Shadows of the Past

To forgive is merely to remember only the loving thoughts you gave in the past,
and those that were given you.

All the rest must be forgotten.
Forgiveness is a selective remembering, based not on your selection.
For the shadow figures you would make immortal are “enemies” of reality.
Be willing to forgive the Son of God for what he did not do.
The shadow figures are the witnesses you bring with you to demonstrate he did what he did not.

It is these shadow figures that would make the ego holy in your sight,
and teach you what you do to keep it safe is really love.
The shadow figures always speak for vengeance,
and all relationships into which they enter are totally insane.

Without exception these relationships have as their purpose the exclusion of the truth about the other, and of yourself.

In the unholy relationship,
it is not the body of the other with which union is attempted
but the bodies of those who are not there.
Every step taken in the making, the maintaining and the breaking off of the unholy relationship is a move toward further fragmentation and unreality.

The shadow figures enter more and more, and the one in whom they seem to be decreases in importance.

The “ideal” of the unholy relationship thus becomes one in which the reality of the other does not enter at all to “spoil” the dream.
And the less the other really brings to the relationship, the “better” it becomes.
Thus, the attempt at union becomes a way of excluding even the one with whom the union was sought. For it was formed to get him out of it, and join with fantasies in uninterrupted “bliss”.

If all but loving thoughts has been forgotten, what remains is eternal.
And the transformed past is made like the present.
No longer does the past conflict with now.
This continuity extends the present by increasing its reality and its value in your perception of it.
In these loving thoughts is the spark of beauty hidden in the ugliness of the unholy relationship where hatred is remembered;
yet there to come alive as the relationship is given to Him Who gives it life and beauty.
That is why Atonement centres on the past, which is the source of separation,
and where it must be undone.
For separation must be corrected where it was made.
The Holy Spirit wants only to make His resolutions complete and perfect,
and so He seeks and finds the source of problems where it is, and there undoes it.
All He perceives in separation is that it must be undone.
Let Him uncover the hidden spark of beauty in your relationships, and show it to you.
Its loveliness will so attract you that you will be unwilling ever to lose the sight of it again.
And you will let this spark transform the relationship so you can see it more and more.
For you will want it more and more, and become increasingly unwilling to let it be hidden from you.
And you will learn to seek for and establish the conditions in which this beauty can be seen.

All this you will do gladly, if you but let Him hold the spark before you, to light your way and make it clear to you. God’s Son is one. Whom God has joined as one, the ego cannot put asunder. The spark of holiness must be safe, however hidden it may be, in every relationship. For the Creator of the one relationship has left no part of it without Himself. This is the only part of the relationship the Holy Spirit sees, because He knows that only this is true. You have made the relationship unreal, and therefore unholy, by seeing it where it is not and as it is not. Give the past to Him Who can change your mind about it for you. But first, be sure you fully realise what you have made the past to represent, and why.

The past becomes the justification for entering into a continuing,
unholy alliance with the ego against the present.
For the present is forgiveness.
Therefore, the relationships the unholy alliance dictates are not perceived nor felt as now.
Yet the frame of reference to which the present is referred for meaning is an illusion of the past,
in which those elements that fit the purpose of the unholy alliance are retained,
and all the rest let go.
And what is thus let go is all the truth the past could ever offer to the present as witnesses for its reality.
What is kept but witnesses to the reality of dreams.

It is still up to you to choose to join with truth or with illusion.
But remember that to choose one is to let the other go.

Only the Thoughts of God are true.
And all that follows from them comes from what they are,
and is as true as is the Holy Source from Which they came.

Rev. Ananda & John McIntosh
1998 - 2006 © Copyright