T. 17. V. 11 – 15. Jesus: “By your choice for the holy instant in your relationship, you undertook to invite the Holy Spirit into it with you and your brother. He could not have entered without your invitation. Although you may have made many mistakes since then, you have also made enormous progress to help Him do His work. He has not been lacking in appreciation for all you have done for Him. Nor does He see the mistakes at all!
Have you been similarly grateful to your brother? Have you consistently appreciated the good efforts, and overlooked all the ‘mistakes?’ Or has your appreciation flickered and grown dim in the light of what seemed to be error? Perhaps you are now entering upon a campaign to blame him for the bewilderment in which you find yourself in this period of change. And by this lack of thanks and gratitude, you make yourself unable to consistently expand the holy instant, and even risk losing sight of it.
The experience of an instant, even a holy instant, however compelling it may be, is easily forgotten if you allow the ego’s use of time to close over it. It must be kept shining and gracious in your mind while you remain within your dream of time, and not covered over with time-bound perceptions. The instant remains. But where are you?
To continually give thanks to your brother is to appreciate the holy instant, keep it fresh in your mind and thus enable its results to be fully accepted and shared. To attack your brother is not to lose the instant, but to make it powerless in its effects on your behalf. You have received the holy instant, but you may have established a condition since in which you cannot expand it. As a result, you do not realize that it is with you still. And by cutting yourself off from its expression, you have denied yourself its benefit. You reinforce this block every time you attack your brother with any separating thought, for the attack must blind you to yourself! And it is impossible to deny yourself and still recognize what has been given and received by you.
You and your brother stand together in the holy presence of truth itself. Here is the goal, together with both of you! Think you not the goal itself will gladly draw to your relationship the means for its accomplishment?
It is just this same discrepancy between the Holy Spirit’s purpose, now accepted, and the ego’s old ‘means,’ still operating, that seems to make you suffer. But this makes Heaven glad because it shows you have begun to awaken! If Heaven were outside you, you could not share in its gladness! Yet because it is within, the gladness, too, is yours but for the acceptance. You are joined in purpose with the Holy Spirit, though remain still separate and divided on the means. Yet the goal is fixed, now firm and unalterable, and the means must fall in place because the goal is sure. And you will share the gladness of the Sonship that this is so.
As you begin to recognize and accept the gifts you have so freely given to your brother in the holy instant, you will also accept the effects of the holy instant, and begin to use them to correct all your mistakes and free you from their seeming results.
And learning this, you will have also learned how to release all the Sonship, and offer it in gladness and thanksgiving to Him Who gave you your release, and Who would extend it through you.”