A Course in Miracles

Chapter 27 - The Purpose of Pain

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.

This body, purposeless within itself, holds all your memories and all your hopes. You use

• its eyes to see,
• its ears to hear, and
• let it tell you what it is it feels.

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.

God’s Witness sees no witnesses against the body, neither does He harken to the witnesses by other names which speak in other ways for its reality.

He knows it is not real.

For nothing could contain what you believe it holds within. Nor could it tell a part of God Himself what it should feel, and what its function is.

Yet must He love whatever you hold dear. And for each witness to the body’s death He sends a witness to your life in Him Who knows no death.

Each miracle He brings is witness that the body is not real.

Its pains and pleasures does He heal alike, for all sin’s witnesses do His replace.

The miracle makes no distinctions in the names by which sin’s witnesses are called. It merely proves that what they represent has no effects. And this it proves because its own effects have come to take their place.

It matters not the name by which you called your suffering. It is no longer there.

The One Who brings the miracle perceived them all as one, and called by name of fear.

As fear is witness unto death, so is the miracle the witness unto life.

It is a witness no one can deny, for it is the effects of life it brings. The dying live, the dead arise, and pain has vanished.

Yet a miracle speaks not but for itself, but what it represents.

Love, too, has symbols in a world of sin.

The miracle forgives because it stands for what is past forgiveness, and is true.

Be Healed That You May Heal

How foolish and insane it is to think a miracle is bound by laws which it came solely to undo!

The laws of sin have different witnesses, with different strengths, and they attest to different sufferings. 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 plaintive cry for help within a world of misery.

It is their sameness that the miracle attests. It is their sameness that it proves. The laws which call them different are dissolved, and shown as powerless.

The purpose of a miracle is to accomplish this, and God Himself has guaranteed the strength of miracles for what they witness to.

Be witnesses unto the miracle, and not the laws of sin.

There is no need to suffer any more. But there is need that you be healed, because the suffering of the world has made it deaf to its salvation and deliverance.

The resurrection of the world awaits your healing and your happiness, that you may demonstrate the healing of the world.

The holy instant will replace all sin, if you but carry its effects with you. And no one will elect to suffer more.

What better function could you serve than this?

Be healed that you may heal! And suffer not the laws of sin to be applied to you. And truth (of what you are) will be revealed to you, who chose to let love’s symbols take the place of sin.

A Course in Miracles

Chapter 27- The Illusion of Suffering

Suffering is an emphasis upon all that the world has done to injure you.

Here is the world’s demented version of salvation clearly shown. Like to a dream of punishment, in which the dreamer is unconscious of what brought on the attack against himself, he sees himself attacked unjustly, and by something not himself.

He is the victim of this “something else,” a thing outside himself, for which he has no reason to be held responsible.

He must be innocent because he knows not what he does, but what is done to him. Yet is his own attack upon himself apparent still, for it is he who bears the suffering. And he cannot escape because its source is seen outside himself.

Now you are being shown you can escape.

All that is needed is you look upon the problem as it is, and not the way that you have set it up.

How could there be another way to solve a problem which is very simple, but has been obscured by heavy clouds of complication, which were made to keep the problem unresolved?

Without the clouds, the problem will emerge in all its primitive simplicity. The choice will not be difficult, because the problem is absurd when clearly seen. No one has difficulty making up his mind to let a simple problem be resolved if it is seen as hurting him, and also very easily removed.

The “reasoning” by which the world is made, on which it rests, by which it is maintained, is simply this:

“You are the cause of what I do.

Your presence justifies my wrath, and you exist and think apart from me.

While you attack, I must be innocent.

And what I suffer from is your attack.”

No one who looks upon this “reasoning” exactly as it is could fail to see it does not follow, and it makes no sense.

Yet it seems sensible because it looks as if the world were hurting you, and so it seems as if there is no need to go beyond the obvious in terms of cause.

There is indeed a need.

The world’s escape from condemnation is a need which those within the world are joined in sharing.

Yet they do not recognize their common need, for each one thinks that if he does his part, the condemnation of the world will rest on him. And it is this that he perceives to be his part in its deliverance.

Vengeance must have a focus. Otherwise is the avenger’s knife in his own hand, and pointed to himself.

And he must see it in another’s hand, if he would be a victim of attack he did not choose. And thus he suffers from the wounds a knife he does not hold has made upon himself.

This is the purpose of the world he sees. And looked at thus, the world provides the means by which this purpose seems to be fulfilled.

The means attest the purpose, but are not themselves a cause, nor will the cause be changed by seeing it apart from its effects. The cause produces the effects, which then bear witness to the cause, and not themselves.

Look, then, beyond effects. It is not here the cause of suffering and sin must lie. And dwell not on the suffering and sin, for they are but reflections of their cause.

The part you play in salvaging the world from condemnation is your own escape. Forget not that the witness to the world of evil cannot speak except for what has seen a need for evil in the world, and this is where your guilt was first beheld.

In separation from your brother was the first attack upon yourself begun, and it is this the world bears witness to. Seek not another cause, nor look among the mighty legions of its witnesses for its undoing. They support its claim on your allegiance.

What conceals the truth is not where you should look to find the truth.

The witnesses to sin (witnesses to the body as your reality) all stand within one little space. And it is here you find the cause of your perspective on the world.

Once you were unaware of what the cause of everything the world appeared to thrust upon you, uninvited and unasked, must really be. Of one thing you were sure;

of all the many causes you perceived as bringing pain and suffering to you, your guilt was not among them.

Nor did you, in any way, request them for yourself.

This is how all illusions come about. The one who makes them does not see himself as making them, and their reality does not depend on him.

Whatever cause they (illusions of pain and suffering) have is something quite apart from him, and what he sees is separate from his mind. He cannot doubt his dreams’ reality, because he does not see the part he plays in making them, and making them seem real.

No one can waken from a dream the world is dreaming for him. He becomes a part of someone else’s dream. He cannot choose to waken from a dream he did not make.

Helpless he stands, a victim to a dream conceived and cherished by a separate mind.

Careless indeed of him this mind must be, as thoughtless of his peace and happiness as is the weather, or the time of day. It loves him not, but casts him as it will, in any role that satisfies its dream. So little is his worth that he is but a dancing shadow, leaping up and down according to a senseless plot conceived within the idle dreaming of the world.

This is the only picture you can see, the one alternative that you can choose, the other possibility of cause, if you be not the dreamer of your dreams.

And this is what you choose, if you deny the cause of suffering is in your mind.

Be glad indeed it is, for thus are you the one decider of your destiny in time. The choice is yours to make between

• a sleeping death and dreams of evil or
• a happy wakening and joy of life.

What could you choose between but life or death, waking or sleeping, peace or war, your dreams or your reality?

Yet if the choice is really given you, then you must see the causes of the things you choose between exactly as they are and where they are.

What choices can be made between two states, but one of which is clearly recognized?

Who could be free to choose between effects, when only one is seen as up to him?

An honest choice could never be perceived as one in which the choice is split between a tiny you and an enormous world, with different dreams about the truth in you.

The gap between reality and dreams lies not between the dreaming of the world and what you dream in secret. They are one. The dreaming of the world is but a part of your own dream you gave away, and saw as if it were its start and ending, both. Yet was it started by your secret dream, which you do not perceive, although it caused the part you see and do not doubt is real.

How could you doubt it while you lie asleep, and dream in secret that its cause is real?

A Course in Miracles

Chapter 27 - The "Hero" of the Dream

The body is the central figure in the dreaming of the world. There is no dream without it, nor does it exist without the dream in which it acts as if it were a person, to be seen and be believed. It takes the central place in every dream, which tells the story of how it was made by other bodies, born into the world outside the body, lives a little while, and dies, to be united in the dust with other bodies dying like itself.

In the brief time alotted it to live, it seeks for other bodies as its friends and enemies. Its safety is its main concern. Its comfort is its guiding rule. It tries to look for pleasure, and avoid the things that would be hurtful. Above all, it tries to teach itself its pains and joys are different, and can be told apart.

The dreaming of the world takes many forms, because the body seeks in many ways to prove it is autonomous and real.

It puts things on itself which it has bought with little metal discs or paper strips the world proclaims as valuable and good. It works to get them, doing senseless things, and tosses them away for senseless things it does not need, and does not even want.
It hires other bodies, that they may protect it, and collect more senseless things that it can call its own.

It looks about for special bodies which can share its dream. Sometimes it dreams it is a conqueror of bodies weaker than itself. But in some phases of the
dream, it is the slave of bodies that would hurt and torture it.

The body’s serial adventures, from the time of birth to dying is the theme of every dream the world has ever had. The “hero” of this dream will never change, nor will its purpose. Though the dream itself takes many forms, and seems to show a great variety of places and events wherein its “hero” finds itself, the dream has but one purpose, taught in many ways.

This single lesson does it try to teach again, and still again, and yet once more;

that it is cause and not effect, and you are its effect, and cannot be its cause.

Thus are you not the dreamer, but the dream, and so you wander idly in and out of places and events which it contrives. That this is all the body does is true, for it is but a figure in a dream.

But who reacts to figures in a dream unless he sees them as if they were real?

The instant that he sees them as they are, they have no more effects on him because he understands he gave them their effects by causing them, and making them seem real.

How willing are you to escape effects of all the dreams the world has ever had?

Is it your wish to let no dream appear to be the cause of what it is you do?

Then let us merely look upon the dream’s beginning, for the part you see is but the second part, whose cause lies in the first.

No one asleep and dreaming in the world remembers his attack upon himself.

No one believes there really was a time when he knew nothing of a body, and could never have conceived this world as real.

He would have seen at once that these ideas are one illusion, too ridiculous for anything but to be laughed away. How serious they now appear to be!

And no one can remember when they would have met with laughter and with disbelief.

We can remember this, if we but look directly at their cause, and we will see the grounds for laughter, not a cause for fear. Let us return the dream he gave away unto the dreamer, who perceives the dream as separate from himself, and done to him.

Into eternity, where all is one, there crept a tiny, mad idea, at which the Son of God remembered not to laugh. In his forgetting did the thought become a serious idea, and possible of both accomplishment and real effects.

Together, we can laugh them both away, and understand that time cannot intrude upon eternity. It is a joke to think that time can come to circumvent eternity, which means there is no time.

A timelessness in which is time made real;

• a part of God which can attack itself;
• a separate brother as an enemy;
• a mind within a body,

all are forms of circularity, whose ending starts at its beginning, ending at its cause.

The world you see depicts exactly what you thought you did, except that now you think that what you did is being done to you. The guilt for what you thought is being placed outside yourself, and on a guilty world which dreams your dreams and thinks your thoughts instead of you.

• It brings its vengeance, not your own.
• It keeps you narrowly confined within a body, which it punishes because of all the sinful things the body does within its dream.

You have no power to make the body stop its evil deeds, because you did not make it, and cannot control its actions or its purpose or its fate.

The world but demonstrates an ancient truth; you will believe that others do to you exactly what you think you did to them.

But once deluded into blaming them, you will not see the cause of what they do, because you want the guilt to rest on them.

How childish is this petulant device to keep your innocence by pushing guilt outside yourself, but never letting go!

It is not easy to perceive the jest when all around you do your eyes behold its heavy consequences, but without their trifling cause. Without the cause do its effects seem serious and sad indeed. Yet they but follow, and it is their cause which follows nothing, and is but a jest. In gentle laughter does the Holy Spirit perceive the cause, and looks not to effects.

How else could He correct your error, who have overlooked the cause entirely?

He bids you bring each terrible effect to Him, that you may look together on its foolish cause, and laugh with Him a while. You judge effects, but He has judged their cause, and by His judgment are effects
removed.

Perhaps you come in tears, but hear Him say,

“My brother, Holy Son of God, behold your idle dream, in which this could occur,”

and you will leave the holy instant with your laughter and your brother’s joined with His.