PLEASE EXPLAIN WHAT APPEARS AS THE DEATH OF THE BODY?
Compliments of Northwest Foundation for ACIM.
ANSWER: Ah-h, wonderful question. The visibility and tangibility of your Individuality—the visibility and tangibility of you—is as eternal as you: It does not die and it cannot die. The simple fact is, that not one single Individuality (and I care not how many lifetimes you think you have lived) has had one millisecond of an interruption of an experience of body. The simplest way I can put it is, that everyone else buries that of you which was the furthest they could follow you in your journey. But you find yourself experiencing uninterrupted identity, or body.
Now if in the process, you or anyone else was experiencing what is believed to be a life-threatening disease, and indeed one that ultimately "takes your life," you will find that there will be a point—which everyone else will call your death—where you have moved through your fear of death and found yourself still present, and that the apparent cause of your death is no longer present. Because how can it stand if the realization has occurred to you that it couldn't kill you and didn't kill you. If you find yourself having moved through that point of intense fear that everyone is calling death, and there you are, intact—an uninterrupted conscious experience of identity—how can the thing that occasioned the great fear still be fearful to you, when you know as an experiential fact that it couldn't take away your life. It can't! And so you will find that apparent illness gone. You will say, "I have been healed," except that it will be truly clear to you that it didn't have any substance in the first place except in your imagination and, therefore, you weren't really healed of anything.
Now it is NOT necessary to die in order to have that kind of realization. And that is where curiosity comes into play, that is where the willingness to say—"nothing that I see means anything" comes into play; "Nothing that I see means what I think it means." Then comes the trust to be willing to lean into the unknown. In other words, to be willing to go into that inner place of peace where Truth can reveal itself to you directly as Knowing. Not as a knowing arrived at through thinking, but a Knowing arrived at because there's nothing standing in the way of your direct experience of your essential substance as the Presence of God expressed. And so, you can have that healing now, not after that point of great fear--which ultimately you discover had no power over you at all.
There CANNOT be the death of the body any more than there can be the death of Individuality. There CANNOT be an annihilation of the world any more than there can an annihilation of God. God and God's infinite manifestation, God and the visibility and tangibility of the Movement of God called Creation are inseparable. But what you must understand is, that this visibility and tangibility—which is generally referred to as a material world, because it is made out of matter—is not matter, but idea experienced by Mind and, therefore, it is all absolutely spiritual.
Now there is a piece of knowledge which is generally available, and most all of you know it but you don't understand its meaning. This piece of knowledge is: When matter has been looked at through an electron microscope—when it has been looked at through your finest instruments—it used to be thought that there were little billiard balls, little pieces of substance whirling around; those little pieces of substance are nothing more than a pattern of energy—little patterns of energy, moving--but never having substance in the sense of a material object. There is no other way to put it. There are no building blocks that are not just energy pattern—pattern of energy—which has no density to it whatsoever. The fact that your scientists cannot find matter anywhere—and they have already disclosed that to the public—should have been the great release from the illusion of a material world to be overcome. And [it] should have been the "open sesame," if you will, to a new apprehension of everything that you are seeing.
Energy is light of one frequency or another. And we will not talk about frequency. But energy is light, I'm going to say totally substanceless in the sense that you think of substance. This table that you hear a knocking from is substanceless as is the hand that is knocking on it. It is substanceless in the sense of it being matter, something totally unlike the divine Mind, God, totally unspiritual. It is not totally unspiritual. The realization that this hand and this table are not matter but energy, held together by something, is what allows everyone to begin to say, "Maybe there's a different way to perceive this." And that's when curiosity begins. That's when you begin to rattle the jail door and discover that you are not locked into your present perception of what substance is, and what you are.
Now this table looks like it does; it does not look like a glass of water. But the glass of water looks like it does, and doesn't look like a table. The visibility that you are seeing appears the way it is, because it is energy held together by Intent. And I'm not speaking here of some intent that you could, through your limited thinking, bring into play. I'm talking about the Intent of God, or the Intent of the infinite Creative Mind that is inseparable from an Idea that the infinite Mind has.
"Behold I make all things new," in other words I'm going to say, conception unconfined occurs as the experience of revelation. You just thought revelation was something that happened to poor humanity, but revelation is the Movement of Mind. The action of God is revelation—the revealing of that which is new. Mind experiences the revelation, and it has meaning and that meaning constitutes Intent. And that Intent is instantaneously reflected in energy pattern that Mind experiences as substance.
And so, the actual fact of it is that right now as you sit here in the state of Philadelphia on an apparently solid clod of earth called your planet, you Are the conscious experience of Mind experiencing its ideas as having substance, and there isn't one bit of matter to it. And that could be the end of the workshop. Now we are going to take a break. I'm going to ask you something on this break—do not talk to each other unless you are going to put into words whatever this answer has triggered with you. Do not worry, next break you can talk gibberish. But during this break, either be quiet with what is triggered in you, or talk about what is triggered within you.
QUESTION: Raj what you've just said to me, said that to see from fourth-dimension, to see from Reality is to see everything as my own self. And there is no difference, there is no a separation.
ANSWER: I'm going to interrupt you for just a moment. This is absolutely true. But be careful, because your definition of self—everyone's definition of self relative to themselves—is so strongly identified with the body and with their experience of life that has been minus the infinite view, that it is rather easy to begin to think that we are creating our world. That this Self that is One with everything, is a projection of the self we have always thought we were. It is true that everything you are seeing is your Self, but the only way that is true is if you are letting God's point of view be your point of view. And you cannot experience God's point of view until you are no longer claiming a mind of your own—as though you have a mind stuck inside your skull that is different from the mind of the person sitting next to you, or different from the Mind of God.
You see, if God is Infinite Mind, He did not create a bunch of little creatures with little minds. God expressed Himself as You; God expresses Himself/Herself as every single one of You; and God has withheld nothing of what He/She Is from His/Her Self-expression, called You—which means that You are the Presence of God. You are not the presence of something else that is the Creation of God. You must understand that Creation is not the way you define it three-dimensionally. You have a musician who creates song, or a potter who creates a pot, and the pot is something separate from the potter that somehow embodies something of the vision and connectedness with reality of the potter.
God's Self-expression is God expressed. And there isn't a separate thing called man or woman; there isn't a separate thing called Individuality. Individuality is the Whole Mind of God. That is what It Is. That is what you Are, and that is what each of you Are. That is why there is inseparable Oneness. Now, it is a difficult thing to explain in words, because your words are used to describe the three-dimensional experience. But God as the One Infinite Presence, the One Infinite Mind, expresses Himself. And because God is Infinite, that expression is Infinite. And so, we can say that God expressing Himself is Infinitely Individualized.
Now that seems to suggest infinite number of Individualities that are different. But it is all the Infinite Presence of God embodied, but not embodied as separate entities. Therefore, you will forever be You, and I will forever be Me, and there will be Awareness of Individuality. But the only way you can say that all you are seeing is yourself, is if you are not indulging in the sense of a separate mind, and are letting—as the Bible says—
that mind be in you, which was also in me. And that Mind is God—God's point of view. That is the way in which you will see everything as yourself. And as you do begin to have a clearer experience of it all being You, you may know that you are leaving the ego frame of reference and are having the clearer experience of God/You. Now, please continue...
QUESTION: This gets to the question that I was leading up to—having to do with the Creation of the world, which is hotly debated and of course, among Course students. We normally hear that God Created the world, and what you're saying is, I, you, we created the world in that Total Unison. But the Course also says that the ego made the world, and speaks of waking up as the world disappearing. And that is interpreted by many to mean that they must flash out of here, that they must get rid of bodies, that they must somehow ascend...
ANSWER: Before we get too much further, I will interrupt again... It is more correct to say that God Created the world and the ego created a misperception of the world.
As I indicated earlier, the definition of this table or this hand as being matter, as having originated out of a big bang of primordial cosmic debris or matter, is the misconception. But it is treated as though it is fact. And then behavior is based upon that fact, which isn't a fact at all—it is just a mutually agreed upon misperception of an idea held in the Mind of God. Please continue....
QUESTION: When the Course talks about what is valuable, it says to see it as only those things which are infinite are valuable and our Reality and, therefore, the physical world appears to be discounted—or in other words, anything that we can experience with the five senses. And also the idea that the Course says, that you cannot see two worlds at the same time, which is interpreted by some to mean that to see Reality means that what we see as the physical world disappears.
ANSWER: What you see disappear is the physicalness of it, the materialness of it that I described. But there will not be a void left, because there was something there in the first place to be misperceived. It is true you cannot see two worlds, and you are not now seeing two worlds. You are seeing—the one and only Creation of God that exists—clearly, or unclearly. Your belief that your unclear perception of the world is the one that is true is a delusion, a form of insanity. Because you are believing what is not true. But your insane perception is not the making of a separate world; it is just a distorted perception of the one and only world there is to be experienced.
The woman who will not leave the building—the institution that she is hospitalized in—because she does not want to wreak havoc for the planes and the people on the planes, will not finally emerge into a different world. She will emerge into the one that was there all along, but which she was misperceiving. But she will be minus the misperception and the fear occasioned by the misperception. She is not experiencing a different world. You are all only ever experiencing the One and only world, or Creation of God, that is happening.
Now, there is one other point that is important here and that is: Creation isn't something that happened—creation is what is happening. The world is not some huge perpetual motion machine, set in motion in an initial act of Creation. Your very existence at this moment is the result of, or the simultaneous evidence of, the Living God, now. You are not a product of the past, not even "God's past." Creation is always now.
That's the end of the answer.
~excerpt from Gathering with Raj/Jesus, Pennsylvania 1992
Conducted by the Northwest Foundation for ACIM
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