 Good morning. Good morning. Our last dialogue began with me asking the question or asking you to address the illusion of sickness and since so often it seems that the word sickness and death enter into the same sentence. I wanted to go into a dialogue about death. So starting off with the question what is death? What is death? Well, once again, maybe we'll this time start off a little bit more with what the common usage of the word is, a new world, which would be death of a body normally. Whether we're talking about death of a spouse, a friend, a loved one, pet, animals, you know, organic life, so on and so forth. Death is seen to be in the world again. Something's happening, something that was animated and seemed to be full of movement and life energy seems to suddenly be stagnant and still. The breath has left. Yes, the breath has left and the heart is no longer beating or if we use more modern definitions, you know, the brainwaves have stopped so on and so forth that would go into definitions and once again, if we define anything in the world, it's we've defined something a problem if death is perceived as a problem. You know, like people say I don't want to die. I want to I want to live. Doctors save lives and all these things when we define death is in the world. Obviously we've defined life as being in the world and we're back to the duality that death is the opposite of life and really you can't go very far with that. I mean you can come up with all kind of constructs about talking about after life, what happens after the body dies, you can come up with all kinds of concepts, perhaps reincarnation and what the soul does and the soul comes in and the soul goes out and so on and so forth, but really you're still just playing around with a bunch of concepts and you're still trying to define death and life as being in the world. When as we've discussed the world is just a screen. The world is just a projection. The world is a screen in which meanings get read onto it. So in the Ottoman sense, although this runs against the common experience, the body is not born, the body does not die, the body is not sick, the body is not well. We've talked about sickness and health, that these are meanings that are read onto the images of the world. If the world is seen as nothing more than dancing shadows, then these shadows are given labels and names and meanings and and these are given, this is given meaning from the mind. So we really need to pull the discussion of death back to a larger context or to talk about it in the big picture and in that sense, with your question, what is death, I'd like to just turn back to a course of miracles and just use a couple paragraphs as a springboard for our discussion. Because we've been talking about this world is a projection or a hallucination or a dream world and we need to pull the discussion of death back to a deeper level. It's page 63 in the first edition of A Course in Miracles in the teacher's manual. 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 asked this question before, but now we need to consider it more fully more carefully. It is the one fixed unchangeable belief of the world that all things in it are born only to die. This is regarded as quote the way of nature, unquote, not to be raised to question, but to be accepted as the quote natural, unquote law of life. The cyclical, the changing and unsure, the undependable and the unsteady, waxing and waning in a certain way upon a certain path, all this is taken as the will of God and no one asked if a benign creator could will this. In this perception of the universe as God created it, it would be impossible to think of him as loving. Or who has decreed that all things pass away, ending in dust and disappointment and despair can but be feared. He holds your little life in his hand, but by a thread ready to break it off without regret or care, perhaps today. Or if he waits, yet is the ending certain. Who loves such a God knows not of love because he has denied that life is real. Death has become life's symbol. His world is now a battleground where contradiction reigns and opposites make endless war. Where there is death is peace impossible. And then if we just turn the page for a line on page 64, at the top of the page, it starts the quote reality, unquote, of death is firmly rooted in the belief that God's son is a body. And if God creates bodies, death would, God created bodies, death would indeed be real. But God would not be loving. So we get back to our belief in the body, which is just a fragmentation of the belief that separation is possible. You know, this belief in time and space, which make distance, whether in a time sense or a spatial sense possible, and bodies and matter and the fragmentation just continues on and on and on. So the perception is very twisted. And in the twisted perception, I mean, that is death. To have a twisted perception, to have an idea or a belief in mind that is held and given reality that God did not create is death. So it is only by waking up. It's only by looking at the ego and seeing it's unreality that death can be given up. Now, another way we can come at it is from more of a, an emotional approach in a sense that this can still seem kind of abstract. It's like, okay, you know, this is very abstract to me. You know, I can, I have a sense of watching bodies die and animals die and so on and so forth. And that, that death, that definition is something that I've known for a long time. But this, this sense of a dream world and this sense of the ego and my mind still seems rather hazy. Another way of really simplifying it is to bring it down to emotion or feeling. How do I feel? And in that sense, the Course simplifies things again by saying that you have but two emotions. One is love and one is fear. Love is a, of course, a resultant or it's an emotion that comes from choosing to align with or choosing with the Holy Spirit and fear is an emotion that comes from choosing with the ego. So whenever the mind aligns with one or the other, the emotion is produced as love or fear, which really simplifies it. So we could talk about peace and contentedness and happiness and joy and so forth. But those in a sense are all attributes or offshoots of love. And we could talk about hatred and anger and jealousy and depression and all kinds of discomfort and upset and basically all those are just offshoots of the emotion of fear. So from this definition, obviously when one is feeling fear or any of its derivatives, this is death, this is an indicator that the mind has chosen death. And when one is very peaceful, very content in a state of joy, feeling very connected and everything, this is a state of love and the mind has chosen a miracle. It's in its right mind and therefore it has chosen life. A miracle is in a sense a reflection of life because in the ultimate sense when we speak of life with a capital L, we are speaking of knowledge again or the kingdom of heaven, which again is purely abstract, infinite, eternal, it has nothing to do with time and space and bodies at all. So in that sense, the miracle is like a reflection of life. So this brings it down to a decision and it's a decision that you can tell that you're making one way or the other based on how one feels. So death in terms of that definition is really not an ending or a change at all as we have usually thought of death in terms of death of the body. Yes, it's in a sense death is a change in the state of life. I mean, it simplifies it that there's just life and death and when one is upset, mildly annoyed, tiny bit frustrated or angry, raging, depressed, then the mind has chosen death. Regardless of the form of upset, it's a decision for death. It's in a sense it's like a hell on earth in the sense that the mind is in a state of fear. So just as health and sickness are a state of mind, death and life are a state of mind. Yes. It has nothing to do with the body or the world or anything outside my mind. In a sense, when we bring it back to the ultimate metaphysics too, that's why the Bible and the Course say that there is no death because what God created is really all that exists. And so the hallucination of fear, the hallucination of pain, the hallucination of any form of upset is a miscreation or a fantasy or a fictitious made up experience even, we could call it, that to a mind that's dreaming, to a mind that's sleeping seems very real. You know, it's been chosen, it's been believed in and so to it, it seems very real. So we're not trying to dismiss those feelings as just as hallucinations is something because everyone of us who've come to this planet or everyone who perceives himself in this world has had those experiences. It's just the Course is giving us a sense that there is something beyond these experiences that these are not states of mind that come from God, that God did not create fear or so on and so forth. Talk about the commonly held belief that when the body dies and speaking of death in that framework, that when the body dies, you know, the mind wakes up or heaven is there or however you want to talk about it, that that's when eternal peace is mine. And of course, in the context of what you've just said, that makes no sense whatsoever. And it doesn't follow that that's the case.