Conscious Inner Transformation

One thing about life is that we often don’t know where we’re going. The future is a big unknown for the most part, and this is understandably scary. We can try to mitigate that fear of the future by planning, organizing, keeping busy, having faith, catering to the guarantees of some authority etc, etc. Things like planning, organizing and trusting our sense of truth as far as the future is concerned are part of life, and it would be limiting to deny them. They can become prison bars, however, when they join the ranks of strategies of coping with the cognitive dissonance and discomfort that facing the unknown can cause.

To live we must live every moment, and to do this we must be aware of how we trap ourselves into a less than alive perspective. The highways and byways of inner growth can involve many things, but our attitude in the present moment is a foundation for any of these paths to take us toward fulfillment. The present moment isn’t an insulated bubble of experience. It is dynamic. Its dynamic nature is punctuated by its two opposite ends to establish the impression that time flows from past to future. On one end, the past, are all our experiences and memories, and anything established and recorded. In fact, for most of us, what we perceive as reality is really the past. The time it takes for a perception to become conscious is the time it takes for that perception to become a record of a moment that has already passed.

To really experience the present you need to be able to get beyond the recording process of experience, and into what doesn’t involve itself in time lags. This is none other than our own inner nature, our own being and sense of existence and selfhood. It’s actually easier said than done, because survival demands and conditioning force us to focus on the two extremes of our present moment dynamic, and all too often in a manner that does not encourage fully living. You can tell this is so if life seems overwhelming, or if there is anxiety or a sense that you have to submit to events beyond your control. You can tell you are in a perceptual trap if you don’t feel free, or if you feel you should be doing something other than what you are doing, or including something in your life that isn’t being included, whether you can define it or not.

In fact, many of the symptoms that identify natural transformers and potential healers are symptoms of being acutely aware that some serious compromising is going on in the way we are approaching life, and/or in the way life is approaching us. One way to start turning the tide is to identify how you relate to yourself and your environment every single moment, and to recognize your relationship with the past and the future as perhaps part of the cause of undesirable conditions that can make life less than alive and free.

Usually we turn our backs to the past and face the future. This seems right, given the future is the great unknown and our first impulse is to control it or have our catcher’s mitt in place to intercept anything it has to throw at us. At the same time, we may end up backing away from that future and stepping deeper and deeper into the past because no matter what defines it, it is a known variable and a more secure place than the dark void ahead of us. This can be like stepping into a many colored fog that can wrap around us so that our forward view is filled with passed imagery we take as an impending future.

Our stepping back into memory or conditioning (what we “know”) can be projected onto the future as a sense of expectation or self-fulfilling prophecy that keeps us on a treadmill of established patterns. For some this can feel safe if the past is pleasant, but for those acutely desiring to grow beyond former confines, it can be tormenting to the point of feeling trapped by fate. To avoid our insecurity we can adopt a defensive attitude and become allies with the very things we seek to transcend, and often without consciously realizing what is going on.

Most people seem practically addicted to this orientation given how apparently disfunctional “normalcy” is defended in our society, and how so many are secretly comfortable with the world going to hell in a handbasket (as far as appearances go, at least). At least they take comfort in knowing where everything is going, right around to where life turns into a broken record. People who are apparently satisfied with their strategies of projecting the past into the future and repeating the predictable cannot change unless they want to change, and nobody wants to change unless the current situation becomes less than tolerable. Transformers are simply individuals with a more acute sense of the intolerable than most. When they get over all those things telling them they are wrong for feeling this way, they seek solutions. Some wait for the future to bring solutions, some go out and actively search and a minority or those actively seeking ends up building solutions to share with the rest.

In my series of articles here, I’d like to share my own experiences of building what may be solutions to at least some readers. It is not my intention to express dogma or strict methodology, and I will avoid listing things to be addressed in a disciplinary fashion. At this stage, at least, I want to express some thoughts concerning basic orientations with respect to life and self that might help transformers along the way. One of these involves the orientation in relation to the present moment, and specifically the two dynamic extremes of the present moment we understand as past and future.

As counter-intuitive as it may seem, if you reverse your orientation to past and future, your relationship with the present moment and yourself can become free of both stress and limitation to great degree. It’s not a panacea for every form of dissatisfaction in life, but it is a very good start, and a foundation that can lead to surprising and fulfilling results.

Imagine yourself in a stream that flows from an undefined and unknown void in the front and continues to flow behind you. Imagine this as if you are in a wind tunnel and you can sea the streams reaching you. Once the flow reaches you it takes form, and that form solidifies into definition at passes you. It leaves its mark both within you and behind you as all you are and know, through direct experience or hearsay. The front is obviously the future and the back the past. It can seem the flow is coming toward you from this unknown void or that you are actually driving or travelling toward it. There is no way of knowing what is in that void, and so you can find yourself backing up to immerse yourself in the apparent safety of what you do know, the predictable forms of what has already occurred.

But there is another way. Imagine turning around in relation to this flow. Turn your back on the dark or luminous but undefined void and look toward the past, toward all the forms that define your internal structure, the structure of your relationships and the structure of the world at large. These are the forms of who you have become, and what you perceive your world has become, not necessarily identical with who you are.

Facing the future does not do us any good, because there is no such “thing”. The future is made of possibilities, not actualities. It is a realm of potential, not manifestation. Experience lies in the present, but the conditions of the past are the attractors that draw possibilities into the present. Nothing is random because every probability is magnetized by the foundation where the previous moment accepts the next. Ultimately, the buck stops with us as far as causes are concerned, because in one way or another we either consciously or subconsciously choose where we will go or are led there by circumstances when that choice cannot or is not applied. Both choices and circumstances are defined by all that has already been established in our existence. If we are to have the power to change our choices and our circumstances, we must face the causes already in existence. Facing the past, does not mean diving into it. On the contrary. Our natural inclination is to back away from what we face to get a better perspective on it and a wider field.

When we face the past, we back away into the future. The more we back away into the future, the more we surround ourselves with possibility instead of inevitability. We need not define the future to navigate the present. We only need to define our own choices and all that influences those choices, whether it seems within or beyond our current sense of control. That sense of control, in fact, is also defined by past experience and circumstances. What we consider probable or not for ourselves always seems to be proven so by something that is already established. Thus, if something has never been done, it can never be done, according to this attitude, and only what already is can ever be. I don’t know about you, but to me this is a prison mind-set, however convincing it may seem.

When you face the past in every moment, you discover where the past is controlling you, and has been forging your future literally behind your back. You tap into resources of understanding, sensing and insight to make sense of all the patterns you can now consciously unveil, and latent forces of creativity and energy start making themselves useful. After all, necessity is the mother of invention and opportunity the father. By facing the patterns that define you and your life in every event in the present, your can become aware where those patterns cycle in endless themes and variations. When you are so aware, you can combine your need for chance with the opportunity to change the constant repetition into something new and fresh. As you face the past, you will realize the future is not your enemy, but your ticket to freedom.

Bad probabilities exist with good ones, and this is as it should be because freedom is about the right to say yes and the right to say no. Life can be a constant yes, but this implies that there will be some no’s involved, and when we deeply realize the future as our friend, we can slowly (and Rome indeed was not built in a day) begin to recognize our own role in the happenings of our lives through action, omission and submission.

Go back to the image of the flow of time, where you are facing the past, and your back is to the future. Now try the “trust” exercise often used in therapy. Let yourself fall backwards knowing that there is always something to catch you. This something is your own deeper nature, reflected in the nature of the possibility/probability of your own wholeness. When your motive is to be more you, which is one and the same with being more free and more fulfilled, you attract that probability as a presence right behind you. Your choice to become whole and free precipitates as a presence right in the moment beyond this one, and this presence not only catches you so you don’t fall flat, but guides you in understanding how to change and heal so wholeness can be realized in the most balanced and healthy manner. It may be an adventure. It may have challenges. It may not be a completely smooth ride, but it will increasingly feel right.

That wholeness is not just behind you. It is within you and all around you, but covered by everything that denies it. And all that denies it is really embedded in the past and in what is established within us right along with our true nature, the nature of wholeness, freedom and fulfillment. Listen to this presence. It may take time to hear its voice or sense its presence as a subtle feeling. But if you choose the path toward wholeness, if you turn to toward open-eyed (never blind) trust and truly feeling into your every moment. Your resources to toward the blossoming of the greatness of yourself will come on-line like a wondrous panel of possibility.

It is not easy to change ingrained habits around something as fundamental as how we orient to the present moment, but it is worth making the choice and following through. It is also only the beginning…