Corresponding Text Section
Chapter 28: The Two Dreams
7. The False Witnesses of Pleasure and Pain
Pain demonstrates that the body must be real. It is a loud, demanding noise, whose shrieks would drown out the Holy Spirit’s Voice, and keep Its Guidance from your awareness. Pain compels attention, drawing it away from Spirit and focusing it upon itself. Its purpose is the same as pleasure, for they both are means to make the body seem real. What shares a common purpose is the same in essence. This is the law of purpose, which unites all things and those who share in it within itself. Pleasure and pain are equally unreal because their purpose cannot be achieved. Thus are they means for nothing, for they have a goal without a meaning. And they share the same lack of meaning that their purpose has.
The belief in compulsive error shifts focus from pain to pleasure, and back again to pain. For either witness is the same, and carries only one message: “You are here, within this body, and you are vulnerable to suffering pain. You can have pleasure, too, but only in this body, so only at the cost of also experiencing pain.” These witnesses are joined by many more. Each one seems different, because each has a different name, and so it seems to answer to a different sound. Except for this, the witnesses of the belief in compulsive error are all alike. Call pleasure “pain” and it will hurt. Call pain “pleasure” and the pain behind the pleasure will not be felt for a while.
As long as the source of pleasure is believed to be in something other than your Relationship with Reality, you will believe you suffer when that source isn’t available to you. And as long as the source of pain is believed to be in something outside your mind – that is, outside the meaning your mind is assigning to a mere sensation – you will believe you suffer when that outside “cause” of pain seems to be present.
The witnesses to the “reality” of compulsive error merely shift from name to name, as one steps forward and another back. Yet which is foremost makes no difference. These witnesses merely dance to the tune of death.
This body, purposeless within itself, holds all the memories and hopes of which you are aware. You use its eyes to look, its ears to listen, and let it tell you what it feels. Yet it does not know. It tells you only the names you gave it to use when you call forth the witnesses to its reality. You cannot choose among them which are real, for any one you choose is unreal like the rest. This name or that you choose, but nothing more. You do not make a witness true because you call it by Truth’s Name. The truth is found in it only if it is Truth it represents. And otherwise it bears false witness, even if you call it holy.
The Divine’s Witness sees no witnesses against the body. Neither does It harken to the witnesses by other names that speak in other ways for the body’s reality. It knows that the body is not real, for nothing finite could contain what you believe it holds within itself—a Child of the Divine. Nor could it tell a Part of the Divine Itself what It should feel, and what Its Function is. Yet must the Divine’s Witness love whatever you hold dear. And for each witness to the tune of death It sends a Witness to your Life within the One Who knows no death. Each miracle It brings is Witness that the body is not real. The body’s pains and pleasures does It cure alike, for all of the witnesses to the body’s reality and its seeming compulsive error do Its Witnesses replace.
The miracle makes no distinctions in the names by which the witnesses to error’s reality – to separation – are called, be this fear, sin, hate, or guilt. It merely proves that what they represent has no effects. And this it proves because the miracle’s own effects have come to take their place. It matters not the name by which you called your suffering, whether this appeared as pain or pleasure. It is no longer there in the experience you are now choosing. The One Who brings the miracle perceived your pleasures and pains all as one, and called them truly by the single name of “fear.” As fear is opposite of Love and witness unto death, so is the miracle the Witness unto Love and Life. It is a Witness everyone must acknowledge, for It brings the Effects of Life, and Life is real. The dying live, the dead arise, and pain has vanished. Yet a miracle speaks not only for itself as demonstration of Life, but for what it represents. Love, too, has real symbols in a world of illusion. The miracle forgives because it stands for the truth beyond forgiveness.
How senseless it is to think that a miracle is bound by laws that it came solely to undo. The “laws of separation” have different witnesses, with different perspectives. And they attest to different suffering. Yet to the One Who sends forth miracles to bless the world, a tiny stab of pain, a little worldly pleasure, and the throes of death itself are but a single sound: a call for healing and a tearful cry for help within a world of misery. It is their sameness that the miracle bears witness to. It is their sameness that it proves. The laws that call them different are dissolved, and shown as powerless. The Purpose of a miracle is to accomplish this. And the Divine Itself has guaranteed the Strength of miracles for what they witness to.
Be witnesses unto the miracle and not the “laws” of separation. There is no need to suffer any longer. But there is need that your mind be healed, because the suffering of the world has made it deaf to its awakening and Deliverance. The Resurrection of the world awaits your healing and happiness, that you may demonstrate the healing of the world. The Holy Instant will replace all belief in separation if you carry only Its Effects with you. And no one will elect any longer to suffer. What better function could you serve than this? Be healed that you may heal, and consent not to the laws of separation being applied to you. And Truth will be revealed to you who choose to let Love’s Symbols take the place of error.
