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. ²For it was offered you, and you accepted. ³Yet you must learn still more about this strange devotion, for it contains the third obstacle that peace must flow across. ⁴No one can die unless he chooses death. ⁵What seems to be the fear of death is really its attraction. ⁶Guilt, too, is feared and fearful. ⁷Yet it could have no hold at all except on those who are attracted to it and seek it out. ⁸And so it is with death. ⁹Made by the ego, its dark shadow falls across all living things, because the ego is the “enemy” of life.

2. And yet a shadow cannot kill. ²What is a shadow to the living? ³They but walk past and it is gone. ⁴But what of those whose dedication is not to live; the black-draped “sinners,” the ego’s mournful chorus, plodding so heavily away from life, dragging their chains and marching in the slow procession that honors their grim master, lord of death? ⁵Touch any one of them with the gentle hands of forgiveness, and watch the chains fall away, along with yours. ⁶See him throw aside the black robe he was wearing to his funeral, and hear him laugh at death. ⁷The sentence sin would lay upon him he can escape through your forgiveness. ⁸This is no arrogance. ⁹It is the Will of God. ¹⁰What is impossible to you who chose His Will as yours? ¹¹What is death to you? ¹²Your dedication is not to death, nor to its master. ¹³When you accepted the Holy Spirit’s purpose in place of the ego’s you renounced death, exchanging it for life. ¹⁴We know that an idea leaves not its source. ¹⁵And death is the result of the thought we call the ego, as surely as life is the result of the Thought of God.