What is a sense of sickness but a sense of limitation? Of a splitting
OFF and separating FROM? A gap perceived between yourselves and what is
seen as health? The good is seen outside; the evil, in. And thus is
sickness separating off the self from good, and keeping evil in. God is
the ALTERNATE to dreams of fear. Who shares in them can NEVER share in
Him. But who withdraws his mind from sharing them IS sharing Him. There
is no other choice. Except you share it, nothing can exist. And YOU
exist because God shared His Will with you, that His creation might
create.

It is the SHARING of the evil dreams of hate and malice, bitterness and
death, of sin and suffering and pain and loss, that makes them real.
Unshared, they are perceived as meaningless. The fear is gone from them
because you did not give them your support. Where fear has gone there
love MUST come, because there ARE but these alternatives. Where one
appears, the other disappears. And which you share becomes the only one
you have. You have the one which you accept, because it is the only one
you WISH to have. You share no evil dreams if you forgive the dreamer,
and perceive that he is not the dream he made. And so he cannot be a
part of yours, from which you BOTH are free. Forgiveness separates the
dreamer from the evil dream, and thus releases him.

Remember if you share an evil dream, you will believe you ARE the dream
you share. And fearing it, you will not WANT to know
your own identity, because you think that IT is fearful. And you WILL
deny your Self, and walk upon an alien ground which your Creator did not
make, 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 WILL attack your
brother, as a part of what you hate. There IS no compromise. You are
your Self or an illusion. What can be between illusion and the truth? A
middle ground, where you can be a thing that is not you, must be a dream
and cannot be the truth.

You have conceived a little gap between illusions and the truth to be
the place where all your safety lies, 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 perceive. Here are the sounds it
hears; the voices which its ears were made to hear. Yet sights and
sounds the body can perceive are meaningless. It cannot see nor hear. It
does not know what seeing IS; what listening is FOR. It is as little
able to perceive as it can judge or understand or know. Its eyes are
blind; its ears are deaf. It cannot think, and so it cannot have
effects.

What is there God created to be sick? And what that He created not can
be? Let not your eyes behold a dream; your ears bear witness to
illusion. They were made to look upon a world that is not there; to hear
the voices that can make no sound. Yet are there other sounds and other
sights which CAN be seen and heard and understood. For eyes and ears are
senses without sense, and what they see and hear they but report. It is
not they that hear and see, but YOU, who put 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 seen within the gap which you imagined, and let them
not persuade their maker his imaginings are real.

Creation proves reality because it shares the function all creation
shares. It is not made of little bits of glass, a piece of wood, a
thread or two perhaps, all put together to attest its truth. Reality
does not depend on this. There IS no gap which separates the truth from
dreams and from illusions. Truth has left no room for them in any place
or time. For it fills every place and every time, and makes them wholly
indivisible.

You who believe there IS a little gap between you, do not
understand that it is here that you are kept as prisoners in a world
perceived to be existing here. The world you see does not exist, because
the place where 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 changing shapes, forever unsubstantial and
unsure. Yet in the gap is NOTHING. And there ARE no awesome secrets and
no darkened tombs where terror rises from the bones of death. Look at
the little gap, and you behold the innocence and emptiness of sin that
you will see within yourself, when you have lost the fear of RECOGNIZING
love.