LESSON 167 There is one life, and that I share with God.

1. 1There are not different kinds of life, for life is like the truth. 2It does not have degrees. 3It is the one condition in which all that God created share. 4Like all His Thoughts, it has no opposite.

5There is no death because what God created shares His life.

6There is no death because an opposite to God does not exist.

7There is no death because the Father and the Son are one.

2. 1In this world, there appears to be a state that is life’s opposite. 2You call it death. 3Yet we have learned that the idea of death takes many forms. 4It is the one idea which underlies all feelings that are not supremely happy. 5It is the alarm to which you give response of any kind that is not perfect joy. 6All sorrow, loss, anxi­ety and suffering and pain, even a little sigh of weariness, a slight discomfort or the merest frown, acknowledge death. 7And thus deny you live.

3. 1You think that death is of the body. 2Yet it is but an idea, irrelevant to what is seen as physical. 3A thought is in the mind. 4It can be then applied as mind directs it. 5But its origin is where it must be changed, if change occurs. 6Ideas leave not their source. 7The emphasis this course has placed on that idea is due to its central­ity in our attempts to change your mind about yourself. 8It is the reason you can heal. 9It is the cause of healing. 10It is why you cannot die. 11Its truth established you as one with God.

4. 1Death is the thought that you are separate from your Creator. 2It is the belief conditions change, emotions alternate because of causes you cannot control, you did not make, and you can never change. 3It is the fixed belief ideas can leave their source, and take on qualities the source does not contain, becoming different from their own origin, apart from it in kind as well as distance, time and form.

5. 1Death cannot come from life. 2Ideas remain united to their source. 3They can extend all that their source contains. 4In that, they can go far beyond themselves. 5But they can not give birth to what was never given them. 6As they are made, so will their mak­ing be. 7As they were born, so will they then give birth. 8And where they come from, there will they return.

6. 1The mind can think it sleeps, but that is all. 2It cannot change what is its waking state. 3It cannot make a body, nor abide within a body. 4What is alien to the mind does not exist, because it has no source. 5For mind creates all things that are, and cannot give them attributes it lacks, nor change its own eternal, mindful state. 6It cannot make the physical. 7What seems to die is but the sign of mind asleep.

7. 1The opposite of life can only be another form of life. 2As such, it can be reconciled with what created it, because it is not opposite in truth. 3Its form may change; it may appear to be what it is not. 4Yet mind is mind, awake or sleeping. 5It is not its opposite in anything created, nor in what it seems to make when it believes it sleeps.

8. 1God creates only mind awake. 2He does not sleep, and His creations cannot share what He gives not, nor make conditions which He does not share with them. 3The thought of death is not the opposite to thoughts of life. 4Forever unopposed by opposites of any kind, the Thoughts of God remain forever changeless, with the power to extend forever changelessly, but yet within themselves, for they are everywhere.

9. 1What seems to be the opposite of life is merely sleeping. 2When the mind elects to be what it is not, and to assume an alien power which it does not have, a foreign state it cannot enter, or a false condition not within its Source, it merely seems to go to sleep a while. 3It dreams of time; an interval in which what seems to happen never has occurred, the changes wrought are substanceless, and all events are nowhere. 4When the mind awakes, it but continues as it always was.

10. 1Let us today be children of the truth, and not deny our holy heritage. 2Our life is not as we imagine it. 3Who changes life because he shuts his eyes, or makes himself what he is not because he sleeps, and sees in dreams an opposite to what he is? 4We will not ask for death in any form today. 5Nor will we let imagined opposites to life abide even an instant where the Thought of life eternal has been set by God Himself.

11. 1His holy home we strive to keep today as He established it, and wills it be forever and forever. 2He is Lord of what we think today. 3And in His Thoughts, which have no opposite, we under­stand there is one life, and that we share with Him, with all creation, with their thoughts as well, whom He created in a unity of life that cannot separate in death and leave the Source of life from where it came.

12. 1We share one life because we have one Source, a Source from which perfection comes to us, remaining always in the holy minds which He created perfect. 2As we were, so are we now and will forever be. 3A sleeping mind must waken, as it sees its own perfection mirroring the Lord of life so perfectly it fades into what is reflected there. 4And now it is no more a mere reflection. 5It becomes the thing reflected, and the light which makes reflection possible. 6No vision now is needed. 7For the wakened mind is one that knows its Source, its Self, its Holiness.