18 The Laws of Illusions II: The Memory of the Present

 

“The war against yourself was undertaken to teach the Son of God that he is not himself, and not his Father’s Son. For this, the memory of his Father must be forgotten. It is forgotten in the body’s life, and if you think you are a body, you will believe you have forgotten it. Yet truth can never be forgotten by itself, and you have not forgotten what you are. Only a strange illusion of yourself, a wish to triumph over what you are, remembers not.

…The memory of God comes to the quiet mind. It cannot come where there is conflict, for a mind at war against itself remembers not eternal gentleness.” The Forgotten Song, ACIM 21-1

“I am a memory, a memory re-enlivened, and yet I am an experience, a renewed experience of Oneness. As We become reunited, you begin to fall in love again. Your heart swells, and, perhaps, unbeknownst to you, you are dwelling in a land of love where the demarcations are faded and where My love pulses. Who needs memories to go around the block in? I remember you vividly. Remember Me.”  HL 4282 

“Let’s have it out. You are an incredible Being Who hides under a mask of his own making. You transfer roles. You transferred your Heritage to Me. I am a projection of you – or, are you a projection of Me? It does get confusing, talking about Our Oneness in terms of two.

Why is the word I capitalized? There is One I, and yet a fringe of the One I babbles on the periphery.

Well, don’t worry about it. It’s all for a good cause. But know that I am the Godhead, and you reign supreme with Me, only you blink such supreme Vastness away. Yes, you do have a veil over your eyes.” HL 4493 

 

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In the previous blog “The Laws of Illusions I” we stated that consciousness created the law of filtering to experience apparent division into minimal constituent parts of matter and energy.

What we call the gap and the bridge between spirit and matter has yet to be defined.

 

The road to amnesia

On the side of the spirit, the will to experience a personal self rose from a desire to experience a self that would not be shared. God shared all He has, which is all He is, when He created our real identity. He shared His mind and His heart, His truth and His love in total free will and granted our identity with this same free will. With this free will, the creative mind had the potential to co-create with God or to project a self that was not the original Self-created by the source but a self-made unshared self. From the desire to experience separation, which could only be done virtually or by dreaming, light and love, although inseparable in essence because they are one and totally shared, could be virtually separated or not shared. Negation or denying had to be invented. So the mind made a detour by imagining duality, twoness. The mind could be split in twoness because it had the will to make decisions or choices by negating or denying, but the heart could not be split since love cannot be divided or negated or denied no more than oneness can be divided and negated because it only is.

From the artificial separation of the mind from the heart, from the artificial separation of truth from love, rose the fear of death or the fear of God and paradoxically an attraction for death and for guilt. The link between the fear of death and the attraction to death is the sense of lack, deprivation, anger. Hence the link is ego, the negation. It can be understood as the apparent loss of eternity and infinity (immortality) through a virtual fall into time and space. It was the Big Bang. Separating from the source, even if it is only virtual, had to be experienced and felt as real. An interference had to be created. Fear of death, which was the perception resulting from the apparent loss of love, was the necessary feeling to separate and attraction for death was the condition for forgetting the truth or knowledge in order to believe in the forms of the outside world through the body. Amnesia was the veil or the gap or the filter that had to be projected to forget the pain of having lost love and at the same time, to start to learn to remember through the recovery of the truth. The Big Bang represents this spectacular detour into fear and the foundation of the first school teaching how to get out of ignorance (forgetting) and how to return to the truth (remembering) by experiencing the illusion of death as a way of resuming life through remembering love.

 

The apparition of time and space

To project a physical world in order to experience the personal self, the attraction of death had to create a virtual home or virtual heaven where the personal self could live its virtual identity or secrecy. It is this attraction to death that created time and space, which are the coordinates of matter. The Big Bang expresses this desire to live a fearful yet attractive and spectacular separation. From the eternal present, the Big Bang marks the beginning of time and space. The force of gravity gave a shape to time and space to give the bodies or forms their consistency, apparently maintaining them apart from the source and from each other. Einstein stated that “gravity is a curvature of the space-time”.

The attraction of death created forgetting while the fear of death created remembering. Since gravity is the force that separates and maintain separated bodies or forms (force of forgetting which is a resistance, a negation), electromagnetism is what holds all forms together and give them a way to communicate or share, filling the gap of the non-communicating, non-sharing bodies (force of remembering unity). It could be said that electromagnetism is the force that keeps all the parts of the physical world together. It is the expression of the permanent love that sustains the physical universe even when it is denied.

It is also known in quantum physics that no (quantum) object can ever be brought to rest. There is always a minimal vibration that fills the universe.  It is called the zero-point field. Since elementary particles cannot be brought to a full, total, absolute rest, there is a background in the universe that contains constant energy or light. The Uncertainty Principle (Heisenberg) states that light energy must exist at every point of the Universe. Is not this energy the presence of love, the soul of the physical universe, the sign that nothing was ever lost, or if it was lost it was lost only in a dream? Love gives a meaning to the universe, it makes it one as it was created one.

 If gravity is related to the split mind, electromagnetism must be related to the heart. So there is no real twoness or opposition between the two forces. What is gravity/ inertia if not a resistance (negation) to acceleration? Because it is also known in quantum physics that the universal minimal radiation pressure (in the musical background of the universe) causes inertia. So where is twoness in reality? (Take a look back at the coffee been in the previous blog.)

 

Two memories

It can be said that the desire to separate invented the memory as a skill. In the non-separation state, only present or now exists. So there is no real need for memory. But in the state of separation, memory is necessary to remember what the personal self has made and experience that state as the real world (illustrated by the picture of the computer memory chip). In that sense memory is a skill made up by the split mind to replace the irreplaceable identity given by God by a fake identity. Our true identity is timeless and spaceless. Our fake identity is bounded and defined by time and space including its birth and its death. Referring to itself in perfect likeness or sameness, our true identity exists in the now in a complete sharing of itself. But a self-made identity is virtually based on its unlikeness to the other self-made identities. It has to invent distance which is expressed by time and space. But distance is a negation and there is no possibility of negating the now. So it can only work within an artificial now which in reality is a past event. Time is a pseudo-continuum between an imagined past and an imagined future projected from the past but without a present or now. Consequently, time and space must also be considered as “past events” if we recall that we could not experience a separate self, a separate thought system if we did not hold the past. Because what we are holding as the past is the illusion of time which is just a thought of separation of a fraction of a billionth of a second (more precisely, a millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second, that is 10^-24 seconds, the “instant” of the beginning or Big Bang) that is already over in Eternity. It never happened in reality, only in the dream. In that sense, the physical universe is also a past event. Its evolution is a reflection of the now in the form of cycles of space-time spinning around the center of now.

Basically, we think memory is a skill that holds only the past. But we have to remember that if memory is totally useless in the now, it is necessary in the virtual world of separation with its space/time (gravity and inertia) coordinates because it is the link that keeps us attached to our real Self (like the electromagnetic field and the zero-point field) which might have been denied but could never be lost. So our real identity resides in the memory as well as our faked identity (see the illustration of the head in the sand washed by the ocean).

There seem to be two memories. There is the selective memory which is the memory of the self we made and which operates by interfering with the Truth of what we are. It functions like a dream where we see the pictures we want to be shown to us. This memory is a skill with applications in the physical world, like science and technology. It is a memory used to forget who we really are. And there is the unselective memory which is without application. It is the memory to remember who we are.

Memory is as neutral as the body. It does not have a will of itself. It holds the information it is given and does what the mind wants. The history of the body and of the physical universe are hidden there. It is the personal self that makes all the strange associations to keep the past alive because the self-made self is a past history, the future being only the projection of this past. The personal self has absolutely no present because it is an illusion. It has no meaning whatsoever. The personal self can virtually exist as long as it obliterates the present. By doing so, it appears to be increased by time until it reaches its end, which is death. It can live only by concealing the truth of our real identity. It is as if the personal self was holding the past against the present or the now of the true self. It could be said that what is perceived or interpreted as death through the selective memory is the reaffirmation of the now, the eternity of life through the unselective memory.

Memory is useful for learning what we already know but have forgotten. There wouldn’t be any meaning to forget if it was not to remember better. But there is a choice to make: we cannot listen to the two memories at the same time. We must forget one to understand the other. We cannot understand the unselective memory by choosing the selective memory. But we can understand the selective memory process if we choose the unselective memory. Then the learning through the selective memory becomes consistent because we get back the real consistency of our true identity. This is what is meant by forgetting the past to reintegrate the life in the now.

[To be continued]

 

Written by Normand Bourque on Mar 12, 2013