Corresponding Text Section

Chapter 16: The Holy Instant

5. Relationships and the Meaning of Love

The Holy Instant is the Holy Spirit’s most useful Device for showing you Love’s Meaning. For Its Purpose is to suspend judgment entirely. Judgment always rests on the past, for past experience is the basis on which you judge. Judgment becomes impossible without the past, for without it you do not compare anything. In the true present you make no attempt to judge because it is quite apparent to you that of yourself you do not know what anything means. You are still afraid of this because you think it means you have lost control, and you believe that without the ego all would be chaos. Yet I assure you that without the ego all would be Love.

The past is the ego’s foremost learning device, for it is in the past that you learned to define your own needs, and acquired methods for meeting them on your own terms. This Course said before that if you single out Part of the Divine Family for your love, and exclude this from others, then you are imposing guilt on all your relationships, and making all of them unreal. If you seek to separate out certain aspects of Totality, and look to them to meet your imagined needs, then you are attempting to use separation to save yourself. How, then, could guilt not enter? For separation is the source of guilt, and to appeal to it for awakening is to believe you are alone.

To believe you are alone is to believe that you are guilty. For to experience yourself as alone is to deny the Oneness of the Creator and Its Creation, and thus to attack Reality. You cannot love parts of Reality and not all of It and understand what Love means. If you would love unlike the Divine, Who knows no special love, how can you understand Love? To believe that special relationships, with special love, can offer you awakening is the belief that separation is awakening. For it is the complete Equality of the Atonement in which awakening is. How did you decide that Aspects of the Divine Family you designated as being special could give you more than others? The past taught you this. But the Holy Instant teaches you it is not so.

Because of guilt, all special relationships have some elements of fear in them. And this is why they shift and change so frequently. They are not based on changeless Love alone. And love where fear has entered cannot be depended on, because it is not perfect Love.

In Its Function as Evaluator of your creative activity, the Holy Spirit uses special relationships, which you have chosen to support the ego, as a learning experience that points to Truth. Within Spirit’s Teaching, every relationship becomes a lesson in perfect Love. The Holy Spirit knows that no one is special, which would require being separate. But It also perceives that you have made special relationships, which It would purify and not let you destroy. However unholy the reason you made them may be, Spirit can translate them into Holiness, by removing as much fear as you will let It.

You can place any relationship into the Holy Spirit’s Care and be sure that it will not result in pain if you offer It your willingness to have the relationship serve no need but Spirit’s. All the guilt in a relationship arises from your use of it; all the Love, from Spirit’s. Do not, then, be afraid to let your imagined need for any relationship go, because this need would only destroy the relationship. Your only need is Spirit’s.

Any relationship that you would substitute for another has not been offered to the Holy Spirit for Its Use. There is no substitute for Love. If you would attempt to substitute one aspect of Love for another, then you have placed less value on one and more on another. You will then not only have separated them, but also judged against both. Yet you will have judged against yourself first, or you would never have imagined that you needed your sisters and brothers as they are not. Unless you had looked upon yourself as without Love, you could not have judged them to be like you in lack.

The ego’s use of relationships is so fragmented that it frequently goes even further than substitution. One part of one aspect of a relationship may suit the ego’s purposes, while it may prefer different parts of another. Thus does it assemble and construct its world to its own inconstant liking, offering for your seeking of Love an image whose likeness does not exist in Reality. For there is nothing in Heaven or on Earth that it resembles, and so however much you seek for its reality you cannot find it, because it is not real.

Everyone on Earth has formed special relationships, and although this is not so in the Realm of Heaven, the Holy Spirit knows how to bring a Touch of Heaven to them here. In the Holy Instant no one is special, for there your personal needs intrude on no one to attempt to make them different. Without the values from the past, you would perceive your sisters and brothers all the same, and like yourself. Nor would you perceive any separation between yourself and them. In the Holy Instant you see in each relationship what it will be when you perceive only the present.

The Divine knows you now. It remembers nothing past, having always known you exactly as It knows you now. The Holy Instant parallels Its Knowing by bringing all perception out of the past and into the true present, thus removing the frame of reference you have built by which to judge your sisters and brothers. Once this frame of the past is gone, the Holy Spirit exchanges Its Frame of Reference in place of the past. Its Frame of Reference is simply the Divine. The Holy Spirit’s Timelessness is found only here, now. For in the Holy Instant, free of the past, you see that Love is in you, and you have no need to look without, to try to snatch it guiltily from where you thought it was.

All your relationships are blessed in the Holy Instant because the Blessing is not limited. In the Holy Instant the Divine Family gains as One. And united in your blessing It becomes One to you. The Meaning of Love is the Meaning the Divine gives to It. Give to Love any meaning apart from the Divine’s, and it becomes impossible to understand Love’s Meaning. The Divine loves every one of Its Children as It loves you, neither less nor more. It needs them all equally, and so do you. You have been asked to offer miracles in time as Divine Essence and I direct, and to let the Holy Spirit bring to you those who are seeking you, and you to them. But in the Holy Instant you unite directly with the Divine, and all your sisters and brothers join in Divine Essence. Those who are joined in Divine Essence are in no way separate. For Divine Essence is the holy Self the Divine Family shares, as the Divine shares Its infinite Self with Divine Essence.

Think you that you can judge the infinite Self of the Divine? The Divine has created It beyond judgment, out of Its Need to extend Its Love. With Love in you, you have no need except to extend It. In the Holy Instant there is no conflict of needs, for there is only one need. For the Holy Instant reaches to Eternity, and to the Mind of the Divine. And it is only there that Love has Meaning, and only there can It be understood.