The total unreality of death must be portrayed to the deluded consciousness. The omnipresence and the omnipotence of life are beyond dispute, and there can be no question that death is a condition set up in human consciousness alone. The first step in demonstrating over death is to get the belief entirely out of the mind that it is God-ordained, or that it is of force or effect anywhere in the realm of pure Being. The next step is to live so harmoniously that the whole consciousness will be not only resurrected from its belief in death but so vivified and energized with the idea of undying life that it cannot dissolve or separate. But an analysis of man, in the supermundane part of his being, reveals that sin or departure from divine law in the use of a faculty actually results in its death.
Death is the failure on the part of man to sustain harmonious life in the body.
Death and sleep are brothers in a metaphysical sense. The life action is never wholly withdrawn from all parts of a form, but in the experience named death there is such cessation of Page 47 vitality that dissolution of the outer shell takes place. Jesus pronounced death to be sleep, and said that the sleeper could be awakened when the vitality was restored in divine order. For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause. We are not afraid to go to sleep at night, yet every time we lie down and fall into unconsciousness of the body, we are enacting in a small way the sleep of death.