You have what seem to be mounds of memories of past situations. But where are those situations now? Can they be found other than in a subjective memory fragment?
You try to use these memory fragments to gain understanding. For example, if you have a conversation with a family member that you find upsetting, you might think back on it later and wonder, What was going on there? Why did I feel so upset? When you use this kind of situational thinking to try to understand a feeling, you are using the ego’s framework of linear time.
Jesus teaches that time is simultaneous, and only our mistaken perception sees one thing happening before or after another. This is a core teaching in A Course in Miracles, and it asks you to completely question everything that you believe is occurring around you.
Through the ACIM daily lessons you are trained to remember that time is already over. You do not have to believe that one thing happens after another in your experience. There is a different way to experience being. In Lesson 90 you practice the thought: “I seem to have problems only because I am misusing time … I do not see the problem and the answer as simultaneous in their occurrence.” (ACIM, W-90) Any situation you find yourself in is a construct of the deceived mind. The mind that believes it has various situations to work out is asleep and dreaming. Ask for a complete change in mind, to see that time is a thought-habit.
“’Did the Holy Spirit set up that situation or did the ego?’ Actually, the very belief in situations is a belief of the ego. Situations can be taken for granted. Where does the situation begin and end? What is a situation? That is why Jesus says in the early part of the Workbook in A Course in Miracles, in no situation do you perceive your own best interests.
He doesn’t say ‘in most’ or ‘almost all,’ he says: in no situation do you perceive your own best interests. The reason that is so is because it is ultimately all quantum and there are no situations. It is that deep. So, when we ask Holy Spirit, ‘Help me out with this situation,’ we’ve already assumed we have a situation, whatever that is. It is always a false construct, whatever the situation has been.”