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The Undoing of Fear
I. The Present Memory
The miracle does nothing. All it does is to undo. Thus it cancels out the interference to what has been done. It does not add, but merely takes away. This world was over long ago. The thoughts that made it are no longer in the mind that thought of them and loved them for a little while. The miracle but shows the past is gone, and what has truly gone has no effects. Remembering a cause can but produce illusions of its presence, not effects.
Remembering is as selective as perception, being its past tense. It is perception of the past as if it were occurring now, and still were there to see. Memory, like perception, is a skill made up by you to take the place of what God gave in your creation. Like all the things you made, it can be used to serve another purpose, and to be the means for something else. It can be used to heal and not to hurt, if you so wish it be.
Nothing employed for healing represents an effort to do anything at all. It is a recognition that you have no needs which mean that something must be done. It is an unselective memory that is not used to interfere with truth.
The Holy Spirit can indeed make use of memory, for God Himself is there. This is not a memory of past events, but only of a present state. You are so long accustomed to believe that memory holds only what is past, that it is hard for you to realize it is a skill that can remember now. There is no link of memory to the past. If you would have it there, then there it is. But only your desire made the link, and only you have held it to a part of time where guilt appears to linger still.
The Holy Spirit’s use of memory does not seek to use it as a means to keep the past, but rather as a way to let it go. Like the body, it is purposeless within itself. If it seems to serve to cherish ancient hate, and gives you pictures of injustices and hurts that you were saving, this is what you asked its message be and that it is. All of the strange associations made to keep the past alive, the present dead, are stored within it, waiting your command that they be brought to you, and lived again.
Time is but another phase of what does nothing, Only the past is held in memory as you make use of it, and so it is a way to hold the past against the now.
Remember nothing that you taught yourself, for you were badly taught. When ancient memories of hate appear, remember that their cause is gone. So you cannot understand what they are for. Be glad that it is gone, for this is what you would be pardoned from. See instead, the new effects of cause accepted now, with consequences here. They will surprise you with their loveliness. The ancient new ideas they bring will be the happy consequences of a Cause so ancient that It far exceed the span of memory which you perception sees.
This is the Cause the Holy Spirit has remembered for you, when you would forget. It is not past because He let It not be unremembered. It has never changed. Its consequences will indeed seem new, because you thought that you remembered not their Cause. It was not your Father’s Will that He be unremembered by His Son.
What you remember never was. It can deserve but laughter, when you learn you have remembered consequences that were causeless and could never be effects. The miracle reminds you of a Cause forever present, perfectly untouched by time and interference. You are Its Effect, as changeless and as perfect as Itself. Its memory does not lie in the past, nor waits the future. They but remind you that It has not gone.
What your remembering would witness to is but the fear of God. He has not done the thing you fear. No more have you. So your innocence has not been lost. You need no healing to be healed. In quietness, see in the miracle a lesson in allowing Cause to have Its Own Effects, and doing nothing that would interfere.
The miracle comes quietly into the mind that stops an instant and is still. It reaches gently to other minds to share its quietness. There can be no pause in time to cause the miracle delay in hastening to all unquiet minds, and bringing them an instant’s stillness, when the memory of God returns to them. Their own remembering is quiet now, and what has come to take its place will not be wholly unremembered afterwards.
He to Whom time is given offers thanks for every quiet instant given Him. For in that instant is God’s memory allowed to offer all its treasures to the Son of God, for whom they have been kept. In that instant does the Son of God do nothing that would make himself afraid.
How instantly the memory of God arises in the mind that has no fear to keep the memory away! The trumpets of eternity resound throughout the stillness, yet disturb it not. The stillness speaks in gentle sounds of love the Son of God remembers from before his own remembering came in between the present and the past, to shut them out.
Now the Son of God understands what he has made is causeless, having no effects at all. He has done nothing. In seeing this, he understands he never had a need for doing anything, and never did.
Where is sacrifice, when memory of God has come to take the place of loss? What better way to close the little gap between illusions and reality than to allow the memory of God to flow across it, making it a bridge an instant will suffice to reach beyond? God has closed it with Himself. His memory has not gone by, and left a stranded Son forever on a shore where he can glimpse another shore that he can never reach. His Father wills that he be lifted up and gently carried over. He has built the bridge, and it is He Who will transport His Son across it. Have no fear that He will fail in what He wills. Nor that you be excluded from the Will that is for you.
