Corresponding Text Section

Chapter 29: Undoing the Gap of Separation

3. Silver Miracles and Golden Dreams of Happiness

What waits in perfect Certainty beyond awakening is not our concern. For you have just started to allow your first, uncertain steps to be directed up the ladder separation led you down. The miracle alone is your concern at present. Here is where we must begin. And, having started, will the Way be made serene and simple in the rising up to awakening and the ending of the dream.

When you accept a miracle, you do not add your dream of fear to one that is already being dreamed. Without support the unhappy dream will fade away with all appearances of effects gone with it. For it is your support that strengthens it. No mind is sick until another mind agrees that they are separate. And thus it is their joint decision to perceive sickness as if it were real.

If you acknowledge the part you play in making sickness seem real in the body, and withhold your agreement to participate, the other mind cannot project its guilt without your aid in letting it look upon itself as separate and apart from you. Thus is the body not perceived as being sick by both your minds, from separate points of view. Uniting with your brother’s or sister’s true mind prevents the cause of sickness, and this cause’s perceived effects. Healing is the effect of minds that join, as sickness comes from minds that separate.

The miracle does nothing that affects the Real World just because minds are always joined in Reality, and cannot be separate. Yet in the dreams of this world has this been reversed, and separate minds are perceived as bodies, which are separated, and which cannot join.

Do not accept the appearance of sickness in your sisters and brothers, for if they are sick then have you abandoned them to their own dream by participating in it with them. They have not yet recognized the cause of sickness where it is, and if you accept the appearance of sickness in their body then you have not seen beyond the gap that your bodies seem to make between you, where the sickness has been bred. Thus do you each experience the separateness of sickness, and preserve the little gap unhealed where sickness is kept carefully protected, cherished, and upheld by firm belief, lest the Divine should come to bridge the little gap, and lead you Home to It. Do not oppose Its Coming, for it is Its Coming that you want above all things that seem to glisten in the dream. The end of dreaming is the end of fear, for perfect Love was never in the world of dreams, and where perfect Love is the world of dreams is not.

The gap of separation is little. Yet it holds the seeds of pestilence and every form of ill, because it is a wish to keep apart and not be One. And thus it seems to give a cause to sickness that is not its cause. The purpose of the gap is all the cause that sickness has. For it was made to keep you separated in a body, which you look upon as if it were the cause of pain. The cause of pain is the wish for separation, not the body, which is only separation’s effect. Yet separation is merely empty space, enclosing nothing, doing nothing, and as unsubstantial as the vacant place between the ripples that a whale makes in breaching. And covered just as fast, as water rushes in to close the gap, and as the waves, in joining, cover it.

Where is the gap between the waves when they have joined and covered up the space that seemed to keep them separate for a little while? Where is the ground for sickness when minds have joined to close the gap between them, where the weeds of sickness seemed to grow? The Divine builds the Bridge, but only in the space left clean and open by the miracle. The seeds of sickness and the shame of fear and guilt It cannot bridge, for It can’t destroy the alien will dreamed by Its Children that It created not. Let the effects of this alien will be gone, and clutch them not with eager hands to keep them for yourself. The miracle will brush them all aside, and thus make room for It Who wills to come, and bridge Its Children’s Returning to Itself.

Count, then, the silver miracles and golden dreams of Happiness as all the Treasures you would keep within the Storehouse of the world. The door is open, not to thieves but to your starving sisters and brothers, who mistook for gold a shining pebble, and who tried to store away a heap of snow that shone like silver. They have nothing left behind the open door. What is the world except a little gap perceived to tear Eternity apart, and break it into days and months and years? And what are you who live within the world except a picture of the Children of the Divine in broken pieces, each concealed within a separate and uncertain bit of clay?

Be fearless and let your world be lit with miracles. And where the gap was perceived to stand between you, join your sisters and brothers there. And sickness will be seen to be without a cause. The dream of healing is in forgiveness, and gently shows you that neither you nor your brother or sister have ever done anything that would make fear or guilt real. The miracle would leave no proof of fear or guilt to bring you witness to what never was. And in your Storehouse it will make a place of welcome for your Creator and your holy Self. The door is open so that all those may come who would no longer starve, and would enjoy the Feast of Plenty set before them there. And they will meet with your invited Guests that the miracle has asked to come to you.

This is a feast indeed unlike to those the dreaming of the world has shown. For here, the more that anyone receives, the more is left for all the rest to share. The Guests have brought unlimited Supply with Them. And no one is deprived or can deprive. Here is a Feast the Creator spreads before Its Children, and shares It equally with them. And in their sharing there can be no gap in which Abundance falters and grows thin. Here can the lean years enter not, for time waits not upon this Feast that has no end. For Love has set Its Table in the space that seemed to keep your Guests apart from you.