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Chapter 20: Beyond the Obstacles to Peace

5. Confusing Pleasure and Pain

Your little part is just to give the Holy Spirit your entire belief in sacrifice, and in return to accept the Peace Spirit gives, without the limits that would hold back the Extension of Peace, and so would limit your awareness of It. For what Spirit gives must be extended if you would receive Its limitless Power, and use It for the Release of the Children of the Divine. It is this Gift that you in your right mind would gladly receive. And having It, you cannot limit It.

If Peace is without a home then so are you. And so am I, along with the Divine Who is our Home. Is this your will? Would you forever be a wanderer in search of Peace? Would you invest your hope of Peace and Happiness in what must fail?

Faith in the Eternal is always justified, for the Eternal is forever kind, infinite in Its Patience, and wholly loving. It accepts you wholly, and gives you Peace. But It can unite only with what already is at peace in you, infinite as Itself.

The body itself can give you neither Peace nor turmoil, pain nor Joy. It is a means of communication and not an end. It has no purpose of itself. Its purpose is only to do what is given it to do. The body will seem to be whatever is the means for reaching the goal that you assign to it.

Only the mind can set a purpose and perceive the means for its accomplishment, and justify their use. Peace and guilt are both conditions of the mind that it sets to be attained. And these conditions are the home of the emotion that called them forth, whether Love or fear, and therefore are compatible with this emotion. Just consider an instant which of these emotions is compatible with you. Here is your choice, free for you to embrace and to change. But all that is in it will come with it. And what you believe you are can never be apart from it.

The body is the great apparent betrayer of faith. Disillusionment and the seeds of faithlessness seem to lie in it, but only if you ask of it what it cannot give—for any purpose other than to serve Spirit as a means of communication. Can your mistake in this be reasonable grounds for your depression and disillusionment, and for retaliative attack on what you think has failed you, when you can easily allow this mistake to be corrected? Use not your error as the justification for faithlessness. You haven’t sinned, but you have been mistaken in what is faithful. And the correction of your mistake will give you grounds for faith.

It is impossible to seek for pleasure through the body and not find pain. It is essential that this correlation be understood, for it is one the ego perceives as proof of the reality of sin. The correlation is not punitive at all. It is merely the inevitable result of equating yourself with what is limited and perishable, a confusion that is the invitation to pain. For it invites fear to enter your experience and become your purpose. The attraction of guilt must enter with it, and whatever fear directs the body to do is therefore painful. Then the body will share the pain of all illusions, for the illusion of pleasure is the same illusion as pain.

Is not this inevitable? Under fear’s orders, the body will pursue guilt, serving its master, whose attraction to guilt maintains the entire illusion of its existence. This, then, is the attraction to pain. Ruled by this perception, the body becomes the servant of pain, seeking it dutifully, and obeying the mad idea that pain is pleasure. It is this idea that underlies all of the ego’s heavy investment in the body. And it is this deep confusion of pain and pleasure that the ego keeps hidden from you, and yet feeds upon. It teaches you that the body’s pleasure is happiness. But to itself it whispers that the body’s pleasure is grief.

Why should the body be anything to you but a temporary means of communication? Certainly the elements it is made of are not precious. And, just as certainly, it transmits to you the feelings that you want and seek, having no feelings in itself. Like any communication medium, the body receives and sends the messages that it is given, while having no feeling for them. All of the feelings with which the messages are invested are given by the sender and the receiver. The ego and the Holy Spirit both recognize this. And both also recognize that in this world the sender and receiver – yourself – are the same. The Holy Spirit teaches you this with Joy. The ego hides this fact, for it would keep you unaware of it.

Who would send messages of fear, hatred and attack if they understood that they only send these to themself? Who would accuse, make guilty, and condemn themself?

The ego’s messages of attack and guilt are always sent away from you, in the belief that someone other than yourself will suffer. Or even if you suffer, that someone else will suffer more. The deceptive aspect of your mind – the “great deceiver” – recognizes that this is not so, but, as the “adversary” of Peace, it urges you to send out all its messages of attack and guilt and so free yourself from them, though it recognizes that you will be the receiver as well as sender. To convince you it is possible to send these messages without receiving them, it bids the body search for “pleasure” in symbolic conquest of or by another, offering this to you as “proof” that you are free from attack.

Listen not to the ego’s madness, and believe not that the impossible can be true. Remember that the ego has dedicated the body to the goal of separation and sin in service to the attraction of pain disguised as pleasure and of guilt, and places in it all its faith that this can be accomplished. Its sad disciples chant the body’s praise continually, in solemn celebration of the ego’s rule. Each of them believes that yielding to the attraction of guilt is the escape from pain. Each of them regards the body as themself, without which they would die, and yet within which is their death equally inevitable.

The ego’s disciples choose not to realize that they have dedicated themselves to death. This realization has been offered them, but they have not yet accepted it. And what is offered must also be received to be truly given. So does the ego continue to find the death it seeks, returning it to its disciples.

The Holy Spirit, too, is a communication medium, receiving from the Creator, and offering Its Messages unto the Divine’s Children. Like to the ego and yourself, the Holy Spirit is both the sender and receiver. For the Life that is sent through It returns to It, seeking Itself along the way, and finding what It seeks.