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Chapter 20: Beyond the Obstacles to Peace

6. The Third Obstacle to Peace: The Attraction of Death

To you into whose special relationship the Holy Spirit entered, it is given to release and be released from the dedication to pain and guilt and their believed penalty, death. For this Release has been offered you, and you have accepted It. But you must learn still more about this strange devotion to pain and guilt and death, for it contains the third of the obstacles that Peace must flow across.

No one can die unless they choose death. What seems to be the fear of death is really its attraction. Pain and guilt, too, are feared and fearful. Yet they could have no hold at all except on those who are attracted to them and seek them out. So it is with death. Made by the ego, its dark shadow falls across all living things, because the ego is the idea of the opposite of Life. And yet a shadow cannot kill. What is a shadow to the living? They simply walk past, and it is gone.

But what of those who have become convinced that their dedication is not to live? Behold the shadow-draped “sinners,” the ego’s mournful chorus, plodding so heavily away from Life, dragging their chains and marching in the slow procession that honors their grim master, lord of death. Touch any one of them with the gentle hand of forgiveness, and watch their chains fall away, along with yours. See them throw aside the dark robe they were wearing to their funeral, and hear them laugh at death.

With your forgiveness your sisters and brothers can escape the sentence their belief in separation and sin would lay upon them. This is not arrogance—it is the Will of the Divine. What could be impossible to you who choose Its Will as yours? What is death to you? Your dedication is not to death or to its master, which is merely a mistaken idea in the mind of its maker. When you accepted the Holy Spirit’s Purpose in place of the ego’s, you renounced the idea of and belief in death, exchanging these for faith in Life. We know that the result of an idea leaves not its source. And death is the result of the thought we call the ego, as surely as Life is the result of the Thought of the Divine.

From the thought of the ego came the belief in sin and guilt and death, in opposition to Innocence and Life and the Will of the Divine Itself. Where can such opposition lie but in the troubled minds of the insane, dedicated to madness, and set against the Peace of Heaven?

One thing is sure: the Divine, Who created neither sin, guilt nor death, wills not that you be bound by them. It knows of neither sin nor its seeming results. The shrouded figures in the funeral procession march not in honor of their Creator, Whose Will it is that they live. They are not following this Will; they are opposing It. And what is the shadow-draped body that they would bury? It is a body they dedicated to death, a symbol of separation, a sacrifice to sin, offered to the idea of corruption – the ego – to feed upon and keep itself alive. It is a thing condemned, forsaken by its maker, and lamented by every mourner who looks upon it as themself.

Those who believe they have condemned the Children of the Divine to this are arrogant. But you who would release them are merely honoring the Will of their Creator. The arrogance of sin, the pride of guilt, the sepulcher of separation, all are part of the unrecognized dedication to death. The glitter of guilt laid upon the body would kill it. For what the ego craves it kills for that thing’s obedience to it. Yet what obeys it not it cannot kill. You have accepted a different dedication that will keep the body incorruptible and perfect as long as it is useful for your holy Purpose in Spirit.

The body no more dies than it can feel. In itself it does nothing, for in itself it is nothing. It is neither corruptible nor incorruptible. It is merely the result of a tiny, mad idea of corruption, which can be corrected. For the Divine has answered this mad idea with a perfect Idea, an Answer that left not Its Source, and therefore brings the Creator to the awareness of every mind that hears Its Answer and accepts It. You who are now 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 this Course than by showing you that the correction that seems to be the hardest – the release from death and its corruption – can be accomplished first?

The body can only serve your purpose. As you perceive 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 perceive not how often and how loudly they call to it, and bid it come to save them from true Communication which is Union. For death is conceived as safety to them, the great dark savior from the Light of Truth, the answer to the Answer, the silencer of the Voice that speaks for the Divine. Yet they find that the retreat to death is not the end of conflict. Only the Divine’s Answer is conflict’s end.

The obstacle that is your seeming love for death, which Peace must flow across, appears to be very great. For in it lie hidden all the ego’s secrets, all its strange devices for deception, all its sick ideas and weird imaginings. Here is its insane belief in the final end of Union, the triumph of the ego’s making over Creation, the victory of lifelessness over Life Itself. Under the dusty edge of its distorted world the ego would lay the Children of the Divine, slain by its orders, proof in their decay that the Divine Itself is powerless before the ego’s might, unable to protect against the ego’s savage wish to eliminate the Life that the Divine created.

My sisters and brothers, Children of our Creator, the ego’s wish is only a dream of death. The ego is simply a mistaken perspective of a troubled mind that a frightened child has made. There are no dark altars, no grim commandments or twisted rituals of condemnation to which the body leads you, and no funeral. Ask not release of it. Just free the body from the merciless and unrelenting orders you laid upon it, and forgive it and yourself what you ordered it to do. In exalting it you commanded it to die, for only death could seem to conquer Life. And what but insanity could look upon the defeat of the Divine and think it real?

The fear of death will disappear as its appeal is yielded to the real Attraction of Love. The end of the belief in separation and sin is very near, nestled quietly in the safety of your holy relationship, protected by your union, and ready to grow into a mighty Force for awakening and for the Divine.