not release of IT. But FREE it from the merciless and unrelenting orders you laid upon it, and forgive it what you ordered it to do. In its exaltation, you COMMANDED it to die, for only death COULD conquer life. And what but insanity could look upon the defeat of God, and think it REAL?

The fear of death will go as its appeal is yielded to love’s REAL attraction. The end of sin, which nestles quietly in the safety of your relationship, protected by your union, ready to grow into a mighty force for God, is very near. The infancy of salvation is carefully guarded by love, preserved from every thought that would attack it, and quietly made ready to fulfill the mighty task for which it was GIVEN you. Your new-born purpose is nursed by angels, cherished by the Holy Spirit, and protected by God Himself. It NEEDS not your protection; it is YOURS. For it is deathless, and within it lies the END of death. What danger can assail the wholly innocent? What can attack the guiltless?

What fear can enter and disturb the peace of sinlessness? What has been given you, even in its infancy, is in full communication with God AND you. In its tiny hands, it holds, in perfect safety, every miracle you will perform, held out to YOU. The miracle of life is ageless, born in time, but nourished in eternity. Behold this infant, to whom you gave a resting-place by your forgiveness of EACH OTHER, and see in it the Will of God. Here is the babe of Bethlehem reborn. And everyone who gives him shelter will follow him, NOT to the cross, but to the Resurrection and the Life.

When anything seems to you to be a source of fear, when any situation strikes you with terror and makes your body tremble and the cold sweat of fear comes over it, remember it is ALWAYS for one reason; the ego has perceived it as a symbol of fear, a sign of sin and death. Remember, then, that neither sign nor symbol should be CONFUSED with source, for they must STAND FOR something OTHER than themselves. Their meaning CANNOT lie in them, but must be sought in what they REPRESENT. And they may thus mean everything or nothing, according to the truth or falsity of the IDEA which they reflect.

Confronted with such seeming uncertainty of meaning, judge it not. Remember the holy Presence of the One GIVEN you to be the Source of judgment. Give it to Him to judge FOR you, and say:

"Take this from me and look upon it, judging it for me.

Let me not see it as a sign of sin and death, nor use it for destruction.

Teach me how NOT to make of it an OBSTACLE to peace,

but let You use it FOR me, to FACILITATE its coming."

"

It is critical to recognize this fundamental truth about the world. It is true of the world, it is true of every part of the world, of every world, every planet, every galaxy, and every part of space and time itself.

Time is change, and change is death.

Space is separation, and separation is death.

Space and time are systems of death.

There is no escaping this. There are no exceptions.

If something can change, it can stop being the way it is. Fundamentally it doesn't matter how perfect something seems to be, how new it is, how long-lasting, how impervious, how hard or solid, how much vitality it has, how much time was put into it, what it's made of, who made it, what brand name is slapped on it, how ancient it is, or how slowly it seems to change.

All things in space and time are constantly in a state of dying. We call "cell division" life. It is SEPARATION. It is death.

ALL THINGS HERE DIE.

"There IS no life outside of Heaven."

That which is immortal lives forever. It remains constantly the same. In order to be immortal it cannot change or be changed. It has to be invulnerable and impervious. It has to last forever. It cannot have any quality of modification, change, alteration or effect. It cannot be influenced, moved, transformed, attacked, made different, or questioned. It has to be always rock solid, the same, permanent, true, real, everlasting, and endless. Reality is ABSOLUTE.

That is true of all things in heaven's reality, in God. It is not true of ANYTHING in this world.

EVERYTHING in this world changes. Time forces it to change. TIME IS CHANGE. Time is a seeming force that takes whatever exists, and does not allow it to be permanent. It takes whatever is there now, and converts it into something else. It does not allow anything to stay the same. It does not permit permanence of any kind. Time is destructive. It is fundamentally a process of making sure NOTHING can last. NOTHING.

Time is death, and it is only a matter of time.

This means all things in space and time will end.

"Some things will last in time a little while longer than others. But the time will come when all things visible will have an end." "The world you see is merciless indeed, unstable, cruel, unconcerned with you, quick to avenge and pitiless with hate. It gives but to rescind, and takes away all things that you have cherished for a while. No lasting love is found, for none is here. This is the world of time, where all things end."

Think not that there is just some small PARTS of the world that do this. Think not that there are some places you can go, people you can meet, body types, vocations, objects or anything at all anywhere in this whole system which escapes this law. It is the law of death. It is the law of NO freedom. It is the law of punishment. It is the law of sin and payment. Everything has a cost. Nothing is without sacrifice. And there is loss everywhere. Welcome to hell.

"For this world is the symbol of punishment, and all the laws which seem to govern it are the laws of death."

"Yet the worms as well are doomed to be destroyed as certainly. And so do all things live because of death. Devouring is nature's "law of life." God is insane, and fear alone is real."

Time DEVOURS.

"You do not really want the world you see, for it has disappointed you since time began. The homes you built have never sheltered you. The roads you made have led you nowhere, and no city that you built has withstood the crumbling assault of time. Nothing you made but has the mark of death upon it. Hold it not dear, for it is old and tired, and ready to return to dust, even as you made it."

You cannot WANT this. But if you are not willing to look at its nature, you WILL want it, because you will be in denial. You will think the world is not like this. That there is hope. There is NO HOPE in the world. It has NO HOPE of ever succeeding at escaping death. It has NO HOPE of ever ceasing to disappoint.

It always falls short because something always changes. Everything always comes to an end. Every physical form transforms and decays and is no longer like itself. And nothing has any sense of any permanent identity at all, so there is no knowledge or anything trustworthy. You cannot rely on it. You cannot depend on it. It lies to you constantly. It is not your friend. It gives only to take away, and it never really gave in the first place.

You can only want the world if you are not willing to look at this. You can only want it if you think this is not true of the world. If you have the rose-tinted glasses of selective perception, in which you fake a sense of positivity and try to dress the world up as great and valuable. You invest time into it. You assemble its objects into pleasing configurations. You try to make it look new and shiny. You clean it and polish it. You make it appear never before seen as if it has given birth to something utterly fresh and interesting. And every single time it is a decoy to tempt you to stay in hell.

You cannot want the world because it was not MADE with love. It was not made through an act of wanting. It was made of rejection. You made it by rejecting the shit in your mind that you did not want and hated, by projecting it out. And thus your unwanted garbage turned into a dumpster pit filled with lies about external salvation and valuable treasures. You do NOT really want the world, and that is the underlying truth.

You cannot want a world which fails. You would be insane to do so. You cannot want a world which offers nothing of real value. You cannot want a world that does nothing for you and everything against you. You cannot want a world whose offerings are always death wrapped in a picture frame of sparkling jewels and special love. You cannot want a world that fundamentally can only die and can never sustain anything.

"You who feel threatened by this changing world, its twists of fortune and its bitter jests, its brief relationships and all the "gifts" it merely lends to take away again, attend this lesson well. The world provides no safety. It is rooted in attack, and all its "gifts" of seeming safety are illusory deceptions. It attacks and then attacks again. No peace of mind is possible where danger threatens thus."

You cannot want a world that denies its own existence, hates itself, destroys itself, is completely disinterested in you, and attacks you at every turn. You cannot want a word that does not want you, and instead rejects you and abandons you. You cannot want a world that wants you to be destroyed and ignore who and what you are. How can you love something that is so utterly unloveable? To love it would have to be to completely overlook it.

That's what forgiveness means. "To forgive is to overlook." It means to NOT SEE the world. To look past the bodies and not see them. To look past physical matter and beyond the veil. To NOT SEE the world. That is forgiveness. Because your focus on the truth and the light of God BLINDS you to hell and makes the world of form turn transparent. You cannot look upon hell with love and expect the darkness to remain. Shine upon it and it will be dispelled from your sight.

"Strength overlooks these things by seeing past appearances. It keeps its steady gaze upon the light that lies beyond them."

"Just as forgiveness overlooks all sins that never were accomplished, healing but removes illusions that have not occurred." "What fear would feed upon, love overlooks."

"For, at its center, Christ has been reborn, to light His home with vision that overlooks the world."

"Forgiveness RECOGNIZED as merited will heal. It gives the miracle its strength to OVERLOOK illusions."

"To forgive is to OVERLOOK. Look, then, BEYOND error, and do not let your perception rest UPON it, for you will believe what your perception HOLDS."

"For you are asked but to forgive all things that no-one ever did; to overlook what is not there; and not to look upon the unreal as reality."

"It is impossible to overlook what you would see, and fail to see what you have chosen to behold. How surely, therefore, must the real world come to greet the holy sight of anyone who takes the Holy Spirit's purpose as his goal for seeing."

"To overlook nothingness is merely to judge it correctly, and because of your ability to evaluate it truly, to LET IT GO."

"YOU DO NOT WANT THE WORLD."

"Is he (Jesus) the Christ? Oh yes, along with you. His little life on earth was not enough to teach the mighty lesson that he learned for all of us. He will remain with you to lead you from the hell you made to God."

The things of this world change. Change is impermanence. Change is mortality. Change is death.

If you associate your self with being one of these things, you are forced to have to believe that you are something that can die.

This will induce the immediate fear of death, and you will not be able to let it go while you believe you are something mortal.

In this world, most people believe that they are bodies, and that everyone else is a body. Bodies are mortal. They grow and change and shift and generally speaking end up in a state we call death. And yet even that isn't the cessation of change, because they go on to transform into food for other creatures and become the building blocks of further forms which appear to be reborn. And on it goes.

The problem is, if your or someone else's identity is wrapped up in something mortal and changing, you are locked into a fear state. You cannot believe you are a body and deny that you MUST therefore believe that you will change and die. That you'll stop being you.

Even every moment in which the body changes and moves is like a death - who you were as a child, almost unrecognisably transformed into an adult, and an old person, and a corpse. Who can you be in all of that when it keeps shifting and changing?

When a person believes they are a body, their mind is sick. The mind in its natural state recognises that your SELF is immortal spirit. Something that does not change, something that never dies. And in that there is safety and security and nothing to fear.

But believing in being a body makes the mind narrow and limited, as an attack upon immortality. And now this attack turns to sickness, and the body is attacked and made to be sick and corrupt and malfunctioning. And then it dies. Seemingly the inevitable consequence of being one at all.

Knowing that the mortal body can die, and believing that you or a loved one is a body, you are forced into a state of mind where you fear their death and your own. Their mortality becomes your mortality. Just by believing they are a body, you believe they will die. And this induces a fear of loss. A certainty that they WILL be lost, and there is no escape, and no solution to the calamity of being mortal.

This fear will then lead to all manner of panic and desperation, searching for answers, trying to find causes, even efforts to heal. Efforts to work miracles. Efforts to raise the dead and heal the sick. Efforts to be a miracle worker overcoming the forces of death with your power.

But this is a kind of miracle-working effort rooted in the unhealed healer. Anyone who believes they are a body is unhealed. And so the unhealed healer feels compelled by fear to save and fix those who are broken, yet simultaneously knowing they cannot be saved, and knowing that their demise is already written, if they be something that can die. A hopeless lost cause from the outset.

In this state we put up a fight, we resist death, we try to stop it happening. We'll do anything to keep a person in their body, as a body, because we believe that is what they are. And that to lose the body is a loss of the person, a true real loss in reality.

So we think that if we do everything we can to stop it happening, to prevent further sickness, to put up barricades against death, to defend against the evil medical system interfering and making things worse, to stop others from meddling or to deny help, and to enact attempts to solve the problem or to make the problem go away, are all the result of an insane compulsion to stop death happening.

But this resistance is really a form of attachment. It's a way of trying to keep the person going in a body by making the body real and associating them with the physical. This is how we hold on psychologically, through identification. And the more we believe they are a body the more we will interpret physical change as a threat, and will fear death even more.

Unless someone is going to reach a state in which they are so miraculous and healed that their body becomes incapable of sickness or death, which is quite advanced, generally speaking the body is going to become sick and die. The result of the choice to be unhealed leads to the inevitable consequence of death and dissolution.

This could be seen as acceptable, if a person would not resist this, and would not think of the person as a body. As just recognizing that bodies are doing what bodies do in their mortal ways. If it is recognised that people are not bodies, there need be no resistance or fear of the body changing. After all, change is all the body CAN do. It is constantly dying and transforming and becoming something else.

If we resist and fear the physical changing, interpreting it as a threat and a potential end to someone's life and existence, we'll create so much control and resistance and heroism and trying to be a saviour and healer and all manner of "not letting go". This is not a surrendered state or a healing state, it's a state of alarm and stress and fear and panic and horror. All unnecessary.

A person wanting to keep another person going at all costs, to prevent their departure to higher realms, to stop all sickness happening, and to ward off death itself, is really in a special relationship with the body. It's part of the belief and identification that the person is their body, and not an immortal being. And should anything happen to that precious treasured body, it is taken to mean an actual assault upon the persons reality and existence. Every change becomes a blow and insult to peace.

This whole attitude of resistance and fear of death is a layer of interpretation on top of what actually physically happens. Regardless of whether it's right or not for the body to reach a death state, you can either resist its changes or you can accept them. In order to accept them you have to let go.

Letting go means not believing that a person is something mortal, or that they can be attacked, or that they can ever die. It means not confusing the body for the person. And not minding or needing or depending on the body "staying alive" in order to be happy. It means recognizing physical things are always coming and going and transforming their state, and nothing physical is everlasting.

To surrender and let the death happen is far better than fighting against it. Because in truth you cannot win by fighting anything. To attack death is to fuel it. To resist sickness is to reinforce it. To want to heal and rescue the body-self is to imprison a person in a body further and bind them with sickness and guilt.

We must detach from the physical in all ways, including our own sense of identity and that of others. We must let go of believing that physical things will not change, because they are made of change and change is all they can do. We need to recognize that people are permanent souls that cannot change, because permanence is all they can do. And separate out the two.

We then can "let death be", without resistance, without fear, without attacking it, without feeling offended by it, without making it an enemy, without scapegoating it or hating it, or feeling reluctant or unwelcome toward it. This doesn't mean we have to condone it or choose it or support it, because it's still the result of an unhealed mind. But if it IS going to happen, we must not put up an egoic fight against it.

Resistance is futile. You cannot heal something by resisting it. It may seem paradoxical but actually by accepting something you let it go and let it be, but at the same time this gives you freedom, which opens you up to love and power, and makes you capable of healing. You can't heal a sickness by trying to make it real and then fighting against it. You have to not mind it first, and allow it, and then you are in a better position to help.

I used to see myself a rising up against sickness and death, becoming the kind of miracle worker that would be on some kind of crusade of revenge to conquer it and overpower it and make it stop. This never worked. And it's a good thing it didn't, otherwise I wouldn't have learned that this isn't how healing works. You can't stop death by trying to stop death. It has to be recognised as nothing and of no consequence or importance.

You stop it by letting it be nothing, recognised as nothing, unimportant and not worth resisting, and you allow it to be, SO THAT you can be aligned and identified with spirit, have access to God's power, recognize others as immortal, reinforce the LIFE in them, and thus give the life of resurrection and healing. It's kind of about getting your priorities straight. Death doesn't matter. Why fear something that has no effect on anything real?