Living Your Magic by Anthony Robert;

Author:Anthony, Robert; [Dr. Robert Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
Published: 2020-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

It’s Impossible to Create a Future Based on the Past

It never ceases to amaze me how many people try to create their future based on their past. If you think about it, on what planet would that ever work? Even when you make an investment, the company you are investing in is obligated to tell you in writing: “Past performance is not a predictor of future results.”

If we didn’t live in a thought-created world that’s happening moment-to-moment, looking to create the future based on the past might have some logic. However, because we live in a thought-created world and the nature of thought is transient and changes moment-to-moment, we can’t predict the future based on the past, because that doesn’t take into account any new thoughts we might have when that future moment shows up.

Also, when the future arrives, we will be a different person than we are in this moment because we’re constantly changing moment-to-moment. The future will always be an incomplete equation because we can never really take into account what we will be like or what we will be thinking in any particular future moment. So, there’s no way to know how we’ll be feeling in that moment when the future becomes the present.

The idea that we “just know” we’ll be devastated if such and such happens is the result of looking into our already-created past, not towards the not-yet-created future. We don’t know what new possibilities for action or change will occur to us in any given moment. So, the idea that we “already know” how the future will take form (let alone how we’ll react to it) is naïve at best and self-fulfilling at worst.

The way it works is that we tend to think of the future as a logical extension of the past and the present. So, we look to our memory and our imagination to create a baseline idea of what we think will happen in the future. Then we find ourselves either dreading it or chasing after the excitement of what we have convinced ourselves will be coming our way. Yet, the missing piece is still the thoughts that will occur to us in the moment that future shows up. This is what creates both the positive expectation or the fear of our imagined future and our actual experience of that “future” when it shows up.

In other words, every element we perceive about our imagined future is a product of our thinking in this moment. That would be great if everything worked out exactly as we imagined, but the variables are far more arbitrary than we think.

That’s why the more we think about a future event, the more we either vacillate between hope and fear, or we lock ourselves into positive expectation. Our fixed prediction of future events and our reaction to and the experience of those events is what we proceed to sell ourselves and everybody around us on and defend at all costs. And we haven’t even gotten to the most important part yet.

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