The Little Hindrance

Chapter 26 – 5. The Little Hindrance

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 in 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 your brother’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
that leads to nothing and that 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 past, 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
judgment 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 illusions about time and place effect a change in where
he really is?
 
The unforgiven is a voice that calls from out a past forevermore gone by.
And everything that 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 All-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? This course will teach you only what is now. 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 whom 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 you are 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 nor 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 that 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 took the place
of love. And so you die each day to live again, until you cross the gap
between the 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 that 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 your brother, and behold the world in which perception of your
hate has been transformed into a world of love.