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Chapter 29: Undoing the Gap of Separation

2. Healing as Reversing Effect and Cause

Without a cause there can be no effects, and yet without effects there is no cause. The cause is made a cause by its effects; the creator is a creator by its creation. Effects do not create their cause, but they do establish its causation. Thus the Children give Creatorship to their Creator, and receive the Gift that they have given It. It is because they are the Divine’s Children that they must also be creators, who create as the Divine created them. The Circle of Creation has no end. Its Starting and Its Ending are the same. But in Itself It holds the Universe of all Creation, without beginning and without end.

Creatorship is creation. Love must be extended. Purity is not confined. It is the Nature of the Innocent to be forever uncontained, without a barrier or limitation. Thus is Purity not of the body. Nor can It be found where limitation is. The mind and its reflection in the body can be healed by Purity’s Effects, which are as limitless as Itself. Yet must all healing come about because the mind is recognized as not within the body, and its Innocence quite apart from the body, and where all healing is.

Where, then, is healing? Only where the Cause of healing is given Its Effects. For sickness is a meaningless attempt to give effects to causelessness, and make it be a cause. In sickness do the Children of the Divine always attempt to make themselves their own cause, and not allow themselves to be their Creator’s Effects. As a result of this impossible desire, they believe they have become something other than Love’s Effects, and must be their own cause because of what they believe they have become.

The Cause of healing is the only Cause of Everything. It has only one Effect. And in that Recognition causelessness is given no effects, and none are perceived.

A mind within a body, in a world of other bodies each with separate minds, are your “creations” as your own cause, the result of the “other” mind you made making effects unlike your holy Self. And as the maker of these effects, you must be like them. All this means is that you have put yourself to sleep and dreamed a dream in which you were an alien to yourself, and merely a part of another’s dream. The miracle does not awaken you, but it does show you who the dreamer is. It teaches you that there is a choice of dreams while you are still asleep, depending on the purpose of your dreaming. Do you desire dreams of death or healing?

A dream is like a memory, in that it pictures what you want to be shown to you. An empty storehouse with an open door holds all your shreds of past memories and waking dreams. Yet if you are the dreamer in process of waking up, then you perceive this much at least: that you have caused the dream, even if you seem to be awake in it, and can desire and accept another dream as well—one in which you actually awaken out of all dreams. But for this change in content of the dream to be accepted it must be realized that it is you who dreamed the dreaming that you do not like. It is simply an effect that you have caused, and you would not continue to be cause of this effect. In fearful dreams you are the victim of what you fear. But in forgiving dreams is no one asked to be a victim or a sufferer. These are the gentle and happy dreams the miracle exchanges for your own. Awakening does not ask that you make yet another dream, only that you realize that you made the sad dream that you would exchange for this happy one.

This world is causeless in truth, as is every dream that anyone has ever dreamed within the world. No true plans are possible in this world, and no meaningful design exists that could be found and understood, because such plans and design would require a meaningful context in which to be formed. But what meaningful context can be expected from a thing that has no cause? Yet if it has no cause, then it also has no real purpose. You may cause a dream, but never will you give it real effects. For that would change the cause of these effects, and this you cannot do. Those who are dreaming are not awake, though they dream that they are, and so are not aware that they sleep. They perceive the effects of their dreams – illusions of themselves as sick or well, depressed or happy – but without a stable cause with guaranteed effects.

The miracle establishes the fact that existence in this world is merely a dream being dreamed, and that therefore its context and content are not true. This is a crucial step in dealing with illusions. Illusions cease being fearful when you realize that you made them up. The fear was held in place because you did not see that you are the author of the dream, and not a figure in the dream. Dreamers give themselves the consequences that they dream they gave their sisters and brothers. And it is only this the dream has cobbled together and has offered them, to falsely show them that their wishes have been fulfilled. Thus do they secretly fear their own attack, but perceive it at another’s hands. As victims in their own dream they believe they suffer from the dream’s effects, but are innocent of being the cause of these effects. They do not see that they authored their own attack, and so they believe they must be innocent of what they caused.

The miracle shows the dreamer that they indeed are author of their dream, and therefore responsible for it, but also that they have done nothing in reality. What they feared was a real cause was without the real effects that would make it a cause. And so it never was.

The separation started with the dream that the Creator was deprived of Its Effects – Its Children – and powerless to bring them home, since in Its Children’s dreams It was no longer their Creator. The dreamers created themselves in the dream of the separation, but what they made – the ego – turned against them, taking on the role of being their maker, as the dreamers had taken on that role in dreaming the separation. And as the dreamers dreamed that they rejected their Creator, so the figures in their dreams have rejected them. This rejection of all by all is what is experienced as the separation.

The body is the servant that the dreamers in the dream of this world dreamed, but they despise it for the retribution they believe it offers them through its death that seems to end the dream. So they abuse it because they have adopted as their own the motives they have given it.

Just as attacks against the dreamer from figures in their dreams appear to prove that the dreamer could not be the maker of their dreams, so do perceived affronts against you from the elements of your “waking” life appear to prove that you are not the maker of your experience. In the waking dream of this world cause and effect are thus first split off and then reversed, so that effect – the perceived happenings in life – is believed to be cause, and the cause – the perceiver – becomes apparent effect of what seems to be happening to them from the world they perceive. This reversal of cause and effect was the last step in the separation, with which awakening, which proceeds to go the other way, begins. This last step in the separation was itself an effect of what had gone before as the previous steps in the separation. The miracle is the first step in giving back to thoughts the function of causation, not effect of what appears to be happening outside the mind. For this confusion of cause and effect has produced the dream, and while it lasts will awakening be feared. Nor will the Call to awakening be heard, because it will seem to be the call of fear.

Like every Lesson that the Holy Spirit offers you, the miracle is clear. It demonstrates what Spirit would have you learn, and shows you that the effects of this new learning are what you want. In the miracle’s forgiving dream are the effects of your meaningless dreams undone, and now all who have been judged and rejected, including those perceived as foes, are perceived as friends with merciful intent. The enmity of others is seen as causeless now, because they did not author it. And you can accept the role of maker of the enmity you have looked upon, because you see that this enmity has no real effects and so you need no longer fear taking responsibility for it. Now are you freed from this much of the dream: the reversal of cause and effect—believing the world is happening to you. And thus the world has become neutral, and the bodies that still seem to move about as separate things need not be feared. And so there is no need for them to be perceived as being sick.

The miracle returns the cause of fear to you who made it. But it also shows that, having no effects, the world is not cause of anything, because the function of causation is to have effects. And where effects are gone, there is no cause. Thus is the body released from sickness by miracles because they demonstrate that the mind made sickness, and employed the body to be victim, or effect, of what it made.

But half a lesson will not teach the whole. The miracle would be useless if you only learn that the body can be released from sickness, for this is not the Lesson the miracle was sent to teach. Its Lesson is that the mind was sick that thought the body could be sick, and that mis-projecting its guilt caused nothing in Reality, and had no effects. Thus the body is released from all appearances of sickness as the mind without fear accepts its own wholeness. And this is the whole Lesson the miracle comes to teach.

This world is full of miracles. They stand in shining Silence next to every dream of pain and suffering, of separation and guilt. They are these dreams’ alternative, the choice to take responsibility for being the dreamer rather than deny the active role in making up the dream, and then to let the dream go entirely. They are the glad effects of taking the consequence of sickness back to its cause. The body is released because the mind acknowledges: “This has not been done to me, but I am doing this, and I would do otherwise.” And thus the mind is free to make another choice instead.

Beginning here, awakening will proceed to change the course of every step that led into the descent to separation, until all the steps have been retraced, the ladder gone, and all the dreaming of the world undone.