A little hindrance can seem large indeed to those who do not understand
that miracles are all the same. Yet teaching that is what this course is
FOR. This is its only purpose, for only that is all there is to learn.
And you can learn it many different ways. All learning is a help or
hindrance to the gate of Heaven. Nothing in between is possible. There
are two teachers only, who point in different ways. And you will go
along the way your chosen teacher leads. There are but two directions
you can take, while time remains and choice is meaningful. For never
will another road be made except the way to Heaven. You but choose
whether to go TOWARD Heaven, or away to nowhere. There IS nothing else
to choose.

Nothing is ever lost but time, which in the end is meaningless. For it
is but a little hindrance to eternity, quite meaningless to the real
Teacher of the world. Yet since you DO believe in it, why should you
waste it going nowhere, when it CAN be used to reach a goal as high as
learning can achieve? Think not the way to Heaven’s gate is difficult at
all. Nothing you undertake with certain purpose and high resolve and
happy confidence, holding each other’s hand and keeping step to Heaven’s
song, is difficult to do. But it is hard indeed to wander off, alone and
miserable, down a road which leads to nothing, and which has no purpose.

God gave His Teacher to replace the one you made, not to conflict with
it. And what He would replace has been replaced. Time lasted but an
instant in your mind, with no effect upon eternity. And so is all time
passed, and everything exactly as it was before the way to nothingness
was made. The tiny tick of time in which the first mistake was made, and
all of them within that one mistake, held also the CORRECTION for that
one, and all of them that came within the first. And in that tiny
instant time was gone, for that was all it ever was. What God gave
answer to IS answered and is gone.

To you who still believe you live in time and know not it is gone, the
Holy Spirit still guides you through the infinitely small and senseless
maze you still perceive in time, though it has long since
gone. You think you live in what is past. Each thing you look upon you
saw but for an instant, long ago, before its unreality gave way to
truth. Not one illusion still remains unanswered in your mind.
Uncertainty was brought to certainty so long ago that it is hard indeed
to hold it to your heart, as if it were before you still.

The tiny instant you would keep and make eternal, passed away in Heaven
too soon for anything to notice it had come. What disappeared too quickly
to affect the simple knowledge of the Son of God can hardly still be
there, for you to choose to be your teacher. Only in the past, – an
ancient past, too short to make a world in answer to creation,
– did this world appear to rise. So very long ago, for such a tiny
interval of time, that not one note in Heaven’s song was missed.

Yet in each unforgiving act or thought, in every judgement, and in all
belief in sin, is that one instant still called back, as if it could be
made again in time. You keep an ancient memory before your eyes. And he
who lives in memories alone is unaware of where he is. Is this a
HINDRANCE to the place whereon he stands? Is any echo from the past that
he may hear a fact in what is there to hear where he is now? And how
much can his own delusions about time and place affect a change in where
he really is?

The unforgiven is a voice that calls from out a past forever more gone
by. And everything which points to it as real is but a wish that what is
gone could be made real again, and seen as here and now, in place of
what is REALLY now and here. Is this a hindrance to the truth the past
is gone, and cannot be returned to you? And do you WANT that fearful
instant kept, when Heaven seemed to disappear, and God was feared and
made a symbol of your hate?

Forget the time of terror that has been so long ago corrected and
undone. Can sin withstand the Will of God? Can it be up to you to see
the past, and put it in the present? You can NOT go back. And everything
that points the way in the direction of the past but sets you on a
mission whose accomplishment can only be unreal. Such is the justice
your Ever-Loving Father has ensured must come to you. And from your own
unfairness to yourself has He protected you. You CANNOT lose your way
because there is no way but His, and nowhere can you go except to Him.

Would God allow His Son to lose his way along a road long
since a memory of time gone by? A dreadful instant in a distant past,
now perfectly corrected, is of no concern nor value. Let the dead and
gone be peacefully forgotten. Resurrection has come to take its place.
And now you are a part of resurrection, NOT of death. No past illusions
have the power to keep you in a place of death, a vault God’s Son
entered an instant, to be instantly restored unto His Father’s perfect
Love. And how can he be kept in chains long since removed, and gone
forever from his mind?

The Son that God created is as free as God created him. He was reborn
the instant that he chose to die instead of live. And will you not
forgive him now, because he made an error in the past that God remembers
not, and is not there? Now are you shifting back and forth between the
past and present. Sometimes the past seems real, as if it were the
present. Voices from the past are heard, and then are doubted. You are
like to one who still hallucinates, but lacks conviction in what he
perceives. This is the borderland between the worlds, the bridge between
the past and present. Here the shadow of the past remains, but still a
present light is dimly recognized. Once it is seen, this light can never
be forgotten. It must draw you from the past into the present, where you
really ARE.

The shadow voices do not change the laws of time or of eternity. They
come from what is past and gone, and hinder not the true existence of
the here and now. The real world is the second part of the hallucination
time and death are real, and have existence which can BE perceived. This
terrible illusion was denied in but the time it took for God to give His
answer to illusion for all time and every circumstance. And then it was
no more, to be experienced as there.

Each day, and every minute in each day, and every instant that each
minute holds, you but relive the single instant when the time of terror
was replaced by love. And so you die each day to live again, until you
cross the gap between past and present, which is not a gap at all. Such
is each life; a seeming interval from birth to death, and on to life
again, a repetition of an instant gone by long ago, which cannot BE
relived. And all of time is but the mad belief that what is over is
still here and now.

Forgive the past and let it go, for it IS gone. You stand no longer on
the ground that lies between the worlds. You have gone on, and
reached the world that lies at Heaven’s gate. There is no hindrance to
the Will of God, nor any need that you repeat again a journey that was
over long ago. Look gently on each other, and behold the world in which
perception of your hate has been transformed into a world of love.