THE PRESENT MOMENT

God is remembered in the Present Moment.

In what the Course terms the ‘real world’ of the Present Moment there is no past perception to taint the moment in which you perceive the world and every relationship in it.

The scientific world supports the idea that there is a real world, but it does so by defining it by what it is not. The world we ‘see’ with our eyes is not the world that truly exists. Everything we see and experience is a perception of what was because our eyes, ears and brain are organs affected by both time and space. What we see has been ‘translated’ by eyes and ears and brain, which requires past perception to make a judgment on what we are seeing ‘now.’ We live in the fabric of time and space and by this process we are judging (in a split second) what is real, relative to that time and space, rather than what is Eternal….outside of time and space. Our eyes and ears see and hear what passed but a second ago, and then make a cognitive judgment about the thing seen and heard. In this process we cannot help but lose the true essence of what is, in favor of what we want it to be, tainted by emotion and mental discernment which is for the most part, an indiscernible process.

What does it matter? It makes us aware of a choice in our daily life. We can choose to want to see only the real world that God has Created. God creates only the Eternal, and the Eternal lives in the Present Moment only. In the Present Moment we drop all need for judgment and therefore, we drop all fear.

The Present Moment must then require no eyes, ears or brain, right? While we are here, in a body, we must ‘perceive.’ Eastern Philosophy and the Course both acknowledge what needs to occur is not a denial of this world of the physical realm, but the ability to see ‘beyond’ it. And we can see the ‘real world’ with right minded perception while in a body.

This perception is what Jesus talked about when he told us ‘not to worry for the morrow, for the morrow would take care of itself.’ This ‘right minded’ perception is brought about through the act of forgiveness. It is a process by which we purposely drop all judgment and allow the Spirit within us to perceive without eyes and ears, and only with an inner eye and an inner ear that holds nothing to a past, worries not of a future, and accepts what IS as the beautiful world untainted by judgment. It is a world without fear. For without judgment there is no fear. What is there to fear if we have not made a judgment based on past experiences that brought fear? What is there to fear if we do not judge anything as worthy of fear? Love is the absence of fear.

Here are some short statements made in the Course in this regard:

“The world as you perceive it cannot have been created by the Father, for the world is not as you see it. God created only the eternal, and everything you see is perishable.

The real world is all that the Holy Spirit has saved for you out of what you have made, and to perceive only this is salvation, because it is the recognition that reality is only what is true.

The real world can be actually be perceived. All that is necessary is a willingness to perceive nothing else. For if you perceive both good and evil, you are accepting both the false and the true and making no distinction between them.

If you believe in truth and illusion, you cannot tell which is true.

Perceiving only the real world will lead you to the real Heaven, because it will make you capable of understanding it.

The perception of goodness is not knowledge, but the denial of the opposite of goodness enables you to recognize a condition in which opposites do not exist. And this is the condition of knowledge.

Truth is not absent here but it is obscure.

To believe that you can perceive the real world is to believe you can know yourself. You can know God because it is His Will to be known.”

One of the statements, if you are not a Course student, might need some clarity. “For if you perceive both good and evil, you are accepting both the false and the true and making no distinction between them.”

What we perceive, we believe. Everything we see, we have judged as real by the past perceptions we have had. If we are seeing it, we are believing it. If we are believing it, it is real to us.

So, if we are perceiving both good and evil in the world, we have believed in both. If we believe in the reality of both good and evil, we are ‘accepting’ them. To accept something is to see them both as ‘acceptable’ truths and truth is of God for that is why it is called a ‘truth.’ But, if God made the world, would He have accepted evil as part of it? Therefore, all that we see that we have ‘judged’ as evil, is a perception we have ‘made’ in this world, and is therefore ‘real’ to us because we have accepted it as real but not because it IS real. It is not the ‘real world.’ Behind our perceptions of evil, lies a desire for evil to real. That is the ‘truth that shall set you free” of which Jesus spoke. There is no evil, but there is a perception of evil that needs to be brought to the light and seen for the fearful thought it is.

God is waiting our remembrance of Him, behind the veil we think is our world. And in our remembrance of His Real World, we are free to accept the Eternal Creations that we are. Love is what we are but it cannot be known by us until we perceive the Present Moment.

This day, let’s choose to see what is, and not what we have ‘made.’

Dianne Perreto