Corresponding Text Section

Chapter 30: The Happy Dreams of the Real World

5. What Seems Eternal All Will Have an End

How willing are you to forgive your sisters and brothers? How much do you desire Peace instead of endless strife and misery and pain? These questions are the same in different form. Forgiveness is your Peace, for herein is the end of the dream of separation, of danger and destruction, flaw and sin and death, madness and murder, grief and loss. This is the “sacrifice” awakening asks, and gladly offers you Peace instead of this.

Swear not to die, thou holy Child of the Divine! For in doing so you make a bargain that you cannot keep. The Child of Life cannot perish. It is immortal like Its Creator. What It is cannot be changed. It is the only thing in all this world that must be One.

What seems eternal all will have an end. The stars will disappear, and night and day will be no more. All things that come and go – the tides, the seasons, the lives of people, all things that change with time and bloom and fade – will not return. Where time has set an end is not where the Eternal is.

The Divine’s Children can never change by what others made of them. They will be as they were created, and as they are, for time appointed not their Destiny, nor does it set the hour of their birth and death. Forgiveness will not change them. But time waits upon forgiveness, that the things of time may disappear because they have no use.

Nothing continues past its purpose. If it be conceived to die, then die it must, unless it does not take this purpose as its own. Change is the only thing that can be made a blessing here, where purpose is not fixed, however changeless it appears to be. Think not that you can set a goal unlike the Divine’s Purpose for you, and establish it as changeless and eternal. You can give yourself a purpose that you do not have, but you cannot remove the Power to change your mind, and see another Purpose there. Change is the Gift the Divine gave to all that you would have made eternal, to ensure that only Heaven would not pass away.

You were not born to die. You cannot change your holy Self, because your Function has been fixed by the Divine. All goals except one are set in time, and they change so that time might be preserved. Forgiveness alone in this world does not aim at preserving time, but aims at time’s ending when it has no use. With time’s Purpose complete, it is gone. And where it once held seeming sway is now restored in full awareness the eternal Function – Creation – the Divine established for Its Children. Time can set no limit or end to the Fulfillment of this Function, nor Its Changelessness. There is no death because the Living share the Function their Creator gave to them. Life’s Function cannot be to die. It must be Life’s Extension, that It be as One forever and forever, without end.

This world of illusions will bind your feet and tie your hands and kill your body only if you think that it was made to destroy the Divine’s Children. For even though this world was a dream of death, you need not let it stand for this to you. Let this be changed, and everything in the world must be changed as well. For everything here is defined as what you perceive its purpose is.

How lovely is the world whose purpose is forgiveness of the Divine’s Children! How free from fear, how filled with Blessing and with Happiness! And what a joyous thing it is to dwell a little while in such a happy place! Nor can it be forgotten, in such a world, that it is just a little while until Timelessness comes quietly to take the place of time.