Future Reality
Sunday, June 12, 2011 at 12:19 How to Make Your Dreams Come True suggests that once the vision has “taken” it’s sufficient to revise the Present and Future Realities once a week.
Different people will probably come up with different ways of doing this, but at the moment I am finding that it is very powerful to re-type and revise my Future Reality first thing every morning, and to re-type and revise my Present Reality every evening. This seems to provide the impetus to work towards the vision throughout the day. In fact this impetus is strong enough for me to no longer feel the need to ask the question “Is this what I want to be doing?”
My initial version of my Future Reality was written on 27 May. Since then it has expanded, contracted to one sentence and expanded again. Here are the two versions for comparison:
27 May
I am living a very well-ordered life in which the principles of “How To Make Your Dreams Come True” are put fully into practice. I love creating and everything I set my hands to comes to fruition effortlessly. I am extremely healthy and fit. I have a close circle of friends. All this makes me feel alive, full of energy and peaceful.
12 June
I am living a powerful, well-ordered and creative life in which everything gets done when it needs to be done. I’m supported in my work by a tidy and efficient office. The Dreams Manual has been a great success and I am teaching its principles through seminars, teleconferences and the internet, while living entirely by those principles myself. I am extremely fit and full of energy and enjoy long-distance walking, yoga and physical challenges (including passing the 100 push-ups challenge). I run a highly successful blog for ……. and this has resulted in a lot of new members. I speak and read French with fluency. I naturally attract people who share my enthusiasm for living and this is resulting in some amazing friendships. I love the sense of freedom and achievement that all this gives me.
Once I’ve written today’s Present Reality this evening, I’ll post a similar comparison.
Reader Comments (16)
Perhaps this is an example of your metaphor of "you can't eat everything on the menu." Perhaps if I climb a little higher up the hill I could find some common themes that would be more suited to the FR exercise. (I have started keeping a separate FR at work, one for each of my big projects, and then one 'bigger' one encompassing attitudes and habits.)
I LOVE the idea of writing the FR in the morning and the CR in the evening. That sounds like a great idea.
I agree Mike. I'm implementing this change today.
Mark:
So crazy - I'm getting excited reading your future vision!
That's interesting. The same applies to Catholic prayer, and I expect Seraphim will tell us that it applies to Othodox prayer as well (that's Orthodox as in Russian and Greek Orthodox, etc).
With respect to your current future vision, do you still hold to the 3-5 year plan?
What I don't know is whether in 3-5 years time I will write up my Present Reality one evening and it will be exactly the same as my Future Reality.
More likely I think the Future Reality will continue to evolve so it's always ahead of me.
Some mentors call it the Wheel of Life. Covey calls them roles. They usually list 5-12 areas. I don't know if Mark has somethings similar. As you do your review, focus on each area in turn.
A perfectly-balanced life has a perfectly-balance wheel, but in the short-term it's hardly ever balanced. In the mid- and long-term, over-doing an area is just as un-balancing as short-changing one.
Don't worry about finding the perfect list. As you do the exercise for a few months, you'll see areas that need to be split and ones that can be combined to meet your current life.
I did not have time to re-read all comments and articles, so I'm sorry if this has already been asked. Are you still doing your daily "What's better?"
Yes, currently I add to it throughout the day, but I'm still experimenting with the best times of day to do the various bits of the Dreams methods.
"Developing Discrepancy:
At the same time, the practitioners help clients to develop and recognize the discrepancy between their drinking behaviors and their personally held goals and values. This involves highlighting the gap between "where they are" and "where they actually are" (deploying discrepancy)."
http://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/Social/Module6Motivation&Treatment/Module6.html
For 5 or 10 minutes a day at the most, use natural hypnosis as a method of accepting desired new beliefs. During that period concentrate your attention as vividly as possible upon one simple statement. Repeat it over and over while focusing on it for this time ... Do not allow distractions, but if your mind insists upon running about then channel its images in line with your declaration. The repetition, verbally or mentally, is important because it activates biological patterns and reflects them. Do not strain .... During this period ... remember that you are using the present as a moment of power to insert new beliefs and that these will be materialized. When the exercise is finished do not dwell upon it .... Three days at the very least are necessary before you can tell, through results, how effective it has been .... You may experience spectacular results at once. But continue the exercise even if this happens. Inner channels must be repatterened. There will be a feel to this that will serve as your own individual guideline.
"" It is good that life never fulfils your dreams - it always goes on disposing, in a way. It gives you a thousand and one opportunities to be frustrated so that you can understand that expectations are not good and dreams are futile and desires are never fulfilled. Then you drop desiring, you drop dreaming, you drop proposing. Suddenly you are back home and the treasure is there."
Osho"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajneesh
Usually this means stopping identifying yourself with the ego. The problem is that the ego always regards the future as where all it's sense of lack is fixed.
The brain often wants what the heart doesn't have a desire for. The ego fails to connect itself to a larger flow of life. Step 1 is therefore to reduce the momentum the ego has built up in this unaligned direction, separating heart desires from ego wants. Future reality needs filtering through that process.
It also needs filtering by becoming aware of the resistances to the heart's desires. The future reality will be incomplete until the voice of fear over a future reality has been acknowledged. There will be several consequences to this imagined reality, not all of which will be ok within the unconscious.
There also needs to be leeway in your future reality. The brain may have a poor idea of what is best for you as it projects from past habits and conditioning in an attempt to fix what it sees as lacking. So our grip of future reality must not be too tight - a blueprint more than a final copy.