Tomorrow Is a Parallel World

Though I have other posts to get to putting up, today I have had two influences that lead me to want to add a follow up to the post last week about The Value of Now.

The first nudge is based on a wonderful quote by C.S. Lewis from Soul Gatherings, a blog I follow and love to read daily like a fortune cookie, by Theresa:

You can’t go back and change the beginning,

but you can start where you are and change the ending.

~ C.S. Lewis ~

Obviously C. S. Lewis was advocating for a practice of Better Endings.

Then today I happened upon a movie about the implications of parallel realities: Yesterday. This is a fun story about a fairly unsuccessful but well-motivated musician in England named Jack Malik who, after a bus accident caused by a global blackout, wakes up to find he is living in a reality where, among some other odd glitches, nobody has ever heard of The Beatles! So, Mark reintroduces Beatles songs as if he were the original songwriter/ singer, and he attains great success and fame for his apparent genius. 

I will not spoil the ending to Yesterday for you; this is a film well worth seeing.  But it led me to think about how, since Time as we think we know it is an illusion according to modern physicists as well as many spiritual philosophies, then past and present Moments can rightly be considered parallel realities.

If we consider the future, such as Tomorrow, to be a parallel reality to Now, then what are some implications for, again, the value of Today?

A better endings visualization: Imagine that tomorrow is a parallel reality to today.  Many aspects remain stable across these parallel worlds: you are still where and how you are living though a day older, most routines are intact, etcetera.  But creatively envision adding one TWEAK to your parallel reality of tomorrow.  What element(s) might you change as you shift upon waking tomorrow morning into a slightly more ideal or satisfactory reality sphere?  To be effective with this technique, you might consider only tweaking tomorrow slightly, to a reality it is quite feasible and possible for you to realize without too shocking of a reality shift.

images are from pixabay.com

You can extend this thought experiment to a future a bit further out to add some more meaningful or life-changing, reality bending tweaks. Six months from today what might your future look like from an ideal standpoint? Write it down, describe yourself living in a parallel reality six months from now that contains the sorts of changes you wish were possible.  Then consider, what steps can you take now, and in the near foreseeable future, to bring this new reality about?

Since the future IS a parallel reality to the present Moment, we CAN tweak those elements we would like to change, then carry forth in that direction.

Better Endings to All!

The Value of NOW

In my early college years, I often mused over the thought that “Today is Yesterday’s Tomorrow.”  Now while exploring implications of the principle of Better Endings for creative re-visioning, this phrase has come back into the foreground for my understanding.

It is a truism that yesterday’s future is where you stand/ think/ act today.  As well though, consider:  When you have a memory of a “past” event, this memory is transpiring in your mind’s eye only NOW, filtered through your reflection and projection in the present moment.  As your consciousness changes, so does your view of the past, coloring a memory and recasting it in the present moment.

We rescript our life story and hence our personal reality moment by moment, day by day.

Likewise, when you conceive of or envision a “future” condition or action, this visualization is occurring in your mind’s eye right NOW, also as a projection from your immediate-present waking awareness (or in your dream awareness: when you dream of a future or a past event, the dream is still occurring NOW). 

The future has no reality apart from our projections about it, for as soon as the next day or another moment arrives, it is NOW.

As well, your anticipations or expectations about “future” events are multiplex; you may envision a wide array of possible or probable outcomes of present conditions, yet these can unfold only as a future-NOW event. 

The future, as a mere projection from our current outlook, exists as a potentially infinite array of possibilities limited primarily by the constraints we impose as determined by our present state of bias or beliefs.

The simple fact, then, that Tomorrow’s Yesterday is Today carries great value; this is the value, the amazing potential, of NOW.

images are from pixabay.com

Below is a Better Endings Seed, a visualization exercise that you may use for journaling or contemplation:

What’s Coming Up for you Tomorrow, and how may it be influenced by aspects of the thought world you inhabit Today? 

If you desire to improve your Tomorrow, how might you tweak your prospective outlook today?

An easy way to apply this Better Endings visualization technique is to make a list of some of what you expect to do or aim to accomplish tomorrow. THEN: ADD ONE NEW ELEMENT that will make your tomorrow more exciting or more creatively productive. Add ONE THING that will propel you forward Tomorrow in a different, more progressive direction.

Please feel free to Comment about the results of this thought experiment!

Marry Your Future, with a Vision Board!

Maybe this is a bit of a stretch for our topic this month of The Sacred Marriage, but I find myself sitting at my office desk and looking at my bulletin board that I realize I have turned into a Vision Board.  I have embarked upon my final year of teaching before publishing my book, Your Life Path, and then retiring and relocating to focus full-time on writing and life mapping services.

I pilot every life mapping tool that I will be introducing with this book, and the art of “future casting” is a big part of this approach.  Any form of creative envisioning of what I like to call your future Lifescapes can be helpful to you in manifesting the life conditions you desire to express.

On my Vision Board bulletin board I have the poem Ithaca by Cavafy (You can click on the Youtube video embedded below, narrated by Sean Connery!):

I also have a collage of images that represent my journey ahead to realize my Life Dream.  It shows my future ambitions and goals:

To create your own Vision Board, simply imagine!  What CORE VALUES do you intend (not simply wish for or hope to do, but INTEND) to establish in your future Dream Come True?  Even if your most desirable future is the life you are living Now, what core values are you manifesting that you intend to extend and embellish further on the road ahead?

Goal setting is not about–or need not involve, anyway–LINEAR THINKING.  By focussing on VALUES rather than specific, material objectives, you remain open and flexible to however the Universe or Spirit fills your mold.

You can write your future values or conditions you intend to live into onto a poster board or in Publisher on a blank page on your computer. Then find (or draw or paint in) pictures online or in magazines that represent these values and conditions, and place them on your Vision Board in a manner that feels right to you. You can also cut out or cut and paste words and phrases onto your collage.

I like to create my Future Casting Collages (BTW, do several! The future is not cast in stone!) to represent my pathway from where I am Now to the future Now I aim to create around me.

images (other than my own) are from pixabay.com

I invite and welcome your Comments and Stories!

I would invite your collages to share, but actually I recommend you hold these close and share them mainly with your loved ones. Your VISION is your own; nurture it well and it will be!

How to Burst your Bubble! (Are you living in a bubble of the Present?)

Time is a funny concept; after all, that is what it is.  Quantum physicists such as Brian Greene have declared time to be a grand illusion.  As a cultural anthropologist familiar with ‘Indian Time’ from living and working in Native communities I know this to be true.  The Hopi concept of “manifesting” from a subjective, non-physical realm of thought—of bringing into manifestation that which is positive, as Benjamin Whorf aimed to describe in the 1940’s—is quite different from the English language coded notion of time as a linear progression of objectified “minutes” or other imaginary time frames  ‘getting later.’

Living in the Present conceived of as a distinct moment of a linear flow of Time keeps you in a bubble.  The Past is always experienced as prior to this moment of active awareness, the Future is ever elusive,  ahead of where you are; both Past and Future are but illusions then, from your sense-based bubble location in Time.

Being in the Now, having your mindful awareness wheresoever you choose to place your focus, embraces experience as an undifferentiated flow of consciousness. Your clear memory is Now; your current sense-perceptions are Now; that which is latent or potentially yet to be and can be realized from Here is also Now; see?

Lodged within the temporal-bubble concept of Time, you may believe you are where you are at today because of decisions and actions from your past and that future conditions are determined by your past and current choices.  From your viewpoint within this Bubble of the Present, your current life conditions may feel inevitable; so it can seem very difficult to change momentum in a major way to pursue goals that feel ever elusive.

Shifting your perspective to that of Being in the NOW can help you Burst the Bubble of your current life predicament.  You can creatively envision any NOW you choose to imagine, and in so doing you can perceive and construct a pathway to manifest that Now of your imagining.

images are from pixabay.com

Imagine your Life Dream fulfilled. Where are you Now (in this desirable future scenario)? Where are you living, how did you get Here? What habits can you change and what choices can you make today and in the near foreseeable future that will alter the course of your Life Path to realize your deepest ambitions? 

Choose one of these activities or new behaviors to implement, Now!

I welcome YOUR Comments and Stories.

The Road Ahead

The Road goes ever on and on

Down from the Door where It began,

Now evermore the Road does lead

And I must follow, if I can,

Pursuing it with weary feet

Until It joins some larger Way

Where many paths and errands meet,

And whither then?

I cannot say.

–  J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

I had some difficulty formatting this poem from The Hobbit for my recent post on “Better Beginnings,” yet it is so apt to our monthly theme of “The Call to Adventure” that I repeat it here as I recall the poem from my initial reading of The Hobbit some 43 years ago.

I first memorized and used this poem when I was 19. I was adventuring for the summer of my freshman college year in Yakutat, Alaska.  I worked at a crab and salmon cannery there that summer. I was traveling with a good friend, Barb. One day—which became one of many similar days—we were hiking some five miles along a dirt road through a primeval Ponderosa Pine forest that led to a beach unpeopled for hundreds of miles.

The Forest was higher, I realized as I walked along that primitive pathway, than the skyscrapers of New York City. In the City I would feel daunted, but in the Forest leading to the Ocean I felt connected with the whole of Nature and Life Itself.

I started reciting “The Road” song that Bilbo Baggins wrote (as I recall the story from way back then) in The Hobbit. It mirrored directly the experience I was having as Barb and I trekked through the primeval Forest.

The ROAD goes Ever ON and ON…

Down from the DOOR where IT Began…

And EVER MORE the ROAD does lead,

And I must FOLLOW, IF I CAN…

PURSUING IT with weary feet

Until it joins SOME LARGER WAY

Where many paths and errands MEET,

And whither then?

I CANNOT SAY.

Reciting “The Road” song from The Hobbit over and over again like a mantra while walking hours through a remote Alaskan pine forest became prophetic for me of my entire lifetime of spiritual adventure and travel. Within a year of returning from this Alaskan odyssey I discovered a spiritual path (Eckankar, which does not necessarily endorse the ideas I express in this blog) which has brought much freedom, love and joy into my life.  I discovered this path first in a dream of returning on a bus from my Alaska adventure, then connected outwardly with my spiritual path less than a week later after encountering a woman who was in my dream! I have followed that Road ever since.

Here is a creative technique I offer that I have been using myself this week.  Close your eyes as if to daydream (enter a light contemplation state). Imagine THREE ROADS leading off slightly to your left, ahead forward, and slightly to your right (imagine more than three if you choose; this is for you to develop as you please).

Explore each pathway with your imagination; where does each Road lead? If these represent alternate futures (which is how I have been envisioning them this week), which is the Way for you to go forth in your life in order to realize and fulfill your deepest sense of life Purpose and Mission?

images are from pixabay.com

Maybe one of these pathways is your current best way forward, but the others might hold potentials to integrate into that direction, so your path forward does not have to sacrifice one set of qualities or values in order to embrace a greater Whole.

I welcome your comments and stories!

 

THE HOLOGRAPHIC ADVENTURE OF YOUR LIFETIME

Where do you go when you imagine following your Call to Adventure? What image or scene comes to mind when you envision feeling a sense of utter fulfillment?

Your Call to Adventure may come as an IMAGE that beckons and pulls at you like the “thin biting call of Soul.” Ron Neary’s vision of the Devil’s Tower butte in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, for instance, or the memory of Shangri-La that won’t let Robert Conway be happy anywhere else after he has found his fateful oasis of the Soul in Lost Horizon are two great fictional examples.

I remember from high school and early college years that I would often close my eyes and imagine rowing a boat to the middle of a lake, then I would set the oars to rest and settle back to read a good book while floating on the lake, listening to the rhythmic lapping of the water under the calm blue sky. Sometimes in this reverie I would nap and my boat would drift until it came to moor on a deserted island shoreline.

Many years later I will soon enough be retiring to a lakeside community. I intend to explore the lake with a kayak and maybe a rowboat. Was my youthful daydream then a trip in spacetime to a future I could already imagine?

Your Call to Adventure evokes more than a desirable place or a future activity, though this vision might signal the context of your greater Life Dream.

This past week I had a thought while walking university halls to teach yet another class, this time a five day, 40 hour “winterim” with 33 students that turned out to be a delight because of our combined enthusiasm for the material. The thought that came through one morning was:

Is my life a hologram?

The more I consider this profound possibility, the more probable I find it to be. Quantum physicists have been entertaining this notion, too, it turns out. Some venture so far as to suggest our entire reality is but a holographic projection along the event horizon of a black hole!

If my life is a hologram, what this means to me is that every Moment (as only Now is Real and therefore All of life experience is “in the NOW”) is a microsegment of the Whole projection of a lifetime. Remember that in a hologram, the Part is embedded in the Whole such that the Whole is always present in every fraction (or, fractal) of Itself. I “live” (have my physical attention and sense of ‘being’) in the “present” projection of our illusionary three dimensions of timespace, yet from higher dimensions (4th and beyond) I can perceive the Whole of my complete lifetime and perhaps zooming further Beyond with spiritual awareness I can even see the broader context of THIS lifetime in multiple lifetimes, multiple universes, and a limitless expanse of Cosmos.

So then future and past and present are all ONE, and the Whole is so much greater than the sum of its luminously integrated Parts.

all images are from pixabay.com

I realize with this Life is a Hologram perspective, then, that I/you/Soul can EXPLORE the Whole from ANY location within the holographic Whole, at any “time.”

Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the Stream;
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
Life is BUT A DREAM.

Try it, I invite you. Close your Eyes and DREAM! I welcome your Comments and Story!

On a Clear Day…The Future is NOW

We are exploring the MYSTIC Archetype throughout this month of March.  The Mystic, including your own unconscious persona Mystic archetype Ally within what I refer to as your Ensemble Cast of Mythic Archetype Allies, is capable of serving as a Seer, able to foresee future potentials and probabilities.

Time is an illusion, as spiritual teachers and more recently modern physicists have emphasized. I have always found a paradox in the spiritual invocation to “Live only in the Present Moment; all exists only Now!” and the notion that NOWNESS in this spiritual sense is not coterminous with the Present tense such as is imaginally constructed in English or other Indo-European languages and cultures.

Spiritual sciences (e.g. Eckankar, my own path of forty plus years) speak of the “spacetime continuum,” as would Einstein, who recognized the inseparability of time-space values.  Physicist Brian Green, in THE ELEGANT UNIVERSE, has demonstrated that the Present on Earth may be Past or Future to some alien being within our own galaxy but on a distant planet (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/fabric-of-cosmos.html). Physicists including Green have also recently claimed that the Future sends information to the Present (or past, backwards in ‘time’) just as we also “look back” on the timetrack when we apply our faculties of memory and reflection.

Future prospection is a very appealing notion to me. We use it whenever we anticipate or wonder about or even ‘daydream’ about “the Future.” So, folks, I invite you to wrap your thoughts around this newsflash:

THE  FUTURE  IS  NOW!

Where/when you place the spotlight of your aware attention is Here-Now! The Present moment is a bubble of awareness along the spacetime-track of your conscious attention, like the floating air bubble in a leveling tool. Now consider that you can shift your attention along this track as easily as you might tilt the leveling tool, to focus on a past or future scenario.

You do need to be open to this possibility; to accept your own capacity to perceive a wider spectrum of the spacetime continuum.  I have had definite prophetic dreams which later manifested very directly as perceived in the dream, and I often revisit past moments in contemplative inner journeys.  As I prepare for retiring in a little over two years, I often imagine my future scenario living near a lake in Western New York.

What many call “daydreaming” is a great tool for future prospection. It s so simple: close your outer eyes, open your inner awareness, and Be-Here-Now!

images gratefully from pixabay.com

For example:  In a future within my expanded NOW awareness, I see the mist of the Falls (Niagara Falls) downriver from where Sophie (my dog) and I are standing on the Four Sisters Islands, just upstream from the mighty cascade. It is a Spring day, one of the first since the snow has melted from the winter season. It is around 3 PM on a weekday, with only a few cars parked behind us in the parking area behind the footbridge we have crossed to be here. In this future outlook I recall a distant past of visiting near this same spot but from a different vantage point as a teenager. Some things have changed.  The mist rising from the Falls appears a little closer; can that be in forty years or is that a function of changes in my own perception? The city is much more built up all around, though the tourist sites are much as I remember and the traffic feels as busy but less chaotic. My thoughts now are thoughts of a big move to come; am I making the right choices? Will I meet new friends after I move? I do not wish to be a burden on my sister’s circle of relations, as she has a well-established family of her own friends from her forty years of living where she is. I am looking for a sign as I sit by the rushing waters, Sophie safely on a tie out within reach.  A leaf floats into a little pool formed by a cluster of rounded rocks at the edge of the island. It hovers within this little pool, as if lodged in a suspended animation of placid calm in the midst of the greater turbulence just outside this little enclave. That is my sign then! (“And I shall have some peace there; for peace comes dropping slow…” [W.B. Yeats, Lake Isle of Innisfree])

******   ******

Please use this yourself! It is simple and profound. Just close your outer eyes, open your inner awareness, and shift your attention to Be-Here-Now!

I invite and always welcome your Comments, Insights and Stories.

 

 

Envision Your Dream, Daily

There’s a principle referred to in many meditative traditions called “Dying Daily.” This means that every day as you practice contemplation or meditation you SURRENDER. In a way you are surrendering your ‘old self’ to be reborn to the ‘new’, daily.

So, here’s a thought. Remember to DREAM daily. By this I mean, envision your Life Dream every day, knowing that your Present exists in relationship with this desired future condition! Then every day you are living INTO your “dream come true.”

Many years ago I made a huge transition when I moved from Buffalo, New York (a lifelong Easterner til then) to Phoenix, Arizona (Out West). Every night for the year preceding this big move, I contemplated and asked questions inwardly  about this momentous turning point.  I work spiritually as many do with an Inner Guide figure, which helps me to focus on gaining higher awareness.  And every night, my question would be answered in a dream. One night, I woke with an actual song jingle and melody:

“I’m leaving, but there are a few doors left to close before I get over there.”

For the rest of the six months or so before my Great Adventure West, I sang this song frequently every day. Meanwhile I also taped pictures from SEDONA LIFE Magazine, a wonderful photojournalist sort of magazine depicting the amazing red rocks and canyons of Sedona, Arizona onto my office wall.

I was PREPARING, both outwardly and inwardly; orienting toward the new life I was about to assume with this trip upon which I was about to embark. The song lyric helped me realize every day that every action I was taking was movng me in the direction of this transformational life experience.

My move from Buffalo to Phoenix was indeed transformational! I became an anthropologist and experienced the Southwest and Native American cultures like I never could even have imagined as an Easterner.

So, what is YOUR DREAM around the horizon of some major departure? IMAGINE it daily; place PICTURES of your destination in your mind … and on your walls.  LIVE your dream now, in your imagination. Contemplate it, meditate about it. Surrender to its amazing potentials.

Now as I approach returning ‘back East’ for transitioning into the next stage of my life in 3 years, on my computer desktop I have a sepia postcard of the lake I will relocate near. Along the right of my screen is the lakeside  shoreline, winding up and around toward a clock tower that represents the very town I will be moving to. So, I have copied and pasted a little rowboat icon onto the base of this shoreline. Now every time I take some action in my daily life that moves me somehow closer to realizing this Big Move, I move the rowboat icon up the shoreline just a bit, closer to my Dream destination.

What are you doing or what might you do to ENVISION your future Dream come true? I welcome your insights and stories!

 

On a Clear Day You Can See Forever

This month’s topic is the metaphor Life is… A Mountain with Vistas.  I offer this topic to encourage you to nourish your own capacity to thrive, not merely to survive.  The principle we are working with here is VISION, and the method is to energize your divine gift of imagination via creative visualization.  Daydreams, for example, can help you discern where your deepest desires are so that you can increase your motivation to fulfill your most intrinsic life purpose and Quest.

The daydream I shared Friday and Sunday, for instance, revealed to me my deep desire for spiritual freedom and creative independence. On the surface this daydream was about reading a great book while drifting in a rowboat on a peaceful lake, then bumping up against an island and getting out to explore. Yet this is my spiritual quest (to a degree) in a nutshell! It shows my desire for spiritual freedom (the boat floating freely), my love of knowledge (the book), and my creative curiosity and love to explore and to thereby serve (by being a trailblazer). Nurturing this daydream has allowed me to cultivate free thinking and an adventurous freedom which I also have sought to share and foster in others: students, friends and family, readers.

What do your daydreams reveal to you about your own inherent gifts and motivations?  What vistas and quest do they expose?

Consider next the lyrics to a rather mysterious song, taken from a somewhat obscure and equally mysterious musical starring https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZyNKZUWJSa0?rel=0“>Barbara Streisand, Yves Montand and Jack Nicholson, ON A CLEAR DAY YOU CAN SEE FOREVER.

“On A Clear Day (You Can See Forever)”

On a clear day
Rise and 1ook around you
And you’ll see who you are

On a clear day
How it will astound you
That the glow of your being
Outshines every star

You’ll feel part of every mountain sea and shore

You can hear
From far and near
A word you’ve never, never heard before…

And on a clear day…On a clear day…
You can see forever…

And ever…
And ever…
And ever more. . .

 

Do you remember this movie musical (also a long running Broadway show)? It was about this young woman (Streisand in the movie) who while trying to overcome a smoking addiction by seeing a psychologist who practices hypnosis, becomes a high class lady from a former lifetime under that hypnotic influence. The doctor (Montand) falls in love with the past-life version of his client. At some point she and the doctor realize they have a Soul bond that may transfer across lifetimes, so that perhaps in a future life they might find each other again and fall in love!

What can you take from this to apply to your own aspirations?

To me: Life is greater than, vaster than only what appears on the surface.  As spiritual sojourners each on our own cosmic quest (however we might individually conceive of this), there are stones to upturn (to look under), mountains of knowledge to explore in search of WISDOM, LOVE, FULFILLMENT. 

ANY life experience can bring one to the awareness and fulfillment you might seek. It doesn’t matter if you are a housewife or a scientist, a millionaire or unemployed. From wherever you ARE, you can LOOK and SEE that which you seek to understand.

So, here’s a technique I offer you this week, based on the lyrics from this musical above.

Imagine it is a CLEAR DAY. You are at a mountain top, overlooking a vast expanse.  Turn West and you can see highlights from your Past. Ahead and surrounding you immediately is the Present. To the East (the direction of the new dawn) is your future. Contemplate these vistas freely. How do these vistas relate to each other, and how can you bring great Bounty into your present life from your Future that fulfills all that which has brought you to Here-Now?

I always invite and welcome YOUR insights and stories!

 

Enjoy the Fruit from Your Labors of Love

Life is a Bowl of Cherries means you get to enjoy the fruits of all the work you have done and the love you have given and shared as you bring about and experience the “manifesting” stages of your life. My 88 year old mother, for example, though suffering from late stage Parkinsons, has her family’s love and support for all she has given us. She has more visitors than many at her nursing home, and this is one of the fruits of her many sacrifices and gifts of being a terrific mother through the years.

How can you manifest a future wherein you will benefit from the fruits of your own labor and dedication? How will you construct this future as one filled with abundance and vital purpose? As I anticipate retirement in just a few years, I see this not as any form of slowing down or resting but as a graduation from my primary career work into a continuing adventure of service, creative productivity, and giving back to life for all I have received and learned through life experiences.

A Contemplation and Journaling Seed:

What are to be the fruits of your life’s labor of love? Some you are already enjoying Now; what are these? Others you can yet choose to manifest; what are those? How will you help these fruits to mature?

It always helps to visualize and contemplate your future of abundant growth while appreciating the bounty of the present moment as well.

FOR A LIFE OF ABUNDANCE: Follow Your Heart

Envision a future of life fulfillment and abundance that you are already “living INTO,” Now! PLease go ahead, I invite you and I entreat you to take some time out from whatever busi-ness you are about right now; to close your eyes and dreamily, freely:

I M A G I N E 

So just think of it: Life IS a Bowl of Cherries. Okay then, what does YOUR “bowl of cherries” contain in your imagined dream of life fulfillment? What relationships or conditions, behaviors, activities, locations, etecetera comprise  the cherries filling your bowl of abundance in the parallel reality of your future dream come true?

I encourage you to contemplate, journal, walk and muse, paint or write a haiku or poem about your life of abundance.

And as always, I welcome your response in any form of sharing.

Now then also, would you need to make any specific sorts of changes or tweaks to your current life course in order to bring this abundance about? Consider how you might make such adjustments as simply and effectively as possible from your present vantage point.

My dear sister whom I am visiting has a refrigerator magnet that reads: THERE IS NO PLAN: FOLLOW YOUR HEART! Yet what if, after all, following your heart truly will fulfill your “plan”, even if you didn’t know you have one? The question remains the same by either viewpoint: How to ‘truly’ follow your Heart?

Some speak of nudges, others pay attention to their dreams and “intuitions;” still others stay centered on their current course, neither expecting nor desiring change. And you know, it’s all good: Life is Good, no matter what.

Myself, though, I enjoy creating or composing my life actively as I go along. I love adventure and creating some measure of change and flexibility to bring about variety as that “spice of life.” I enjoy the Present Moment of Nowness, yet I also enjoy musing inwardly and reflecting lightly on the Past, and I enjoy looking forward to creating a future of my own choice and design. All of that involves listening to the Heart and ALLOWING the Moment to unfold yet being an active, mindful participant.

The Here and Now is multidimensional, resplendent, full of potentials and possibilities! So take a peek into the byways of your Heart’s own rhythm and pulse, and… Follow!

What Is Your One Thing?

Here’s a thought: ALLOW the Future to affect your Present NOW. Contemplate a desirable future event, deeply. Then imagine backwards to where you are presently. What might you be doing now or in the foreseeable near future that can carry you, even PROPEL you forward to the realization of that desired effect or set of conditions?

We do this in reverse order unthinkingly, much of the ‘time.’ That is, we are generally dimly aware of how our present thoughts or actions might influence future developments or “consequences.” But reasoning or imagining backwards instead FROM a desired future can help us be more mindful of our thoughts and actions as constituting a process by which future and present are naturally interconnected or ‘entangled’.

Adapting the PRESENT in view of a desired future can LAUNCH and PROPEL you directly to that desirable set of outcomes, like a “truly aimed”  arrow from a taut bow.  I offer this concept of discerning the “One Thing” to life mapping clients who are aiming to manifest life goals. To be effective, the One Thing needs to be something very definite and will generally incorporate ‘out of the box’ thinking.

Here is a personal example: While engaged in an archetypal psychotherapy process several years ago, I was developing the Life Maps Process by conducting a series of interview studies and writing articles about the results. When I began to understand that the interview subjects were benefitting from the very process of engaging in life review and reflection, I wanted to take this beyond the “study” phase to write and publish a personal development book and handbook by which people could do this on their own. My therapist helped me to recognize One Thing I could do to create the time and mental space I would need to make this shift of focus and produce the book: a full month writing retreat! Although I had very little savings, she asked me to consider taking a one month retreat, and the more I thought about that prospect, the better it sounded.

I found a way to hire a pet sitter and I rented a chalet in Steamboat Springs, Colorado for a full month that next summer. I brought my elder cat companion Ariel with me. Every day for 10 to 14 hours almost every day, I wrote a proposal, several preliminary chapters and the opening chapter pages for a full book. Since then, I have never stopped my forward motion toward manifesting this dream.  I have now acquired an agent and have a well developed, full book manuscript and proposal. Hopefully in a few months we will begin to circulate the proposal. With true fulfillment, I will at length be able to announce to you here when LIFE PATHS: Life Mapping to Live Your Dream, Now! will be released.

The point is that the writing retreat was precisely the One Thing that would launch and propel me in the true direction of realizing my future goal. It took planning. It took a leap of faith to find the means to accomplish the agenda. It took finding the right place, the right chalet. But when it all came together, it was like magic and every day was filled with wonder and delight. I was manifesting in the present every day that month material that would only fully coalesce in the future of my envisioning. Most of the material that I organized and wrote is still embedded in the current manuscript, though much additional material has developed since what I could only begin to conceive of then. The retreat SET IN MOTION for me a process that has only accelerated ever since.

So, WHAT IS YOUR ONE THING?  What future Life Dream would you love to be able to manifest, IF ONLY?  If only WHAT? You had the time, the money, the opportunity of one sort or another? Then consider: how can you OPEN THE PORTAL of that specific OPPORTUNITY?

I invite youto take some time to work this ONE THING out. Don’t just commit to a new habit or activity in order to move toward your envisioned future. It’s not (usually) just about exercising more or journaling more or reading more; although, in principle any of those COULD be your One Thing, if it can truly FUEL your specific trajectory forward to realize your goal. But is there something more, something different, something DISTINCT that you CAN DO that will aim you irrevocably in the direction of fulfilling the very future that is reaching back to you RIGHT NOW and calling you forth?

I welcome your Comments and Stories!

Future Casting

I would like to introduce the notion of Future Casting as a mode of creative visualization. Consider you stand before a blank canvas that represents your future. In fact, imagine you have a stack of empty canvasses, of various sizes, available to you. Take one and put it on an easel; this represents the blank screen of your mind (unless you prefer a physical canvas and paint or other artistic media).

Now then, focus inwardly on a desirable future scenario. Represent that scenario on your empty canvas or blank page.  Draw, paint, place text, finger paint, place collage images, or do anything to ENVISION your future scenario. Consider this is but one of several possible futures.  Complete one and put it to the side (so you can see it, though). Now, start another.

Your Alternate Future-scapes can be similar to one another, with tweaks or special features with each one; or, they can be very different, representing radically different future conditions or options. The only guideline is to allow yourself TOTAL FREEDOM in your imagining. This is a FANTASY adventure, not necessarily a practical one at this stage.

After casting two or more of these Alternate Future-scapes, review them, one at a time. Contemplate their message to you. Then, take a walk! Or, do something you enjoy to relax and allow these ideas to percolate or to “incubate” in your consciousness. When you come back, try writing about (or simply use active imagination/ contemplate) any of these alternative futures. You can journal about this over several days, refining ideas, and you can ask yourself what kernel of future reality have you implanted here.

Be mindful with this practice. Intend to clarify some aspects of the direction you may go in order to realize your Best Case future scenario. Nothing is written in stone nor should it be. Allow Your future envisioning to remain flexible, yet allow some coherent ideas to form around which the rest may flow.

I did this a few months ago and the results were profound. I now know where I am likely to retire and what that will be about.  Having a clear idea of where I am heading helps me to now prepare in that direction, always remaining open to further information.

 Quantum physicists like Brian Greene now tell us that the future may reach back to us as we reach back to the past; that is, there may be “waves” of probability coming to us in the Present from the Future as there are also memory waves to and from the past.

Future casting, then, is a matter of perceptual exploration.  If the future is an array of unlimited possibilities more narrowly framed as a set of probabilities connected to present conditions, we can project a future in keeping with our creative intention to move in a direction of our choice. To move beyond the threshold of the Present leading inexorably into consequences or a chain of events outside our control, we only need to stop, look, and Imagine!

So I encourage you to go Future Casting!

I welcome your Comments and Stories.

Through the Wormhole of Memories and Anticipation

Last week on the Science Channel’s “Through the Wormhole” with Morgan Freeman, I watched an episode called, “Is Time Travel Possible?” The program explored various attempts by physicists to break the time barrier, mainly concluding that the laws of physics or of nature so far as we yet understand have built-in barriers to time travel, especially into “the Past”. One argument says that even if time travelers were to travel back to the Titanic on that fateful evening to warn the captain of the impending collision with an iceberg, the captain must not have accepted the time traveler’s warning, because the ship still sank.

Explorations into quantum mechanics such as the discovery of nonlocality effects between entangled particles as well as quantum gravity properties, the program stated, might have implications for time travel once these are better understood. But, for now anyway, time travel seems but a distant fantasy.

As the program ended, I found myself unconvinced. There IS already a time machine that you and I use every day; in fact, every moment. Memory is a time machine embedded within the matrix of cognition and consciousness. Past, present and future memories or ‘schemas’  are “entangled”. That is the very basis of–and purpose of–this Better Endings blog adventure.With Better Endings  I invite you to become, along with me, a “Memory-naut”. Explore the realms of your own conscious memories and internalized mindsets or schemas. Now then, what might happen were you to willingly alter or ‘re-construct’ the very fabric of a memory or of an anticipation? Past–Present–Future are entangled. When you alter a mental/emotional construction about of the Past, you affect the Present and Future at the same time.

I will eventually introduce you in this Better Endings blog to a personal growth/ self-help tool which I use in my Life Maps coaching process ( see lifepathmaps.com), called “Re-Vision the Past”. I’ll invite you to travel back in your memory to an event you may have felt you had little power to control and which has had a negative impact on “the person you have become”. You can go back to that event and constructively re-vision it; right the ‘wrong’. Re-live it, but this time from the perspective of your more mature present understanding and empowerment today.

Past and Present–and ultimately Future constructs, too–are “entangled.” Change any one of them, and you will have changed them all.

Related articles

• Time travel (elliotfh.wordpress.com)
• Time Travel (plato.stanford.edu)
• Review: Memes of Loss and Devotion by Darren White (saboviec.wordpress.com)