People are thoughts in the mind, they are not really people. People do not have their own private minds and private thoughts. And they cannot seem to exist outside of the One Mind. A Course in Miracles states that at no single instant does the body exist at all, it is always remembered or anticipated. It is the fiction of identity as a person that has to be forgiven.

You can see as many thoughts as you want. You can watch those thoughts come by, come and go in your awareness. The ones that seem to be dead, the ones that seem to be living..there’s no difference. It’s artificial, birth and death. And responsibility, there’s only one that ACIM teaches us, and that’s to accept the Atonement.