coming alive, and being there for it!

WHAT IS THE ''SECOND DEATH'' THAT'S MENTIONED IN THE BIBLE?

**"He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. The one who conquers will not be hurt by the second death." ~Revelation 2:11

**"Truly I say to you, there are some of those who are standing here who shall not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in His kingdom." ~Mathew 16:28

"No one can die unless he chooses death" ~Text, ACIM

QUESTION: I've been giving a lot of thought about the things that you've been saying about thinking. And it's occurred to me before I heard you say this that when we're not thinking we're fully present in the moment and we're giving our attention to whatever is in front of us. And awareness seems to expand in the moment. In other words, ideas or insights occur in the moment of what is going on. This is the way I'm experiencing this. And in the moment it's timeless. Here in this moment is no time. If I'm seeing this correctly.....

ANSWER: That is correct.

QUESTION: Now if that in fact "be here now, this is the Kingdom of God now," with my full attention present, I am not in time, which is the past or the future, the opportunity to be here now forever as I am in my body is possible as it fulfills purpose?

What I'm trying to say is I'm approaching the "golden years" of my life span as we understand it, which means I'm going to be facing the wall of hypnosis of "well, the medical bulletins as we die on the installment plan . . . as our body begins to deteriorate on the installment plan I guess. I know the relationship between thinking and fear and all that accompanies all that. And what I guess I'm trying to say or understand with you is I read in one of the "Conversations" that we can be here for a hundred years, two hundred years....
ANSWER: ....a thousand years.
QUESTION: A thousand years?
ANSWER: Or until you simply wish to be somewhere else.
QUESTION: In other words, by choice, not by sin, suffering, death and all that?
ANSWER: That is correct.
QUESTION: So I remember in the scriptures you said, I think that it was recorded that you said, someone asked you something about death and you said, "that there would be those present who would not taste the second death."** I don't know if this was related to. In other words, I was to understand there were those there present who would still be around until you would come to them again. At that time I understood your return was to be "in the clouds" and to appear kinda like a great "Cecil B. DeMille production."***
ANSWER: The first death was birth. The first death was your sudden ignorance of what you divinely are, at which point in your limited perception you took yourself to be only what you see and call your body. The second death is when you Wake up.
QUESTION: Ohhhhh, I never . . . that makes sense.
ANSWER: Of course,
QUESTION: Okay, okay, so the second death is a living
experience of translation?
ANSWER: The only experience, no matter what you call it, the only experience you ever have available to you is a living experience.
QUESTION: Right, because we're here consciously.
ANSWER: Even in the belief of death and passing on, as friends have done, as relatives have done, from their standpoint there was never an interruption of living, of being conscious and of being themselves and of being identifiable. In other words, having what you would call a body. So no matter how many times you think you may have been born and died you have never had anything but a living experience-an experience of being. Continue...
QUESTION: So what I want to clarify with you today is I don't want to walk that road of watching myself deteriorate and go through that process, that illusion called sin, suffering and physical death.
ANSWER: Then you only have one solution or one way in which to do that.
QUESTION: And that's to be fully here in the present moment.
ANSWER: Doing what?
QUESTION: Not thinking and being willing to recognize.....
ANSWER .....that which is Real in each and everything. Because that is the act of Love. That is the fulfilling of your function. That is your nature. That is your being. And Love embodied because you are not claiming a right to express anything else is healing. Now healing simply means the uncovering, the bring into view that which has always been present-what has really always been present-right here, right here, right here, you see?
I'm going to address your specific question. The answer is yes. If you learn to be present in the moment with innocence--meaning that you are not applying your own personal definitions to everything and you are willing to recognize what is divinely present in each and every thing, you will NOT have any further experience of death. You will NOT experience any further disease. And any disease that you might currently be experiencing will disappear in the uncovering to you of what is divinely real right where you are.
Now before you continue so that this doesn't sound so wonderful that it's impossible to achieve, or so that you don't all make it highly complex, remember the day dream we were talking about yesterday. Because a daydream is a fantasy....
.....Someone in his reverie and his distraction behaves in a way that's inconsistent with what's really going on. And what's really going on can at times interfere with his reverie. But in order for him to become free of whatever the details are of his reverie, all he has to do is shift his attention back to the obvious, to what is really going on. And this is not an intellectual feat. IT'S A MATTER OF WHAT YOU ARE VALUING. So Waking up is a shifting of what you value. It's not about being something better. And so there's no work involved. It's a matter of changing what you value.
And what we've been talking about for the last two days, coming to a point where you are valuing your capacity to Love more than you value the right you think you have to get even, to be angry, to feel jealousy, to hate and the list goes on and on. Every time you think you have a right to engage in these activities you are valuing them and you are in a reverie, a negative reverie. [Love] binds you to Reality, the Kingdom of Heaven, right here, a Son or a Daughter of God that you are right now and most of all God, which is the substance and activity of all of this as well as you.
You know, you can't love in the past and you can't love in the future, can you? The only place that you can feel love is in the instant of conscious awareness you're having. And the only place you can extend it, embody it is in the now, which is timeless. And so if you engage in love you are in perfect alignment with the only moment there is, if I may put it that way, you see. That puts you out of time. And how difficult is it to do that. You don't need a degree. You don't need any mechanical objects. You don't need money. You simply have to say, "I value expressing Love more than anything else." Well, you say, "that's very magnanimous and wonderful but there are so few people who do it it must really be hard or everyone would be doing it. I don't know if I can do it."
So let's make it a little more relevant. You know the question is, "what's in it for me?" This really makes it more relevant, "what's in it for me." Well what's in it for you is that peace is yours, the absence of gut wrenching knots of fear. The uninterrupted experience of joy. I know joy doesn't motivate you as much as not experiencing pain. So we'll talk about that. It will be the absence of pain. It will be the absence of all kinds of hurting. On that basis I think you all could muster up enough energy to dare to at least begin to choose for Love more consistently at every moment.
~excerpt from Gathering with Raj/Jesus Yucaipa, Ca 1996
Conducted by the Northwest Foundation for ACIM
www.nwffacim.wordpress.com
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