ARCIM

Daily Lesson 190 ~
July 9

I choose the Joy of the Divine instead of pain.

If pain were real it would proclaim that the Divine, Author of all that is, must be uncaring of Its Children’s suffering, or cruel. But because the Divine does care for the well-being of each of Its Children, and only Gentleness and Mercy abide in It, pain cannot be real in any form. It is merely witness to the Divine Children’s mistake in what they think they are. In their confusion, pain becomes a dream of retaliation for a crime that could not be committed; for attack on what is wholly unassailable. It is a nightmare of abandonment by an eternal Love that could never leave the Children It created in Love.

If the Divine is real then there is no pain in truth. If pain is real then the Divine doesn’t exist. Thus the experience of pain indicates that delusion has temporarily taken the place of Truth in the mind. The mind that believes pain is real must believe that the Divine’s Will of perfect Peace and Happiness for Its Children has been denied. Such a mind has confused the Divine with fear. It must believe that the Divine is mad and traitor to Itself, for indifference and cruelty are not part of Love. Fear, going further in denying Love and using pain to prove that the Divine is dead, has demonstrated in dreams that death is victor over Life. Pain would prove that the Child of the Divine is a body, corruptible in life and death, as mortal as the Creator that fear has slain.

Peace to such foolishness! The time has come to laugh at such nonsensical ideas. There is no need to think of them as savage crimes or secret sins with weighty consequence. Who but the deeply confused could conceive of such ideas as cause of anything real? The witness to such ideas – pain – is meaningless as they, and no more to be feared than the delusions that pain shields and tries to demonstrate must still be true.

Pain is simply a wrong perspective, for every form pain takes will disappear if perceived aright, as focus is shifted to Life from Its apparent blockage by pain’s demand for attention. Because it is not a fact at all, when pain is experienced in any form, delusion has been chosen. It is your mistaken thoughts alone that can invite pain into your experience. Nothing can injure or hurt who you truly are in any way. There is no cause beyond yourself that can reach you and bring oppression. No one and nothing but Blessedness can affect your Being, not even your mistaken ideas. There is nothing in the world that has the power in reality to make you ill or sad, or weak or frail.

But it is you who have the Power to control all things you conceive, perceive and experience merely by recognizing what you are—a Child of the Divine, given Power to create like your Creator, and an essential part of Life Itself. As you see the Holiness and Harmlessness in all things, they will recognize and accept your holy will as one with theirs. And what was perceived as fearful before now becomes a Source of Innocence and Joy. Your true Thoughts leave no room for intrusion, i.e., for the presence of anything unlike Themselves.

My holy sisters and brothers, think of this awhile: the world you perceive does nothing. It has no effects at all. It merely represents your thoughts. And it will change entirely as you elect to transform your mind, and choose the Joy of the Divine as what you really want. Your Self is radiant in this holy Joy, unchanged, unchanging, and unchangeable forever and forever. And would you deny a little corner of your mind its own Inheritance, and keep it as an infirmary for pain, a sickly place where living things must come at last to die?

The world may seem to cause you pain. And yet the world, as causeless, has no power to cause. As an effect it cannot make effects. As an illusion it merely reflects what you wish and desire. Your idle wishes represent its pains and yours. Your strange desires bring its dark dreams. Your thoughts of death envelop it in fear, while in your kind forgiveness does it live.

Pain is the thought of a will apart from the Divine’s taking form and wreaking havoc in your holy mind. Pain is the ransom you have unconsciously paid to decline your Freedom, to avoid what you believed would be the overwhelming burden of taking full responsibility for your creative Power. In pain does the Divine seem to be denied the Children It loves. In pain does fear appear to triumph over Love, and time to replace Eternity and Heaven. And the world is proclaimed a cruel and a bitter place, where sorrow rules and little joys give way before the onslaught of the savage pain that waits to end all joy in misery.

Lay down your arms and come without defense into the quiet Place where Heaven’s Peace holds all things still at last. Lay down all thoughts of danger and of fear. Let no thoughts of conflict or attack enter with you. Lay down the cruel sword of judgment that you have held against yourself, and put aside the withering assaults with which you seek to hide your holiness.

Here will you understand that there is no pain. Here does the Joy of the Divine belong to you. This is a day when it is given you to realize the lesson that contains all of awakening’s Power. It is this: Joy is Reality; pain is illusion. Joy is awakening; pain is merely sleep. Joy alone is Truth; pain is deception.

And so again we make the only choice that ever can be made. We choose between illusions and the Truth, or pain and Joy, or hell and Heaven. Let our gratitude unto our Teacher fill our hearts as we learn that we are free to choose our holiness in place of separation, Peace instead of conflict, the Light of Heaven for the darkness of our nightmares, and the Joy of the Divine instead of pain.

 

Corresponding Text Section

 

Chapter 17: The Illusion of the Special Relationship

 

5. The Dance of Ritual Death between Bodies

In perceiving the special relationship clearly, it is necessary first to realize that it involves a great deal of pain. Anxiety, despair, guilt, and attack all enter into it, disrupted by periods in which they seem to be gone. All of these periods in the special relationship, regardless of perceived content, must be understood for what they are. Whatever form they take, they are always an attack on the self, to make the other guilty.

We have spoken of this before, but there are some aspects of what is really being attempted that we have not yet touched on. Very simply, the attempt to make guilty is always directed against the Divine. For the ego would have you believe that the Divine, and It alone, is guilty – of having abandoned Its Children to this bleak world – leaving the Divine Family open to attack, and unprotected against it.

The special love relationship is the ego’s chief weapon for keeping you from Heaven. It does not appear to be a weapon, but if you consider how the world values it, and why, you will realize what it must be. The special love relationship is the ego’s most boasted gift, and the one that has the most appeal to those unwilling to relinquish guilt. The “dynamics” of the ego are clearest here, for, counting on the attraction of this offering, the fantasies that center around it are often quite open. Here they are usually judged to be quite socially acceptable, and even natural. Few consider it bizarre to love and hate together, and even those who believe that hate is “sin” merely feel guilty in the special relationship, but do not correct it.

This is the “natural” condition of the separation. And those who learn that it is not natural at all seem to be the unnatural ones. For this world of illusions is the opposite of the Realm of Heaven, having been made to be Its opposite. And everything here takes a direction exactly opposite to what is true. In Heaven, where the Meaning of Love is known, Love is the same as Union. Here, where the illusion of love is accepted in Its place, love is perceived as separation and exclusion.

It is in the special relationship, born of the hidden request for special love from the Divine, that the ego’s disdain seems to triumph. For the special relationship is the renunciation of the Love of the Divine, and the attempt to secure for the split self the specialness that the Divine could never give. And it is essential to the preservation of the ego that you believe this specialness is not perceived as hell, but heaven. For the ego would never have you see that the separation can only be loss, being the one condition in which Heaven cannot be.

To each person, Heaven represents the perfect idea of completion. There is no disagreement about this, because both the ego and the Holy Spirit accept this concept. They are, however, in complete disagreement regarding what completion is, and how it is accomplished. The Holy Spirit knows that Completion is first in Union, and then in the Extension of Union. To the ego, completion lies in triumph, and in the projection of “victory,” even to the final triumph over the Divine. In this it perceives the ultimate “freedom” or autonomy of the pseudo-self, for nothing would remain to interfere with it. And this is its idea of heaven. From this thought process it follows that for the ego the Idea of Union, which is a Condition in which the ego cannot interfere, must be hell.

The special relationship is a strange and unnatural ego device for attempting to join the ideas of hell and heaven, and making them indistinguishable. And the attempt to find the imagined “best” of both worlds has merely led to fantasies of both, and to the inability to perceive either one as it truly is. The special relationship is the triumph of this confusion. It is a kind of union from which Union is excluded, and in which the basis for the attempt at union rests on exclusion. What better example could there be of the ego’s maxim, “Seek but do not find”?

Most curious of all is the concept of the self that the ego fosters in the special relationship. This “self” seeks the relationship to make itself complete. Yet when it finds the special relationship in which it thinks it can accomplish this, it gives its “self” away to the other in an attempt to trade itself for the self of the other. This is not Union, for there is no Extension and therefore no mutual Increase. Each partner tries to sacrifice the partial self they believe they are in exchange for another partial self they think would complete their own. Each feels guilty for the “sin” of attempting to take the other’s self, and of giving nothing of real value in return. For how much value can anyone place upon a partial self that they would give away in order to get a more complete one?

The “completing” self that the ego seeks from the other is always one that is special, for who would want to complete their incomplete self with something not special? And whoever seems to possess a special self is “loved” by others for what can be taken from them. Where both partners perceive this special self in each other, the ego perceives “a match made in heaven.” For neither will recognize that they have asked for delusion, and so they will not interfere with the ego’s fantasy of heaven, which it offered them to replace Heaven as It is. Yet if all illusions are of fear – and they can be of nothing else – then the illusion or fantasy of heaven is nothing more than an attractive form of fear, in which the guilt is buried deep, and rises in the form of special “love.”

The appeal of delusion lies only in the terrible attraction of guilt, which the ego holds out to all who place their faith in littleness. The conviction of littleness lies in every special relationship, for only those who believe themselves to be deprived could value specialness. The “demand” for specialness, and the perception of the giving of specialness as an act of love, would make perfect Love a delusion. And the real purpose of the special relationship, in strict accordance with the ego’s goals, is to eliminate Reality from awareness and substitute illusion for It. For the ego is itself an illusion, and only illusions can be the witnesses to its “reality.”

You would not want the special relationship if you perceived it as an insane attempt to triumph over the Divine. We need not even consider the fearful nature of such an attempt, nor of the guilt it must entail, nor of the sadness and the loneliness that results from it. For these are only attributes of the entire cult of the separation, and the total context in which this cult is thought to thrive. The central theme in its devotion to the idea of sacrifice, as preposterous as it may sound, is that the Divine must die so you can live. And it is this theme that is acted out in the special relationship. Associating with the ego, through the sacrifice of your incomplete self you think that you can subdue another incomplete self and borrow this from the other, to complete the self you believe you have become. And you are willing to trade the self you believe you have become because you do not think it offers you the specialness that you deserve. And holding it in such low esteem, you have made it little and unworthy, because you are afraid of it.

How can the unlimited Power of the Inheritance of the Divine be believed by those who have so belittled themselves? For so fearful has the Truth become to those who cherish delusion that unless they believe they have rendered It weak, and little, and unworthy of value, they would not dare to look upon It. They think it safer to endow the little self that they have made with power they believe they have wrested from another, triumphing over Truth and leaving It helpless.

Perceive clearly how this ritual is enacted in the special relationship. An altar is erected between two separate bodies, on which each seeks to sacrifice their self, and on their body raise another self that takes its power from this ritual death. Over and over and over this ritual is enacted in the special relationship. But it is never completed, nor ever will be completed. For the ritual of completion can only mimic true Completion, and Life arises not from death, nor Heaven from delusional dreams.

Whenever any form of special relationship tempts you to seek for love in ritual, remember that Love is Content, and not form of any kind. The special relationship is a ritual of form, aimed at the raising of form to take the place of Content, at the expense of the Divine. Yet there is no Meaning in form apart from Content, and never can be. The special relationship must be recognized for what it is symbolically intended to be: a sacrificial ritual in which strength is believed to be extracted from the death of the Divine, and invested in Its executioner, as the sign that form has triumphed over Content, and Love has lost Its Meaning.

Would you want this insane idea to be possible even apart from its clear impossibility? For if it were possible, you would have made yourself helpless. The Divine is not angry about this delusion. It merely could not let this happen. You cannot change Its Mind. No rituals that you have set up in which the dance of death delights you can bring death to the Eternal. Nor can your chosen substitute for the Wholeness of the Divine have any influence at all upon Reality. See in the special relationship nothing more than a meaningless attempt to place idols before the Divine, and by honoring them to obscure their pettiness and the Divine’s Glory.

In the Name of your Completion you do not want this. And every idol that you raise to place before your Creator stands before you, in place of what you are. Awakening rests in the simple fact that illusions are not fearful because they are not real. And they only seem to be fearful to the extent to which you fail to recognize them for what they are. And you will fail to recognize them to the extent to which you want them to be true. And to the same extent you will be denying Truth, and in doing so rendering yourself unable to make the simple choice between Truth and illusion, the Divine and fantasy.

Remember this simple choice and you will have no difficulty in perceiving the decision as just what it is, and nothing more. The core of the separation delusion lies simply in the fantasized destruction of Love’s Meaning. And unless Love’s Meaning is restored to you, you cannot know yourself, who share Its Meaning. Separation is only the decision not to know yourself. Its entire thought system is a carefully-contrived learning experience – contrived by the separated ones in their deep confusion – designed to lead away from Knowledge and into fantasy. Yet for every learning that would hurt you the Divine offers you Correction and complete Release from all its consequences.

The decision regarding whether or not to listen to this Course and follow its Teacher is just the choice between Truth and illusion, Knowledge and fantasy. For in this Course is Truth, separated from illusion, and not confused with it at all. How simple does this choice become when it is perceived as only what it is. For only fantasies make confusion in choosing possible, and they are totally unreal. This Time of Joy is thus the time to make the easiest decision that you ever faced, and also the only one. You will cross the Bridge into Reality simply because you will recognize that the Divine is on the other side, and nothing at all is here. The only possibility as this is realized is to make the natural decision that both follows and leads you to Truth.