 We continue today with Chapter 15, The Holy Instant, the two uses of time. Can you imagine what it means to have no cares, no worries, no anxieties, but merely to be perfectly calm and quiet all the time? Yet that is what time is for, to learn just that and nothing more. God's teacher cannot be satisfied with his teaching until it constitute all your learning. He has not fulfilled his teaching function until you have become such a consistent learner that you learn only of him. When this has happened, you will no longer need a teacher or time in which to learn. One source of perceived discouragement from which you may suffer is your belief that this takes time and that the results of the Holy Spirit's teaching are far in the future. This is not so. For the Holy Spirit uses time in his own way and is not bound by it. And all the waste that time seems to bring with it is due but to your identification with the ego, which uses time to support its belief in destruction. The ego, like the Holy Spirit, uses time to convince you of the inevitability of the goal and end of teaching. To the ego, the goal is death, which is its end. But to the Holy Spirit, the goal is life, which has no end. The ego is an ally of time, but not a friend, for it is as mistrustful of death as it is of life, and what it wants for you it cannot tolerate. The ego wants you dead, but not itself. The outcome of its strange religion must therefore be the conviction that it can pursue you beyond the grave. And out of its unwillingness for you to find peace, even in death, it offers you immortality in hell. It speaks to you of heaven, but assures you that heaven is not for you. How can the guilty hope for heaven? The belief in hell is inescapable to those who identify with the ego. Their nightmares and their fears are all associated with it. The ego teaches that hell is in the future, for this is what all its teaching is directed to. Hell is its goal. For although the ego aims at death and disillusion as an end, it does not believe it. The goal of death, which it craves for you, leaves it unsatisfied. No one who follows the ego's teaching is without the fear of death. Yet if death were thought merely as an end to pain, would it be feared? We have seen this strange paradox in the ego's thought system before, but never so clearly as here. For the ego must seem to keep fear from you to hold your allegiance. Yet it must engender fear in order to maintain itself. Again, the ego tries, and all too frequently succeeds, in doing both, by using dissociation for holding its contradictory aims together, so that they seem to be reconciled. The ego teaches thus, death is the end as far as hope of heaven goes. Yet because you and the ego cannot be separated, and because it cannot conceive of its own death, it will pursue you still because guilt is eternal. Such is the ego's version of immortality, and it is this ego's version of time it supports. The ego teaches that heaven is here and now because the future is hell. Even when it attacks so savagely that it tries to take the life of someone who thinks its only voice that adheres, it speaks of hell even to him. For it tells him hell is here as well, and bids him leap from hell into oblivion. The only time the ego allows anyone to look upon with equanimity is the past, and even there its only value is that it is no more. How bleak and despairing is the ego's use of time, and how terrifying, for underneath its fanatical insistence that the past and the future be the same, is hidden of far more insidious threat to peace. The ego does not advertise its final threat, for it would have its worshippers still believe that it can offer them escape. But the belief in guilt must lead to the belief in hell, and always does. The only way in which the ego allows the fear of hell to be experienced is to bring hell here, but always as a foretaste of the future. For no one who considers himself as deserving of hell can believe that punishment will end in peace. The Holy Spirit teaches thus, there is no hell. Hell is only what the ego has made of the present. The belief in hell is what prevents you from understanding the present, because you are afraid of it. The Holy Spirit leads as steadily to heaven as the ego drives to hell. For the Holy Spirit, who knows only the present, uses it to undo the fear by which the ego would make the present useless. There is no escape from fear in the ego's use of time. For time, according to its teaching, is nothing but a teaching device for compounding guilt until it becomes all-encompassing, demanding vengeance forever. The Holy Spirit would undo all of this now. Fear is not of the present, but only of the past and future, which do not exist. There is no fear in the present when each instant stands clear and separated from the past, without its shadow reaching out into the future. Each instant is a clean, untarnished birth in which the Son of God emerges from the past into the present. And the present extends forever. It is so beautiful and so clean and free of guilt that nothing but happiness is there. No darkness is remembered, and immortality and joy are now. This lesson takes no time. For what is time without a past and future? It has taken time to misguide you so completely, but it takes no time at all to be what you are. Begin to practice the Holy Spirit's use of time as a teaching aid to happiness and peace. Take this very instant now and think of it as all there is of time. Nothing can reach you here out of the past, and it is here that you are completely absolved, completely free and holy without condemnation. From this holy instant wherein holiness was born again, you will go forth in time without fear and with no sense of change with time. Time is inconceivable without change, yet holiness does not change. Learn from this instant more than merely that hell does not exist. In this redeeming instant lies heaven, and heaven will not change, for the birth into the holy present is salvation from change. Change is an illusion, taught by those who cannot see themselves as guiltless. There is no change in heaven because there is no change in God. In the holy instant in which you see yourself as bright with freedom, you will remember God, for remembering him is to remember freedom. If you are tempted to be dispirited by thinking how long it would take to change your mind so completely, ask yourself how long is an instant? Could you not give so short a time to the Holy Spirit for your salvation? He asks no more, for he has no need of more. It takes far longer to teach you to be willing to give him this than for him to use this tiny instant to offer you the whole of heaven. In exchange for this instant, he stands ready to give you the remembrance of eternity. You will never give this holy instant to the Holy Spirit on behalf of your release while you are unwilling to give it to your brothers on behalf of theirs. For the instant of holiness is shared and cannot be yours alone. Remember then when you are tempted to attack a brother that his instant of release is yours. Miracles are the instant of release you offer and will receive. They attest to your willingness to be released and to offer time to the Holy Spirit for his use of time. How long is an instant? It is as short for your brother as it is for you. Practice giving this blessed instant of freedom to all who are enslaved by time and thus make time their friend for them. The Holy Spirit gives their blessing instant to you through your giving it. As you give it, he offers it to you. Be not unwilling to give what you would receive of him for you join with him in giving. In the crystal cleanness of the release you give is your instantaneous escape from guilt. You must be holy if you offer holiness. How long is an instant? As long as it takes to re-establish perfect sanity, perfect peace and perfect love for everyone, for God and for yourself. As long as it takes to remember immortality and your immortal creations who share it with you. As long as it takes to exchange hell for heaven long enough to transcend all of the egos making and ascend unto your Father. Time is your friend if you lead it to the Holy Spirit to use. He needs but very little to restore God's whole power to you. He who transcends time for you understands what time is for. Holiness lies not in time but in eternity. There never was an instant in which God's Son could lose his purity. His changeless state is beyond time for his purity remains forever beyond attack and without variability. Time stands still in his holiness and changes not. And so it is no longer time at all for cut in the single instant of the eternal sanctity of God's creation, it is transformed into forever. Give the eternal instant that eternity may be remembered for you in that shining instant of perfect release. Offer the miracle of the holy instant through the Holy Spirit and leave his giving it to you, to him. And from the workbook, lesson 115, the morning and evening review. Salvation is my only function here. My function here is to forgive the world for all the errors I have made. Thus I am released from them with all the world. My part is essential to God's plan for salvation. I am essential to the plan of God for the salvation of the world. For he gave me his plan that I might save the world. On the hour, salvation is my only function here. On the half hour, my part is essential to God's plan for salvation. Amen.