In the second scene of Shakespeare's final play The Tempest, the protagonist Prospero, the magician and deposed governor of Milan, speaks with his daughter Miranda with whom he escaped from his home many years before. When she unexpectedly is able to recall some memories of her distant childhood, her father says:

What seest thou else
In the dark backward and abysm⁽¹⁾ of time? (I,ii)

While Shakespeare did not place any nefarious connotations to Prospero's words regarding memory—this was the wise magician's beloved daughter, after all—we can read more into them when they are seen within the context of A Course in Miracles and its understanding of the role that time and memory play in the ego's thought system. One cannot conceive of our world without linear time, and since we are continually enjoined by Jesus to consider the purpose of everything, we begin our examination of memory with a discussion of the nature of time and its calculated and not-very-loving purpose in the ego's plan of salvation.

The Purpose of Time and Memory

Time did not come into existence until the first projection of error outward, which gave rise to the material universe (T-18.I.6:1-2). Our temporal world consists of past, present, and future, and these are nothing more than expressions in form of the ego's thought system of sin, guilt, and fear. After the projection from the mind of this unholy trinity, a most maladaptive means of escaping from God's wrath, sin becomes what we believe we did in the past, guilt what we experience in what we think of as the present, and fear the understandable response to the punishment we believe is inevitably forthcoming in the future. The ego depends on this nexus of hate for its survival, since all three components—different aspects of the one thought of separation—bear witness to the seeming fact that the impossible has occurred, for God's Son has left his Source and now seems to exist in the imperfect state of separation, the ego's warped notion of salvation.

Enter memory—"the dark backward and abysm of time"—as the means the ego uses to root us in the mind's insane thought system of separation, and then its murderous practice of special relationships that we experience in the body. The ego represents the antithesis of Heaven's light, hence the adjective dark to denote the obscuringly tenebrous nature of memory; backward because memory roots us in the past, the home of sin; while abysm expresses memory's purpose in hurtling us down the cavernous depths of the ego's netherworld of guilt and damnation. The purpose of time therefore is to preserve the nightmares that prevent us "from awakening and understanding they are past" (T-13.IV.6:6). In other words, time keeps in our awareness the nightmare of separation so that we would never recognize that it has already been undone and so is long since gone.

Stated still another way, the world of time roots us in the world of bodies, since time and space are opposite sides of the same illusory coin of separation (T-26.VIII.1:3), and it is only bodies that experience linear time, which does not exist in the mind at all. On this bodily level, then, we hold our brother's sin against him, the memory of which we never relinquish in the present, retaining it in awareness in order to prove that he deserves to be punished, a fact witnessed to by our hate- motivated suffering. Thus time's purpose:

The continuity of past and future, under its [the ego's] direction, is the only purpose the ego perceives in time, and it closes over the present so that no gap in its own continuity can occur. Its continuity, then, would keep you in time … (T-13.IV.8:2-3).

Moreover, the body's experience of time is merely the projected shadow of the mind's decision to remain an ego. Memory, too, is simply the ego's vassal, carrying out, as it were, the guilt-driven messages of its lord and master, the wrong mind:

Memory holds the message it receives, and does what it is given it to do. It does not write the message, nor appoint what it is for. Like to the body, it is purposeless within itself. And 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. Committed to its vaults, the history of all the body's past is hidden there. 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 (T-28.I.5:3-8).

This clearly means, as we shall now see, that memory does not truly involve the past, which quite simply does not exist. Rather, it exists only in the mind's ongoing wish to preserve its ever-present choice to be separated—relived again and again and again—by denying its own perceived power to hurt, now seen in a world that seems to be all around it and which threatens its innocence. This is the face of innocence described near the end of the text, the self that feels continually imposed on by the world, leading to the "sinless" self's eventual retaliation on its victimizers in self-defense, the memory of past sins against it, justifying its unforgiving counterattacks (T-31.V.2:6; 3).

From this use of time and memory—the home of present and ancient hate—there is no escape for us and for the objects of our projection. And so memory can be understood as one of the ego's major weapons in its war against God, or better, against the decision-making mind choosing God. To consider more specifically the nature of memory is the theme of our next section.

Memory: A Present Decision Projected into a Non-existent Past

We begin with a definition of memory, already hinted at just above: a present decision projected into a non-existent past. Since time is an illusion, there can be no past. The basis for the past is the belief that the separation from God actually happened. Since it did not, because it could not—"In time this [the idea of separation] happened very long ago. In reality it never happened at all" (M-2.2:7-8)—how could time possibly exist, except in dreams? Therefore, what we think of as memories of the past can be nothing but decisions made by the mind in the present to reinforce belief in the ego's delusional thought system. This denies God's eternal Love since it makes linear time seem real. Our decision making is therefore the only "time" that exists in the mind:

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 it in your mind, see it as a dark cloud that shrouds your brothers and conceals their reality from your sight (T-13.VI.2:4-5).

It is the decision-making mind's present fear of the light that drives us into the "comforting" arms of the ego; our "friends" of sin, guilt, fear, and death (T-19.IV-D.6:3) that link us to the past sin of separation, thereby maintaining its insane thought system in our current experience.

We must never underestimate the seductive power of these "friends" to lure us into believing the ego's lies of separation and its tale of salvation through special relationships. Music lovers, as well as almost all Germans for whom it has become a virtual folk song, are familiar with Schubert's beautiful setting of Wilhelm Mueller's Der Lindenbaum (The Linden [or Lime] Tree), part of the Viennese Master's final song cycle Die Winterreise (The Winter's Journey). The tree, which we can understand to be the comforting presence of specialness, calls the poem's rejected lover to die in its deceptively gentle embrace: the joys of special love, along with its sorrowful and inevitable disappointments. While our young hero ends up resisting the call, its sounds linger in his mind as he travels far beyond it on his dreary journey into madness. The heartbroken youth speaks to us of the tree's call, coming to him as if out of a dream:

In joy and in sorrow it drew
Me to it always. …
But the branches rustled
As if they called to me:
"Come to me, friend,
Here you will find your rest."

Such is the mesmeric call of memory, reinforcing the ego's thought system of death. Seeking to preserve its individual identity beyond all threat of undoing by the mind's correction of itself, the decision-making mind chooses the ego as its teacher and embraces its wrong-minded thought system of sin, guilt, and fear. When the decision is projected from the mind, memory is born, as is all of time. The seamless flow of eternity, the unseparated nature of reality, is deliberately banned from the mind's awareness, its place taken by the discrete segments that comprise our experience of linear time—the ego's reality:

Past, present and future are not continuous, unless you force continuity on them. You can perceive them as continuous, and make them so for you. But do not be deceived, and then believe that this is how it is. For to believe reality is what you would have it be according to your use for it is delusional. You would destroy time's continuity by breaking it into past, present and future for your own purposes. You would anticipate the future on the basis of your past experience, and plan for it accordingly. Yet by doing so you are aligning past and future, and not allowing the miracle, which could intervene between them, to free you to be born again (T-13.VI.4:2-8).

This defense against the mind choosing to undo its mistaken decision through the miracle is, once again, memory's purpose. It is why the ego made it in the first place. We cherish the uniqueness of our special self, and this is the effect of the cause that is our mind's decision for the ego's separation and the unholy trinity of sin, guilt, and fear. And so we read:

Why would you cling to it in memory if you did not desire its 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 (T-28.I.2:4-7).

Again, we desire the effect (our physical/psychological body), and so we choose the cause (the mind's guilt) that makes our separated self appear in a body. We then forget what we did, splitting off effect from cause, thereby enshrining our past sin behind the ego's veil of forgetfulness, hiding it seemingly for all time from our awareness.

Yet, there is another way of looking

The past that you remember never was, and represents only the denial of what always was (T-14.IX.1:10).

"What always was" is the love that created us and that we are. Letting go of the past and shifting memory's purpose is the means for remembering the mind's present that is the doorway home. This is the Holy Spirit's use of memory, and the holy instant is the Course's term for this shift from time to timelessness. Learning to make this shift is Jesus' goal for us in his course.

The Holy Instant: "For the First Time"

We begin this section with a passage from an early workbook lesson that enunciates the principle of for the first time, the heart of our daily practice of forgiveness:

   Old ideas about time are very difficult to change, because everything you believe is rooted in time, and depends on your not learning these new ideas about it. Yet that is precisely why you need new ideas about time. This first time idea is not really so strange as it may sound at first (W-pI.7.2; italics mine).

Without our memories, every moment within the dream is lived for the first time, meaning there is no past to distort our vision. I commented in the last issue of The Lighthouse (March, 2009) on the conducting of Wilhelm Furtwängler, and how he saw each musical work as a living, organic process. Extending that idea, we can also see how for this great conductor, each performance was conducted for the first time. Works Furtwängler had conducted hundreds of times, like the Beethoven symphonies, became fresh and alive under his direction, for he drew from the timeless, right-minded wellspring from where all great art emanates to re-create the music anew each time he raised his baton.

Yet far more important than this artistic example are the vast implications of the principle of for the first time for our everyday relationships. Persons are not related to for what they can do for us, based on our past experience of them or others, but only for who they are now: minds that have chosen to express love, or that call for love out of their fear of it (T-14.X.7:1), asking to be proven wrong about their decision for the ego. No other perception is justified within the world of illusion, for this simple non-judgmental recognition is all that can be true here. Without the belief in our past sin to project, it is impossible to see sin in anyone. Projection makes perception (T-21.in.1:1; italics mine), and if there is nothing to project, there is nothing to perceive.

For example, consider the relationship between parents and children. In these days of increased longevity, it is not uncommon for adult children to be taking care of aged parents, either directly or indirectly through supervision of their medical and/or custodial care. So often, unfortunately, such increased responsibility is accompanied by thoughts and feelings of imposition, anger, resentment, and guilt—all hardly conducive to loving interactions. These unloving responses are indeed understandable, given the pain most people have felt in their childhood due to ego-based parenting that was sometimes characterized by severe emotional and physical abuse. Yet, all this means is that the children are still carrying the past around with them, making it the apparently justified determiner of their present thoughts, feelings, and behavior.

To be able to be fully present to the needs of one's parents, it would be essential to see mothers and fathers for the first time. Whatever mistakes had been made in the past would no longer be seen or even remembered. As the workbook says: "The past is over. It can touch me not." (W-pII.289). Or, as we read in the text, substituting The past for This world:

[The past] 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 (T-28.I.1:6-7).

In fact, it would be impossible to be truly present to anyone, regardless of the form of the relationship, without letting go of the past. This is what is meant by Jesus' exhortation to us throughout A Course in Miracles that we are not bodies but minds. Minds exist outside time and space, a state in which there is no linear time. Bodies, on the other hand, are very much temporal creatures, forever bound by the calendar and clock, and the laws of development and survival. There are very clearly demarcated developmental stages that commence at conception, just as there are definite laws of eating and sleeping that we believe sustain our existence, and laws of money that govern the need to work to support ourselves and our families—all of which are time-bound. Therefore, to the extent that we identify with our bodies, as we all inevitably do, to that same extent we are making it impossible to be truly present to another person. The shadows of the past (T-17.III) invariably rise before our mind's eyes to cloud our vision, and judgment replaces true understanding. Our unforgiveness of the past precludes any genuine concern or compassion for the pain that all of us experience as creatures of illusion.

However, all this can easily be undone by choosing a different teacher, who gently whispers to us, midst our raucous shrieks of hurt, anger, and desire to punish: "[You] could see peace instead of this" (W-pI.34). Situations of hurt and pain become transformed into the holy encounters of forgiveness, for the unholiness of the past has been released as we recognize the inherent sameness of God's Son:

   When you meet anyone, remember it is a holy encounter. As you see him you will see yourself. As you treat him you will treat yourself. As you think of him you will think of yourself (T-8.III.4:1-4).

As the ego speaks first (T-6.IV.1:2), we are always tempted to see others through the eyes of specialness, thus making them separate and different from us. These perceptions are always predicated on the past, which "enlightens" us as to who and what have the special attributes that can meet our special needs.

When we realize the tremendous cost to us of our mistaken choice in teachers, which leads to the need to attack others to save ourselves, we are ready to receive the answer of Atonement: the separation from Creator and creation has never happened. Releasing our judgments that heretofore we had thought to be salvific, we are able to see through the vision of the holy instant to perceive others as they really are: illusory fragments of God's one Son. Seeing as Jesus sees, we recognize the inherent sameness in all of us: one split mind that consists of the ego, the Holy Spirit, and the decision maker who chooses between them.

We can think of the Holy Spirit's or Jesus' purpose as being to restore our memory to its right-minded function of allowing the miracle to truly enlighten the mind that had been hurtled by the ego into the "dark backward and abysm of time." Thus is memory freed from its function of preserving a past that never was, so it can release the loving Present that has always been. The miracle will have fulfilled its purpose when we remember that the problem is never in the past, but always in the decision maker's choice now. And because the choice is made now, it can be changed, and memory's purpose shifted from the past to the holy instant that is the true present, as we now read:

   The Holy Spirit can indeed make use of memory, for God Himself is there. Yet 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. The limitations on remembering the world imposes on it are as vast as those you let the world impose on you. 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 (T-28.I.4).

In other words, it is our desire to remain separated and blame others for our miserable existence that forges the non-existent link to a non-existent past, wherein our sin and guilt hold sway —hidden and seemingly uncorrected forever.

This same desire—the mind's power to choose—can therefore be redirected from the ego's unholy instant of judgment and attack to the Holy Spirit's holy instant of forgiveness and joining. From Part Two of the workbook we read of the holy instant that it is the only time there is, and the shift in purpose that salvation requires if we are to journey through time to the eternal world of timelessness:

   I have conceived of time in such a way that I defeat my aim. If I elect to reach past time to timelessness, I must change my perception of what time is for. Time's purpose cannot be to keep the past and future one. The only interval in which I can be saved from time is now. For in this instant has forgiveness come to set me free. The birth of Christ is now, without a past or future. He has come to give His present blessing to the world, restoring it to timelessness and love. And love is ever-present, here and now (W-pII.308.1).

And so we live in the holy instant, wherein we meet our brothers and everyday situations for the first time, greeting the reborn Christ in each of us. No shadows of the past hover before our eyes to mar our vision, and we serenely walk the world with gentle smiles upon our faces with which we grace all members of the Sonship (W-pI.155.1:1-3). Tensions, resentments, anxieties, and needless fatigue have disappeared back into their own nothingness—illusion returning to illusion—and the terrible burdens of a past that never was increasingly lighten until they are dissolved by the gentleness of forgiveness. How wonderfully liberating it is to live in the present moment, free of the projected hates of a non-existent past into an equally non-existent future, held together by our judgments of God's Son! As Jesus tells us early in the text:

   You have no idea of the tremendous release and deep peace that comes from meeting yourself and your brothers totally without judgment (T-3.VI.3:1).

What then are judgments but projections onto others of our judgments of ourselves? Most students of A Course in Miracles are familiar with this statement from the workbook:

When you feel that you are tempted to accuse someone of sin in any form, do not allow your mind to dwell on what you think he did, for that is self-deception. Ask instead, "Would I accuse myself of doing this?" (W-pI.134.9:2-3).

In the holy instant we have chosen against the ego's thought system of separation, sin, and suffering, and so these can no longer be in our experience. What remains is the peace that comes when conflict ends, the joy when there is no sorrow, and the glory that is God's Son who has been freed from the imprisoning shackles of guilt. And so we read these inspiring words from Lesson 194:

   Release the future. For the past is gone, and what is present, freed from its bequest of grief and misery, of pain and loss, becomes the instant in which time escapes the bondage of illusions where it runs its pitiless, inevitable course. Then is each instant which was slave to time transformed into a holy instant, when the light that was kept hidden in God's Son is freed to bless the world. Now is he free, and all his glory shines upon a world made free with him, to share his holiness (W-pI.194.5).

To restate this happy fact, living for the first time means that there is nothing to remember. Indeed, Jesus has no memory, for all he knows is that his brothers are choosing wrongly in the mind's present, and that his loving presence will pull us back. What else is there to know? What else would we want to know? Our experience may tell us otherwise, that Jesus tells us specific things, or answers specific questions with specific answers, but these are only the right mind's translations of love's abstract nature into something specific that we could relate to. This follows the same principle we find in the physiology of the eye's functioning. As the image from the world passes through our eyeball on its way to the retina, it is reversed, thus literally casting an upside-down image there, which is what we see. Yet very early on, our brains correct this image so that it is right-side up, which is how we think we see the world since this is our experience, even though it is a lie. As Jesus tells us in the context of our inability to understand Oneness:

It is apparent that a mind so split could never be the Teacher of a Oneness which unites all things within Itself. And so What is within this mind, and does unite all things together, must be its Teacher. Yet must It use the language that this mind can understand, in the condition in which it thinks it is (T-25.I.7:2-4).

The above means that Jesus does not really guide our behavior, since his own teaching tells us that there is no world outside the mind (ideas leave not their source). Again, our minds translate the non-specific experience of his love to the specific "hearing" and "guidance" that we believe informs our lives in the world. This understanding greatly simplifies our daily practice of forgiveness, for each and every situation, event, and relationship is brought back to the single error that caused our upset, now easily corrected by the mind's decision for a different teacher.

Finally, it is important that we not interpret these teachings in a simple-minded way; namely, that we do everything here for the first time. Clearly, in order to survive as physical/psychological creatures, we need to rely on the past for our daily living. How could we ever prepare for the day—washing up, brushing teeth, preparing breakfast, driving to work, etc.—without the past to guide us? Rather, we are speaking of our relationships. Similarly, when Jesus repeatedly exhorts us not to judge, he does not mean that we not make the evaluations required for our everyday functioning as bodies, judgments we all take for granted. His meaning is that we not condemn our brothers, asking ourselves: "Would I accuse myself of doing this?" Such self-examination, recognizing at last the healing nature of for the first time, returns our attention to the mind where we can joyously choose again. Gone is the sin- and guilt-laden past; gone, too, is the fear-driven future. This leaves only the holy instant in which vision has replaced all judgment, and God's Son allowed to remember that he is God's Son.

Conclusion

Following the Course practice of contrasting the ego and the Holy Spirit, we have examined their uses of memory. The ego employs memory to root us in its projected world of linear time, the material world of specifics, thereby reinforcing its unholy trinity of sin, guilt, and fear. By identifying with the ego's purpose, we forget the memory of God's Love that is held for us in our right minds by the Holy Spirit, Who is the symbolic presentation of that memory. When we look at how memory has served our egos and kept us from its right-minded purpose of remembering God, who but the insane would ever choose to continue to use the past against the eternal present? As Jesus said in The Song of Prayer, regarding our needs for specific help for specific problems:

What could His answer be but your remembrance of Him? Can this be traded for a bit of trifling advice about a problem of an instant's duration? God answers only for eternity. But still all little answers are contained in this (S-1.I.4:5-8).

The Holy Spirit uses our experience of time to teach us that there is no time (T-13.IV.7:3-4), and therefore the thought system that made it must be unreal. All it takes to bring us the peace and joy that is our right as God's Son is a change of mind, a little willingness, a nod to God (T-24.VI.12:4) Nothing else is necessary for the temporal world of sin, guilt, and punishment to vanish as if it were never there, because it never was:

   How instantly the memory of God arises in the mind that has no fear to keep the memory away! Its own remembering has gone. There is no past to keep its fearful image in the way of glad awakening to present peace. The trumpets of eternity resound throughout the stillness, yet disturb it not. And what is now remembered is not fear, but rather is the Cause that fear was made to render unremembered and undone. 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 (T-28.I.13).

These gentle sounds have never left our minds, and have been there from the insane instant we entertained the thought of separation, choosing to remember the ego's specialness and forget the all-inclusiveness of the Atonement. However, now we have decided to recall what we forgot, allowing the trumpets of eternity to reverberate throughout the Sonship, yet contained in our healed mind. The principle of for the first time softly disappears into the joyousness of eternity, for we have chosen at last to remember the Love that is our Creator and our Self. What had been dark and backward is released to its own nothingness, and the shining light of Christ is now our sole reality.

We close with this inspiring passage from Helen's prose poem The Gifts of God (originally a series of personal messages to her), which poetically echoes and expands upon the above quotation from The Song of Prayer, reflecting the gentle guidance that leads us to our home, love returning to itself:

   Child of Eternal Love, what gift is there your Father wants of you except yourself? And what is there that you would rather give, for what is there that you would rather have? You have forgotten Who you really are. What but that memory is dear to you? What trifling gifts made out of sickly fear and evil dreams of suffering and death can be the substitute you really want for the rememberance of Christ in you? In the far country you were lost indeed, but you were not forgotten. Hear the call of love to love, by love, in love to you, and rise with love beside you to return the gift of love that God has given you, and you have given Him in gratitude (The Gifts of God, p. 125).

FOOTNOTES:
1. An archaic rendering of abyss.