The reason you can change things for the better or worse is because they did not happen in the ‘past’ and will not happen in the ‘future—they happened now, in the ever expanding perpetual present.
You can make up for things that you’ve done, you can lose weight that you’ve gained, you can apologize for hurts that you’ve caused, because you’re still connected to them…in the present moment, not in some isolated disconnected ‘timeframe’ that we mistakenly refer to as the ‘future’ or ‘past.’
You can love someone you’ve never met, or worship a deity exposed from within and beyond because of this connection. If it were broken, there would be no way to connect—or reconnect—with yourself.
It seems easy and convenient to compartmentalize large parts of our lives into the disconnected ‘past’ and ‘future,’ but the unreality here is total. Things only happen in the present. We cannot escape anything—most assuredly ourselves—by creating these temporal oasis,’ where we deceive ourselves into believing that those places are over and past, or in the case of the future—still yet to happen.
The only reality is the one that has always been and forever will be—the ever expanding moment of the perpetual present.
The present needs neither to be attacked nor defended—it just is! It needs only to be lived, as if you had any other choice. Every motion you perform, every thought you conceive, every feeling you feel, happens only in the present.
The suspect emotions—guilt and fear—are normally associated with the ‘past’ (guilt) and the ‘future’ (fear). By fully living within the present moment, the effects of those two emotions are mostly negated. Our whole concept of management is based on data from the ‘past’ and trying to apply it to the ‘future.’ That data, if you will, only has value when it is experienced in the present.
Love, as an emotion, can only be felt now. It can be remembered, and it can be hoped for, but only experienced in the moment of its release. What are emotions other than the instantaneous celebration of the here and now.
Dreams, and dream-sleep are the natural connectors where rational thought ends and divine thought begins. The whole notion of contradiction rests comfortably within our dreams, and often within our religious beliefs.
The notion of the Holy Trinity (3 distinct persons in one God) is the bedrock of both spiritual and theological Christian dogma. It is central to the belief that God exists on more than one level. So does human existence.
Native Americans, Muslims, Christians, and Jews share this common thread in their beliefs. So often, whether it be Moses, Jesus, Mohammed or Crazy Horse, leaders of their respective tribes went off into the wilderness to receive spiritual enlightenment through a dream or apparition. Native Americans refer to this as a ‘Vision Quest.’
The constraints of rational thought are abandoned here (sorry Jesuits), and the notion of contradiction seems as natural and free-flowing as any other thought. Enlightenment is reached through a higher power, and is not dependent on facts or mistaken empirical knowledge. Only in these isolated endeavors, away from the confusing and misleading structure of what we call society, can true knowledge occur.
Unanswered questions open up spaces into a new consciousness here, and we do not have to dig our heels in to defend—or pledge allegiance to—facts that can only hold us back, imprisoning us to be something other than ourselves.
The very thing that causes us to question is the thing calling out to us—from deep inside ourselves—to return. Dreams, once again, become the fastest way to cross this threshold from a fact based unreality to the beginnings of true knowledge within the gifted moment and its perpetual presence.
(Villanova Pennsylvania: January, 2013)