You consider it “natural” to use your past experience as the reference point from which to judge the present. Yet this is unnatural because it is delusional. When you have learned to look on everyone with no reference at all to the past, either his or yours as you perceived it, you will be able to learn from what you see now. For the past can cast no shadow to darken the present, unless you are afraid of light. And only if you are would you choose to bring darkness with you, and by holding [the past] in your mind, see it as a dark cloud that shrouds your brothers and conceals their reality from your sight.
This darkness is in you [your mind]. The Christ as revealed to you now has no past, for He is changeless, and in His changelessness lies your release. For if He is as He was created, there is no guilt in Him. No cloud of guilt has risen to obscure Him, and He stands revealed in everyone you meet because you see Him through Himself. To be born again is to let the past go, and look without condemnation upon the present. The cloud that obscures God’s Son to you is the past, and if you would have it past and gone, you must not see [the past] now. If you see it now in your illusions, it has not gone from you, although it is not there.
The miracle enables you to see your brother without his past, and so perceive him as born again. His errors are all past, and by perceiving him without [his errors] you are releasing him. And since his past is yours, you share in this release. (A Course in Miracles,T-13.VI.2-3;5:1-3. See also ACIM Text Made Simple.)
The continuation of guilt and fear in our minds depends upon bringing the past into our present awareness. Yet the past is over and does not exist now. Judging the present based upon perceptions from the past makes us blind to what is real now.
Only Love is real, therefore only Love is now. To perceive anything else is to perceive an illusion that is not really there. To free ourselves from the past, we must relinquish all judgment. Without the unreal past, we have no basis for judgment. To attempt to judge based on illusions from the past is insanity. To return to the sanity that accepts the reality of Love, we must turn all our judgments over to the Holy Spirit and let His Light shine away the dark shadows of the past.
As we see our brothers through the Holy Spirit’s vision, we see him as he is now — Love and nothing else. This vision mirrors back to us the truth of the Self we are. When we see our brothers truly, we see our Self truly. We remember we are Love and nothing else.
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