From Death to Life

            Years ago I discovered something about the ego: What it told me to fear was what it secretly desired for me.

            Is there some disaster you are projecting in your life now? Maybe you are afraid you will lose someone or something, like a job. Maybe you fear for a loved one who is in trouble or sick. Maybe you have financial concerns. Maybe your life and your loved ones are settled for now, yet you still catastrophize over something, perhaps your country’s direction or the planet as a whole. Whatever it is, the ego hopes the disaster you fear will come to pass. Fear is really a wish.

            And nowhere is this more clear than with the idea of death. It is the ego’s ultimate goal for you.

            I have faced this lately as I have come to experience my immortality. For the past couple of years, since I became aware the ego has been gone for a while, a part of me has grieved over my “death”. “This means I’m dead” is what I heard at first. The bulk of the grief passed a few months ago after a moment where I faced it head on. There has been a lot of facing things head on in this process for me.

            Lately the death wish came in the form of a feeling I call the “death-pall”. It’s a feeling I’ve always had around death, whether thinking of my own, facing the death of a loved one, and even sometimes in certain scenes in a book or movie. It is dark and tinged with anxiety. And I experienced it recently as though death was upon me rather than past.

            It was a weird thing to have this around as I am in touch with my immortality. It didn’t frighten me. It was just uncomfortable. And it was in the midst of this that I looked directly at the idea of death and felt deeply my former death wish in the ego. Really, truly, deeply I wanted to die. I expected it and a part of me was upset it is not going to happen. Death was seen as blessed relief, presumably from guilt. I didn’t have to deal with it if I was going to die someday. I could just put it off until death took me.

            But, alas, I’m not going to die. Haha! What a notion! It turns out that, yes, indeed, as A Course in Miracles says, the ego was death. It was the negation of Life, and what is that but death? This is clear to me now when I fall out of Life and back into the habits of the ego. It feels like death in relation to Life.

            So in ego I never really feared death: I wished for it. It is what the ego was. This is what I have “lost”. And, oh, yes, Life is so very, very different from death. I have to acclimate to It! I had it all wrong; upside down and backwards. But that’s okay. Life is inevitable.

>>>>> 

This is my last ACIM Mentor article. I am moving out of “correction” to “creation” (extension; expression). I do not yet know what this will look like, but just that my new experience of existence is very different from the old one.

My articles up through 2018 are available in three volumes of The ACIM Mentor Articles. You can find these at www.amazon.com. You can read my 2019 and 2020 articles at www.acimentor.blogspot.com.

Thank you for your interest in my writing for however long you have been subscribed. I leave you with Love and Peace.