Corresponding Text Section

Chapter 27: The Transition to Holy Ground

5. Moving on from the Time of Terror

A little hindrance can seem large indeed to those who do not understand that miracles are all the same. But teaching that miracles are all the same is what this Course is for. That is one way of stating its only Purpose, for understanding that what is the same is the same and what is different is different is all there is to learn. And you can learn it many different ways.

All learning is a help or hindrance on your journey to the Gate of Heaven. Nothing in between is possible. There are only two teachers, and they lead in different directions and in different ways. And you will go along the way your chosen teacher leads. There are only two directions you can take while time remains and choice is meaningful. For never will another Path be made except the Way to Heaven. You but choose whether to go toward Heaven, or away to nowhere. There is nothing else to choose.

Nothing is ever lost but time, which in the end is nothing. It is but a little hindrance to Eternity, quite meaningless to the true Teacher of the world. But since you do believe in time’s reality, why should you waste it going nowhere when it can be used to reach a Goal as high as learning can achieve? Think not that the Way to Heaven’s Gate is difficult at all. Nothing you undertake with certain purpose and high resolve and happy confidence, holding each other’s hand and keeping step to Heaven’s Song, is difficult to do. But it is hard indeed to wander off, alone and miserable, down a road that leads nowhere, and that has no purpose.

The Divine gave Its Teacher to you to replace the one you made, not to conflict with it. And what It would replace has been replaced. From outside of time, time lasted only an instant in your mind, with no effect upon Eternity. And so has all of time passed, and everything is exactly as it was before the way to nothingness was made. The tiny tick of time, in which the first mistake was made, and all of them within that one mistake, held also the Correction for that one, and all of them that came within the first. And in that tiny instant time was gone, for that was all it ever was. What the Divine gave Answer to is answered, and is gone in truth.

The Holy Spirit guides you who still believe you live in time, and know not that it is gone, through the infinitely small, complex and senseless maze you still perceive in time, though it has long since gone. You think you live in what is past. Each thing you look upon you perceived only for an instant, long ago, before its unreality gave way to Truth. Not one illusion still remains unanswered in your whole mind. Uncertainty was brought to Certainty so long ago that it is hard indeed to hold it to your heart, as if it were before you still. The tiny instant you would keep and make endless passed away in Heaven too soon for anything to notice it had come and gone.

What disappeared too quickly to affect the simple Knowledge of the Children of the Divine can hardly still be there for you to choose to be your teacher. Only in the past – an ancient past, too short to make a world in answer to Creation – did this world appear to rise. So very long ago, for such a tiny interval of time, that not one Note in Heaven’s Song was missed. Yet in each unforgiving act or thought, in every judgment, and in all belief in separation and sin is that one instant still called back, as if it could be made again in time. You merely keep an ancient memory before your eyes. And they who live in memories alone are unaware of where they are now.

Forgiveness is the great releaser from time. It is the key to learning that the past is over. Madness is heard no more. There is no other teacher and no other way. For what has been undone no longer is. And who can stand upon a distant shore, and dream themselves across an ocean to a place and time that have long since disappeared? How real a hindrance can this dream be to where they really are? For where they are now is a Fact, and does not change regardless of the dreams they have. Yet can they still imagine they are elsewhere, and that they still reside in time. In the extreme, they can delude themselves that this dream is all that could be true, and pass from mere imagining into belief and into senselessness, quite convinced that they are where they would prefer to be in their madness.

Are such imaginings and delusions a hindrance to the Place wherein you actually stand? Is any echo from the past long gone that you may still believe you hear actually part of what there is to hear where you are now? And how much can delusions about time and place effect a change in where you really are?

Unforgiveness is a voice that calls from out of a past forever gone by. And everything that points to this past as real is merely a wish that what is gone could be perceived as here and now and made real, in place of what is really now and here. Could this be a hindrance to the truth that the past has gone, and cannot be returned to you? And would you want to keep that fearful instant when Heaven seemed to disappear, and the Divine was feared and made a symbol of your guilt?

Forget the time of terror that has been so long ago corrected and undone. Can fear withstand the Will of the Divine? Can it be up to you to perceive the past and attempt to make it the present? Be thankful that you cannot go back. And everything that points the way in the direction of the past merely sets you on a mission whose accomplishment can only be unreal. Such is the Justice our ever-loving Creator has ensured must come to you. And from your own unfairness unto yourself has It protected you. You cannot lose your way, because there is no Way but Its, and nowhere can you go except to It. Would the Divine allow Its Children to lose their way along a road that is long since merely a distant memory of a time gone by?

This Course teaches you only what is now. A dreadful instant in a distant past, now perfectly corrected, is of no concern or value. Let the dead and gone be peacefully forgotten. Resurrection has come to take their place. And now you are a part of Resurrection, not of death. No past illusions have the power to keep you in a place of death, a nightmare the Divine’s Children entered an instant, to be instantly restored unto their Creator’s perfect Love. And how can they be kept in chains long since removed, and gone forever from their whole mind?

The Children that the Divine created are as free as the Divine created them. They were born anew the instant that they seemed to choose to die instead of live. Will you forgive them now, understanding that they made an error in the past that the Divine remembers not, and is not there?

Now are you shifting back and forth between the past and present. Sometimes the past seems real, as if it were the present. Voices from the past are heard, and then are doubted. You are like one who still hallucinates but lacks conviction in what their hallucination shows them. This is the transition to the borderland between the worlds, the bridge between the past and Eternity. Here the shadow of the past remains, but still the eternal Light is dimly recognized. Once It is seen, this Light can never be forgotten. It must draw you from the past into the eternal present – the Holy Instant – where you really are. The shadow voices cannot change the laws of Eternity or of time used truly. They come from what is past and gone, but hinder not the true existence of the here and now.

The hallucination that time and death are real, and have true existence that can be perceived, has a counterpart that undoes what seemed so real before. This counterpart is the Real World, in which the terrible illusion was undone in just the Instant it took for the Divine to give Its Answer to illusion for all time and every circumstance. And then it was no more, and no longer able to be experienced as actually there.

Each day, and every minute in each day, and every instant that each minute holds, you but relive the single instant when the time of terror seemed to replace Love. And so you die each day to live again, until you cross the gap from the past into the eternal present of the Real World, which is not a gap at all. Such is each life: a seeming interval from birth to death, and on to life again, a repetition of an instant gone by long ago that cannot be relived except in dreams. And all of time is but the mad belief that what is over is still here and now.

Anything in this world that you believe is good and valuable and worth striving for can hurt you, and will do so, not because it has the power to hurt, but merely because you have denied that it is only an illusion with no power at all, and therefore made it real in your experience. And it is real to you. It is not nothing, and through its perceived reality you entered the world of illusions. All belief in separation, in power of attack, in hurt and harm, in sacrifice and death, has come to you. For no one can attempt to make one illusion real and still escape the rest. For who can choose to keep the ones they prefer, and find the Safety that the Truth alone can give? Who can believe that illusions are all the same in their unreality, and still maintain that even one is better?

Lead not a little life in solitude, with even one illusion as your only friend. This is no friendship worthy of the Children of the Divine, nor one with which they could be content. But the Divine has given you a real Friend, in whom all Power in Earth and Heaven rests. The one illusion that you think is friend obscures your true Friend’s Grace and Majesty from you, and keeps Its Friendship and Forgiveness from your welcoming embrace. Without this Friend you are friendless, while with this Friend are all friends. Seek not a different friend to take Its Place, because there is no other friend without this One. What the Divine appointed has no substitute. For what illusion can replace the Truth?

Whoever dwells with shadows is alone indeed, and loneliness is not the Will of the Divine. Would you allow one shadow to substitute for the Place of Power that the Divine appointed for your Friend, if you realized this substitution has left your own Place of Power empty and unoccupied? Make no illusion your friend, for if you do it can only take the place of the One whom the Divine knows as Friend to all Its Children. This is your true Friend who brings you Gifts that are not of this world. And only this Friend to whom the Divine’s Gifts have been given can make sure that you receive Them. It will place these Gifts on your Place of Power when you make room for It on Its.

Forgive the past and let it go, for it is gone. You stand no longer on the ground that is between the past and now. You have gone on, and reached the Real World that rests before Heaven’s Gate. There can be no hindrance to the Will of the Divine, or any need that you repeat again a journey that was over long ago. Look gently on each other, and behold the world in which perception of your separation has been transformed into a world of Love.