Corresponding Manual for Teachers Section

Chapter 5: Student / World Questions

9. What Is Death?

Death is the central dream from which all illusions stem. Is it not madness to think of Life as being born, aging, losing vitality, and dying in the end? We have explored this question before, and now we may consider it still more thoroughly. Death is the one fixed, unchangeable belief of the world that all things alive in it are born only to die in the end. This is regarded as “the way of nature” and accepted as the “natural” law of life. To question this belief is to have one’s sanity brought into question. The cyclical, the changing and unsure, the undependable and the unsteady, waxing and waning in a certain way upon a certain path, all are taken as the laws of the perceptible world, and, to those who believe in something beyond this world, as the “will of God.” And few stop to seriously ask if a benign Creator could will this arrangement.

For this perception of the universe, if it were real, and if carefully considered, would mean that the universe’s creator, if it had one, could not be loving. For what all-knowing, all-loving, and all-powerful creator would decree that all things but itself must pass away, ending in dust, disappointment, and despair? Such a deity could only be feared and never truly loved. It would hold your little life in its hand only by a thread, ready to break it off without regret or care, perhaps today. Or if it waits another day, yet is the ending certain. Those who stand in fear of such an imagined god know not of Love, because this god has denied that Life is eternal, and therefore declared that both Life and Love are unreal. Death then becomes life’s symbol for those who stand in fear instead of Love. Their world becomes a battleground where contradiction reigns and opposites engage in endless conflict until death ends their misery.

Death is the symbol of the fear of the Divine, so where death is perceived is Peace impossible. The Divine’s Love is blotted out of memory in the idea, which keeps Reality from awareness like a shield held up to obscure the Sun. The bleakness of death’s symbol as the “grim reaper” is enough to show that it cannot coexist with the Divine. Death holds an image of the Children of the Divine in which they are “laid to rest” in devastation’s arms, where worms wait to greet them, the worms themselves only to last a little while by the destruction they work. Then they too are doomed to be destroyed as certainly. And so do all things live, and but a moment, because of death. Devouring becomes the world’s “law of life,” the Divine is held to be insane, and fear alone is real.

The curious belief that there is a part of dying things that may go on apart from what will die does not proclaim a loving creator, nor reestablish any grounds for Trust. If death is real for anything then there is no Life, because death denies the Power of Life. But if there is Reality in Life, then death is denied. No compromise in this is possible. There is either a god of fear or a Creator Who is Love.

The “reality” of death is firmly rooted in the belief that the Divine’s Children are bodies. And if the Divine created bodies, death would indeed be real. But the Divine would not be loving. The belief in bodies is the point at which the contrast between the perception of the world of illusions and the perception of the Real World becomes most clearly evident. In the Real World, fear is the stranger and therefore death has no meaning. In this perception, the body has been repurposed by Spirit as a means of communication toward awakening from its use as a symbol of limitation which logically must end in death. In this Light, the gentle laying aside of the body in the Real World when its usefulness is complete is free of fear because the mind knows it has no limitations and that Life is eternal.

If the Divine is Love and death were real, then death would indeed be the death of the Divine. And then Its Own Creation must stand in fear of It, because then It would turn from being Creator into destroyer, from Love into avenger. Terrible its thoughts and fearful its image. To behold it would be to die. Such are the logical conclusions of the insane belief in death.

The world attempts countless compromises to justify its mad belief in the god of fear and its child, death, and will attempt countless more as long as its madness exists. Not one can be acceptable to the Divine’s Teachers, because not one could be acceptable to the Divine. The Creator did not make death because It did not make fear, nor did it make the symbols of separation and limitation. All things perishable and the ideas behind them are equally meaningless to It, and so are meaningless in Reality.

“And the last to be overcome will be death.” Of course! Without the idea of death and its author, fear, there is no world of illusions. All “evil” dreams will end with this one. The end of all illusions is awakening’s final goal. And in death are all illusions born, so in the overcoming of death will all illusion end. What can be “born” of death and still have Life? But what is created of the Divine and still can die?

The inconsistencies, the compromises, and the rituals the world fosters in its vain attempts to cling to love while thinking that death is real are senseless fantasies, ineffectual and meaningless. The Divine is, and in It all created things must be, eternally. Otherwise the Divine would have an opposite, and fear would be as real as perfect Love.

Teacher of the Divine, your one Assignment could be stated thus: Accept no compromise in which the idea of death plays a part. Place no faith in fear, and allow neither conflict or chaos to conceal the Truth from you. What seems to die has merely been misperceived and transferred to illusion. Now it becomes your task to simply let the illusion be brought to the Truth. Be steadfast only in this: Be not deceived by the “reality” of any changing form. Truth neither moves nor wavers nor sinks down to death and dissolution.

And what is the end of death? Nothing but this: the Realization that the Children of the Divine are innocent and perfect, now and forever. Nothing but this. But always remember that it is not less than this.