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Chapter 16: The Holy Instant

1. The Ego’s and the Holy Spirit’s Uses of Time

Imagine what it means to have no cares, no worries, and no anxieties, but merely to be perfectly calm, quiet, and confident all the time. Time’s purpose is for you to learn just that, and nothing more. The Divine’s Teacher cannot be satisfied with Its Teaching until this constitutes all your learning. It has not fulfilled Its Teaching Function until you have become such a consistent learner that you learn only of It. When this has happened, you will no longer need a teacher, or time in which to learn.

One of the sources of perceived discouragement from which many students of awakening suffer is their belief that their learning takes time, and that the results of the Holy Spirit’s Teaching must be far in the future. This is not so. For the Holy Spirit uses time in Its Own Way, and is not bound by what are believed to be the laws of time. Time is Spirit’s Friend in Its Teaching. Time does not waste Spirit, as it does you. All the waste that time seems to bring with it is due only to your identification with the ego, who uses time to support its belief in the perishable. The ego, like the Holy Spirit, uses time to convince you of the inevitability of the goal and end of learning. To the ego, the goal is death, which is the ego’s end. But to the Holy Spirit the Goal is Life, which has no end.

The ego is an ally of time, but not a friend. For it is as mistrustful of death as it is of life, and cannot tolerate for itself what it wants for you. The ego wants you to perish, but not itself. The outcome of its strange religion must therefore be the conviction that it can pursue you beyond the grave. It speaks to you of heaven, but assures you that heaven is not for you. How can the guilty hope for heaven? Therefore out of its unwillingness for you to find peace, even in the death it wants for you, it offers you only neverendingness in a nightmare it calls hell. But even that it cannot deliver, because that possibility is as unreal as it is.

The unconscious belief in hell is inescapable to those who identify with the ego. Their nightmares and their fears are all associated with it. The ego teaches that hell is in the future, for this is what all its teaching is directed to, to keep the now out of mind. Hell is the ego’s ultimate goal for you. For although the ego aims at death and dissolution as an end, it does not believe it. The goal of death, which it craves for you, leaves it unsatisfied. No one who follows the ego’s teaching is without the fear of death. If death were thought of merely as an end of pain, would it be feared?

We have observed the strange paradoxes in the ego’s thought system before, but never so clearly as here. For the ego must seem to keep fear from you in order to keep your allegiance. Yet it must engender fear in order to maintain itself, since fear is the condition for its existence. Again, the ego tries, and all too frequently succeeds, in doing both, by using dissociation for holding its contradictory aims together, so that they appear to be reconciled. The ego teaches thus: death is the end, as far as hope of heaven goes. But, because you and the ego cannot be separated, and because it cannot conceive of its own death, it will pursue you still, because your guilt is never-ending.

Such is the ego’s version of immortality. And it is this that the ego’s version of time supports. The ego teaches that its version of heaven must be in an imagined past, because the future must be hell and the present is too fleeting to matter. Even when it attacks so savagely that it tries to take the life of someone who hears it temporarily as the only voice, it still speaks of hell to them. For it tells them that hell has arrived, and to escape this hell it bids them leap from hell into oblivion. The only aspect of time that the ego allows anyone to look upon with some amount of equanimity is the past. And even then, its only value is that it is no more and therefore out of reach.

How bleak, desperate, and terrifying is the ego’s use of time! For underneath its fanatical insistence that the past and future be continuous, and without the present offering a Reflection of Eternity, is hidden the far-more insidious threat to peace that is the idea of hell. The ego does not advertise its final threat, for it would have its followers still believe that it can offer the escape from hell. But the belief in guilt must lead to the belief in hell, and always does. The only way in which the ego allows the fear of hell to be experienced is to bring hell to the present, but always as a foretaste of the future. For no one who considers themself as deserving hell can believe that punishment will end in peace.

The Holy Spirit’s Teaching is naturally the opposite of the ego’s. Spirit teaches thus: There is no hell. The only experience of hell is what the ego always makes of the present. The belief in hell is what prevents you from understanding the true present, because you have become afraid of it. The Holy Spirit leads as steadily to Heaven as the ego drives to the nightmare of hell. For the Holy Spirit, Who knows only the present, uses it to undo all fear, by which the ego always attempts to make the present useless.

There is no escape from fear in the ego’s use of time. For time, according to its teaching, is nothing but a teaching device for compounding guilt, until guilt becomes all-encompassing and demands retribution. Such thoughts sound preposterous, as they are. But to a mind burdened with the deceit of the idea of guilt, what sounds preposterous in the light of day can be believed in the darkness of a mind that has forgotten the Light.

The Holy Spirit would undo all of this madness now. Fear is not of the present, but only of the past and future, which do not exist. There can be no fear in the true present, when each Instant stands clear and separated from the past, without its shadow reaching out into the future. Each true Instant is a clean, untarnished birth, in which the Children of the Divine emerge from the past into the present in the true Light of Day. Their Immortality and Joy are now. And the present as it is in Truth extends forever. It is so beautiful and clean and free of guilt that nothing but Happiness is there. No darkness can be remembered in the true present of now.

This Lesson of the Holy Spirit takes no time. For what is time without a past and future? It has taken time for you to become misguided so completely, but it takes no time at all to be what you are in Truth.

Begin to practice the Holy Spirit’s Use of time as a teaching aid to Happiness and Peace. Take this very instant, now, and think of it as all there is of time. Nothing from the past can reach you here, and it is here in the present that you are completely absolved, completely free, and entirely without condemnation. From this Holy Instant, wherein Holiness is born, you will go forth in time without fear, and with no sense of change with what appears to be the passage of time. Time is inconceivable without change, and Holiness does not change.

Learn from this Instant more than merely that hell does not exist. In this timeless Instant resides the Realm of Heaven. For Heaven will never change, and your birth into the holy Present is your awakening from change. Change is an illusion like all that is perishable, taught by those who have not yet seen themselves as innocent. There is no change in Heaven because there is no change in the Divine. In the Holy Instant, in which you see yourself as bright with Freedom, you will remember the Divine. For remembering It is to remember Freedom.

Whenever you are tempted to feel dispirited by the thought of how long it would take you to change your mind so completely that you will always remember the Divine, ask yourself, “How long is an instant?” And think how it easy it is to give so short a time to the Holy Spirit for your awakening. Spirit asks nothing more, for It has no need of more. It takes far longer to teach you how to be willing to give Spirit this tiny Instant than for It to use this to offer you the Whole of Heaven. In exchange for this Instant, Spirit stands ready to give you the Remembrance of Eternity.

You will be unable to give this Holy Instant to the Holy Spirit on behalf of your Release while you are unwilling to give It to your sisters and brothers on behalf of theirs. For the Instant of Holiness is shared, and cannot be yours alone. Remember, then, when you are tempted to condemn a brother or sister to their guilt, that their Instant of Release is yours. Miracles are the Instant of Release you offer your sisters and brothers and the world, and will therefore receive. They attest to your willingness to be released, and to offer time to the Holy Spirit for Its use of it.

How long is an instant? It is as short for your sisters and brothers as it is for you. Practice giving this blessed Instant of Freedom to all who believe they are imprisoned by time. And thus make time their friend for them. The Holy Spirit gives their blessed Instant to you, through your giving It to them. As you give It, Spirit offers It to you. Be not unwilling to give what you would receive of Spirit, for you join with It in giving. In the crystal cleanness of the release you give is your instantaneous release from guilt. You must be holy if you can offer Holiness, and do.

How long is an instant? As long as it takes to reestablish perfect Sanity, perfect Peace, and perfect Love for everyone. As long as it takes to remember true Invulnerability in Heaven, and your immortal creations who share this Invulnerability with you. As long as it takes to exchange the belief in hell for the Peace of Heaven. Long enough to transcend all of the ego’s making, to release yourself from the idea of the ego forever, and ascend unto your Creator.

Time is your friend as you leave it to the Holy Spirit to use. Spirit needs only very little time to restore the Divine’s whole Power to you. It Who transcends time for you understands what time is for. Holiness resides not in time but in Eternity. There never was an instant in which the Divine’s Children could lose their Innocence. Their changeless State is beyond time, for their Innocence remains forever beyond attack and without variability. Time stands still in their holiness, and changes not. And so it is no longer time at all. Blessed in the single Instant of the eternal Sanctity of the Divine’s Creation, time is transformed into Forever.

Give the eternal present, that Eternity may be remembered for you in that shining Instant of perfect Release. Offer the miracle of the Holy Instant through the Holy Spirit, and leave to It Its giving It to you.