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Better Than You Can Imagine
“Feel the way you are going to feel when it turns out better than you can imagine.”
I have been honouring that injunction for 52 years. I am convinced that in the face of a medical death sentence it allowed me to live. And to co-found a school. And to meet Christopher. And to uncover the “Thinking Environment.” And to get to write and to publish.
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Feel it. Now. An unimaginably good future. As if it were already here. Feel the way you will feel when it is. It’s the feeling that changes the game.
In 1972 I knew about visualising a particular desired outcome. And I am sure that is a good thing to do. But the difference between visualising an outcome you can imagine and feeling an outcome you can’t is monumental. Same planet. Wildly different creatures.
Letting Go
The idea is that focusing on an outcome we cannot imagine keeps us from limiting the outcome to one that we can imagine. “Better than you can imagine,” is an act of letting go.
Taking Charge
And feeling the way we will feel when that unimaginably good outcome occurs is an act of taking charge, of entirely de-victimising ourselves. We can visualise something as a victim, but we can’t feel it as a victim. Feeling an even-better-than-you-can-imagine outcome is an entirely victim-free, in-charge state of mind.
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Huge Challenge
But letting go while taking charge can be challenging. Choosing to let go of the contents of the future can run up against many people’s habit of preferring to control.
And contradictorily, the very act of feeling the way you will feel when it turns out better than you can imagine can run up against many people’s habit of being a victim.
So when we first attempt to feel the way we will feel when an outcome turns out better than we can imagine without dictating what that outcome will look like, we can at first slip into only picturing ourselves happy, not feeling the happiness. Feeling the happiness seems to call on a set of different skills from just picturing it. We can talk about how we would feel. But actually to feel it, now, in our bodies? That’s hard. But doable. And, apparently, crucial.
I sometimes wonder whether there is something in that contradictory demand of simultaneously taking charge and letting go that produces the power the present has to create the future. I wonder whether that contradiction in some mysterious way creates resolution. Maybe?
The Theory
Anyway, the actual theory1 is that the feeling that the unimaginably good future has already happened, the feeling that the future is the present, the feeling of it, is what creates it in some sort of woo woo quantum way. I’m not a woo woo person generally. But let’s face it, life at the most fundamental level seems pretty woo woo. Quarks? Quantum correlations? Wormholes? Spacetime? Come on. No one has actually seen or experienced or fully understands these quantum creatures. Quantum scientists are, of course, not woo wooists in the “I believe this is the work of God” sense. It is mathematics that saves the quantum woo woo from being actual woo woo. But it’s a fine line.
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So science lover that I am, I am, nevertheless, prepared to keep relying on the practice of feeling a future outcome that is better than I can imagine as a way of creating that future. I can’t prove that the feeling is the force that produces it; but I can note that feeling it seems to have worked pretty well so far. (And it has kept me de-victimised, which is said to produce immunity and good health, which is not nothing.) And, yes, maybe those amazing outcomes are just “post hoc” rather than “proctor hoc.” But? If the future keeps being better than I can possibly imagine, I’m in.
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Today
Here’s my point on this particular day. We cannot know what future our political leaders will produce. And most of us have zero influence on those leaders until the next election day or the eventual overthrow of fascism. Zero.
So we have two choices as I see it. We can either feel fearful, angry, depressed, and despairing as we imagine terrifying outcomes. Or we can feel the way we are going to feel when the outcomes are better than we could imagine. And to stay on track, we can intermittently ask ourselves, “If I knew that this could all turn out better than I can possibly imagine, how would I feel in this moment?”
That is what I’m doing.
You?
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1 See Resurrection, Neville Goddard, DeVorss, 1966 - 2008 and Excuse Me Your Life Is Waiting, Lynn GladHorn, Hodder, 2005.
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