1. Accepting the Atonement for yourself means not to give support to someone’s dream of sickness and of death. 2It means that you share not his wish to separate, and let him turn illusions on himself. 3Nor do you wish that they be turned, instead, on you. 4Thus have they no effects. 5And you are free of dreams of pain because you let him be. 6Unless you help him, you will suffer pain with him because that is your wish. 7And you become a figure in his dream of pain, as he in yours. 8So do you and your brother both become illusions, and without identity. 9You could be anyone or anything, depending on whose evil dream you share. 10You can be sure of just one thing; that you are evil, for you share in dreams of fear.
2. There is a way of finding certainty right here and now. 2Refuse to be a part of fearful dreams whatever form they take, for you will lose identity in them. 3You find yourself by not accepting them as causing you, and giving you effects. 4You stand apart from them, but not apart from him who dreams them. 5Thus you separate the dreamer from the dream, and join in one, but let the other go. 6The dream is but illusion in the mind. 7And with the mind you would unite, but never with the dream. 8It is the dream you fear, and not the mind. 9You see them as the same, because you think that you are but a dream. 10And what is real and what is but illusion in yourself you do not know and cannot tell apart.
3. Like you, your brother thinks he is a dream. 2Share not in his illusion of himself, for your Identity depends on his reality. 3Think, rather, of him as a mind in which illusions still persist, but as a mind which brother is to you. 4He is not brother made by what he dreams, nor is his body, “hero” of the dream, your brother. 5It is his reality that is your brother, as is yours to him. 6Your mind and his are joined in brotherhood. 7His body and his dreams but seem to make a little gap, where yours have joined with his.
4. And yet, between your minds there is no gap. 2To join his dreams is thus to meet him not, because his dreams would separate from you. 3Therefore release him, merely by your claim on brotherhood, and not on dreams of fear. 4Let him acknowledge who he is, by not supporting his illusions by your faith, for if you do, you will have faith in yours. 5With faith in yours, he will not be released, and you are kept in bondage to his dreams. 6And dreams of fear will haunt the little gap, inhabited but by illusions which you have supported in your brother’s mind.
5. Be certain, if you do your part, he will do his, for he will join you where you stand. 2Call not to him to meet you in the gap between you, or you must believe that it is your reality as well as his. 3You cannot do his part, but this you do when you become a passive figure in his dreams, instead of dreamer of your own. 4Identity in dreams is meaningless because the dreamer and the dream are one. 5Who shares a dream must be the dream he shares, because by sharing is a cause produced.
6. You share confusion and you are confused, for in the gap no stable self exists. 2What is the same seems different, because what is the same appears to be unlike. 3His dreams are yours because you let them be. 4But if you took your own away would he be free of them, and of his own as well. 5Your dreams are witnesses to his, and his attest the truth of yours. 6Yet if you see there is no truth in yours, his dreams will go, and he will understand what made the dream.
7. The Holy Spirit is in both your minds, and He is One because there is no gap that separates His Oneness from Itself. 2The gap between your bodies matters not, for what is joined in Him is always one. 3No one is sick if someone else accepts his union with him. 4His desire to be a sick and separated mind can not remain without a witness or a cause. 5And both are gone if someone wills to be united with him. 6He has dreams that he was separated from his brother who, by sharing not his dream, has left the space between them vacant. 7And the Father comes to join His Son the Holy Spirit joined.
8. The Holy Spirit’s function is to take the broken picture of the Son of God and put the pieces into place again. 2This holy picture, healed entirely, does He hold out to every separate piece that thinks it is a picture in itself. 3To each He offers his Identity, which the whole picture represents, instead of just a little, broken bit that he insisted was himself. 4And when he sees this picture he will recognize himself. 5If you share not your brother’s evil dream, this is the picture that the miracle will place within the little gap, left clean of all the seeds of sickness and of sin. 6And here the Father will receive His Son, because His Son was gracious to himself.
9. I thank You, Father, knowing You will come to close each little gap that lies between the broken pieces of Your holy Son. 2Your Holiness, complete and perfect, lies in every one of them. 3And they are joined because what is in one is in them all. 4How holy is the smallest grain of sand, when it is recognized as being part of the completed picture of God’s Son! 5The forms the broken pieces seem to take mean nothing. 6For the whole is in each one. 7And every aspect of the Son of God is just the same as every other part.
10. Join not your brother’s dreams but join with him, and where you join His Son the Father is. 2Who seeks for substitutes when he perceives he has lost nothing? 3Who would want to have the “benefits” of sickness when he has received the simple happiness of health? 4What God has given cannot be a loss, and what is not of Him has no effects. 5What, then, would you perceive within the gap? 6The seeds of sickness come from the belief that there is joy in separation, and its giving up would be a sacrifice. 7But miracles are the result when you do not insist on seeing in the gap what is not there. 8Your willingness to let illusions go is all the Healer of God’s Son requires. 9He will place the miracle of healing where the seeds of sickness were. 10And there will be no loss, but only gain.