T. 16. VII. 4 – 8. Jesus: “The past is gone! Seek not to preserve it in the special relationship that binds you to it, and would teach you that salvation is past so you must reinvent the past to find salvation. There is no fantasy that does not contain the dream of retribution for the past. Would you act out the dream, or let it go?
What you seek in the special relationship may not appear to you to be an acting out of vengeance. Even when the hatred and the savagery break briefly through, the ‘illusion of love’ is not profoundly shaken. Yet the one thing the ego never allows to reach your awareness is that the special relationship is the acting out of vengeance on yourself!
Yet what else could it be? In seeking the special relationship, you look not for glory in yourself, but rather, you seek it from ‘another!’ You have denied the glory that is within you by perceiving yourself separate from it, and then, when you feel ‘something missing,’ the special relationship becomes your substitute for it. And so this form of ‘vengeance’ becomes your substitute for Atonement, and the escape from vengeance the Atonement would bring you then comes to be feared as loss!
Against the ego’s insane notion of ‘salvation,’ the Holy Spirit gently lays the holy instant. We said before that the Holy Spirit must teach through comparisons, and as long as opposites have meaning to you, it uses them to point to truth. The holy instant is thus the opposite of the ego’s fixed belief in salvation through vengeance for the past.
In the holy instant it is understood that the past is gone, and with its passing the drive for vengeance has been uprooted and has disappeared. The stillness and the peace of now enfold you in perfect gentleness. Everything is gone except the truth!
For a time you may attempt to bring illusions into the holy instant, to hinder your full awareness of the complete difference, in all respects, between your experience of truth and of illusion. Yet you will not attempt this long. In the holy instant the power of the Holy Spirit will prevail, because you joined Him. The illusions you bring with you will weaken the experience of Him for a while, and will prevent you from keeping the experience in your mind. Yet the holy instant is eternal, and your illusions of time will not prevent the timeless from being what it is, nor you from experiencing it as it is.
What God has given you is truly given, and will be truly received. For God’s gifts have no reality apart from your receiving them. Your receiving completes His giving. You will receive because it is His Will to give. He gave the holy instant to be given you, and because He gave it, it is impossible that you receive it not.
When the Father willed that His Son be free, His Son was freed eternally. In the holy instant is His reminder that His Son will always be exactly as he was created. And everything the Holy Spirit teaches is to remind you that you have received what God has given you.”