“There are not different kinds of life, for life is like the truth. It does not have degrees. It is the one condition in which all that God created share.”   …ACIM

I would estimate that roughly 99.9 percent of the inhabitants of this world believe this is “life.” They believe that life can be born, can be miserable, can be tough, can be hard for some, and easy for others. But one of the strangest of all beliefs is the one that those same 99.9 percent hold onto for “dear life,” which says life can die; it can be blotted out; it can be lost.

In other words, what God Himself created as eternal – He doesn’t create anything that isn’t eternal – can come to an end. All this silliness comes from a yet stranger belief, the strangest of them all; the belief we can be separated from our Source of Life and still exist.

“If death is real for anything, there is no life.”   …ACIM

Wow! That’s a powerful statement, which says it all. There must be life or I wouldn’t have been able to write this sentence, and you wouldn’t be reading it. So I believe we can safely say that life exists even though most of us have no clue as to what it is. But whatever it is these few years we spend believing we’re trapped in these physical bodies is not it.

If there is any such thing as death then there is no life, and by extension there is no God. There is no compromise to be made in this. Either death is real and there is no life, or life is real and there is no death. And I think it’s quite obvious which one is real. Oh I understand how real death seems to be in this experience we so lovingly refer to as “life.”

“Something that deceives by producing a false or misleading impression of reality“

The above is a dictionary definition of the word “illusion.” It has been pointed out many times in this blog that this so-called “life” is an illusion. That which we refer to as “death” is part of the illusion, which deceives us by producing a false impression of reality. It deceives us because we want to be deceived. You may laugh at the idea that we want to be deceived. Nevertheless, because we are terrified of our own Self, of our own reality, we’d rather face death in the hope that something better awaits us on the other side.

I can hear people now; how silly is that; why would anyone be terrified of their Self, of their own reality? The answer lies in the metaphor: We are afraid – or terrified – of the unknown. As the Course says: “By deciding against your reality, you have made yourself vigilant against God and His Kingdom. And it is this vigilance that makes you afraid to remember Him.” 

We believe we have separated ourselves from God, and in this perceived separation we have forgotten that we are a part of Him. In this illusion of doing that which cannot be done, which is to separate ourselves from our Source of Life, we have made ourselves and God into the exact opposite of what we really are.

We, in our own perception, believe we’re small physical beings depending on sources outside ourselves for everything. We have turned God into that which Albert Einstein described: “A God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own —- a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty.“ And in doing so we have plunged ourselves deep into darkness, uncertainty and fear.

“know that this need not be”   …ACIM

Like every person on this planet I’ve searched for the answer to what the purpose of life is. If we take a few moments and think about the average so-called “lifetime;” can we really see a purpose to it? There’s birth, the process through which we believe we arrive here. Then there’s the growing-up years, aging, the golden years, and eventually that which we refer to as death.

In between the growing-up years and retirement there’s the working years and raising a family in an effort to maintain the status quo, hoping their life will be better than ours was. All the while this is happening our so-called lives are filled with worry, fear, sickness, pain, doctors, pharmaceuticals, hospitals and on and on it goes.

Every now & then we’re able to experience a few fleeting moments of happiness and joy. And as we do we’re assured that all good things must come to an end. My question is; does any of it have any purpose?

It may seem as if I’m being totally negative with this post, but nothing could be further from the truth. The answer to the above question is, yes, it absolutely does have a purpose. 

The Only Purpose Life Has

But that purpose is not to be born and procreate other physical bodies; there’s no purpose in that except to keep ourselves in the illusion of separation. I discovered the answer to this question many years ago while listening to Esther Hicks. She (Abraham) said something that resonated with me and also made perfect sense. It was this: The only purpose to life is to find joy.

Most people can’t accept an answer as simple as that. They need to search for something much more complicated and deeper, which is why they’re always searching. They’re following the leading of the ego which instructs. seek but do not find.

A College Professor once told me, when the plain sense makes common sense don’t look for any other sense. The purpose of finding joy made absolute sense to me and therefore, I’ve never looked for any other purpose since. And the Course agrees; it says: “God’s Will for you is perfect happiness.“

The Course also tells us: “Trials are but lessons which you failed to learn presented once again, so where you made a faulty choice before, you now can make a better one and thus escape all pain which what you chose before has brought to you.” 

“Without your special function has this world no meaning for you. Yet it can become a treasure house as rich and limitless as Heaven itself.”   …ACIM 

Our “special function” is forgiveness. If we’re ever to find happiness then we need to forgive every living thing, including ourselves, for dreaming these unhappy and illusionary dreams. Forgiveness is a simple concept, but not always the easiest one to carry out, but it’s an absolutely necessary one.

But the forgiveness the Course talks about is not the same as it is in this physical world. When we forgive someone for anything in this world we still hold onto the idea that they’re guilty. But even though we believe they’re guilty we decide to overlook what they did. That’s sort of what forgiveness is as the world perceives it.

The forgiveness the Course discusses is nothing like that. First of all you learn and accept the idea that this physical experience is a dream, (an illusion) and you are doing the dreaming, not someone else. When someone does something bad, you realize he or she is no more than a figure in your own dream. What seemed to happen was something you yourself dreamed, and therefore nothing at all happened except you dreamed a bad dream, which you alone can change to a happy one. Once you understand this the figure in the dream is innocent. That’s the forgiveness the Course teaches. When you can accept this, this world can become a treasure house as rich and limitless as Heaven itself.

I’m going to close this post with a quote from Kip Baldwin: “So long as humanity remains in the programmed false finite belief that they are things of matter doing, they will never have the true infinite experience of Being all they are as LOVE, all the true self is…  just LOVE”

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Thank you for visiting this blog – I really and truly appreciate it

YOU NEED NOT SEARCH FOR LOVE – FOR LOVE IS WHAT YOU ARE