Library of Christ Mind Teachings
ACIM Original Edition
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1 Pain is a wrong perspective. When it is experienced in any
form, it is a proof of self-deception. It is not a fact at all. There is
no form it takes which will not disappear if seen aright. For pain
proclaims God cruel. How could it be real in any form? It witnesses to
God the Father’s hatred of His Son, the sinfulness He sees in him, and
His insane desire for revenge and death. Can such projections be
attested to? Can they be anything but wholly false?
2 Pain is but witness to the Son’s mistakes in what he thinks
he is. It is a dream of fierce 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 which could not leave the Son whom It
created out of love.
3 Pain is a sign illusions reign in place of truth. It
demonstrates God is denied, confused with fear, perceived as mad, and
seen as traitor to Himself. If God is real, there is no pain. If pain is
real, there is no God. For vengeance is not part of love. And fear,
denying love and using pain to prove that God is dead, has shown that
death is victor over life. The body is the Son of God, corruptible in
death, as mortal as the Father he has slain.
4 Peace to such foolishness! The time has come to laugh at
such insane ideas. There is no need to think of them as savage crimes or
secret sins with weighty consequence. Who but a madman could conceive of
them as cause of anything? Their witness, pain, is mad as they and no
more to be feared than the insane illusions which it shields and tries
to demonstrate must still be true.
5 It is your thoughts alone that cause you pain. Nothing
external to your mind can hurt or injure you in any way. There is no
cause beyond yourself that can reach down and bring oppression. No one
but yourself affects you. There is nothing in the world which has the
power to make you ill or sad or weak or frail. But it is you who have
the power to dominate all things you see by merely recognizing what you
are. As you perceive the harmlessness in them, they will accept your
holy will as theirs. And what was seen as fearful now becomes a source
of innocence and holiness.
6 My holy brothers, think of this awhile—the world you see
does nothing. It has no effects at all. It merely represents your
thoughts. And it will change entirely as you elect to change your mind
and choose the joy of God 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 a hospital for pain, a sickly place where
living things must come at last to die?
7 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 is what you will. Your idle wishes represent its
pains. Your strange desires bring it evil dreams. Your thoughts of death
envelop it in fear, while in your kind forgiveness does it live.
8 Pain is the thought of evil taking form and working havoc
in your holy mind. Pain is the ransom you have gladly paid not to be
free. In pain is God denied the Son He loves. In pain does fear appear
to triumph over love and time replace eternity and Heaven. And the world
becomes 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.
9 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 attack enter with you. Lay down
the cruel sword of judgment that you hold against your throat, and put
aside the withering assaults with which you seek to hide your holiness.
Here will you understand there is no pain. Here does the joy of God
belong to you.
10 This is the day when it is given you to realize the lesson
which contains all of salvation’s power. It is this: pain is illusion;
joy reality. Pain is but sleep; joy is awakening. Pain is deception; joy
alone is truth.
11 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 are
free to choose our joy instead of pain, our holiness in place of sin,
the peace of God instead of conflict, and the light of Heaven for the
darkness of the world.