Photo by @aronvisuals
In the first few chapters, we will try to create an exhaustive list of the processes that are at play to keep you from altering your life in the way you choose.
The Past is in your future.
If I were to ask you,
“how did you turn up this way ?”
you would say something on the lines of,
“I did this and this in my past, and this and this happened and so I turned up this way.”
So now that you are here, how can you change the way you are ? Do you need to change the past ?
Is this where I reveal that “Back to the future” is true and you can go back and change things in your past? Unfortunately no. Yet I offer an even better solution.
The past does not exist in reality. It only exists in language.
That language is in your head and in the heads of other people.
Being
The more observant of you will probably have a question by now.
“What do you mean by ‘turn up this way’? Which way is that ?”
Every one of us has a way of being. We usually give these ways of being a name. Say “lazy”, “shy”, “afraid”... Then we say, “I am so lazy”.
Lazy, for example, means I am the guy who doesn’t want to work too hard. I tend to leave money on the table, if it’s too inconvenient. Internally there is a whole conversation about how I don’t attain my goals because I am “LAZY” etc etc…
Ways of being depend on time, place and circumstance.
The same “Lazy” person may play the guitar. Now how did they learn to play the guitar if they were so lazy ? Or they may be really good with computers, how did that happen ?
The future you are living into
There is a future you have already decided is going to happen. Your body and mind keep track of how you expect the near future to be. This is what gives you being in the present.
Present, future WAT ?
Yes. Have you noticed that if you wake up one morning expecting something exciting to happen, you are already excited. It’s like the Christmas morning feeling. You wake up excited because you know there’s going to be cake and presents etc.
How about being called into your boss’s office on Friday evening just as you were packing up for the day ? That sinking feeling. Do you feel enthusiastic and excited now ?
Your way of being gives way to emotions, thoughts and actions commensurate with that way of being.
It’s unlikely that you will be creative, when you are anxious. So when your boss calls you, probably for some more work for the weekend, you are more likely to acquiesce and accept the assignment rather than find creative ways to avoid it. Or if you have done this before, you may say no to it without actually understanding what has to be done. You are being “dismissive”.
Action
Your ways of being in a situation limit the kind of actions you can take. It’s very hard to be “creative”, if your way of being is “anxious”. It’s very hard to make progress in a task, if your way of being is “bored”.
Ways of being give rise to not only action, but also thoughts and emotions. Further, ways of being get reinforced with every similar experience. It’s a cycle. Once you have a way of being, the body and mind are looking for more evidence that this is the correct way of being. As, what you seek you will usually find, you get stuck in that way of being.
What has this got to do with the past ?
Everything, it turns out.
Your past is not sitting in your head as the past, it sits as the future you are living into.
Based on your experiences in the past, the mind and body have decided how things are going to pan out in the future.
Suppose, when you were young, you tried to answer a maths question in class. You raised your hand and confidently said “2 + 2 = 5”. The whole class started giggling. Even the teacher smiled. For you, it was a very painful experience and you decided “I am bad at Maths”. This became the future you are living into. Your way of being became that “I am bad at Maths”. When Maths was around, you became tense and just wanted to run away. Try solving calculus in that state of mind. Finally, you became “bad at Maths”.
Voodoo ? No. As the experience was unpleasant you avoided maths. You didn’t practice, you certainly didn’t raise your hand again in maths class. So simply because of lack of practice you became “bad at Maths”. It became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Your past is sitting in your future.
Other people
Other people pick up your ways of being and that triggers a way of being in them. A great example is parents with recalcitrant children.
These parents are usually supercritical with their children. Even small mistakes done by the children are picked up and criticised. This is because the parent’s way of being near the child is “angry” or “frustrated”. The child has a “not listening” or “defiant” way of being when the parent is around. You can understand now why things quickly escalate.
Remember that this is all subconscious. Neither the parent nor the child can help themselves once they have set up the future they are living into.
It’s like a dance that must be danced when the music plays.
This is also how biases work. This is also how confidence tricksters work. Confident ways of being usually trigger “trusting” ways of being in other people. This is how marital arguments repeat ad nauseam as well.
Change
Your past, sitting in your future, is keeping you the way you are by limiting your thoughts and actions at any given moment. There are ways to remove that past. We will discuss more on that in a later chapter.
This is also the last in the list of things keeping you where you are. While the list is not complete, (we didn’t talk about karma or acts of god etc), this should be enough to begin thinking about how to change. In the next chapter we look at creativity and how we lost it and the part it can play in change.