V. The Alternate to Dreams of Fear

T-28.V.1. What is a sense of sickness but a sense of limitation? ² Of a splitting off and separating from ? ³ A gap that is perceived between you and your brother, and what is now seen as health? ⁴ And so the good is seen to be outside; the evil, in. ⁵ And thus is sickness separating off the self from good, and keeping evil in. ⁶ God is the Alternate to dreams of fear. ⁷ Who shares in them can never share in Him. ⁸ But who withdraws his mind from sharing them is sharing Him. ⁹ There is no other choice. ¹⁰ Except you share it, nothing can exist. ¹¹ And you exist because God shared His Will with you, that His creation might create.

T-28.V.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. ² Unshared, they are perceived as meaningless. ³ The fear is gone from them because you did not give them your support. ⁴ Where fear has gone there love must come, because there are but these alternatives. ⁵ Where one appears, the other disappears. ⁶ And which you share becomes the only one you have. ⁷ You have the one that you accept, because it is the only one you wish to have.

T-28.V.3. You share no evil dreams if you forgive the dreamer, and perceive that he is not the dream he made. ² And so he cannot be a part of yours, from which you both are free. ³ Forgiveness separates the dreamer from the evil dream, and thus releases him. ⁴ Remember if you share an evil dream, you will believe you are the dream you share. ⁵ And fearing it, you will not want to know your own Identity, because you think that It is fearful. ⁶ 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. ⁷ 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. ⁸ There is no compromise. ⁹ You are your Self or an illusion. ¹⁰ What can be between illusion and the truth? ¹¹ A middle ground, where you can be a thing that is not you, must be a dream and cannot be the truth.

T-28.V.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. ² Here is a world established that is sick, and this the world the body's eyes perceive. ³ Here are the sounds it hears; the voices that its ears were made to hear. ⁴ Yet sights and sounds the body can perceive are meaningless. ⁵ It cannot see nor hear. ⁶ It does not know what seeing is ; what listening is for. ⁷ It is as little able to perceive as it can judge or understand or know. ⁸ Its eyes are blind; its ears are deaf. ⁹ It can not think, and so it cannot have effects.

T-28.V.5. What is there God created to be sick? ² And what that He created not can be? ³ Let not your eyes behold a dream; your ears bear witness to illusion. ⁴ They were made to look upon a world that is not there; to hear the voices that can make no sound. ⁵ Yet are there other sounds and other sights that can be seen and heard and understood. ⁶ For eyes and ears are senses without sense, and what they see and hear they but report. ⁷ 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. ⁸ Let 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.

T-28.V.6. Creation proves reality because it shares the function all creation shares. ² 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. ³ Reality does not depend on this. ⁴ There is no gap that separates the truth from dreams and from illusions. ⁵ Truth has left no room for them in any place or time. ⁶ For it fills every place and every time, and makes them wholly indivisible.

T-28.V.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. ² The world you see does not exist, because the place where you perceive it is not real. ³ 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. ⁴ Yet in the gap is nothing. ⁵ And there are no awesome secrets and no darkened tombs where terror rises from the bones of death. ⁶ 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.