IT IS APPARENT THAT THERE IS NO DEATH

Paris and Prosperity!

Jul 30, 2023

SPRING

To what purpose, April, do you return again?

Beauty is not enough.

You can no longer quiet me with the redness

Of little leaves opening stickily.

I know what I know.

The sun is hot on my neck as I observe

The spikes of the crocus.

The smell of the earth is good.

It is apparent that there is no death.

But what does that signify?

Not only under ground are the brains of men

Eaten by maggots.

Life in itself

Is nothing,

An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.

It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,

April

Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

-- Spring, Edna St. Vincent Millay (1921)

This is one of my all-time favorite poems. The line, It is apparent that there is no death always gave me a shiver. Since my earliest childhood, somehow, I knew that that was true.

However, everything I saw and everyone I met told me I was wrong.

“Everything dies,” they said, and it sure seemed true. Yet I knew differently in my bones….

Millay is writing in the year 1921. World War I had ended in 1918, a mere two years earlier. That war had killed between 15 and 22 million people worldwide.

Also, between 1918 and 1920, the Great Influenza Epidemic killed between 17 and 50 million people around the world, including almost 700,000 Americans.

Death was a everywhere in those years. It was on everyone’s mind, a ubiquitous part of everyone’s life.

So, how could it possibly be apparent that there is no death to the poet? To her, it is apparent, but, as she concludes.…

It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,

April

Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

The idiocy of April alone is not enough to dispel the illusion that death triumphs over life in the end. We’ve seen so much death; we need something more!

We need something more to substantiate our belief – our innate sense – that there is no death. After all, we see that death happen. And we are trained by our parents, society, religion, and school to trust the evidence of our human eyes. We take it as solid, without much (if any) questioning of “reality.”

Life and death. Natural opposites. But are they?

A Course in Miracles, Lesson 167 is, “There is one life, and that I share with God.” It tells me that this universal belief in death is in fact not true at all.

In this world, there appears to be a state that is life’s opposite.

You call it death.

The lesson then goes on to contradict what the world says is true. I summarize it like this:

· God is everything.

· There is no opposite to God.

· God is eternal.

· We all are One.

· We are all an Idea or a Thought in the Mind of God.

· Ideas leave not their Source.

Since we are all living eternally in the eternal Mind of God, we live and can never die.

But bodies? It’s irrefutable that bodies die, right?

Lesson 167 says:

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….

Ideas leave not their source….

It is the reason you can heal.

It is the cause of healing.

It is why you cannot die.

Three central Truths in A Course in Miracles are:

Ideas leave not their source.

We are asleep in a dream, dreaming that we are separate from God.

And

We can never be separate from God!

Understanding. Knowing these articles of faith, we begin to see the glimmer of Light in the darkness.

The Course points out something that occurs in the Book of Genesis, something that is central to the human experience in the world we see:

What is seen in dreams seems to be very real.

Yet the Bible says that a deep sleep fell upon Adam,

and nowhere is there reference to his waking up.

(ACIM, T-2.I.3:1-7 emphasis added)

The story of the Garden of Eden in Genesis 2:21 gives us a powerful clue to the existence that we experience in the world.

In other words, what we take for reality is all illusion. We are living and moving in a dream -- a state of unreality.

This is the ultimate question that the poet Edgar Allan Poe asked:

Is all that we see or seem

But a dream within a dream?

Lesson 167 has these clear lines:

What seems to be the opposite of life is merely sleeping….

Who changes life because he shuts his eyes… because he sleeps, and sees in dreams an opposite to what he is?

This echoes the Biblical story of Lazarus. When Jesus hears that his friend is sick, he says:

Then he said, “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but now I will go and wake him up.”

John 11:11

Jesus is speaking of death, and the illusion that seems so powerful. Jesus demonstrates here at the tomb of Lazarus, and again on Easter Day: in the Mind of God, (where we live) there is no death.

It is only in our fever-dream, the dream within a dream, that we seem to die.

So, how do I wake up out of this nightmare, where death, disease, injury, loss, despair and hopeless abound?

The Course is clear:

You do not have to continue to believe what is not true

unless you choose to do so.

All that can literally disappear in the twinkling of an eye

because it is merely a misperception.

(ACIM, T-2.I.3:3-4)

The choice is ours. We can believe our “lying eyes” or we can look into our hearts and come to believe what we intuitively know is true.

We are spiritual beings having an all-to-human experience.

We aren’t a body. We have a body.

We don’t have a soul. We are a soul.

That little (little!!) shift on perspective makes all the difference in the world.

Let us help each other wake up today. In joy and thanksgiving that we are living, breathing, loving, powerful Spirits – Divine Ideas in the Mind of God and we have never left our Source.

We are home, eternally, right here, right now.

IT IS APPARENT THAT THERE IS NO DEATH

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