For more than thirty years, I have tested the principles of A Course in Miracles in the laboratory of my own life. I did not accept them blindly. I questioned them, resisted them, doubted them, and then lived them. Time and again, when I leaned into their promise, I found them true.
“I am not a body. I am free.”
That line was once an idea. Today, it is my experience.
This body has grown older and more fragile. Its strength has faded. Its appetites have changed. For over two and a half years, the taste of food has not been mine to enjoy. Nutrition has come not by fork and plate but through a tube. Medicines have flowed not as symbols of cure, but as extensions of maintenance.
I have not been sustained by flavor or appetite for quite some time.
And yet, I have been sustained.
Sustained by conversation. Sustained by friendship. Sustained by the quiet companionship of Cherie. Sustained by the words that flowed through these hands long after the voice itself weakened. Sustained by the Mind that does not age.
The Course teaches, “I rest in God.” It also says, “The peace of God is shining in me now.” These are not poetic phrases. They are descriptions of an interior condition available even when the body falters.
Now I take what may be my final lesson in trust.
There comes a point when preserving the body becomes more effort than living through it. When intervention begins to feel less like care and more like postponement. When the machinery of survival grows louder than the quiet Voice that has guided me for decades.
This is not a rejection of life.
It is a completion.
I have lived long enough to love deeply, to serve, to write, to fly my last mission, to teach my last class, to locate my last beacon. I have watched the world change. I have changed with it. I have written what I came to write.
The body was always a classroom. It was never the Self.
Today, I choose to be sustained only by the Love of God. No more food. No more drugs. Only water as needed, and the Presence that has never left me.
This is not bravado. It is not theology. It is not defiance.
It is release.
The Course reminds us that “Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists.” If that is true, then what I am cannot be diminished by the ending of cellular activity. The image known as Robert Sears will fade from view. The personality will dissolve into memory. The voice you heard will quiet.
But what was real in me was never the image.
If you have read my words, if you have paused with an idea long enough to question your own fear, if you have felt even a flicker of peace where anxiety once lived, then what was real in me has already met what is real in you.
There is no tragedy here.
There is tenderness.
There is gratitude.
There is profound appreciation for ACIM Gather, for the many groups that allowed me to share what I was learning, for the readers who wrote to say, “That helped.” For Cherie, who stood beside me in body when my body weakened, and beside me in mind when my thoughts searched for clarity.
I do not claim spiritual heroism. I claim only this: the Love that carried me for three decades has proven trustworthy.
If I am wrong, I will discover that soon enough.
If I am right, I have nothing to fear.
The body may require less and less. The Self requires nothing at all.
So this is not goodbye in the way the world understands goodbye. It is simply a laying down of tools that have served their purpose.
The pen has written.
The voice has spoken.
The lesson has been learned.
I am sustained by the Love of God.
And that is enough.