“Now” has no meaning to the ego. The present merely reminds [the ego] of past hurts, and it reacts to the present as if it were the past. The ego cannot tolerate release from the past, and although the past is over, the ego tries to preserve its image by responding as if it were present. It dictates your reactions to those you meet in the present from a past reference point, obscuring their present reality. In effect, if you follow the ego’s dictates you will react to your brother as though he were someone else, and this will surely prevent you from recognizing him as he is. And you will receive messages from him out of your own past because, by making it real in the present, you are forbidding yourself to let it go. You thus deny yourself the message of release that every brother offers you now.
Unless you learn that past pain is an illusion, you are choosing a future of illusions and losing the many opportunities you could find for release in the present. The ego would preserve your nightmares, and prevent you from awakening and understanding they are past. Would you recognize a holy encounter if you are merely perceiving it as a meeting with your own past? For you would be meeting no one, and the sharing of salvation, which makes the encounter holy, would be excluded from your sight. The Holy Spirit teaches that you always meet yourself, and the encounter is holy because you are. The ego teaches that you always encounter your past, and because your dreams were not holy, the future cannot be, and the present is without meaning. (A Course in Miracles, T-13.IV.5;6:5-10. See also ACIM Text Q & A.)
The ego has a clever scheme to keep us hooked in its thought system of separation. By teaching us that the past is real and with us now, it makes the present moment invisible to us because we’ve covered it with past memories. We then interpret everything we perceive in terms of the past. This means we see nothing as it is now as long as we subscribe to the ego’s scheme.
It’s time to unsubscribe. The ego does not offer us an unsubscribe link. But the Holy Spirit offers us an alternative that renders the ego scheme inoperative. By letting ourselves open to the Holy Spirit’s vision, we learn that the past is not with us. The past is over and cannot affect us at all unless we choose the ego’s scheme.
As we accept the Holy Spirit’s vision, we see our brothers truly. We freely join with them, for they are part of our one Self. In the joining, we receive our brothers’ gift of release from the separation scheme to remember that we are one in God’s Love.
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