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Chapter 29: Undoing the Gap of Separation

5. Separating the Dreamer from the Dream

What is a sense of sickness but a sense of limitation, of a splitting off and separating from, a gap perceived between ourselves and what is perceived as health? The sickness is perceived as inside, and the good outside. And thus sickness dreams of separating off the self from the good, and keeping the opposite of good there.

The Divine is the Alternate to dreams of fear and sickness. Whoever participates in dreams of fear and sickness cannot share in the Divine. But whoever withdraws their mind from participating in them is sharing It. There is no other choice. Except you share the Divine, nothing can exist, and you exist because the Divine shared Its Will with you, that Its Creation might extend without end.

It is participating in dark dreams of fear and malice, bitterness and death, of guilt and suffering and disaster – believing in the message that their appearance delivers – that seems to make them real. Unshared are these dreams perceived as meaningless. The fear is gone from them when no support is given them, while not abandoning the dreamer of these dreams. Where fear has gone with connection to your sisters and brothers yet maintained, there Love must come, because only these alternatives exist. Where one appears, the other disappears. And which you participate in becomes the only one you have. You will have the one that you accept, because it is the one you believe you want.

You participate in no dark dreams if you forgive the dreamer, and perceive that they are not the dream they made. And so they cannot be a part of your dreams, from which you both are free. Forgiveness separates the dreamer from the dream, and thus releases the dreamer.

Remember that if you participate in a dark dream, you will believe that you are the dream you participate in. And fearing it, you will not want to know your own Identity, because you will think that It is fearful. And you will deny your holy Self, and walk upon an alien ground that your Creator did not create, and where you seem to be a “something” you are not. You will make war upon your Self, Which seems to be your enemy, and you will attack your sisters and brothers as a part of what you fear.

There is no compromise. Either your holy Self is you or you are an illusion. What could exist between illusion and Truth? A middle ground where you can be a thing that is not you must be a dream, and cannot be the Truth. And thus it is nothing.

You have conceived a little gap between illusions and the Truth to be the place where all your safety is, and where your self is safely hidden by what you have made. Here is a world established that is sick, and this the world the body’s eyes look upon. Here are the sounds it listens to and the voices that its ears were made to hear. Yet sights and sounds the body can look upon and listen to are meaningless. The body cannot see or hear. It does not know what seeing is, or what hearing is for. It is as little able to perceive truly as it can judge, or understand, or know. Its eyes are blind and its ears are deaf to Reality because it is limited and temporal. It cannot truly think but only receive thoughts, and so it cannot have effects. For it was never created.

What that the Divine created can be sick? And what that It didn’t create can be? Let not your eyes perceive a dream, your ears bear witness to illusion. They were made to perceive a world that is not there, to hear voices that are soundless. Yet are there real sights and sounds that can be seen and heard and understood, and you can cease using the body’s senses to obstruct these. For eyes and ears are nonsensical senses, and what they perceive they merely report. It is not they that hear and see, but you, who draw together every jagged piece, each senseless scrap and shred of evidence, and make a witness to the world you want.

Let not the body’s ears and eyes perceive these countless fragments found within the gap that you imagined, and allow them to persuade their maker that your imaginings are real. Creation proves Reality because It shares the Function that all Truth shares. It is not made of little bits of glass, a piece of wood, a thread or two perhaps, put together to attest a seeming truth. Reality does not depend on such as this. There is no gap that separates the Truth from dreams and illusions. Truth has left no room for them in any place or time. For in truth Spirit fills every place and time, and thus makes time and place wholly indivisible while these can serve Its Purpose.

You who believe that there is a little gap between you and your sisters and brothers do not understand that it is in this imagined gap that you are kept as prisoners in a world perceived to be existing there. The world you look upon does not exist because the place you perceive it is not real. The gap is carefully concealed in fog, and misty pictures rise to cover it with vague, uncertain forms and figures and changing shapes, forever unsubstantial and unsure. Yet in the gap is nothing. And there are no awesome or awful secrets and no darkened tombs where terror rises from the bones of death. Behold the little gap, and you will see the emptiness of the belief in separation, and the Innocence that you will know within yourself when you have lost the fear of recognizing Love.