What Is the Relationship Between the Present and Knowing?
All the laws of Heaven influence reality; therefore, we come to know them through experience. In the present, reality appears free from evaluation. Therefore, when we do not evaluate what we experience, the intellect recognizes the laws and the relationships between them.
Knowing is the result of a process in which recurring patterns and lawful regularities are recognized within the information available to us. The laws recognized through experience, together with the network of relationships between them, continually expand throughout our experiences.
There is always more information present in the present than we already know. More laws are manifested than we have recognized so far, and more relationships between those laws become apparent than we have come to know throughout our lives.
We can recognize new laws and new relationships only in the present, because reality appears only in the present, and reality is influenced by every law.
We cannot perceive the past or the future. Therefore, they appear in our imagination only in the form that our current knowledge makes possible. Nothing genuinely new can appear within the imagined past or the imagined future—only the knowledge we already possess.
New information can arise only from the present, where something appears in our experience that we have not yet come to know. Therefore, genuine knowing is possible only in the present.
Within the imagined past and future, and within the timeless dimensions that we are capable of creating in our imagination, only the laws we already know appear in every conceivable relationship. Not all of these relationships are possible. In fact, we often know that, according to the laws of the world, what exists in our imagination can never become reality.
Creating these imagined networks of relationships is itself part of the process of knowing, because it continually becomes evident that many of these relationships cannot sustain continuity through time. Those laws and relationships between laws that cannot be sustained can exist only temporarily if the opposite required for their existence also exists, or they cannot appear in reality at all if no equilibrium can be established to sustain their existence, even temporarily.
Our evaluations make it possible to create various imagined realities in which those evaluations appear to be real. However, because evaluations are not part of the appearance of reality, these worlds exist only within our imagination, and the imagined past and future remain imagined realities as long as they contain evaluation.
In the present, we experience what truly exists. The world exists in complete harmony because it cannot exist in any other way. Therefore, our experiences reveal that whenever we evaluate reality, the only thing that can be untrue is our evaluation, because what we experience exists according to the laws of Heaven.
Knowing is not possible even in the present if we evaluate our experiences, because then we no longer perceive the manifestation of harmony but the opposites created by our evaluations. Thus, what takes place in the present is not knowing, but the emergence of an intention to change.
Under the influence of evaluation, the intellect appears as free will—as the intention to change.
When evaluation is absent, the intellect does not seek to change our experiences. The result is not free will, but the recognition of the lawful regularities that appear throughout our experiences—the process of knowing.
Consciousness is always in the present. Evaluation can obscure reality, and through the activity of the intellect free will appears, seeking to change what consciousness experiences.
When evaluation is absent, reality appears without distortion, and the intellect recognizes the laws that are appearing within reality.