Dingo said:
I guess the upshot is, we need to live in 'the now', which is obviously difficult, but in reality we are not, we are working towards something we perceive is going to happen in the future. This could be one area where I come unstuck.
To me, the interesting thing is that "Now" seems to have always been right in front of our faces, but we fail to see it because we've been behaviorally conditioned and our consciousnesses have been trained to live in a linear story line narrative of our lives, instead of actually experiencing our lives and the world, as it is, and fully, OSIT.
Jerry said:
This seems to me trying to trick a law by veiling the real intent with a rewording of it. The intent is really that you don't want some things to occur.
If the flow is constricted, then wouldn't it follow that the prevention of the undesirable things wouldn't happen?
Let's call "the not happening of all the things you don't want" - 'E' and "anticipation" - 'A'
A → ~E (A implies not E)
Or: anticipating the not happening of all the things you don't want will constrict the flow of the not happening of the things you don't want.
Wonderful, Jerry! I want to give you a high five so bad.....
If we could combine the NOT logic with a knowledge of actual vs imaginary possibilities, we might have enough data to set up actual experiments!
Dingo said:
Bud said:
To try and cancel the possibility of a negative happening, is there any evidence in reality at the moment, as it relates to you, that might suggest the possibility that a specific unwanted event, happening a specific way, is possible?
I think the meaning of the word 'possible' must be taken seriously in this context, or one would risk falling into imagination, OSIT.
No there is no evidence, only past experience, and this is obviously the crux of the main issue of worrying about stuff all the time, like money, because we imagine some possible outcome all the time based on the past, and we tend to assume the worst.
Dingo, I really hope you enjoyed that link to the "Holy Grail of no Anticipation", because it's worth a re-read and because it seems to me that people are not picking up on some clues that are available.
The Left brain - Right brain thing is important to contemplate, OSIT.
You could think of it this way: The left brain is the story teller and the right brain is the 'feeler and creator of the Now'.
Try to ditch the 'time' concept by temporarily suspending your left-brain internal story-line. Instead, feel an Eternal Now where there is no 'time' - only cycles and repeating cycles and patterns of motion.
Instead of saying "at any given time", you could say "at any given point on a particular cycle". You are always at some point of some cycle or set of cycles that relate to you as well as coincide with the worldly and cosmic cycles. Whatever cycle you are currently engaged with is part of multiple cycles that steadily increase in scope, rather than 'time'. Whatever has happened in your 'past' happened on a previous point of a cycle which will be coming back around eventually, if not sooner.
This is an important reason for recapitulation and knowing your machine, because only learning lessons will release you from repeating patterns (cycles of motion) if they're undesirable. The more self-aware you become, through recapitulation or other means, the more you should come to know about your own repeating cycles and where you are on any 'circle', so-to-speak.
You said "No there is no evidence, only past experience", but past experience is specific and your worry seems to be generalized. What will help is for you to figure out what cycles repeat for you and what are the usual sequences so that you can recognize and be able to 'predict' things in your own life.
I don't know how old you are, but you could do your recapitulation of your life in cycles of 20 years, then 10 years, then 5 years, etc, going from making the most general statement of what a period of time was about for you and working your way down to the specific details that validate your general statement. You could even count the cycles in a day to determine how many behaviors repeat during the course of a day. How many 'routines', 'rituals', or "regular ways of doing something" make up the entirety of a day for you.
From the most repetitive behaviors in the course of a day, to something you only do once every 20 years or more, place everything you can about your life into a single context like a solar system, or galaxy, with orbiting bodies to represent these habits, or cycles.
If you make an effort to recap in terms of cycles instead of a linear story line, this will give you valuable practice for identifying personal repeating patterns, OSIT. This is the way your life happens anyway, so it's also more realistic.
By fooling ourselves into living a linear narrative, we create an illusion that there are "future moments" that are "fresh and new and full of promise and danger". Well, maybe. But a case can also be made that whatever you are doing now, you've done before and will do again, because there are only cycles.
You could probably combine Jerry's "NOT Anticipation" (which I find wonderful, burble, burble :)) with the idea of actual possibilities which are real for you from your knowledge of your own cycles and patterns and you should be able to see your life more like a model of a living operating system and less like some random walk mystery needing prayerful intervention except for maybe an extraordinary case or two.
Does this make any sense?
