1. A little hindrance can seem large indeed to those who do not understand that miracles are all the same. 2Yet teaching that is what this course is for. 3This is its only purpose, for only that is all there is to learn. 4And you can learn it in many different ways. 5All learning is a help or hindrance to the gate of Heaven. 6Nothing in between is possible. 7There are two teachers only, who point in different ways. 8And you will go along the way your chosen teacher leads. 9There are but two directions you can take, while time remains and choice is meaningful. 10For never will another road be made except the way to Heaven. 11You but choose whether to go toward Heaven, or away to nowhere. 12There is nothing else to choose.
2. Nothing is ever lost but time, which in the end is meaningless. 2For it is but a little hindrance to eternity, quite meaningless to the real Teacher of the world. 3Yet since you do believe in it, why should you waste it going nowhere, when it can be used to reach a goal as high as learning can achieve? 4Think not the way to Heaven’s gate is difficult at all. 5Nothing you undertake with certain purpose and high resolve and happy confidence, holding your brother’s hand and keeping step to Heaven’s song, is difficult to do. 6But it is hard indeed to wander off, alone and miserable, down a road that leads to nothing and that has no purpose.
3. God gave His Teacher to replace the one you made, not to conflict with it. 2And what He would replace has been replaced. 3Time lasted but an instant in your mind, with no effect upon eternity. 4And so is all time past, and everything exactly as it was before the way to nothingness was made. 5The tiny tick of time in which the first mistake was made, and all of them within that one mistake, held also the Correction for that one, and all of them that came within the first. 6And in that tiny instant time was gone, for that was all it ever was. 7What God gave answer to is answered and is gone.
4. To you who still believe you live in time and know not it is gone, the Holy Spirit still guides you through the infinitely small and senseless maze you still perceive in time, though it has long since gone. 2You think you live in what is past. 3Each thing you look upon you saw but for an instant, long ago, before its unreality gave way to truth. 4Not one illusion still remains unanswered in your mind. 5Uncertainty was brought to certainty so long ago that it is hard indeed to hold it to your heart, as if it were before you still.
5. The tiny instant you would keep and make eternal, passed away in Heaven too soon for anything to notice it had come. 2What disappeared too quickly to affect the simple knowledge of the Son of God can hardly still be there, for you to choose to be your teacher. 3Only in the past,—an ancient past, too short to make a world in answer to creation,—did this world appear to rise. 4So very long ago, for such a tiny interval of time, that not one note in Heaven’s song was missed. 5Yet in each unforgiving act or thought, in every judgment and in all belief in sin, is that one instant still called back, as if it could be made again in time. 6You keep an ancient memory before your eyes. 7And he who lives in memories alone is unaware of where he is.
6. Forgiveness is the great release from time. 2It is the key to learning that the past is over. 3Madness speaks no more. 4There is no other teacher and no other way. 5For what has been undone no longer is. 6And who can stand upon a distant shore, and dream himself across an ocean, to a place and time that have long since gone by? 7How real a hindrance can this dream be to where he really is? 8For this is fact, and does not change whatever dreams he has. 9Yet can he still imagine he is elsewhere, and in another time. 10In the extreme, he can delude himself that this is true, and pass from mere imagining into belief and into madness, quite convinced that where he would prefer to be, he is.
7. Is this a hindrance to the place whereon he stands? 2Is any echo from the past that he may hear a fact in what is there to hear where he is now? 3And how much can his own illusions about time and place effect a change in where he really is?
8. The unforgiven is a voice that calls from out a past forevermore gone by. 2And everything that points to it as real is but a wish that what is gone could be made real again and seen as here and now, in place of what is really now and here. 3Is this a hindrance to the truth the past is gone, and cannot be returned to you? 4And do you want that fearful instant kept, when Heaven seemed to disappear and God was feared and made a symbol of your hate?
9. Forget the time of terror that has been so long ago corrected and undone. 2Can sin withstand the Will of God? 3Can it be up to you to see the past and put it in the present? 4You can not go back. 5And everything that points the way in the direction of the past but sets you on a mission whose accomplishment can only be unreal. 6Such is the justice your All-Loving Father has ensured must come to you. 7And from your own unfairness to yourself has He protected you. 8You cannot lose your way because there is no way but His, and nowhere can you go except to Him.
10. Would God allow His Son to lose his way along a road long since a memory of time gone by? 2This course will teach you only what is now. 3A dreadful instant in a distant past, now perfectly corrected, is of no concern nor value. 4Let the dead and gone be peacefully forgotten. 5Resurrection has come to take its place. 6And now you are a part of resurrection, not of death. 7No past illusions have the power to keep you in a place of death, a vault God’s Son entered an instant, to be instantly restored unto his Father’s perfect Love. 8And how can he be kept in chains long since removed and gone forever from his mind?
11. The Son whom God created is as free as God created him. 2He was reborn the instant that he chose to die instead of live. 3And will you not forgive him now, because he made an error in the past that God remembers not, and is not there? 4Now you are shifting back and forth between the past and present. 5Sometimes the past seems real, as if it were the present. 6Voices from the past are heard and then are doubted. 7You are like to one who still hallucinates, but lacks conviction in what he perceives. 8This is the borderland between the worlds, the bridge between the past and present. 9Here the shadow of the past remains, but still a present light is dimly recognized. 10Once it is seen, this light can never be forgotten. 11It must draw you from the past into the present, where you really are.
12. The shadow voices do not change the laws of time nor of eternity. 2They come from what is past and gone, and hinder not the true existence of the here and now. 3The real world is the second part of the hallucination time and death are real, and have existence that can be perceived. 4This terrible illusion was denied in but the time it took for God to give His Answer to illusion for all time and every circumstance. 5And then it was no more to be experienced as there.
13. Each day, and every minute in each day, and every instant that each minute holds, you but relive the single instant when the time of terror took the place of love. 2And so you die each day to live again, until you cross the gap between the past and present, which is not a gap at all. 3Such is each life; a seeming interval from birth to death and on to life again, a repetition of an instant gone by long ago that cannot be relived. 4And all of time is but the mad belief that what is over is still here and now.
14. Forgive the past and let it go, for it is gone. 2You stand no longer on the ground that lies between the worlds. 3You have gone on, and reached the world that lies at Heaven’s gate. 4There is no hindrance to the Will of God, nor any need that you repeat again a journey that was over long ago. 5Look gently on your brother, and behold the world in which perception of your hate has been transformed into a world of love.