Ch. 15. V. 1 – 4. Jesus: “The holy instant is the Holy Spirit’s most useful learning device for teaching you love’s meaning. For its purpose is to have you suspend judgment entirely. Judgment always rests on the past, for past experience is the basis on which the ego has you judge.
Judgment, then, is impossible without holding onto the past, for without it you would have no basis to think you understand anything you perceive. The past is therefore the ego’s chief teaching device, for it was in the past that you learned to define your own needs, and acquired methods for meeting them on your own separate, special terms. Without the past, you would make no attempt to judge, because it would be quite apparent that you do not understand what anything means to you! You are afraid of this because you believe that without the ego and the past, all would be chaos. Yet I assure you that without the ego, all would be love!
We have already established that to limit your love to just a special part of the Sonship is to bring guilt into your relationships, and thus make them unreal! If you seek to separate out certain aspects of totality, and then look to them to meet your imagined needs, you are attempting to use the principle of separation to save you from the effects of separation! How, then, could guilt not enter? For the attempt to separate from the whole is the source of all guilt, and to ‘appeal to separation’ for your salvation shows you believe you are alone and separate.
To falsely believe you are alone is to make yourself guilty! For to experience yourself as alone is to deny the very Oneness of the Father and His Son, and thus to attack your reality! You cannot love just parts of reality and understand what love really means! If you would love un-like God, Who knows no such thing as special love or separation, how can you expect to understand real love?
To believe that special relationships, each with a separate special love, can offer you salvation, reveals the assumed belief that ‘separation is salvation!’ Instead, it is the complete equality of the Atonement in which your salvation lies! How can you decide that special aspects of the Sonship can give you more than others? With the past the ego has taught you this! Yet the holy instant teaches you it is not so.
Because they are tainted with guilt, all special relationships have elements of fear in them. This is why they shift and change so frequently. They are not based on the stability of changeless love. And love, where fear has entered, cannot be depended on because it is not perfect Love.
In His function as the re-interpreter of what you’ve made, the Holy Spirit uses your special relationships, which you have chosen to support the ego, as learning experiences that point you back to truth. Hence under His teaching, every relationship becomes a lesson in love!”