T. 27, VI. 1 – 4. Jesus: “Pain results from your attempt at separation, and having made the body, its pain demonstrates to you that the body must be your reality! Pain is a loud, obscuring voice whose shrieks would silence what the Holy Spirit offers you, and keep His words from your awareness. Pain compels your attention, drawing it away from Him and focusing it upon itself.
Pain’s purpose is the same as pleasure, for they both are means to make the body real to you. 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 of making the body real cannot be achieved. Thus are they means for what is really nothing, for they have a goal without a meaning. And both pleasure and pain share the lack of meaning which their purpose has!
As ‘proof’ of separation, sin shifts from pain to pleasure, and back again to pain. For either witness is the same, and carries but one message: ‘You are here alone, within this body, and you can be hurt. You can have pleasure too, but only at the cost of pain and death.’
These witnesses are joined by many more. Each one appears different only 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, one form to another, as one steps forward and another back. Yet which is foremost makes no difference. Sin’s witnesses hear but the call of death!
This mortal 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 to 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, is what 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, even if you were to call him by the holy Name of God Himself!
God’s Witness, the Holy Spirit, sees no witnesses against the body. Neither does He hearken to the witnesses by other names that speak in other ways for its reality. He simply knows it is not real. For nothing could contain the self that you believe it keeps within. Nor could it tell a part of God Himself what it should feel and what its function is. Yet must the Holy Spirit love whatever you hold dear. And for each witness to the body’s death He sends a miracle as witness to your eternal Life in Him, Who knows no death.
Each miracle the Holy Spirit brings to you is witness that the body is not real. Its pains and pleasures does He heal alike, for all sin’s witnesses do His miracles replace.”