Applying the Law of the Double Negative, Never, Never Land is Now

Our key to peace and health necessarily lies in our deeper understanding of the abstraction of time. Whether it’s a fantasy of winning the lottery, retiring, arriving in heaven, achieving fame, etc., there’s a projection to the future that robs our arrival to this present moment. We’ve carried a notion that Never, Never Land is a place where all conflict is resolved, all suffering gone. Yet when we look at it grammatically, we can always touch this peace in the present moment. In A Course in Miracles, we have an eloquent description of how we must forget the past in order to become whole. Our capacity to re-member our original oneness is presented in the chapter called The Function of Time:

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.

“Now” has no meaning to the ego. The present merely reminds it of past hurts, and it reacts to the present as if it were the past. Chapter 13, Section IV, #4

The key to touching our being-ness stands in our willingness to step outside of time. Our re-connection, in contrast to ego, commands our surrender into the virgin quality of the present moment. Our return to light commands our acceptance that time is merely a mental abstraction. Our notions of linear continuity only imprison our capacity to just be.

The First Noble Truth in Buddhism states that all suffering arises from attachment. We’re then instructed to release from this imprisonment. The Christian tradition commands us to forgive our enemy, to treat them as we would be treated. The wisdom from most ancient spiritual traditions states that the road to peace comes through forgiveness and compassion. It comes through our waking to the present moment, in full arrival to the glory of Never Never Land. As stated in A Course in Miracles, “Now is the release of time.” Chapter 13, Section VI, #8