The Past Has Never Been

"You are invulnerable because you are guiltless. You can hold on to the past only through guilt. For guilt establishes that you will be punished for what you have done, and thus depends on one-dimensional time, proceeding from past to future. No one who believes this can understand what 'always' means, and therefore guilt must deprive you of the appreciation of eternity. You are immortal because you are eternal, and 'always' must be now." -- A Course in Miracles; Chapter 13, Section I, 8:1-2

"By accepting your guiltlessness, you learn that the past has never been, and so the future is needless and will not be." -- A Course in Miracles; Chapter 13, Section I, 9:1

O.K., so today's blog is sort of a continuation of yesterday's thoughts about eternity. The ideas of past and future, of right and wrong, of guilt and innocence... these polarized ideas perpetuate the myth of separation from God, dissecting eternity into segments of time and experience, blinding us to the meaning of 'always.' Forgiveness, the release of all preconceptions and judgments, all mental constructs about a given person or situation, returns our mind to an expanded state, the right-mindedness that can directly experience 'always' and eternity. "Always has no direction."

We often think we're forgiving someone or something else, someone separate from 'me.' That is never the case. We're always and only forgiving ourselves, since the holographic dream we each experience is a projection of our own guilt in our own mind. The fact that guilt is such an individual and private judgment, a private matter, is the best evidence that it is not real. We can never know what's truly in the mind of someone else in the dream... because they're not there. Our perception of others is really a projection of our own mind. We are the projector. As Byron Katie likes to say, "No two people have ever met." :-)

The beauty here is that the past has never been! No matter what our projections are now or have been, it never happened! The miracle is that through our willingness to let go of our projections, our willingness to return to right-mindedness, we can actually experience the Truth of this. The past has never been. The linear concept of time has been dissolved in the dream. The miracle is forgiveness, the healing of our own mind. "Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow." -- The Bible; Isaiah 1:18

"The miracle is a learning device that lessens the need for time. It establishes an out-of-pattern time interval not under the usual laws of time. In this sense it is timeless. The miracle is the only device at your immediate disposal for controlling time." -- A Course in Miracles; Chapter 1, Section I, 47:1-3 & 48:1

"Forgiveness offers everything I want." -- A Course in Miracles; Workbook Lesson 122