 We continue today with Chapter 5, Time and Eternity. God in His knowledge is not waiting, but His kingdom is bereft while you wait. All the sons of God are waiting for your return, just as you are waiting for theirs. Delay does not matter in eternity, but it is tragic in time. You have elected to be in time rather than eternity, and therefore believe you are in time. Yet your election is both free and ultrable. You do not belong in time. Your place is only in eternity, where God Himself placed you forever. Guilt feelings are the preservers of time. They induce fears of retaliation or abandonment, and thus ensure that the future will be like the past. This is the ego's continuity. It gives the ego a false sense of security by believing that you cannot escape from it, but you can and must. God offers you the continuity of eternity in exchange. When you choose to make this exchange, you will simultaneously exchange guilt for joy, viciousness for love, and pain for peace. My role is only to unchain your will and set it free. Your ego cannot accept this freedom and will oppose it at every possible moment and in every possible way. And as its maker, you recognize what it can do because you gave it the power to do it. Remember the kingdom always, and remember that you who are part of the kingdom cannot be lost. The mind that was in me is in you, for God creates with perfect fairness. Let the Holy Spirit remind you always of His fairness, and let me teach you how to share it with your brothers. How else can the chance to claim it for yourself be given you? The two voices speak for different interpretations of the same thing, simultaneously, or almost simultaneously, for the ego always speaks first. Alternate interpretations were unnecessary until the first one was made. 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. The ego's decisions are always wrong because they are based on the error they were made to uphold. Nothing the ego perceives is interpreted correctly. Not only does the ego cite scripture for its purpose, but it even interprets scripture as a witness for itself. The Bible is a fearful thing in the ego's judgment. Perceiving it is frightening, it interprets it fearfully. Being afraid, you do not appeal to the higher court because you believe its judgment would also be against you. 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. As you sow, so shall you reap. He reinterprets to mean what you consider worth cultivating you will cultivate in yourself. Your judgment of what is worthy makes it worthy for you. Vengeance's mind says the Lord is easily reinterpreted if you remember that ideas increase only by being shared. The statement emphasizes that vengeance cannot be shared. Give 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. I will visit the sins of the fathers unto the third and fourth generation as interpreted by the ego is particularly vicious. It becomes merely an attempt to guarantee the ego's own survival. To 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. The wicked shall perish becomes a statement of atonement if the word perish is understood as be undone. Every loveless thought must be undone. A word the ego cannot even understand. To the ego to be undone means to be destroyed. The 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. The part of your mind that you have given to the ego will merely return to the kingdom where your whole mind belongs. You can delay the completion of the kingdom but you cannot introduce the concept of fear into it. You need not fear the higher court will condemn you. It will merely dismiss the case against you. There can be no case against the child of God and every witness to guilt in God's creations is bearing false witness to God himself. Appeal everything you believe gladly to God's own higher court because it speaks for him and therefore speaks truly. It will dismiss the case against you however carefully you have built it up. The case may be foolproof but it is not godproof. The Holy Spirit will not hear it because he can only witness truly. His verdict will always be thine is the kingdom because he was given to you to remind you of what you are. When I said I am come as a light into the world I meant that I came to share the light with you. Remember my reference to the ego's dark glass and remember also that I said do not look there. It is still true that where you look to find yourself is up to you. Your patience with your brother is your patience with yourself. Is not a child of God worth patience? I have shown you infinite patience because my will is that of our father whom I learned infinite patience. His voice was in me as it is in you speaking for patience toward the sonship in the name of its creator. Now you must learn that only infinite patience produces immediate effects. This is the way in which time is exchanged for eternity. Infinite patience calls upon infinite love and by producing results now it renders time unnecessary. We have repeatedly said that time is a learning device to be abolished when it is no longer useful. The Holy Spirit who speaks for God in time also knows that time is meaningless. He 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. He is the only blessing you can truly give because he is truly blessed because he has been given you freely by God. You must give him as you received him. And from the workbook, Lesson 35 My mind is part of God's. I am very holy. Today's idea does not describe the way you see yourself now. It does however describe what vision will show you. It is difficult for anyone who thinks he is in the world to believe this of himself. Yet the reason he thinks he is in this world is because he does not believe it. You will believe that you are part of where you think you are. That is because you surround yourself with the environment you want. And you want it to protect the image of yourself that you have made. The image is part of this environment. What you see while you believe you are in it is seen through the eyes of the image. This is not vision. Images cannot see. The idea for today presents a very different view of yourself. By establishing your source, it establishes your identity. And it describes you as you must really be in truth. We will use a somewhat different kind of application for today's idea because the emphasis for today is on the perceiver rather than on what he perceives. Each of the three five-minute practice periods today begin by repeating today's idea to yourself and then close your eyes and search your mind for the various kinds of descriptive terms in which you see yourself. Include all the ego-based attributes which you ascribe to yourself positive or negative, desirable or undesirable, grandiose or debased. All of them are equally unreal because you do not look upon yourself through the eyes of holiness. In the earlier part of the mind searching period you will probably emphasize what you consider to be the more negative aspects of your perception of yourself. Toward the latter part of the exercise period however more self-inflating descriptive terms may well cross your mind. Try to recognize that the direction of your fantasies about yourself does not matter. Illusions have no direction in reality. They are merely not true. A suitable, unselected list for applying the idea for today might be as follows. I see myself as imposed on. I see myself as depressed. I see myself as failing. I see myself as endangered. I see myself as helpless. I see myself as victorious. I see myself as losing out. I see myself as charitable. I see myself as virtuous. You should not think of these terms in an abstract way. They will occur to you as various situations, personalities and events in which you figure across your mind. Pick up any specific situation that occurs to you. Identify the descriptive term or terms you feel are applicable to your reactions to that situation and use them in applying today's idea. After you have named each one, Ed but my mind is part of God's. I am very holy. During the longer exercise periods there will probably be intervals in which nothing specific occurs to you. Do not strain to think up specific things to fill the interval but merely relax and repeat today's idea slowly until something occurs to you. Even nothing that does occur should be omitted from the exercises. Nothing should be dug out with effort. Neither force nor discrimination should be used. As often as possible during the day pick up a specific attribute or attributes you are ascribing to yourself at the time and apply the idea for today to them. Repeat the idea in the form stated above to each of them. If nothing particular occurs to you merely repeat the idea to yourself with closed eyes. My mind is part of God's. I am very holy. So today we are opening to identifying with holiness and we are reminded that you will believe that you are part of where you think you are. That is because you surround yourself with the environment you want. So everything that is perceived, the entire environment is based on thoughts of where you think you are and this is an image that's being protected. This is an image in mind. It's part of the environment which is still in mind. Ideas leave not their source. When the mind is perceiving a fragmented world it is looking through the eyes of the image. When we turn to the Holy Spirit to give us sight the world is seen in a completely different way. Today we introduce the thought of holiness. I am very holy. In our text we were opening now to the contrast between time and eternity. This is a contrast that needs to be shown very clearly by the Holy Spirit because I cannot be a time being and an eternal being. It must be one or the other. In the Holy Spirit Jesus are reminding us that we are eternal beings. We were not sent to time. We were not put here by God in time. This was a desire and this was a choice. Jesus told us in the chapter 5 reading today you have elected to be in time rather than eternity and therefore believe you are in time. So again there is no victimization that involves God. The belief in victimization always involves the ego a desire to separate, a choice to separate. And very sweetly we are reminded by Jesus yet your election is both free and ultrable. You do not belong in time. Your place is only in eternity where God himself placed you forever. This is where the holiness comes in. An eternal being is holy. An eternal being cannot be changed. Love is constant. Love has no opposite. Love is eternal. And giving ourselves over to this holy, pure and beautiful idea is really an invitation to the Holy Spirit. It's an invitation saying show me who I am. Reveal to me my perfect innocence. Perfect love, perfect joy and happiness. Help me remember that God's will for me is perfect happiness. Help me remember that my mind has not been violated. I am as I was created. I am holiness. The alternative to holiness cannot exist. We can call that alternative fear or guilt but this is the ego. This is the puff of nothingness. This is the false identity. This is the imposter self that could never be. And as we watch our feelings, if we notice any guilt today let us remember what we were told in the text today that guilt feelings are the preservers of time. They induce fears of retaliation or abandonment and thus ensure that the future will be like the past. We are being shown both the impossibility of linear time and we are seeing how guilt and the perception of time being linear are completely connected. The ego is trying to make up a sense of continuity through linear time. It's always trying to replicate something from heaven. In this case continuity. The eternal is continuous. Eternity is continuity but the ego tries to ensure that the future will be like the past and give itself a false sense of security by believing that you cannot escape from such an elaborate plan and an elaborate trick as linear time. But in terms of escape, Jesus says, but you can and must. God offers you the continuity of eternity in exchange. So today as we accept our holiness we are simultaneously exchanging guilt for joy and viciousness for love and pain for peace. We are allowing ourselves to have our will unchained and have our will set free to be one with the will of the Father to know our perfect happiness. This is a most wonderful opportunity to change our mind about our mind to admit that I was completely wrong about how I perceived myself in time. I was completely wrong about all the feelings that I seemed to have in time and open wide to be shown the truth of my identity in God. My identity as the living Christ and so we practice with our lesson of the day. My mind is part of God's. I am very holy.