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A Course in Miracles Chapter 27 - Healing of the Dream Purpose of Pain or Witnesses to Sin
Pain demonstrates
the body must be real.
It is a loud, obscuring voice whose shrieks would silence what the Holy Spirit says, and keep His words from your awareness. Pain compels attention, drawing it away from Him, and focusing upon itself. Its purpose is the same as pleasure, for they both are means to make the body real. What shares a common purpose is the same. This is the law of purpose, which unites all those who share in it within itself. Pleasure and
pain are equally unreal, because their purpose (to make the body
real) cannot be achieved.
Thus are they means for nothing, for they have a goal without a meaning. And they share the lack of meaning which their purpose has.
Sin shifts from pain to pleasure, and again to pain. For either witness is the same, and carries but one message: “You are here, within this body, and you can be hurt. You can have pleasure, too, but only at the cost of pain.” These witnesses are joined by many more. Each one seems different because it has a different name, and so it seems to answer to a different sound. Except for this, the witnesses of sin are all alike. Call pleasure pain, and it will hurt. Call pain a pleasure, and the pain behind the pleasure will be felt no more. Sin’s witnesses but shift from name to name, as one steps forward and another back. Yet which is foremost makes no difference. Sin’s witnesses hear but the call of death.
IT DOES NOT KNOW. It tells you but 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 like the rest. This name or that, but nothing more, you choose. You do not
make a witness true because you called him by truth’s name.
The truth is found in him if it is truth he represents, and otherwise he lies, if you should call him by the holy Name of God Himself. |
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