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Chapter 29: Undoing the Gap of Separation

4. Withdrawing from Fearful Dreams

Accepting the Atonement for yourself means not giving support to someone’s dream of sickness and demise. It means that you share not their wish to separate and turn illusions on themself. Nor do you wish that illusions be turned instead on you. Thus illusions have no effects. And you are free of dreams of pain because you let someone else be free. Unless you help them, you will suffer pain with them because that will be your wish. And you will become a figure in their dream of pain, as they will be in yours. So will you both become illusions, and therefore be without your true Identity. You could be anyone or anything, depending on whose unhappy dream you participate in. In an unhappy dream you can be sure of just one thing: that you are unhappy and thus ill, for you participate in a dream of fear.

There is a way of finding certainty right here and now: refuse to be a part of fearful dreams, whatever form they take, for you will forget your Identity in them. You remember yourself by not accepting dreams as causing you, and giving you effects. You stand apart from these dreams, but not apart from those who dream them. Thus you separate the dreamer from the dream, and join with one but let the other go.

The fearful dream, no matter its form, is merely illusion in the mind. And you would unite with the mind, but never with the fearful dream, which cannot be united with. It is the dream that holds fear and thus hate, and not the mind that dreamed it. You perceive them as the same when you believe that you are merely a dream. And then what is real and what is illusion you do not know and cannot tell apart.

Like you, in this world your sisters and brothers think that they are a dream. Support not their illusion of themselves. For your Identity depends on their reality. Think, rather, of them as minds that are sisters and brothers to you though yet in which illusions still linger. They are not your sisters and brothers by what they dream, nor are their bodies – the imagined “hero” of the dream – your brothers or sisters. It is their reality that is your sister and brother, as is yours to them. Your mind and theirs are joined in the Divine Family. Their bodies and their dreams only seem to make a little gap in Eternity in which your body and dreams are dwelling with theirs. And yet between your true minds there is no gap. To participate in their dreams is thus to meet them not, because their dreams would separate them from you.

Therefore release them merely by recognizing the Part in the Divine Family you share, and not on dreams of fear. Let them acknowledge who they are in truth by not supporting their illusions through your misplaced certainty in their misdeeds, for if you do you will have faith in your illusions. With faith in yours, your sisters and brothers will not be released, and you will be kept in bondage to their dreams. And dreams of fear will haunt the little gap, inhabited only by illusions that you have supported in each other’s minds.

Be certain that if you do your part, they will do theirs, for they will join you where you stand. Call not to them to meet you in the gap of separation between you, or you will believe that it is your reality as well as theirs. You cannot do their part for them, but this you attempt to do, and leave your own undone, when you become a passive figure in their dreams of disaster instead of choosing Spirit’s happy Dream for yourself.

Identity in fearful dreams is meaningless because the dreamer and the dream are one. The identity of those who participate in a dream must be the dream they are in, because participation demonstrates a cause that is shared. In fearful dreams you are merely confused, and you share confusion, for in the gap no stable self exists. What is the same – the sameness of the Divine Family and the sameness of all illusions – while different from each other in every way, in the gap become confused, because what is the same appears to be unlike and what is unlike appears to be the same. The Members of the Divine Family appear different from each other, and illusion appears to have different forms, and so illusions and the Divine Family appear to be the same.

The fearful dreams of your sisters and brothers are only yours because you let them be. But if you take your own dreams away your sisters and brothers will be free of them, and of their own as well. Your dreams are witnesses to theirs, and theirs attest the seeming reality of yours. But if you see there is no truth in yours, their dreams will disappear before their eyes, and they will understand what made the dream.

The Holy Spirit is in both your minds, and It is One because there is no gap that separates Its Oneness from Itself. The gap between your bodies matters not, for what is joined in Spirit is always One. No one can be sick if another accepts their Oneness with them. Their desire to be a separated and sick mind cannot remain unless it has a witness or a cause. And both are gone if someone wills to be united with them. They dreamed that they were separated from their sisters and brothers, and by sharing not this dream you leave the space between you free. And the Creator comes to join Its Children whom the Holy Spirit has joined.

The Holy Spirit’s Function is to take the broken picture of the separated ones and put the pieces into place again. This holy Picture, healed entirely, does Spirit hold out to every separate piece that thinks it is a picture in itself. To each Child It offers their Identity, which the whole Picture represents, instead of just a little, broken bit, which they insisted was themself. And when they see this Picture, they will recognize their holy Self. If you participate not in your sisters and brothers’ dreams, this is the Picture that the miracle will place within the little gap, left clean of all the seeds of separation and sickness. And here the Creator will receive Its Children, because Its Children were gracious to themselves.

I thank you, Creator, knowing You will come to close each little gap that lies between the broken pieces of Your separated Children. Your Holiness, complete and perfect, is in every one of Your Creations. And they are joined, because what is in one is in them all. How holy is the smallest grain of sand when it is recognized as being Part of the completed Picture of the Divine Family. The forms the broken pieces seem to take mean nothing. For the Whole is in each one. And every Aspect of Creation is the same as every Other in You.

Attempt not to join your sisters and brothers’ dreams, but join with them, and where you join Its Children, the Creator is. Who seeks for substitutes when they see they have lost nothing? Who would want to have the “benefits” of sickness when they have received the simple happiness of health? What the Divine has given cannot be a loss, and what is not of It has no effects. What, then, would you perceive within the gap? The seeds of sickness come from the belief that there is joy in separation, and that giving it up would be a sacrifice. But miracles are the result when you do not insist on perceiving in the gap what is not there. Your willingness to let illusions go is all that the Healer of the Divine’s Children requires. It will place the miracle of healing where the seeds of sickness were. And there will be no loss, but only gain.