Is that all there is?

I love that wonderful song, and most dearly in the rendering by Joan Morris and William Bolcom, from their Leiber & Stoller album (Other Songs by Leiber & Stoller, Nonesuch H-71346). I could not find this particular song, but you can just about imagine how they would perform it from this wonderful YouTube video.




There is always that haunting feeling that something is missing, and you can stash it for a while, but it won't go away. After many years of spiritual seeking, it all really only came together for me, in the way A Course in Miracles in explains it to me, namely that the choice for the separation, for individual awareness, on a spiritual level is the equivalent of giving up everything for nothing. We gave up the all, for nothing at all, and then spend the rest of our lives wondering what's missing. Well, duh! Only everything is missing. For the choice for individuality means the choice for a limited life, living on borrowed time, for a while, until we die. The Course variously describes the choice for the ego as the choice for death, for murder, for the crucifixion. Logion 11 sums it all up beautifully.

The dead are not alive. We who chose individual existence over the peace of heaven, find ourselves on a treadmill of constantly having to justify our individuality, and making it real by sleight of hand, even though any fool could see in advance that no matter what you do, it ends in death. To keep up the system implies a constant re-affirmation of death and crucifixion, which is beautifully captured in Wilhelm Reich's little book The Murder of Christ. Without going along with Reich's overall thesis, I still find this description remarkably powerful, because it lays bare the mechanism of constant justification which is needed to keep this individual awareness going, and it demands a constant validation of our choice against the awareness of the whole which we have denied in the process and which is our real life in the end, transcending all specific forms, and returning to our natural inheritance.

The living will not die. The other choice, is waking up from the dream, and returning to our real life, which as the Course puts it is only in Heaven. Thus only when we wake up from the dream will we know what our life is, namely the life of the spirit, and we will simply know our immortal reality. The misunderstanding is always that these bodies will become immortal. No what we are, spirit, is always immortal, and we just played a temporary role in these bodies, but they don't matter.