How to Remember the Future

Quantum Physicists tell us that the mathematics of the past and the future are the same. This prompts them to ask the question – “Why do we only remember the past.” Actually we remember the future all the time but we are heavily conditioned to negate this kind of perception. Every time we have an intuition about something, or a desire or a feeling that something is going to happen, we are remembering the future. It’s happening all the time.

How many people consistently trust and act on this kind of remembering? Not many! That’s because of the Cause of Human Problems called Ignoring Your Intuition. When this form of conditioning is in play we have an experience of intuitive knowing (we remember the future) which is then immediately followed by a conditioned response. The conditioned response is a fear that if we trust or take action based on this “knowing” there will be some kind of negative consequence that we really don’t want to have to face. The result is that we do not trust and act on our inner knowing in that instance. We further ingrain the habit of not being able to make the distinction between our conditioned thinking and our inner knowing.

Because so many people can’t tell the difference between an intuitive knowing kind of thought and an emotionally reactive conditioned response kind of thought, we assume that we don’t remember the future and only remember the past.

Intention

Another phenomenon related to remembering the future has to do with intention. Intention is something that is often been talked about as something that we create or do. We have an intention. We set an intention. We intend our life into reality. This is the commonly held kind of thinking that leads to the notion that “I create my reality!”

I propose that intentions are something we perceive. They are future possible realities that we can step into. In order to look at intention in this way we have to examine how intention comes to us.

Knowing is based on direct experience. You can’t “know” the taste of a strawberry without taking a bite of one.

Therefore we use our senses to know something, or we could say to experience something that is as yet distant from us in time and space but already exists.

We experience intentions through our senses. The formulating of the intention into words is done by our intellect, but the words are only the representation of that which we are experiencing, not the experience itself.

The formulation of an intention into words is what gives it similarity to our other thoughts that are also structured in words. Even though both intention thoughts and conditioned response thoughts are both formulated in words, the origin of these two kinds of thoughts is completely different. To understand this, we have to look more closely at our five senses and how we “sense” our intentions.

As you are reading this web page, assuming that you are reading the words silently, are you hearing the words that you are reading now with your ears? No, you are hearing them in your awareness. Imagine for a moment someplace that you love to go on vacation (assuming you are not there at the moment). Imagine what it looks like to be there. Can you see it? Are you seeing these images with your eyes? No, you are seeing them in your awareness. What makes this possible? When you have a thought or see an image in your “mind’s eye” you are using an aspect of your ability to hear and see that is independent of your physical sensing mechanisms of your ears and your eyes.

Consider that our ability to sense is an innate characteristic of Awareness itself and that our physical senses are perhaps only the outer and grosser expression of that capacity. So we can distinguish between our physical senses and our “subtle senses.” Our “subtle senses: are the innate ability that we have to “see, hear, taste, touch and smell” that happens in Awareness itself. Just the fact that we hear thoughts and see mental images in our mind makes it clear that the “subtle senses” are a natural part of human experience. Everyone can hear thoughts in their mind. We do it all the time.

If you have been taught to think that the body and your ability to think are the results of the chemistry that makes up the body or that it is certain chemical interactions in the brain that produce your thoughts, this idea that awareness is primary and that it is not produced as a by-product of having the physical body may seem like it is backward to you. However, matter is made of energy, not the other way around. And likewise, I am proposing that energy is actually just the expression of awareness, not the other way around. It is not important whether you believe these ideas as they are just one explanation for how it is that we could do something like remembering the future. Fortunately, the Pure Awareness Techniques will work independently of belief or even intellectual understanding of how or why they work.

Our physical senses are limited to sensing in our immediate environment. We can only see so far and hear things from a certain distance. Certainly, with taste, smell, and touch, it is similar too. The food has to touch our taste buds to register the taste, but we can “imagine” the taste of a hot fudge sundae (if we’ve tasted one in the past).

Though we may not be aware of this, all five senses have subtle counterparts, such as imagining a taste. Our subtle senses are innate capabilities inherent in awareness itself. The subtle senses are not limited to sensing things in our immediate environment or even in our current place in time and space. Consider that when you “see” that favorite vacation spot in your mind’s eye, you may not be recalling a memory stored in the brain but actually “seeing” the place.

Lynn McTaggert’s book, “The Field,” cites recent research on memory that strongly suggests that memory isn’t actually images and sounds stored on some ‘hard drive” in your brain. Instead, the research suggests that the brain acts more like a high-speed internet connection, a technology for accessing information from “the field.” The field then includes the past and the future and all time and space. Consistent with this idea is that intentions are a product of the subtle senses tuning into a specific place in time and space, a place that is a possible future reality that we can step into. We are perceiving a future reality that already exists, but we just aren’t proximate to it yet in time and space, so we aren’t yet experiencing it with our physical senses.

An analogy may help to clarify how intentions move from sensing to manifestation. Let’s say that you are visiting Paris, France for the first time. You arrive and go to your hotel. You have booked a hotel with a view of the Eiffel Tower from your hotel window. But you are quite a ways across the city so although you can see the Eiffel Tower from your window, it is just a general outline of it. You know it’s the tower because you have seen it in pictures protruding up above the city as it does.

So you decide that you will take a nice long walk through Paris and get up close to the Eiffel Tower so that you can experience it first hand. You go down to the front desk and get a map and directions on how to walk through the streets of Paris to the tower, and off you go.

From down at the street level, you now can’t see the Eiffel Tower anymore as the view is blocked by the nearby buildings. As you walk in the direction of the tower, every now and then, you come to a place where the streets are open in just the right way, and you get glimpses of the tower as you get closer and closer. Each time you see it successively closer, you can make out more and more of the detail. Now you can see the many crossing strips of metal, the elevators, the landings, and even some little figures of people standing up on the tower.

As you get closer and closer, the details of the tower come into sharper and clearer view until you get right up next to it, and you can even reach out and touch the actual metal structure with your hands. Now you are having the direct experience of the Eiffel Tower up close and personal using your physical senses.

This story is analogous to what happens when we have an intention. Having the intention is a perception of something that is remote in time and space. It is something that already exists, and it is a possible reality that we may step into given the right circumstances. Therefore we are remembering the future or having a perception of a future reality. This is your awareness having a direct experience of something in the future with the subtle senses.

As we know from Quantum Physics, time is an illusion, and everything exists all at once. We are just moving through life inside the illusions of time and space. So the future possible reality that you might step into already exists.

If you are used to thinking of your reality as being only that which you can see and touch and perceive with your physical senses, then this idea is going to seem quite foreign and strange to you. But whether you believe it or not, you are using your subtle senses all the time. Every time you have a thought, everything you remember, something like which way to turn to get to the grocery store, you are using your subtle senses to navigate through life.

Because the subtle senses are not limited by time and space, when you remember the past and the future, you are using your subtle senses. This is not an ability relegated only to psychics we’re talking about here. This is a natural ability that every human has. Just the fact that we hear thoughts in our minds makes it clear that we all have subtle senses because we are not hearing the thoughts with our ears.

The problem is that most of us are so conditioned to “think” that we have not developed the skill of being able to clearly distinguish our made-up thoughts from our subtle sensory perceptions of the future. Perhaps those we call psychics are simply people who have developed the skill of clearly making this distinction.

Intention vs. Expectation

Remembering the Future Doesn’t Necessarily Come with a Calendar

Why is it so common to not be able to distinguish between the thoughts we make up in our mind and those subtle sensory perceptions of the future?

To understand what happens, we need to look at the difference between intention and expectation. If we take intention to be a perception or a remembering of the future, this is distinct from expectation, which is a story that we make up in our mind and to which we become attached to it happening in a certain way.

For most people, it seems to work in the following way. We have a remembering of the future (intention), and then the mind jumps in and attempts to control when and how our intention manifests. When we remember the future, it usually doesn’t come with a calendar or a date when the intention becomes reality. Sometimes it does, but for most people, there isn’t real clarity about when the intention that we perceive with the subtle senses will happen or if it will actually happen at all. Like in our story about taking a walk to the Eiffel Tower, just because we might happen to notice the Louvre along the way doesn’t necessarily mean that we took a side trip to get up close to it or, for that matter, that we will arrive at the Eiffel Tower at a particular minute or second in time.

Our mind has become conditioned to jump in and set a date when we “want it to happen.” We may also start to dictate how it will come about. When we do this, we convert our intention into an expectation. And in that moment, it changes from a perception of a possible future reality that we might step into to something that only exists as a story made up in our mind. When we create an expectation, we disconnect from our natural experience of perceiving what is coming, and we start to live inside of a story of how we think it should be.

Intentions and expectations are uniquely different. Intentions are fluid. They evolve as we get closer to them in time and space. Just like the Eiffel Tower becoming clearer as we got closer to it in our walk across Paris, our intention becomes clearer as we get closer to the time and place that we are perceiving with our subtle senses

We may find as we get closer to the experience of our intention, we might have to take a different route than we originally thought we would in order to get to it. Similar to our walk towards the Eiffel Tower, if a street that we were going to take is closed for repairs we may have to adjust our course and go around the closed street.

Similarly, as we approach our intention, we may find obstacles along the way that we couldn’t see when we first had the perception of the intention, and we may have to adjust how we get there. So intentions evolve as we get closer to that possible reality that we may step into. We might even decide on the way to the Eiffel Tower to take a side excursion and go to the Louvre for the day instead and see the Eiffel Tower on another day. If someone accompanying us had the expectation to go to the Eiffel Tower they may get upset if they are attached to their expectation and it doesn’t get met.

Expectations are more rigid and fixed than intentions. This is because we become attached to “our way” – the way that we think things should happen. When we turn an intention into an expectation, we set ourselves up for disappointment because the story that we are making up about how and/or when it should happen doesn’t exist anywhere other than in our mind. So it can’t happen the way that we expect it to because in creating the expectation, we have disconnected from simply perceiving reality as it is coming to us.

The other thing about expectations is that they tend to lead to emotional reactions when the expectation doesn’t happen the way we want it to. The emotional reaction is embedded into the expectation at its inception. I suspect this happens because there must be some part of us that already knows that it can’t happen the way we hope, and so the seed of our emotional reaction gets germinated. This is what makes expectations and their pending or already present reactions good candidates for the OUT Technique.

Being able to remember the future without attachment to the specifics of the timing and the how allows us to remain fully present in Pure Awareness, responding to the needs of each moment with the fullness of our Being.

What a great way to live. By cultivating this way of being by practicing the Pure Awareness Techniques, your life will rapidly become more and more the expression of perceiving intentions and then stepping into the reality of the evolving intention as it naturally comes into being. This doesn’t mean that you won’t be doing anything. On the contrary! When you clearly distinguish between intention and expectation, you simply stop absorbing yourself in useless notions about how you want the universe to organize things for you.

Instead, you are fully present in the uncertainty of each moment, enjoying and delighting in the richness and adventure of each of these moments. The laws of nature act through your body, mind, and personality, sometimes with great dynamism. So don’t be concerned that living from Pure Awareness is going to make you a couch potato. Far from it!

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