T-5.VI Time and Eternity
1. God in His knowledge is not waiting, but His Kingdom is bereft while you wait. ²All the Sons of God are waiting for your return, just as you are waiting for theirs. ³Delay does not matter in eternity, but it is tragic in time. ⁴You have elected to be in time rather than eternity, and therefore believe you are in time. ⁵Yet your election is both free and alterable. ⁶You do not belong in time. ⁷Your place is only in eternity, where God Himself placed you forever.
2. Guilt feelings are the preservers of time. ²They induce fears of retaliation or abandonment, and thus ensure that the future will be like the past. ³This is the ego’s continuity. ⁴It gives the ego a false sense of security by believing that you cannot escape from it. ⁵But you can and must. ⁶God offers you the continuity of eternity in exchange. ⁷When you choose to make this exchange, you will simultaneously exchange guilt for joy, viciousness for love, and pain for peace. ⁸My role is only to unchain your will and set it free. ⁹Your ego cannot accept this freedom, and will oppose it at every possible moment and in every possible way. ¹⁰And as its maker, you recognize what it can do because you gave it the power to do it.
3. Remember the Kingdom always, and remember that you who are part of the Kingdom cannot be lost. ²The Mind that was in me is in you, for God creates with perfect fairness. ³Let the Holy Spirit remind you always of His fairness, and let me teach you how to share it with your brothers. ⁴How else can the chance to claim it for yourself be given you? ⁵The two voices speak for different interpretations of the same thing simultaneously; or almost simultaneously, for the ego always speaks first. ⁶Alternate interpretations were unnecessary until the first one was made.
4. The ego speaks in judgment, and the Holy Spirit reverses its decision, much as a higher court has the power to reverse a lower court’s decisions in this world. ²The ego’s decisions are always wrong, because they are based on the error they were made to uphold. ³Nothing the ego perceives is interpreted correctly. ⁴Not only does the ego cite Scripture for its purpose, but it even interprets Scripture as a witness for itself. ⁵The Bible is a fearful thing in the ego’s judgment. ⁶Perceiving it as frightening, it interprets it fearfully. ⁷Being afraid, you do not appeal to the Higher Court because you believe its judgment would also be against you.
5. There are many examples of how the ego’s interpretations are misleading, but a few will suffice to show how the Holy Spirit can reinterpret them in His Own light.
6. “As ye sow, so shall ye reap” He interprets to mean what you consider worth cultivating you will cultivate in yourself. ²Your judgment of what is worthy makes it worthy for you.
7. ““Vengeance is mine”, says the Lord” is easily reinterpreted if you remember that ideas increase only by being shared. ²The statement emphasizes that vengeance cannot be shared. ³Give it therefore to the Holy Spirit, Who will undo it in you because it does not belong in your mind, which is part of God.
8. “I will visit the sins of the fathers unto the third and fourth generation”, as interpreted by the ego, is particularly vicious. ²It becomes merely an attempt to guarantee the ego’s own survival. ³To the Holy Spirit, the statement means that in later generations He can still reinterpret what former generations had misunderstood, and thus release the thoughts from the ability to produce fear.
9. “The wicked shall perish” becomes a statement of Atonement, if the word “perish” is understood as “be undone”. ²Every loveless thought must be undone, a word the ego cannot even understand. ³To the ego, to be undone means to be destroyed. ⁴The ego will not be destroyed because it is part of your thought, but because it is uncreative and therefore unsharing, it will be reinterpreted to release you from fear. ⁵The part of your mind that you have given to the ego will merely return to the Kingdom, where your whole mind belongs. ⁶You can delay the completion of the Kingdom, but you cannot introduce the concept of fear into it.
10. You need not fear the Higher Court will condemn you. ²It will merely dismiss the case against you. ³There can be no case against a child of God, and every witness to guilt in God’s creations is bearing false witness to God Himself. ⁴Appeal everything you believe gladly to God’s Own Higher Court, because it speaks for Him and therefore speaks truly. ⁵It will dismiss the case against you, however carefully you have built it up. ⁶The case may be fool-proof, but it is not God-proof. ⁷The Holy Spirit will not hear it, because He can only witness truly. ⁸His verdict will always be “yours is the Kingdom”, because He was given to you to remind you of what you are.
11. When I said “I am come as a light into the world”, I meant that I came to share the light with you. ²Remember my reference to the ego’s dark glass, and remember also that I said, “Do not look there”. ³It is still true that where you look to find yourself is up to you. ⁴Your patience with your brother is your patience with yourself. ⁵Is not a child of God worth patience? ⁶I have shown you infinite patience because my will is that of our Father, from Whom I learned of infinite patience. ⁷His Voice was in me as It is in you, speaking for patience towards the Sonship in the Name of its Creator.
12. Now you must learn that only infinite patience produces immediate effects. ²This is the way in which time is exchanged for eternity. ³Infinite patience calls upon infinite love, and by producing results now it renders time unnecessary. ⁴We have repeatedly said that time is a learning device to be abolished when it is no longer useful. ⁵The Holy Spirit, Who speaks for God in time, also knows that time is meaningless. ⁶He reminds you of this in every passing moment of time, because it is His special function to return you to eternity and remain to bless your creations there. ⁷He is the only blessing you can truly give, because He is truly blessed. ⁸Because He has been given you freely by God, you must give Him as you received Him.