 We continue today with Chapter 16, The End of Illusions. It is impossible to let the past go without relinquishing the special relationship. For the special relationship is an attempt to re-enact the past and change it. Imagine slights, remembered pain, past disappointments, perceived injustices, and deprivations all enter into the special relationship, which becomes a way in which you seek to restore your wounded self-esteem. What basis would you have for choosing a special partner without the past? Every such choice is made because of something, quote, evil, in the past to which you cling, and for which must someone else atone. The special relationship takes vengeance on the past. By seeking to remove suffering in the past, it overlooks the present in its preoccupation with the past and its total commitment to it. No special relationship is experienced in the present. Shades of the past envelop it and make it what it is. It has no meaning in the present, and if it means nothing now, it cannot have any real meaning at all. How can you change the past except in fantasy? And who can give you what you think the past deprived you of? The past is nothing. Do not seek to lay the blame for deprivation on it, for the past is gone. You cannot really not let go what has already gone. It must be, therefore, that you are maintaining the illusion that it has not gone because you think it serves some purpose that you want fulfilled. And it must also be that this purpose could not be fulfilled in the present, but only in the past. Do not underestimate the intensity of the ego's drive for vengeance on the past. It is completely savage and completely insane. For the ego remembers everything you have done that has offended it and seeks a retribution of you. The fantasies it brings to its chosen relationships in which to act out its hate are fantasies of your destruction. For the ego holds the past against you, and in your escape from the past it sees itself deprived of the vengeance it believes you so justly merit. Yet without your allegiance and your own destruction, the ego could not hold you to the past. In the special relationship you are allowing your destruction to be, that this is insane is obvious. But what is less obvious is that the present is useless to you while you pursue the ego's goal as its ally. The past is gone. Seek not to preserve it in the special relationship that binds you to it and would teach you salvation is past and so you must return to 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? In the special relationship it does not seem to be an acting out of vengeance that you seek. And 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 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. You have denied that it is there and the relationship becomes your substitute for it. And vengeance becomes your substitute for atonement. And the escape from vengeance becomes your 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 uses opposites to point to truth. The Holy Instant is 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 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 it is impossible that you receive it not because he gave it. When he willed that his son be free, his son was free. 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. There is nothing you can hold against reality. All that must be forgiven are the illusions you have held against your brothers. Their reality has no past and only illusions can be forgiven. God holds nothing against anyone for he is incapable of illusions of any kind. Release your brothers from the slavery of their illusions by forgiving them for the illusions you perceive in them. Thus will you learn that you have been forgiven for it is you who offered them illusions. In the Holy Instant this is done for you in time to bring you the true condition of heaven. Remember that you always choose between truth and illusion between the real atonement that would heal and the egos quote atonement that would destroy. The power of God and all his love without limit will support you as you seek only your place in the plan of atonement arising from his love. Be an ally of God and not the ego in seeking how atonement can come to you. His help suffices for his messenger understands how to restore the kingdom to you and to place all your investment in salvation in your relationship with him. Seek and find his message in the Holy Instant where all illusions are forgiven. From there the miracle extends to bless everyone and to resolve all problems be they perceived as great or small possible or impossible. There is nothing that will not give place to him and to his majesty. To join in close relationship with him is to accept relationships as real and through their reality to give over all illusions for the reality of your relationship with God. Praise be to your relationship with him and to no other. The truth lies there and nowhere else. You choose this or nothing. Forgive us our illusions father and help us to accept our true relationship with you in which there are no illusions and where none can ever enter. Our holiness is yours. What can there be in us that needs forgiveness when yours is perfect? The sleep of forgetfulness is only the unwillingness to remember your forgiveness and your love. Let us not wander into temptation for the temptation of the Son of God is not your will. And let us receive only what you have given and accept but this into the minds which you created and which you love. Amen. And from the workbook. Lesson 132. I loose the world from all I thought it was. What keeps the world in chains but your beliefs and what can save the world except yourself? Belief is powerful indeed. The thoughts you hold are mighty and illusions are as strong in their effects as is the truth. A mad man thinks the world he sees is real and does not doubt it. Nor can he be swayed by questioning his thoughts effects. It is but when their source is raised a question that the hope of freedom comes to him at last. Yet his salvation easily achieved for anyone is free to change his mind and all his thoughts change with it. Now the source of thought has shifted for to change your mind means you have changed the source of all ideas you think or ever thought or yet will think. You free the past from what you thought before. You free the future from all ancient thoughts of seeking what you do not want to find. The present now remains the only time. Here in the present is the world set free. For as you let the past be lifted and release the future from your ancient fears, you find escape and give it to the world. You have enslaved the world with all your fears, your doubts and miseries, your pain and tears, and all your sorrows press on it and keep the world a prisoner to your beliefs. Death strikes it everywhere because you hold the bitter thoughts of death within your mind. The world is nothing in itself. Your mind must give it meaning. And what you behold upon it are your wishes. Act it out so you can look on them and think them real. Perhaps you think you did not make the world but came unwillingly to what was made already, hardly waiting for your thoughts to give it meaning. Yet in truth you found exactly what you looked for when you came. There is no world apart from what you wish and herein lies your ultimate release. Change but your mind on what you want to see and all the world must change accordingly. Ideas leave not their source. This central theme is often stated in the text and must be borne in mind if you would understand the lesson for today. It is not pride which tells you that you made the world you see and that it changes as you change your mind. But it is pride that argues you have come into a world quite separate from yourself, impervious to what you think and quite apart from what you chance to think it is. There is no world. This is the central thought the Course attempts to teach. Not everyone is ready to accept it. And each one must go as far as he can let himself be led along the road to truth. He will return and go still further or perhaps step back a while and then return again. But healing is the gift of those who are prepared to learn there is no world and can accept the lesson now. Their readiness will bring the lesson to them in some form which they can understand and recognize. Some see us suddenly on the point of death and rise to teach it. Others find it inexperience that is not of this world which shows them that the world does not exist because what they behold must be the truth and yet it clearly contradicts the world. And some will find it in this Course and in the exercises that we do today. Today's idea is true because the world does not exist and if it is indeed your own imagining then you can lose it from all things you ever thought it was by merely changing all the thoughts that gave it these appearances. The sick are healed as you let go all thoughts of sickness and the dead arise when you let thoughts of life replace all thoughts you ever held of death. A lesson earlier repeated once must now be stressed again for it contains the firm foundation for today's idea. You are as God created you. There is no place where you can suffer and no time that can bring change to your eternal state. How can a world of time and place exist if you remain as God created you? What is the lesson for today except another way of saying that to know yourself is the salvation of the world? Free the world from every kind of pain is but to change your mind about yourself. There is no world apart from your ideas because ideas leave not their source and you maintain the world within your mind in thought. Yet if you are as God created you you cannot think apart from him nor make what does not share his timelessness and love. Are these inherent in the world you see? Does it create like him? Unless it does, it is not real and cannot be at all. If you are real the world you see is false for God's creation is unlike the world in every way and as it was his thought by which you were created so it is your thoughts which made it and must set it free that you may know the thoughts you share with God. Release the world. Your real creations wait for this release to give your fatherhood not of illusions but as God in truth. God shares his fatherhood with you who are his son for he makes no distinctions in what is himself and what is still himself. What he creates is not apart from him and nowhere does the father end. The son begin as something separate from him. There is no world because it is a thought apart from God and made to separate the father and the son and break away a part of God himself and thus destroy his wholeness. Can a world which comes from this idea be real? Can it be anywhere? Deny illusions but accept the truth. Deny you are a shadow briefly laid upon a dying world. Release your mind and you will look upon a world released. Today our purpose is to free the world from all the idle thoughts we ever held about it and about all living things we see upon it. They cannot be there. No more can we. For we are in the home our father set for us along with them and we who are as he created us would loose the world this day from every one of our illusions we may be free. Begin the 15 minute periods in which we practice twice today with this I who remain as God created me would loose the world from all I thought it was for I am real because the world is not and I would know my own reality then merely rest. Alert but with no strain and let your mind and quietness be changed so that the world is freed along with you. You need not realize that healing comes to many brothers far across the world as well as to the ones you see nearby as you send out these thoughts to bless the world but you will sense your own release although you may not fully understand as yet that you could never be released alone throughout the day increase the freedom sent through your ideas to all the world and say whenever you are tempted to deny the power of your simple change of mind I loose the world from all I thought it was and choose my own reality instead. Amen.