68 Should We Heal our Sense of the Future?

“Life is a story you write about yourself. Life is a story also that you witness. It is as if the story of your life writes itself, and it happens before your very eyes. You are the actor and the audience all in one. Others’ stories are also yours. You feel them. They go into your heart. So many stories are written on water and witnessed in your heart. In life on Earth, everything seems to appear and  disappear. Like waves in the Ocean, you meld with the Ocean. Wherever you may think you are, you are the Wholeness of the Ocean. Waves go in and waves go out, and the Ocean is forever. The Ocean I speak of is Infinite.” HL 4928

“The ego has a strange notion of time, and it is with this notion that your questioning might well begin. The ego invests heavily in the past, and in the end believes that the past is the only aspect of time that is meaningful. Remember that its emphasis on guilt enables it to ensure its continuity by making the future like the past, and thus avoiding the present. By the notion of paying for the past in the future, the past becomes the determiner of the future, making them continuous without an intervening present. For the ego regards the present only as a brief transition to the future, in which it brings the past to the future by interpreting the present in past terms.“ A Course in Miracles 15:10

________________________

    Is Time what gives “hardness” to Matter?

Why are we engaged in a race with and against time? Nobody really wants to fight against time because the cause is lost in advance. Time is elusive. Time is like a mosquito that is buzzing around our head when we are ready to fall asleep. Yet it seems that we react to time the way a young cat chases its tail to catch it thinking or pretending that the tail belongs to some other cat.

Like the cat’s tail, time is running circularly and simultaneously in front of our eyes and behind our back! So time needs our belief in it, our constant connection with it to have some seeming consistency. More precisely, time needs us to believe that it is separate from us in order to play its game with us. We mentioned in previous blogs that the mind had to conceal from itself its connection with the body in order to make the experience of being caused instead of being the cause.

Outside of our pros who enjoy racing with and against time and give us the impression of winning this race in official competitions (Formula-1, ski, Phantom Fighters, surfers, etc. by “pushing it to the edge”), we know that time will always beat us because it can run simultaneously in front of us and chase us from behind. In fact, our mind constantly secretes time like the liver secretes bile. We eat space and we need time to digest this space we eat. So there is absolutely no way for us to believe in the reality of space without believing in the reality of time. Time helps us to metabolize, digest, emulsify and absorb chunks of space as bile aids in the emulsification, digestion, and absorption of fats. Time is the main thought used by the mind to constantly connect with the spatial body in a biodynamic exchange process.

 

An action is considered done after it has been done

It is a truism or an old paradigm to say, in the relative world, that an action is said to be done only after we have done it. There is a linear time sequence in the form of delay or interval between the idea of an action (concept), its inception (thought, that is, the moment of concentration and suspension before the starting signal of the maestro is given, the black pulsation), its unfolding (the proper phrasing or technology “Let Light be”) and its completion (actualization: “And Light was”). Moreover, time needs space to make us experience duration (the persistence of the act) which is the only measure or judgment of an act. Note that the words duration, during, endure, perdure come from the Latin durus “hard, resilient, long-lasting”. Without resistance, friction, gravity, hardness, there would be no forms, no perceptions, no stories.

And what can temporarily maintain a form as a form if not its capacity to per-dure? The form is maintained in the mind at the same time as it is projected into space. The mind secretes time as the glue to give the form its hardness, its resilience which is only the expression of its seeming separation from the mind (like the tip of the cat’s tail) — Note glue —> gluons: elementary particles that act as exchange particles for the strong force between quarks just like the exchange of photons in the electromagnetic force between two charged particles —. Hence time has the double property of linking and separating the mind from its projection.

Time is the glue of space. It gives space its seeming hardness, hence its seeming continuity, its seeming duration. This is to say that the seeming physical property of resistance of matter (in the attribute of mass, gravity, friction, inertia) is, in reality, an attribute of time and not of matter itself. That is why we can no longer mentally separate space and time, because they are a representation of each other in a complementary pairing, a reciprocity relation. Time reflects space and space contains time. We talk about music using geometrical/architectural terms and we talk about architecture in terms of vibrant, musically harmonic objects. There is a geometry of duration and a rhythm of space. Time and space share the same relation as light and sound (octaves in frequencies). If we flip time over, we obtain space like if we raise a sound 40 octaves up we obtain light of a certain frequency. Time, as a measure of duration, gives matter its resistive geometrical attribute, its measure or degree of hardness, and continuity.

    The Future according to Time

Our relative sense of the future is simply a desperate attempt to build continuity or duration of space (read Eternity) with the time tool while Real Continuity or Duration is Eternity in the One Instant or in the Now where there is no space for time, hence no time for space.

Our sense of the future follows the same paradigm as the cat chasing its tail. We ignore (by eclipse, oblivion?) that the future (the tip of the cat’s tail) is completely hooked to the past (the cat’s back). In other terms, our sense of the future is the same as our sense of the past.

Trying to build the durability, continuity (seeming eternity) of the physical world with the extension of time (anti-aging) is equivalent to trying to trace a perfect circle by tracing a regular polygon of an infinite number of equal sides (the cat’s tail paradigm again). Adding an infinite number of equal sides to a regular polygon will never yield the perfect unity, continuity, and duration of a circle whose circumference can only be 1 or, by extension, a whole number. 2π•r will always yield a fractional number, never a whole number. It is a broken continuity, a broken duration. It is an illusion of duration.

A pulsation or vibration (“yes” alternating with “no”, light phase alternating with black phase in the film strip of a movie) is the time equivalent of the multi-sided polygon tending to the unity of the circle without ever attaining it. That explains why the physical world is a “perfect” illusion, a perfect combinatory game between space (geometry) and time (vibration). Which is really space and which is really time? Which is you and which is me? Creation is a game and it is supposed to be fun. Why should a game be serious? After all, it is only a game since there is only 1 player to play in the form of many players. How can One take Himself seriously as Two?

It follows that the only rationale we can find behind the old paradigm “An action is considered done after it has been done” is that our secretion of time is hooked to our fear of destruction, consecutive to our virtual opting-out of Oneness (non-sharing of Vision). It is the paradigm of Adam and Eve being thrown out of the Garden of Eden and the following fear of retaliation or abandonment. Our sense of security (read continuity, duration, the resilience of the ego) lies paradoxically in this fear of destruction (absence), which is the undercover agent of guilt. Fear seems to bring more security than truth and love, attack (preventive war) seems to bring more security than peace. Everything that is not Truth, Love, is always fear under a multitude of disguises. Therefore the future has to be like the past: this is our paradigm of security. Our sense of separation can only be anchored in the past (even if separation never really happened), so it will continue into the future. We don’t need any other preservatives than guilt to safeguard our desperate need for time. “You have tried many compromises in the attempt to avoid recognizing the one decision you must make” (ACIM 15:10). We seem to act, to do in front of the future, as if we were DOING only to pay back some kind of a debt through work and/as sacrifice. Don’t we see here again the cat’s tail paradigm?

Therefore, the future we perceive is really based on the avoidance of the Present which is the one decision to make. It is the decision for Love, for Truth. The bridge we artificially and virtually build between the past and the future hardly needs the Present except as a short interlude or as parking space to drop off our machinery. The delay or duration we invent between the past and the future is the absence of the Only Decision (the Decision for Now), which is the absence of the Present, so it looks like a continuity.

    In our previous blog (#67 Gravity is a Thought), we established the equation generating illusion:

2 [Duality]         = 1 [Presence]            +  1 [Absence]

Form [Illusion] = electromagnetism + gravity

Now we can add these mutually convertible equations:

Present + Time  = Space

Present + Space = Time

    Future = judgment

Past is the measurement unit of time applied to its performance or duration (acting) in space. As a measurement, it is a judgment. And this judgment is that we have TO DO (read to work hard, to pay with time) in order for our action to be considered done, that is, durable (=salary) in space. Hence the future, as equivalent to the past, is only a reaction to the past, not really an action to liquidate the past. Present also has a measuring unit: BEING. Being IS the measure. But there is no way we can connect together the measurement units of doing and being. Being is the only Real Doing (Act). Future is a judgment/measure exerted by the mind on itself through the rebound of the external causation syndrome (the victim condemned to work hard).

 

    How to heal the future?

If the old paradigm “An action is considered done after it has been done” is just a measuring unit of our degree of separation from our Wholeness, what would be the new Real paradigm of an Act?

Would it not simply be the inversion, the right-side-up, of our old, worn-out paradigm of an act:

An action can be considered done BEFORE we have done it

     If ego sees time as a device for extending/perduring itself indefinitely in space by increments — our infinite-sided polygon asymptotically tending to the unity of the perfect circle —by using the past as its anchor point, what would be an act conceived and anchored in the present? It has to be done in the Instant. And if it is done in the Instant, it has to be done before we effectively do it. It is like the collapsing of an electromagnetic wave of potentiality/probability into a physical particle with a location in space and time. It is a spontaneous creation without any past and without any future since it is in the Eternal Instant. And where is no past and no future, where can we locate the linear sequence cause —> effect? Nowhere! No cause and no effect means being AHEAD and BEHIND time SIMULTANEOUSLY: the truth behind the cat’s tail!

Hence time, in reality, has nothing to do with the past or the future unless we state that past, future, time, and space are the head and tail of a single phenomenon called a sense of absence or a sense of separation. Paradoxically (the Divine Dichotomy) time can be experienced only in the Present (like everything else in the relative world of forms) but as an absence or avoidance of the One and Only Presence. This absence of presence in the act is what we call DOING. The Presence in the act is what we call CREATING.

 

    Stepping out of eternity and infinity to immediacy

To create means to manifest instantly. Everything is accomplished in the instant. It means that the doing is included in the conception without the need of time and space and work. Art writes itself in the hand of the artist. A painting is done, music is composed, a book is written before there are physically executed. We finally have all the time needed to accomplish ALL in NO time.  All Creation was accomplished in the Instant and just wrote itself in a seeming time and space. But in reality, it is still writing itself, forever, but in an Eternity and Infinity without time and space. Only a perfect circle in which we cannot distinguish between its beginning and its end. “Life is a story you write about yourself. Life is a story also that you witness. It is as if the story of your life writes itself, and it happens before your very eyes. You are the actor and the audience all in one. Others’ stories are also yours. You feel them. They go into your heart“.

Creation needs no duration because what belongs to the Only Instant which is Eternity is always happening.

One could then ask how we can reach this state of creation where we can do without really doing? The answer (easier said than done!) is that time has to be collapsed. But collapsing requires a major change in our way of looking at the extent world.

It has so often been said that we have to let go of the past. And of course, we know that the ego uses the past as a way to extend time to insure its duration, its future, building this duration on the security fed by its fear of destruction. Yet, for a collapse to happen, we need two participants, just like the collision of a particle of matter with a particle of anti-matter results in the collapsing or annihilation of both particles with an emission of photonic light. Future is the sine qua non partner of the past player in this collapsing game. So it might be easier to let go of or annihilate the past if, at the same time, we let go of the idea of the future. If there is no future, there is no past. This formulation sounds easier than the one that says that if there is no past there is no future, even if they are perfectly equally true. Nevertheless, healing can only happen in the present and it aims at releasing the future because it is only a projection of the past, but, like in the cat’s tail metaphor, we just look at the tip of the tail in front of our eyes (fear of sickness, fear of death). So the healing process is really releasing the past by releasing the future.

Using the same new pattern of thinking, we can discover immediacy by looking at the Ocean and its waves. Can waves exist without the Whole Ocean, can sun rays exist with the Whole Sun? It is impossible to separate a wave, even a drop, from the whole of the ocean, no more than it is possible to separate a ray of sun from the sun. A wave is always potentially happening in the wholeness and stillness of the Ocean Deep and a ray of light is always potentially happening in the wholeness of the Sun. Where there is no separation, there is no space, no time, only IMMEDIACY of action which is equivalent to an action that is always happening. In Oneness, there is no cause and no effect. This is the new paradigm of action.

What is the state of Ascension if not this immediacy of the act, its duration through its foreverness of happening in the Instant, as a natural expression of Being without the necessity of doing anything?

Ascension is our healthy, sane Mind look at the world in the wholeness of heart and vision. Ascension is the Last Judgment on judgment. It Is the Real and only Measure of judgment. We don’t really have to leave the body to “ascend”, nor do we have to leave the past and the future. We have to release them by collapsing them. The only thing we really release is the idea of them that the mind is striving to hold desperately.

“Now you must learn that only infinite patience produces immediate effects. This is the way in which time is exchanged for eternity. Infinite patience calls upon infinite love, and by producing results now it renders time unnecessary. We have repeatedly said that time is a learning device to be abolished when it is no longer useful.” ACIM 5:6

 

Written by Normand Bourque on May 28, 2014