Why Are the Past and the Future Not Experiences?
The past and the future are products of our imagination. They appear according to our current knowledge, and therefore no new laws can be recognized within them. In the experience that appears in the present, however, all the laws of Heaven are present, and those laws that are connected in some way to our existing knowledge become recognizable.
Within experience — in the present — all the laws of Heaven are present. From them, however, we perceive only what we are already capable of perceiving and interpreting according to our current knowledge. Every existing law is always present in the present, because reality itself is the manifestation of the laws of Heaven.
Not every existing law becomes interpretable within a single experience, because the very purpose of experience is that the laws become recognizable and understandable one by one.
Every law, however, influences the appearance of reality. According to our knowledge, we become capable of perceiving those aspects of reality that are connected to what we already know. Therefore, we are able to discover new laws through experience, while also coming to know an ever greater variety of evaluated forms and manifestations of the laws we have already recognized.
We also continually recognize and interpret the relationships between the laws that appear. These are all new pieces of information.
The past and the future, by contrast, are only products of our imagination, in which only the laws we have already come to know can appear, because our imagination is nourished by our knowledge.
Our imagination also contains things that can never appear in reality, because our understanding also contains errors. Therefore, the past is not necessarily as we see it, nor does the future necessarily unfold as we imagine or assume.
The products of our imagination — the imagined past, the imagined future, and the various imagined events whose reality we do not even assume — are nevertheless important elements of the process of knowing. They reveal networks of relationships among the elements of our existing knowledge that appear possible according to our current understanding, but only because we do not yet know all the laws that determine reality.
Later, as our knowledge expands through experience, the products of our imagination also change. Therefore, the past always appears differently, and the future is always imagined differently; both continually take on new forms. The experiences that appear in the present, however, remain stable. They always reveal the laws that truly exist, because reality exists and is manifested according to the laws of Heaven, and for us, that reality is always the present.