T. 28. I. 4 – 7. Jesus: “You are so long accustomed to believing that memory holds only what is past, that it is hard for you to realize it is a skill that can remember now. The limitations that the world imposes on your remembering are as vast as any that you ‘let the world’ impose on you!
There is no link of memory to the past, for the past is not! If you would have it in your mind, then there it is. But only your desire has made the link, and only you have limited your memory to a part of time where guilt appears to linger still.
Instead, the Holy Spirit’s use of memory is quite apart from time. He does not seek to use it as a means to keep the past, but rather as a way to let it go!
Memory holds whatever message it receives, and does what it is given it to do. It does not write the message, nor appoint what it is for. Like to the body, memory is purposeless within itself. And if it seems to serve to cherish ancient hate, and gives you pictures of injustices and hurts you have been saving, this is what you asked its message be and that it is to you.
Secretly committed to its vaults, the history of all the body’s past is hidden in your memory of ‘the past.’ All of the strange associations made to keep the past alive and the present dead, are stored within it, waiting your command that they be brought to you and ‘lived again.’ And thus do their effects appear to be increased by time, which took away awareness of their cause from your sight.
Yet time is but another phase of separation, and what really does nothing. It works hand in hand with all the other attributes with which you seek to keep the truth about yourself concealed. Time neither takes away nor can restore. And yet you make strange use of time, as if the past had caused the present and holds it captive. The consequence of this is your belief that no ‘fundamental change is possible,’ because its cause has gone!
Yet change must have a cause that will endure, or else your healing will not last. If the cause is past, no change can be made in the present by ‘choosing once again,’ to see differently. As you have been making use of memory, only the past is held within it, and so it is but a way to hold the past against the now.
Remember nothing that you taught yourself, for you were badly taught by the ego! And who would keep a senseless lesson in his mind, when he can learn and can preserve a better one? When ancient memories of hate appear, remember that their cause is gone, and that you need not understand what they are for.
Choose once again, without the past! Let not the cause you now attribute to unloving thoughts be a memory of what made them what they were, or seemed to be!”