“God said: Heaven is within everyone’s heart. Heaven is really not this distance that you allow it to be. It is so close that We can say that Heaven is no distance at all. It’s only a trick of perception that allows Heaven to be a somewhere sometime later. Heaven does not have to be transported to you. It is already within you. Much the same as when you can’t find your eyeglasses, and they are right on your head.” HL 4689
“Nothing is “older” than anything. I created it ALL AT ONCE, and All of It exists right now.” N.D. Walsch, Conversations with God, Book 2
“Salvation does not lie in being asked to make unnatural responses which are inappropriate to what is real. Instead, it merely asks that you respond appropriately to what is not real by not perceiving what has not occurred. If pardon were unjustified, you would be asked to sacrifice your rights when you return forgiveness for attack. But you are merely asked to see forgiveness as the natural reaction to distress that rests on error, and thus calls for help. Forgiveness is the only sane response. It keeps your rights from being sacrificed.” A Course in Miracles, 30-6
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Perception is what
keeps us in the dream state
Perception is what allows us to experience what we are through what we are not. In other words, perception is the process by which we can experience being or wholeness through its opposite, separation or fragmentation or incompleteness, which is a state of not being something else. Being is wholeness, hence everything that is not whole, that is separate, is no-being. All our five physical senses are there to fragment the continuity of energy into a multiplicity of perceptible forms and give them the attributes of separate and irreducible realities. Not to be is the ultimate expression of the belief in separation. And since not to be is impossible, the only way to experience non-being is true forgetting, hence perceiving, that is, dreaming. Consequently, perception is a direct effect of dreaming, a reaction to the action (projection) of our own belief in being separate beings. We can go as far as saying that perception is the negation of being, hence that perception is not real, since only being is real.
Time and space are the parameters that compensate for this temporary loss of the memory of who we are by building the artificial memory of what we are not. It could better be said that we don’t need any memory of what we really are because we are eternally, without any beginning and end. But we need a memory to bring us back from the state of dream (perception) to the awakened state of being (present). Memory is a kind of swap in consciousness where timelessness and spacelessness could be experienced through the projection of boundaries that would convert timelessness into time and spacelessness into space. This also means that the Omni-Present could only be expressed through an interlude between the past and the future.
In a sense, time and space are the virtual and temporary effects or reactions to a cause or action that, in reality, has no effects: that cause is Eternity/Infinity or timelessness/spacelessness. This cause has no real “effects” because it has no preceding and no following. In other terms, there can’t be any cause or effect in being.
Relative life in the physical world is a reaction to the causeless action of separation. We say causeless because separation does not really exist, so it cannot be really caused nor can it cause anything real. The only action that creates Reality is the Present, in which there is no division, no fragmentation, no differentiation, no cause, no effect, only the wholeness of being.
“Nothing is “older” than anything. I created it ALL AT ONCE, and All of It exists right now.” If God says it, it must be the Truth. This means that all that exists does not have any history, any age since everything is still happening. This also means that what created the illusion of time and space is this causeless action called separation. Separation is a dream, not a real action, and living in the physical world is just a reaction to an action that never really existed.
To realize this truth has very profound consequences in our understanding of the mechanism of perception and memory.
Present cannot be perceived. It can only be experienced
Let’s take a look at the picture of the cheetah above. It is an excellent portrait of what it means to react. To react (re-act) means to act again. It means to repeat an action we have done before. The first act has been memorized and the new act is, in reality, a re-action where a so-called present situation is compared to the one that is memorized, and the image of the original action is recalled and re-en-acted.
So most of our human behaviors consist of reacting more than in acting. It means that we don’t create with the present but repeat with the past. We act in the present when we do something for the first time. This often ends up in what we call “the beginner’s luck”. Then, once we have learned this first act, we tend to re-enact it, and this is when we start making what we call errors. Errors come from comparison with the past. And, in the presence of unknown situations, instead of acting in the present, we usually react “in the future”, usually with fear. In fact, what is the future if not simply the perception of the absence of a pre-programmed action in the memory — and, consequently, the absence of a possible re-action — in the presence of an unknown situation? It is this absence or void that creates fear because we don’t know how to use the present (creation) in those unknown situations. Moreover, it is this perceived void or absence and its accompanying fear that is the “forgotten” present of who we really are. It is as if the present could not be integrated by our memory.
This becomes obvious if we consider that the past and the future are only perceptions or constructions of the mind, while the present is the experience of what really IS, of what has been created all at once, that exists right now, and that will exist forever. Reality is wholeness and wholeness cannot have any past or future, but only present. Present is the realm of creation, not the dreamed playground of action/reaction. We can establish the following non-relation between present and perception: perception cannot be experienced because it is a reaction of the mind to its own projection while present cannot be perceived, but only experienced, because action-reaction does not intervene in the present. Experiencing being means that we suspend looking for causes and effects, actions and reactions. Memory has no place in experiencing being.
If we could re-discover or re-member what it is like to live in the present, which is the wholeness of the state of being, errors would be unknown to us. Other circumstances in life in which we act in the present rather than react with past patterns are when we express happiness, love, and the pleasure of giving and sharing. Love is not an action-reaction perceptual scheme, it cannot be reproduced from the memory of past action; it is purely and exclusively present. Love is without any cause and effect, without any action and reaction.
We misperceive time when we divide it in past, present, and future. In duality, there is only the opposition of past and future in the memory which creates the illusion of a fugitive present. Past and future are outside happenings in the relative world of illusion. The Present, which is Eternity, can only be an inner experience: “It’s only a trick of perception that allows Heaven to be a somewhere sometime later. It is so close that We can say that Heaven is no distance at all. It is already within you.” Isn’t Heaven just another name for Present?
It is obvious then that as long as we maintain a dichotomy between doing and being, that is, our mind acting and reacting separately from our soul, we cannot free ourself from perception, and we cannot experience the present and the present (gift) of creation.
Life is usually perceived as an outside phenomenon, so we tend to live it as a re-enactment process. But life is really an inner process of creation that exists only and eternally right now.
Forgiving is remembering that the past and the future do not exist
All negative feelings like fear, anger, greed, sense of lack, resentment, guilt belong to the illusory domain of perception, which is the domain of duality, the playground of the ego. They are not creative experiences of the present, but only re-enactments of events that never really happened, but were only projected by the split mind.
Truth is equivalent to present, so Truth is also an eternal and ever inner present creation. It is never reenacted. What we call ‘our experiences’ in the relative world mostly are reenactments which we easily confound with Truth.
This brings us to the ambiguous question of forgiving. For-giving and for-getting go together. They express a giving-getting relation. Any “negative” experience is an effect of perception because its subtract is memory whose main topic is separation. If negativity really existed, then it would be real and would oppose to Truth just like falseness.
So for-giving is for-getting because it is the acknowledgment that what has been perceived as negative (resentment, for example), has never occurred in reality. If it really had happened, then it would be unforgivable because it would be real. “If pardon were unjustified, you would be asked to sacrifice your rights when you return forgiveness for attack. But you are merely asked to see forgiveness as the natural reaction to distress that rests on error, and thus call for help.”
We can only forgive our belief in perception, hence in time, hence in past and future with interludes of fugitive present.
Forgiving is simply the decision to create by ceasing to react.
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