This morning we are going to talk about death. This is a topic which we may need more than
five minutes for, but the Course tells us it's the central theme in the ego's thought
system, an essential concept. It's a phenomenon that everyone in this world deals with whether
it's a death of loved ones, death of an idea sometimes, and certainly our own personal
death. And it's clearly an extremely important topic because probably no other topic goes
more to the heart of the confusion of form and content, body and mind. In fact, the third
obstacle to peace in Chapter 19 is "The Attraction of Death." And it's in that discussion that
Jesus makes a very, very important statement where he says do not confuse symbol with source,
and he's speaking very specifically there about death. The symbol would be the death
of the body and the source would be the concept of death that is the integral or the foundational
part, one could say, of the ego thought system. And Jesus is cautioning us against confusing
symbol with source, body and mind, form with content. Namely the issue is not the death
of the body because how could what does not live, die? In other words, the body as we
are told repeatedly in many different ways doesn't die. It doesn't live. It's not born,
et cetera. That everything in the world is simply a projection that has not left its
source in the mind. It is the projection of the ego thought system. And if the ego thought
system consists of the thoughts, of the ideas of separation and then sin, guilt, and fear,
the outcome of our guilt, the inevitable outcome or punishment for our sin is death and that
is what we fear. Certainly we�re all familiar with the third chapter of Genesis which gives
a marvelous, mythic depiction of the birth of the ego. Adam and Eve separate from God's
Will by disobeying His injunction not to eat of the tree. They then feel that they have
sinned. They feel guilty. They hide in the bushes out of fear of God's punishment. They
cover their nakedness which very quickly in Judaism and Christianity, especially in Christianity,
makes the analogy between sin and sexuality. And they�re afraid of God and they hide
because they hear God walking in the garden and then, of course, God catches up with them
and He punishes them. And the ultimate punishment, penultimate punishment actually, because He
punishes them by bringing death into the world, a clear effect of their sin, and then He casts
them out of Heaven never to return. He casts them out of the Garden of Eden never to return
and forbidding them to return and that's the ultimate punishment, of course. So we don't
only die but we will never return Home, and from that point on we have had to deal with
death, and what makes it particularly difficult is that deep down we believe that death is
the inevitable punishment for our sin. And we all believe we are sinners because we all
believe we are here in bodies with personalities and that means we have separated and to the
ego, separation and sin are equated and therefore we deserve to be punished for our sin. And
since we have projected our thought of sin into the body, we therefore believe we are
bodies and bodies deserve to be punished. And, once again, that's why the author of
Genesis or the authors of Genesis put the Adam and Eve story right at the beginning.
And then, of course, it becomes the cornerstone of everything else that follows in the Bible,
both Old and New Testament. And how do we deal with our sin and how do we deal with
the seeming fact of our existence, namely that we will die? So a big, big problem for
all of us as students of the Course is this confusion of symbol and source, and it particularly
becomes an issue, once again, when we consider our own demise, our own death, our own mortality.
And we actually think that our bodies die. We actually believe that we lose. There�s
that wonderful passage in the Introduction to Chapter 13 in the text where Jesus describes
what this wonderful world is, or that the world we think is so wonderful which he tells
us is a "delusional system of those made mad by guilt." And he talks about that one of
the most insane thoughts in our thought system and our experience here as bodies is that
we lose, that we lose love, love is taken from us. And certainly all experiences because
we all have people whom we love who die, beginning with our parents and as we grow older, more
and more people in our lives, family and friends, public figures die, and we mourn them. We
feel there�s been a loss that we lose the love that we believe we had and ultimately
the love that we believe we are, and so this is Jesus' way of telling us how insane all
of this is. So this concludes the first part of our discussion of death where we are really
looking at the idea that death is not of the body but is of the mind. So we'll continue
this next week when we discuss what the implications are.