24 Existing and Being

“The separation was not a loss of perfection, but a failure in communication…

True learning is constant, and so vital in its power for change that a Son of God can recognise his power in one instant and change the world in the next. That is because, by changing his mind, he has changed the most powerful device that was ever given him for change. This in no way contradicts the changelessness of mind as God created it, but you think that you have changed it as long as you learn through the ego. This places you in a position of needing to learn a lesson that seems contradictory; – you must learn to change your mind about your mind. Only by this can you learn that it is changeless.” ACIM VII-5

“God said: It is not for you to discipline the Universe. Every change, no matter how alien to you, serves you. No matter how hard a change is for you to accept, no matter how much a change seems like a loss to you, it is a gain. The tide of change has lapped you closer to shore. It may not be the shore you had in mind, and yet it brings you closer to your desires. With or without your consent, room has been made for you. And now you go forward like a fish in the sea weaving through the water.”  HL 4142 

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The difference between existing and being is not easy to understand. We generally tend to confuse the two of them or, at least,  we are more comfortable with the idea of existing than of being. One reason for this confusion is that we make a distinction between what is concrete and what is abstract. We associate abstraction with conceptualized generalization (like a theory) made by the mind and concreteness with what appears as separate wholes through the perceptual lenses of the body. Furthermore, we tend to associate concreteness with reality and abstraction with illusion or, at least, unreality. It is then easy to associate existence with concreteness and being with abstraction. It is generally required that a theory (abstraction) be verified and confirmed by the facts (which are more perceptions than facts). Generalization is a consequence or result of finding a common link between separate wholes or facts or events. If the link applies to all the separate wholes, then a theory can be established. That is probably why science never tried to demonstrate God: it seems impossible to add up all the separate wholes of the universe and find a link that can fit all of those wholes and express them in a generalization or theory named God. Well, quantum theory seems to have found that universal link through the concept of the unified field or point zero field (which we talked about in Blog #17 The Laws of Illusions I). We will reexamine this concept of a unified field further.

But our understanding of existing does not seem to lead us to an understanding of being. And this goes beyond intellectual understanding. Being seems a pure abstraction while we easily associate existence with the specifics of space/time localization. Existing is also almost synonymous with doing. In the relative world, we don’t seem to have a real identity if we don’t refer to what we are doing in life. In the realm of existence, it seems almost impossible to conceive our identity as only being without any reference to doing. And yet, being is our only real identity.  Existence is our mixed identity: a mix of our real identity as being with an identity that we have built ourself through separation.  Hence ego seems to be a constituent of existence. At the same time, existence allows growth in awareness of our being.

So far we have learned that concreteness is an illusion, a perception, not a fact because it is based on division. Everything that seems to be divided or separate is a perception. In the relative world, we believe in facts: facts are associated with truth and truth can be seemingly demonstrated by the recurrence of facts. But how can a fact be reality or truth when everything is based on division and change? How can reality be divided? How can meaning be divided? We can only associate facts with specificity. And, effectively, ego illusions are specific. Yet the mind, by nature, is oriented towards abstraction or generalization. So, if we tend to believe that concreteness is reality, that truth resides in concreteness, it is because part of our mind, which is fundamentally abstract, became concrete when it split. This “concrete” part of the mind believes in the ego and the ego depends totally on the concrete since it makes us believe that our existence is defined by separation.

Ego depends only on perceptions because to experience separation it has to perceive everything as separate wholes without any relationships between them. Ego has to negate communication unless it can use it to establish and extend separateness. Its basic concrete activity is to negate any relation outside its own thought system. It will use communication only to protect itself and when it feels threatened, it will break the communication. So what kind of generalization or abstraction is ego capable of since it selectively responds in specific ways only to things that it perceives as related? Yet, if the mind has the capability of distorting its function, it cannot give itself new or different functions because it did not create itself.  The sane mind is God’s creation so it has never lost the capability of relating, hence communicating, hence expressing meaning, hence expressing Truth.

Existence rests on communication even though ego negates communication. The ego is a component of existence but abstraction is also another component. Ego is incapable of abstraction because it negates relations. Abstraction belongs to the sane part of the mind. Abstraction is essentially the look for meaning, the search for truth which is the search for reality. The ego has its own system of meaning, its own system of truth based on perceptions. But the faculty of abstraction in existence can counterbalance perception. Perception is an illusion because it does not have any meaning by itself. It is the consequence of a judgment. This is the reason why, through abstraction, we generally look for meaning by collecting as much as possible links between separate wholes and events. The scientific method aims at overcoming those judgments to establish the meaning or the truth of objectively observed separate wholes or facts. We could say that meaning rises from communication or sharing something in common, that meaning is communication, that meaning is sharing.

However, existence is specific in establishing its rules of communication: it chooses how, what, when to communicate based on evaluation and what it judges worth communicating. Existence is limited by space and time. It is still a selective process so it cannot really access truth or knowledge. It cannot understand being.

Being is what allows our divine mind to always react in the same way to everything that is fundamentally true. It communicates with what is real. And since only One is real, it is its own generalization or abstraction.  It does not react to what is not true because it does not perceive, it only knows. What it knows is eternal, unchangeable. Abstraction in being is not the product or the assemblage of separate wholes. It is at the very source of being. And reality is totally abstract as One, it is beyond any distinctions. There is no you, me, us, they. There is only One. Being is the quintessence of abstraction.  We could almost say that existence does not exist or it dissolves itself in the vastness of being.  This is a theme that is recurrent in Heavenletters.

Our difficulty in understanding love is directly related to our difficulty in understanding being. Being is its own object, so is love. Love is the uppermost abstraction. In fact, love and being are the same. Being, love, and knowledge are isomorph.

Knowledge and Information

Ego cannot know, it can only perceive so it must depend on what is concrete. The mind, as originally created by God, can only know and is incapable to perceive because it is abstract. Total abstraction is what oneness is about. It is the source of all meaning, all relations, all communication. It is also called Reality or Truth.

This brings us to make a clear distinction between Knowledge and information. God communicated His knowledge which is His truth, His love when He created our mind. This knowledge is eternally unchangeable yet it can paradoxically be increased. But it increases essentially through sharing which is the very essence of communication. And sharing must be and is total because what is shared is being. Existences can only be partially shared because bodies don’t communicate by themselves. The mind can use the body to communicate or not to communicate. At the level of being, having is identical to being. So what God shares is all that He has and what He has is all that He is.

Information pertains to the world of existence. What could be called knowledge of the physical world is a cumulation of information about a specific world with specific laws.  Perception submitted to generalization is not knowledge. It is information. And as it used to be said in cybernetics: information is neither mass nor energy, it is information. Meaning seems to “grow” by new discoveries, new theories, new generalizations. We know more about the relative world through the cumulative process of information, but we don’t know more about the Truth or Reality. Meaning is not a construct through generalization. Meaning, or generalization, is at the origin of the world: it can be called everythingness, nothingness, vastness, infinity, eternity. It can be forgotten then remembered but it cannot be reconstructed because it has never been destructed by a dream called space and time.

The growing “knowledge” of the physical universe is cumulative information that is asymptotic to real knowledge or truth. It tends toward the truth but it can never touch it or attain it. Yet it can be “translated” into knowledge or truth.

Knowledge is beyond learning because learning is inscribed in time and process. Information in the physical world is based on duality: true or false, knowledge or ignorance. Furthermore, everything in the world seems driven by the principle of scarcity, loss, separation, and death and it is well expressed by the laws of thermodynamics.

Real knowledge has been given to us. But we chose the process of learning through information, giving rise to problems of instability in functioning, inaccuracy in interpretations. The world of perception is based on interpretation, not on facts.  The only absolute fact is truth and truth doesn’t allow any room for interpretation.

The unified field or point zero-field revisited.

In examining the difference between existing and being through contrasting concreteness and abstractness, we would tend to think that existing and being are in a dual relationship. But they are not. As well as there is no I, you, we, they in being, there is an apparent I, you, we, they in existence because existence is the experimentation of the indivisible unity of being through existential division. If the only fundamental relation, in reality, is oneness through perfect likeness or sameness, the principle of the relation in existence is likeness through seeming unlikeness. In order to establish a relation between fundamental likeness or sameness and seeming unlikeness, we need a translator so that communication is reestablished between what is seemingly unlike and what is fundamentally alike.

This translator is love as the full expression of sameness of being in existence. Being is omnipresent in existence. The mind can imagine separation and makes itself believe in it but being is immutable and indivisible. Atonement is integrated into the fabric of the universe. What is healing if not the translation of perception into knowledge, the translation of darkness into light, the translation of sorrow into joy, the translation of lack into abundance? This process of continuous translation is at work in the apparent physical universe and is expressed through the unified field or point zero field in quantum physics. Is not change itself this very process of continuous translation or atonement at work in our relative life? We say apparent physical universe because part of the universe is abstract with an apparent concrete counterpart.

Human beings are not only isolated wholes defined by chemical reactions. They form altogether a unified energy in a vaster unified energy field where all the constituents communicate instantly with each other beyond the time/space limitation. This is called universal connectivity.

If atoms in their quantum state can communicate and exchange information instantly, without having to travel any distance in space and time, through an ocean of electromagnetic waves or quantum light, it might be because they are not separate wholes like billiard balls but the most concentrated point of the center of a force which extends to the totality of space and time. Are we not made of these atoms and is there not a part of ourself that communicates continuously with the rest of the universe without having to travel any distance? It is a comprehensible representation of being, a comprehensible representation of the essence of love.

Written by Normand Bourque on Apr 25, 2013