1. What is a sense of sickness but a sense of limitation? 2Of a splitting off and separating from? 3A gap that is perceived between you and your brother, and what is now seen as health? 4And so the good is seen to be outside; the evil, in. 5And thus is sickness separating off the self from good, and keeping evil in. 6God is the Alternate to dreams of fear. 7Who shares in them can never share in Him. 8But who withdraws his mind from sharing them is sharing Him. 9There is no other choice. 10Except you share it, nothing can exist. 11And you exist because God shared His Will with you, that His creation might create.
2. 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. 2Unshared, they are perceived as meaningless. 3The fear is gone from them because you did not give them your support. 4Where fear has gone there love must come, because there are but these alternatives. 5Where one appears, the other disappears. 6And which you share becomes the only one you have. 7You have the one that you accept, because it is the only one you wish to have.
3. You share no evil dreams if you forgive the dreamer, and perceive that he is not the dream he made. 2And so he cannot be a part of yours, from which you both are free. 3Forgiveness separates the dreamer from the evil dream, and thus releases him. 4Remember if you share an evil dream, you will believe you are the dream you share. 5And fearing it, you will not want to know your own Identity, because you think that It is fearful. 6And 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. 7You will make war upon your Self, which seems to be your enemy; and will attack your brother, as a part of what you hate. 8There is no compromise. 9You are your Self or an illusion. 10What can be between illusion and the truth? 11A middle ground, where you can be a thing that is not you, must be a dream and cannot be the truth.
4. 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. 2Here is a world established that is sick, and this the world the body’s eyes perceive. 3Here are the sounds it hears; the voices that its ears were made to hear. 4Yet sights and sounds the body can perceive are meaningless. 5It cannot see nor hear. 6It does not know what seeing is; what listening is for. 7It is as little able to perceive as it can judge or understand or know. 8Its eyes are blind; its ears are deaf. 9It can not think, and so it cannot have effects.
5. What is there God created to be sick? 2And what that He created not can be? 3Let not your eyes behold a dream; your ears bear witness to illusion. 4They were made to look upon a world that is not there; to hear the voices that can make no sound. 5Yet are there other sounds and other sights that can be seen and heard and understood. 6For eyes and ears are senses without sense, and what they see and hear they but report. 7It 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. 8Let not the body’s ears and eyes perceive these countless fragments seen within the gap that you imagined, and let them persuade their maker his imaginings are real.
6. Creation proves reality because it shares the function all creation shares. 2It is not made of little bits of glass, a piece of wood, a thread or two, perhaps, all put together to attest its truth. 3Reality does not depend on this. 4There is no gap that separates the truth from dreams and from illusions. 5Truth has left no room for them in any place or time. 6For it fills every place and every time, and makes them wholly indivisible.
7. You who believe there is a little gap between you and your brother, do not see that it is here you are as prisoners in a world perceived to be existing here. 2The world you see does not exist, because the place where you perceive it is not real. 3The gap is carefully concealed in fog, and misty pictures rise to cover it with vague uncertain forms and changing shapes, forever unsubstantial and unsure. 4Yet in the gap is nothing. 5And there are no awesome secrets and no darkened tombs where terror rises from the bones of death. 6Look 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.