What’s Around the Bend?

What is around the corner in your life that you can envision as you “look forward” to embrace and maximize your future potentials?

Yes, being mindful and accepting of the here and now is important for appreciating life as it is, yet Nowness embraces more than the present in timespace; past-present-future are interconnected or we could say “entangled,” always. On Through the Wormhole this past week  the focus of the episode on state of the art  Physics perspectives was about the question of how the Future affects the Present. The Future exists Now, as a manifold of possibilities. How you envision your own future helps to orient toward and manifest specific potentials of the future conditions you envision.

This past semester I conducted some 65 students through a life mapping process, and they created some really amazing Life Dream Maps for themselves as a means of artistically grounding Future Action Plans they developed. Many of their Life Dream Maps were in the form of board game designs, reflecting versions of the Milton Bradley game of LIFE. These life mappers embellished their game boards beautifully, representing their anticipated goals and Turning Points with personally very meaningful images.

Since this week at Better Endings for Life Paths is about conjoining your ARTIST Archetype Ally with the image of Crossing the Threshold to establish a desirable set of life conditions, I invite you to envision and create your own Life Dream Map.

On a large, blank sheet of paper (maybe 11″x 17″), sketch out a winding pathway or devise your own “pathway” sort of image. Consider the major steps or cornerstone “turning point” spaces on your path to be pivotal actions or events you can anticipate experiencing as you wend your way consciously to manifest your Life Dream. Represent some image of your Life Dream itself as the Goal or destination point on your game board.  In designing your Future Dream Map, be as specific as you can about time frames for arriving at your Turning Point spaces. But you can also include playful transition points that, if you “land” on these steps, might say something like “Pause to Reflect,” “Move Back two steps before moving forward,” or “Leap ahead confidently” to the next Turning Point.

Have fun with this. Play it as an actual game if you like or play with your friends by each of you creating their own game boards! Whether you sketch this out roughly or artistically invest quality time in producing your game board, I encourage you to display it and save it as a time capsule that you can look back at as you proceed along your own path to manifest your Dream!

I welcome your insights and stories!

Story of the Week #1–Historical Rewrites : Where Were You When?

 

Why is it those of us who were alive back then do still remember where we were when JFK was shot and when the Twin Towers came down, but not for many other major events or catastrophes?  A CNN program Friday night (Nov. 21, 2013), called “Where were you when Kennedy was shot?” found that most people interviewed felt not just Kennedy’s life but their own, the country’s, and the world at large were significantly altered by the split second action of Oswald’s bullet striking down a US President.

What might have happened had Kennedy somehow avoided that fateful shot?  Perhaps–notables on the CNN program averred–the Vietnam war might have been shortened or forestalled, or Castro’s regime dismantled, or the Civil Rights movement might have been accelerated, perhaps (my conjecture) all or any of this changing the political atmosphere enough so that MLK or JFK’s own brother Bobby might have evaded their own untimely deaths.  Pure conjecture, surely.  Still, there is some evidence suggesting that major catastrophic events do have a contextual ripple effect.  Like a heavy planet that bends spacetime more so than a lighter one does, perhaps history has a force like gravity, all its own.

A Through the Wormhole TV episode called “Is There a Sixth Sense?” explores implications of a well known yet mysterious phenomenon whereby random number generating computers (RNG’s)–which have been around for decades–exhibit a non-random “spike” just before major cataclysmic events have occurred, famously including 4 hours BEFORE the Twin Towers were hit, and the recent Indian Ocean tsunami.  An organization called Global Consciousness Effect (GCE) based at Princeton has been studying this effect over the last seven years. So far they have concluded the effect is real, though they have not determined a cause.

The future can be thought of as a probability wave, where anything is possible but past and present conditions constrain the likelihoods of which future states will become activated in the reality stream of a given timeline. If we are all so interconnected by ripples in the fabric of time, or ‘heavy’ events, so that major shifts or glitches in the normal tendencies can affect the very fabric of all of our lives, the implications are staggering.

What if when we collectively support positive or constructive trends instead of feeding into negative ideological frenzies or collective fear or hatred, history itself–mirroring our own momentum or tendencies–to some degree conforms? For example, what happens when a possible catastrophe, like a looming terrorist threat or a potentially devastating hurricane, abates or is averted? Now whether any  of this conjecture has validity on the largest scale, perhaps at very least in our own lives, positive, constructive thinking such as Norman Vincent Peale and many others have advocated affects our own ‘local’ time ripples, anyway, which may have a wider effect from there?  Perhaps this lays the groundwork for more than just our own Better Endings!

Related articles

• In Memory of President John F. Kennedy (waldorfnycblog.com)
• Anthony: For boomers, JFK assassination ripples still (newsday.com)

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)