School for A Course In Miracles

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School for A Course In Miracles

“The universe of learning will open up before you in all its gracious simplicity.” T-14. II. 6:4
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Ken Wapnick Videos on Death & Tim’s Recommended Movies about Death

 

Ken Wapnick 5 minute videos on “Death”:

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click here

 

For Ken’s Foundation’s Youtube channel with over 200 (ten minute or less) videos: 

click here

 

 

Some thought-provoking movies about death and dying and the afterlife:

1) Ghost… the classic with Patrick Swayze, Demi Moore, and Whoopi Goldberg

*** 2) Coco…. beautiful animated CGI flick about Day of the Dead

*** 3) Departures… wonderful Japanese movie about forgiveness and respect

* 4) Hearts and Souls… funny and insightful with Robert Downey Jr, where 4 dead souls “haunt” him and work out their unresolved issues thru him.

5) What Dreams May Come… Robin Williams looking for his wife in the afterlife

* 6) Meet Joe Black… Anthony Hopkins as the dying man and Brad Pitt as “Death,” who has come to get him.

** 7) Flatliners… unusual movie about a group of med students who take turns taking their lives and bringing each other back, and in so doing learn some powerful forgiveness lessons, with very young Kevin Bacon, Kiefer Sutherland, and Julia Roberts. 

*** 8) Six Feet Under TV series… one of the best tv series ever! It’s about a family running a funeral home in LA and their many conversations with the dead folks they are working on…

* 9) All of Me… funny movie about souls inhabiting other bodies after death, with Lily Tomlin (the inhabiter) and Steve Martin (the inhabited)

10) One for The Angels… another classic: Ed Wynn meets Mr. Death in a 1959 Twilight Zone Show (Season 1, #2) on Netflix…   click here  

*** 11) Collateral Beauty… Ed Norton hires three actors to play Death (H. Mirren), Time, and Love to help his friend Will Smith get past his grieving. (A Tim & Lyn favorite!)

12) The Seventh Seal… Ingmar Bergman at his best, about a knight returning from Crusades and his interactions and conversations and chess game with Death.

13) Two X-Files Shows…  [1]”Tithonus” (6th Season, Eps. 10) about a photographer who can’t die:    https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B001DCEK96/ref=atv_dp_season_select_s6

* 14)  [2] “How The Ghost Stole Christmas” :(6th Season, Eps. 6)

Ed Asner and Lily Tomlin as two dead souls that haunt Mulder and Scully on Xmas Eve    : https://www.amazon.com/dp/B001DCEKAU

15) Heaven Can Wait… clever and funny, with Warren Beatty as dead soul mistakenly taken and James Mason as angel-in-charge.

** 16) Sixth Sense… part horror flick/part moving drama about afterlife, with Bruce Willis (nominated for 6 Academy Awards)

* 17) Brand New Testament… Very very quirky movie where God’s daughter releases (on everyone’s cell phone) the date they are going to die….

* 18) A Little Bit of Heaven… with Kate Hudson as woman who finds out she is terminally ill.

19) PS I Love You… Wife finds letters (with helpful suggestions for her) from her dying husband to her… after he dies, with Hillary Swank, Gerald Butler, and Kathy Bates.

** 20) Biutiful….Inarritu directs, Bardem stars as the dying man

*** 21) Amour… touching movie about love between elderly French couple.  It won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and was nominated in four other categories: Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Screenplay, and Best Director.

** 22 & 23) Dead Man Walking & The Green Mile… two very great movies about death row.

*** 24) Kodachrome… on Netflix,  movie with Ed Harris as disgruntled dying parent on road trip with his estranged son.

25) Whose Life Is It Anyway?… Richard Dreyfus as man who fights for his right to die.

(The above starred *** shows are particularly recommended!)

 

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The Belief in The Murder/Death of God, and Our One True Self

More than 50 years ago in April 1966 (does it feel that long?), Time Magazine came out with its now legendary cover “Is God Dead?” It is a topic that the Course explores and discusses as the basis for our choosing to believe in separation from Our Father in Heaven. In order to pretend our disconnect from Source, we had to justify and believe in our ‘killing’ or destroying our connection and Oneness with God.

It is easy and quite normal from the ego’s point of view to skip over and quickly ‘forget’ those passages in the Course that talk about the death of God. The idea of ‘murdering’ God and our own true identity as His One Son is consciously so repulsive, not to mention in truth impossible.

Which is why, as the Course explains, we have to constantly project that guilt/blame for believing we did just that, onto the world and someone or something else, besides us… or we would let go of that secret belief that death is even possible, in a heartbeat (the Holy Instant). 

 

Here are some of the references in the Course…

where Jesus talks about the how and why of our belief in God’s death, and our own, and their impossibility:

 

“Our Ego Belief in the Murder and Death of God and Our True Self”

 

Text:

Ch.16, p.343, par. 12,

The special relationship (any relationship with a person or thing, seen through the eyes of the ego) must be recognized for what it is; a senseless ritual in which strength is extracted from the death of God, and invested in His killer as the sign that form (the entire physical universe of time and space) has triumphed over content (our Identity as Love), and love has lost its meaning. Would you want this to be possible, even apart from its evident impossibility? If it were possible, you would have made yourself helpless. God is not angry. He merely could not let this happen. You cannot change His Mind. No rituals that you have set up in which the dance of death delights you can bring death to the eternal (our true reality… and God’s).

Ch.19, p.403, par.7

7 There is no stone in all the ego’s embattled citadel that is more heavily defended than the idea that sin (the belief in our severed Oneness with God) is real: the natural (ego) expression of what the Son of God has made himself to be (separate from God), and what he is (now… a killer, a destroyer of Oneness). To the ego, this is no mistake. For this is its reality; this is the “truth” from which escape will always be impossible. This is his past (sin), his present (guilt) and his future (fear). For he has somehow managed to corrupt his Father, and change His Mind completely.

Mourn, then, the death of God, Whom sin has killed! And this would be the ego’s wish, which in its madness it believes it has accomplished.

 

Ch.23, p.486, par.2

2 Do you not realize a war against yourself (our true reality as God’s One Son) would be a war on God? Is victory conceivable? And if it were, is this a victory that you would want? The death of God, if it were possible, would be your death. Is this a victory? The ego always marches to defeat, because it thinks that triumph over you (your Real Self) is possible.

And God thinks otherwise. This is no war; only the mad belief the Will of God can be attacked and overthrown. You may identify with this belief, but never will it be more than madness. And fear will reign in madness, and will seem to have replaced love there. This is the conflict’s purpose. And to those who think that it (the attack and overthrow of God) is possible, the means seem real.

 

Ch.26, p.543, par.6-7

But judge him not (your brother), for you will hear no song of liberation for yourself, nor see what it is given him to witness to (his and your sinlessness), that you may see it and rejoice with him. Make not his holiness a sacrifice to your belief in sin. You sacrifice your innocence with his, and die each time you see in him a sin deserving death.

…You who would make a sacrifice of life, and make your eyes and ears bear witness to the death of God and of His holy Son, think not that you have power to make of Them (God and His Son) what God willed not They be.

 

 

Workbook:

 

Les.72, on  attacking God and God’s death, p.124, par.5-6

And every grievance that you hold insists that the body is real. It overlooks entirely what your brother is. It reinforces your belief that he is a body, and condemns him for it. And it asserts that his salvation must be death, projecting this attack onto God, and holding Him responsible for it.

6 To this carefully prepared arena, where angry animals seek for prey and mercy cannot enter, the ego comes to save you. God made you a body (so the ego sarcastically tells us…) Very well. Let us accept this and be glad. As a body, do not let yourself be deprived of what the body offers. Take the little you can get. God gave you nothing. The body is your only savior. It is the death of God and your salvation.

7 This is the universal belief of the world you see.

Les.163 on the death of God and His One Son, p.309, par.5-6

Here is the opposite of God (death) proclaimed as lord of all creation, stronger than God’s Will for life, the endlessness of love, and Heaven’s perfect, changeless constancy. Here is the Will of Father and of Son defeated finally, and laid to rest beneath the headstone death has placed upon the body of the holy Son of God.

5 Unholy (God’s Son in a body that will die) in defeat, he has become what death would have him be. His epitaph, which death itself has written, gives no name to him, for he has passed to dust. It says but this: “Here lies a witness God is dead.” And this it writes again and still again, while all the while its (death) worshippers agree, and kneeling down with foreheads to the ground, they whisper fearfully that it is so.


…God was once alive and somehow perished; killed, apparently, by those who did not want Him to survive. Their stronger will could triumph over His, and so eternal life gave way to death. And with the Father died the Son as well.

 

Manual:

#17, p.45, par.7

 Accept your separation, but do not remember how it came about. Believe that you have won it (from God), but do not retain the slightest memory of Who your great “opponent” really is. Projecting your “forgetting” onto Him (God), it seems to you He has forgotten, too.

7 But what will now be your reaction to all magic thoughts (belief that certain things or forms in the world can make us feel better, or make us feel worse)? They can but re-awaken sleeping guilt (for having separated from God and destroying the Oneness with our Creator in our minds), which you have hidden but have not let go. Each one (each magical thought that some thing, and not God, can make us feel better) says clearly to your frightened mind, “You have usurped the place of God. Think not He has forgotten.” Here we have the fear of God most starkly represented. For in that thought has guilt already raised madness to the throne of God Himself. And now there is no hope. Except to kill. Here is salvation now. An angry father pursues his guilty son.

Kill or be killed, for here alone is choice. (What the ego tells us…) Beyond this there is none, for what was done cannot be done without. The stain of blood can never be removed (reference to Macbeth’s wife), and anyone who bears this stain on him must meet with death.

 

#27, p.67, par.5

5 The “reality” of death is firmly rooted in the belief that God’s Son is a body. And if God created bodies, death would indeed be real (when we believe we are bodies, we are all ‘dead men walking’) . But God would not be loving. There is no point at which the contrast between the perception of the real world (the world seen thru the Holy Spirit’s eyes) and that of the world of illusions becomes more sharply evident (as our belief in death).

Death is indeed the death of God, if He is Love. And now His Own creation must stand in fear of Him. He is not Father, but destroyer. He is not Creator, but avenger. Terrible His Thoughts and fearful His image. To look on His creations is to die.

 


Text, Ch.23, p.495-498, Sec. III & IV excerpts (where the word ‘murder’ is used more than 20 times):

He (all of us) may deny he (believes he) is a murderer and justify his savagery with smiles as he attacks (judges). Yet he will suffer, and will look on his (mind’s) intent in nightmares where the smiles are gone, and where the purpose (murder) rises to meet his horrified awareness and pursue him still.

For no one thinks of murder (the death of God and our innocence as His Son, in our minds) and escapes the guilt the thought entails. If the intent is death (in the mind), what matter the form it takes (in the world)?

You are not asked to fight against your wish to murder. But you are asked to realize the form it takes conceals the same intent (all form in the world mirrors only one of two thoughts in the mind… love or death). And it is this you fear, and not the form. What is not love is murder. What is not loving must be an attack. Every illusion is an assault on truth (love).

Each form of murder and attack that still attracts you and that you do not recognize for what it is, limits the healing and the miracles you have the power to extend to all. Yet does the Holy Spirit understand how to increase your little gifts and make them mighty. Also He understands how your relationship is raised above the battleground, in it no more. This is your part; to realize that murder in any form is not your will. 

Who with the Love of God upholding him could find the choice of miracles or murder hard to make?

The bad news is that Jesus is telling us… we secretly believe we continue to kill our real connection with God and our brothers, and destroy our awareness of our true identity as God’s One Innocent Son… every time we attack and judge our brothers, by projecting our own guilt onto them.

The good news is that we didn’t, couldn’t, and never will be able to do that in reality! God still loves us, and Jesus didn’t go anywhere, and we can’t be ‘prodigal sons’ no matter how much we pretend.

For more discussion “On Death and Dying”

see Ken Wapnick’s Cd set (or MP3 or DVDs)

click here

Course References on Death and Dying:

“There is no death, the Son of God is free…”

27. WHAT IS DEATH?

Manual p.66

1 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 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 “the way of nature,” not to be raised to question, but to be accepted as the “natural” law of life. 

————————————

 Text, Chapter 23, p.493, par.19

19 There is no life outside of Heaven. Where God created life, there life must be. In any state apart from Heaven life is illusion. At best it seems like life; at worst, like death. Yet both are judgments on what is not life, equal in their inaccuracy and lack of meaning. Life not in Heaven is impossible, and what is not in Heaven is not anywhere. Outside of Heaven, only the conflict of illusion stands; senseless, impossible and beyond all reason, and yet perceived as an eternal barrier to Heaven. Illusions are but forms. Their content is never true. 

——————————-

WB Lesson 163, p.309

There is no death. The Son of God is free.

 1 Death is a thought that takes on many forms, often unrecognized. It may appear as sadness, fear, anxiety or doubt; as anger, faithlessness and lack of trust; concern for bodies, envy, and all forms in which the wish to be as you are not may come to tempt you. All such thoughts are but reflections of the worshipping of death as savior and as giver of release.

The idea of the death of God is so preposterous that even the insane have difficulty in believing it. For it implies that God was once alive and somehow perished; killed, apparently, by those who did not want Him to survive…

Our Father, bless our eyes today. We are Your messengers, and we would look upon the glorious reflection of Your Love which shines in everything. We live and move in You alone. We are not separate from Your eternal life. There is no death, for death is not Your Will. 

—————————————-

28. WHAT IS THE RESURRECTION?

Manual p.68

1 Very simply, the resurrection is the overcoming or surmounting of death. It is a re-awakening or a rebirth; a change of mind about the meaning of the world. 

2 The resurrection is the denial of death, being the assertion of life. 

There is no death. The Son of God is free.

———————————————

Text, Chapter 19: The Attainment of Peace

C. The Third Obstacle to Peace: The Attraction of Death, p.416

1 To you and your brother, in whose special relationship the Holy Spirit entered, it is given to release and be released from the dedication to death. For it was offered you, and you accepted. Yet you must learn still more about this strange devotion, for it contains the third obstacle that peace must flow across… What seems to be the fear of death is really its attraction.

 7 Those who fear death see not how often and how loudly they call to it, and bid it come to save them from communication. For death is seen as safety, the great dark savior from the light of truth, the answer to the Answer, the silencer of the Voice That speaks for God. Yet the retreat to death is not the end of conflict. Only God’s Answer is its end. The obstacle of your seeming love for death that peace must flow across seems to be very great. For in it lie hidden all the ego’s secrets, all its strange devices for deception, all its sick ideas and weird imaginings. Here is the final end of union, the triumph of the ego’s making over creation, the victory of lifelessness on Life Itself.

 

D. The Fourth Obstacle: The Fear of God, p.420

1 What would you see without the fear of death? What would you feel and think if death held no attraction for you? Very simply, you would remember your Father…

4 See how the belief in death would seem to “save” you. For if this were gone, what could you fear but life? It is the attraction of death that makes life seem to be ugly, cruel and tyrannical. You are no more afraid of death than of the ego. These are your chosen friends. For in your secret alliance with them (death and the ego) you have agreed never to let the fear of God be lifted, so you could look upon the face of Christ and join Him in His Father…

… The exaltation of the body is given up in favor of the spirit, which you love as you could never love the body. And the appeal of death is lost forever as love’s attraction stirs and calls to you. From beyond each of the obstacles to love (and peace), Love Itself has called.

Also see:

*Workbook, Les. 167, p.318-319:

“You think that death is of the body. Yet it is but an idea (in the mind)… Death is the thought that you are separate from your Creator… What seems to be the opposite of life (in Heaven) is merely sleeping.”

*Song of Prayer Pamphlet, Part 3. Healing:

Sec.I p.16, par. 1-2

Sec. II p.17-18, par.1-5 (including…)

“This is what death should be; a quiet choice, made joyfully and with a sense of peace, because the body has been kindly used to help the Son of God along the way he goes to God. We thank the body, then, for all the service it has given us.

But we are thankful, too, the need is done to walk the world of limits, and to reach the Christ in hidden forms and clearly seen at  most in lovely flashes. Now we can behold Him without the blinders, in the light that we have learned to look upon again. — We call it death, but it is liberty. It does not come in forms that seem to be thrust down in pain upon unwilling flesh, but as a gentle welcome to release.

 

If there has been true healing, this can be the form in which death comes when it is time to rest a while from labor gladly done and gladly ended. Now we go in peace to freer air and gentler climate, where it is not hard to see the gifts we gave were saved for us. For Christ is clearer now; His vision more sustained in us; His Voice, the Word of God, more certainly our own. — Death is reward and not a punishment. But such a viewpoint must be fostered by the healing that the world cannot conceive.”(S-3.II.2:1-4/3:1-5/5:5-6)

For Further Discussion

on Death & Dying

by Ken Wapnick:

(Click on pictures below for info)

 

 

Happy Resurrection!

Please visit this  Course & Coffee Chat replay on the Course’s meaning of the Resurrection (click here)…

and check out these selected Course readings given at Easter Time about the Resurrection:

Chap. 20, sections I & II p. 425-428 “The Gift of Lilies”

WB Les. 135  p. 256 par. 24-25-26 “This is my (our) Eastertime.”

Manual #28 “What is The Resurrection?” p.68-69

Click here

for our latest SFACIM post on

“Healing: What It Is, What It Isn’t”

Quarterly on a Sunday : Lighthouse Newsletter Study Group (Next One TBA)

Every Three Months, on a Sunday, 1- 3pm @ RMMC.

Next one: TBA

The group meets four times a year at RMMC on a Sunday afternoon from 1- 3pm. Upcoming dates and selected newsletter will be announced, or you can contact Chris Dixon. (kevlene@q.com).

There will be study and discussion of one of Ken Wapnick’s past Lighthouse newsletters published by Foundation for A Course In Miracles (FACIM). 

 

Recommended for Ongoing Course Students

(Newcomers …click here)

$7 suggested donation for class.   

 

The Lighthouse Newsletter to be covered will be announced a few weeks before class. 

 

IMG_0003

We suggest reading the Lighthouse article ahead of time, making notes to share about it, and numbering the paragraphs in each section of the newsletter for easy reference. 

 

 

 Facilitated by Chris Dixon

All of Dr. Kenneth Wapnick’s insightful Lighthouse Newsletters are contained in this Lighthouse Anthology from FACIM.org…

Hardcover Book
First edition. 520 pages.
  
 

Excerpted from the Introduction:

In 1990, the Foundation for A Course in Miracles began its official newsletter, The Lighthouse. It evolved into a quarterly periodical announcing classes and publications, and featured articles written by us (Kenneth and Gloria). We have thought for some time now, echoed in the numerous requests of others, to have these articles available as a collection, and thus are pleased to announce this compendium of writings entitled From The Lighthouse. The articles cover a wide range of topics, as we considered both the world of A Course in Miracles as well as the world at large through the lens of the Course’s teachings on forgiveness. When taken together, as they are in this compendium, these writings provide a window into how we at the Foundation have seen A Course in Miracles as a spiritual path, as well as our own development as a center dedicated to preserving and teaching its principles.

Below are some excerpts From The Lighthouse (click on title to read):