1. What waits in perfect certainty beyond salvation is not our concern. For you have barely started to allow your first, uncertain steps to be directed up the ladder separation led you down. The miracle alone is your concern at present. Here is where we must begin. And having started, will the way be made serene and simple in the rising up to waking and the ending of the dream. When you accept a miracle, you do not add your dream of fear to one that is already being dreamed. Without support, the dream will fade away without effects. For it is your support that strengthens it.
2. No mind is sick until another mind agrees that they are separate. And thus it is their joint decision to be sick. If you withhold agreement and accept the part you play in making sickness real, the other mind cannot project its guilt without your aid in letting it perceive itself as separate and apart from you. Thus is the body not perceived as sick by both your minds from separate points of view. Uniting with your brother’s mind prevents the cause of sickness and perceived effects. Healing is the effect of minds that join, as sickness comes from minds that separate.
3. The miracle does nothing just because the minds are joined and cannot separate. Yet in the dreaming has this been reversed and separate minds are seen as bodies, which are separated, and which cannot join. Do not allow your brother to be sick, for if he is, have you abandoned him to his own dream by sharing it with him. He has not seen the cause of sickness where it is, and you have overlooked the gap between you, where the sickness has been bred. Thus are you joined in sickness, to preserve the little gap unhealed, where sickness is kept carefully protected, cherished, and upheld by firm belief, lest God should come to bridge the little gap that leads to Him. Fight not His coming with illusions, for it is His coming that you want above all things that seem to glisten in the dream.
4. The end of dreaming is the end of fear, and love was never in the world of dreams. The gap is little. Yet it holds the seeds of pestilence and every form of ill because it is a wish to keep apart and not to join. And thus it seems to give a cause to sickness which is not its cause. The purpose of the gap is all the cause that sickness has. For it was made to keep you separated, in a body which you see as if it were the cause of pain.
5. The cause of pain is separation, not the body, which is only its effect. Yet separation is but empty space, enclosing nothing, doing nothing, and as unsubstantial as the empty place between the ripples that a ship has made in passing by. And covered just as fast, as water rushes in to close the gap, and as the waves in joining cover it. Where is the gap between the waves when they have joined and covered up the space which seemed to keep them separate for a little while? Where are the grounds for sickness when the minds have joined to close the little gap between them, where the seeds of sickness seemed to grow?
6. God builds the bridge, but only in the space left clean and vacant by the miracle. The seeds of sickness and the shame of guilt He cannot bridge, for He can not destroy the alien will that He created not. Let its effects be gone and clutch them not with eager hands to keep them for yourself. The miracle will brush them all aside and thus make room for Him Who wills to come and bridge His Son’s returning to Himself.
7. Count, then, the silver miracles and golden dreams of happiness as all the treasures you would keep within the storehouse of the world. The door is open, not to thieves, but to your starving brothers, who mistook for gold the shining of a pebble and who stored a heap of snow that shone like silver. They have nothing left behind the open door. What is the world except a little gap perceived to tear eternity apart, and break it into days and months, and years? And what are you who live within the world except a picture of the Son of God in broken pieces, each concealed within a separate and uncertain bit of clay?
8. Be not afraid, my child, but let your world be gently lit by miracles. And where the little gap was seen to stand between you and your brother, join him there. And so sickness will now be seen without a cause. The dream of healing in forgiveness lies, and gently shows you that you never sinned. The miracle would leave no proof of guilt to bring you witness to what never was. And in your storehouse it will make a place of welcome for your Father and your Self. The door is open, that all those may come who would no longer starve, and would enjoy the feast of plenty set before them there. And they will meet with your invited Guests the miracle has asked to come to you.
9. This is a feast unlike indeed to those the dreaming of the world has shown. For here, the more that anyone receives, the more is left for all the rest to share. The Guests have brought unlimited supply with Them. And no one is deprived or can deprive. Here is a feast the Father lays before His Son and shares it equally with him. And in Their sharing there can be no gap in which abundance falters and grows thin. Here can the lean years enter not, for time waits not upon this feast, which has no end. For Love has set its table in the space that seemed to keep your Guests apart from you. [1]
All the dreams that happened in the gaps between us fade away when we agree to join. This is the miracle that ends all fear. We do not bring our dreams of fear to our Father. We do not come to tattle about all the things we dreamed up that our brothers did to us in the space and time that made them out to be our enemies. We come in happy acceptance of the brotherhood. We come as Christ Who is the Son – as one, healed of all that would set us against each other, healed of all that would separate me from you and you from me.
Sickness is bred in minds that agree to be at war with one another. Take your mind out of all agreements that would set you against the Son and there is nobody and nothing that can project its guilt upon you. When I unite my mind with yours and accept my part in making you my enemy, I prevent the madness from taking place. For joining with your mind, recognizing you as part of me and not apart from me prevents both the cause of sickness and all its perceived effects.
We are spending too much time studying this course to overlook the beautiful lesson in healing that is provided here. Today ask Holy Spirit to illuminate this passage to your mind and instill within it the devotion to healing that has been assigned to us. Sickness is the effect of separate minds; healing is the effect of minds that are joined.
Miracles actually do nothing for minds are already joined and it is impossible for my mind to be separate from you. We are one Body in Christ and as God’s Son. Yet in the perceptual world of ego and separation – you seem to have your own body, separate and different from mine, with ideas and behaviors that are alien to me and thus I cannot perceive the two of us being eternally linked and yet holding opposing viewpoints and going in opposite directions. There are things about your body that will always frighten me. You may be bigger than me and thus I am afraid you will step on me and crush me, eat all my food, or infringe upon my space. Or you may be so small I am afraid of your vulnerability and weakness, afraid you may shatter or expecting me to walk about on my tippy toes to protect your fragility and sensitivity. Your skin may be the color of those who would blame me for all their earthly sorrows or conversely your skin may be the color of those who have oppressed me and held me back from all my potential and denied me access to the world’s advancement and acclaim. The private parts of your body may offend me by their very nature and all the things that have been said and done by people with the same private parts with which you were born! Or perhaps your private parts will drive me wicked with desire for what you have and hold dear, and I have not. And I will spend my life chasing after what you have, and I have not!
In this state we cannot be joined. But in this state we can agree to be joined. We can see past the body and all the craziness that seems to pop up in the spaces between our bodies. The miracle is the simple recognition that the emptiness that fills the empty spaces between us cannot be real for they have no value. The miracle does nothing but sweeps away the nothingness so that the truth of our joining is made apparent. There is no need for signs and wonders. There is no need for holy water, holy hands, or holy lands. There are no such things as special prayers or blessings for all that is done in love is done in God and in Love there is no partiality, no specialness, no favorites, no hierarchies. It is God and His Son as one.
The end of dreaming is the end of separation, it starts with the agreement to join, it starts by recognizing the sad substitute for love that the world of dreams would offer us to stay in the gap of nothingness, to not accept our reality as Christ, the resurrected Son, but to stay on the cross in a bleeding, dying, humiliated body that seems to be the cause of all our pain.
The separation is the cause of all our pain, the body the effect of separation. Just as eternity cannot be broken up in days and nights, minutes and hours, weeks, months, and years, neither can the Son of God be broken into pieces contained in separate shards of clay. We do not hold the body accountable for sin for it is only an effect of separation. Forgive the body and it will serve us well through time; hold it accountable and it will not.
A miracle is nothing to be afraid of – a miracle is gentle; its light is truth, and its outcome is sure. A miracle closes the gap between you and me for we meet there where we can see no cause for the insanity that would sour us, sicken our minds and bodies, and come between the Father and the Son. Do not harden your mind toward mercy and grace for mercy and grace are the healing agents of the world which stand for agreement to join.
Make of your empty storehouse a festival of God’s Love. Let it be a feast where God’s mercy and grace are extended to all the broken bits and pieces that stand in place of the Son. Here there is nobody who goes hungry, who is lonely or afraid for this is a festival in honor of the Father, the honored Guest, Who shares in His unlimited abundance. Nobody who joins can deprive or be deprived; here all that is belongs to all that is and ever was and ever will be. Welcome the feast of Love to fill the gap between ourselves and our misconceptions of God’s Love.
[1]A Course in Miracles. Chapter 28 The undoing of fear iii. the agreement to join. Foundation for Inner Peace, Second Edition (1992).
For daily 2021 Workbook lessons visit www.i-choose-love.com courtesy of Linda R.
Audio credit: www.eckiefriar.com
the friar patch 