http://www.facimoutreach.org/qa/questions/questions107.htm#Q607
Q #607: Why do we choose suffering as a defense against our guilt? Why not pleasure?
Q #607: In your answer to Question #388, you say that A Course in Miracles "tells us that true prayer is the prayer of the heart, and it is always answered because in the dream we have and experience anything we truly desire."
Why then, do we suffer? Your answer, I assume, is that we want to reinforce our guilt because we unconsciously believe that would save us from God's wrath. This is a very unsatisfying answer. Why don't we just always select pleasure in the world as a defense, and leave out the pain altogether?
A: The Course offers a clear and simple answer:
"It is impossible to seek for pleasure through the body [or the world] and not find pain" (T.19.IV.B.12:1).
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This is true, for pleasure and pain are exactly the same thing, just judged differently by a mind that is refusing to look at the source of endless joy and who would grab for the dividedness of pleasure instead. Thus asking for pleasure IS asking for pain, and the one will not come without the other. The pain may delay its appearing for awhile and allow you to believe pleasure is joy...but in the end, it will trounce you and bounce you...and destroy that illusion entirely.
>>A Course in Miracles "tells us that true prayer is the prayer of the heart, and it is always answered because in the dream we have and experience anything we truly desire."<<
True prayer is prayer which does not ask amiss, or in other words does not ask unwholly. Thus what true prayer would ask for, it asks to continue, seeing that this is what it already has, and in fact is. Thus it is a prayer of rejoicing, not of requesting out of lack. It can correctly be called the prayer of the heart, for the heart is love, and the prayer is love as well.
However, you cannot have anything in the dream, and the experiences of the dream are unreal. You cannot have anything in reality either, for you ARE everything, and in order to "have" something, it must be separate from you. Thus the majority of asking, yes even asking for spiritual help and progress, is lack-based ideation...or a direct reinforcing of the idea of separation. The only thing you can truly desire cannot be experienced for it is not in time, and can only be known...which knowledge is far beyond experience. Experience is only of the dream and is a substitute for knowing knowledge and seeing it clearly, which evokes natural whole joy in peace of love, extended without end.
>>Why then, do we suffer?<<
Suffering is the result of fear in its many forms, and fear is the recoiling from perception that reports unwholeness to a mind refusing to look wholly, and thus believing it is not and cannot see wholly. Suffering is divided and gradated. It is divided into pleasure and pain, and only one of these is recognized as suffering. It is gradated along a scale allowing us to believe in combinations of a little pain and a little pleasure, blurring the definition lines even further. We utterly refuse to admit that pleasure is pain, and that it is not satisfactory, glorifying it to call it love and joy when it is not. We KNOW that it is not this, and yet we insist that it is wonderful. If you take a really close look at certain romantic feelings, anticipation, sexual attraction...and compare these to certain other feelings of fear, a distinct similarity can be recognized...but we shut out that recognition vehemently, and insist that we can make our pleasure-based experience and love-hate relationship real and cause it to "last forever." Sadly we discover eventually this is a falsehood, and painful suffering falsehood. So, simply put, we suffer because we choose to suffer by our plain ol' stubbornness. Even when we see people retching with painful suffering as the result of broken so-called love relationships, or from loved one's dying, etc., we still insist that it is love, that is it real, and that we absolutely won't give it up, even when standing in a graveyard of dead bodies crying our eyes out. What will it take to admit the simple truth...that this "experience" is not joy or love or peace?
>>we want to reinforce our guilt because we unconsciously believe that would save us from God's wrath<<
This idea is true, even though it is a metaphor. When we refuse to look wholly, we send to the soul of us a message of split attention, which is a split desire, which splitting breaks the idea of wholeness in mind...making a false image (for wholeness cannot be split). This split in mind function use makes thinking segmented thoughts (plural) into a sequencing game, trying to find the whole from separated parts. It cannot be done. When we covered over certain parts or aspects of wholeness by our refusal to look upon them equally, we made voids to our vision in this manner. These voids "appear" as the unknown, and thus God (wholeness) seems to be hidden in a dark void or unknown mysteriousness...and fear is evoked by this apparent result of our refusal (denial of attention to part of wholeness). Wrath of God is actually originally perceived as annihilation because the appearance of voids makes it seem that we will lose vision and awareness altogether...and that would be annihilation if it were possible...but it is not, and that is the single limitation to freedom. One cannot shut out the light of wholeness altogether, not even in their made up imagery-and-concept-based dying world. The fear of being forgotten is primal and yet is fear of nothing, of impossibility, for it is based on false use of mind and the resultant shifting sands of perceptions generated in this way.
>>Why don't we just always select pleasure in the world as a defense, and leave out the pain altogether?<<
Selecting or choosing actually is judging or attempting to give unequal attention to part of the whole. It is not possible to do this, for the whole absolutely requires in love that it all both give and receive whole attention (love). We can believe we have thus sinned and voided part of the whole or the vision of the whole, but it is untrue. Our attention is whole, our will is whole, our knowledge is whole, our power is whole, our vision is whole...always. But in the freedom of mind that is our reality, it is possible to deny what we see. We see it, but refuse to admit to seeing it. The "apparent" effect is profound and devastating and alluring...and yet, it cannot be true, for we cannot prevent our vision anymore than we can destroy knowledge. We are just playing a painful mind game. Having seemed to accomplish our goal of refusing attention, we make many pairs of opposites, a design inherent in misuse of mind function. We then judge our pairs to be duality and greater and lesser...or in other words, the tree of the (false) knowledge of good and evil. We would run from the one side of the pair to the other, not perceiving that both are the same...illusion. Beneath that perception, however, we know that both sides of the pair are the same illusion and thus the mind's true function periodically exchanges one side of the pair for the other, an rather inconsistent (unfaithful) balancing act that at times appears to be karma, and at other times appears to be just the opposite of karma. To say that anything in perception is selected as a defense is true in a way, but is true only as a continuing cycle of dividing vision by defining everything, and calculating everything, and planning everything, and so on. We keep trying more and newer ways to discover the "truth" of duality at deeper and deeper levels of division. This is a defense against admitting that our original premise of wholeness being revealed through examination of made-up separatedness parts was a false idea. Since selecting or choosing is founded entirely upon just such a premise, it is readily seen that selecting itself in its many forms is the problem. Selecting is in fact, offering more attention to part of the whole and less attention to part of the whole, and doing this by partial and attempted whole exclusion. However, that is a contradictory idea...one cannot exclude part of the whole...what is "whole exclusion"? It is NOTHING! In dreamside obviousness, one would typically run from the pain and toward the pleasure. Problem is that pain is tied to their behind with an unbreakable elastic band, fully guaranteeing it will catch up to them sooner or later, and the faster they run with more and more energy, the harder it will hit them when it eventually and inevitably hits them. You cannot make the denial of something into that something. You cannot selet things without their being a separateness to them in order to perform selection. Selection "is" the idea of separation and specialness.
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altarlight
The inner light can answer any of this world's queries and resolve any of its problems. Beyond all of these concerns, the inner light will show you who you are and your relationship to all...and bring you an understanding of love and peace that transcends ordinary human thought processes. Discover what it truly means to "love one another" and to "see peace."
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