Yes, yes, I know. Allow me to explain what seems like a frankly ridiculous statement.
But hear me out. It's very simple:
You have a mind—we all do—that tries to predict the future. When it's doing this, it presents you with imagery of that future, to allow you to ‘make plans, decisions and preparations’. You can conjure up these ideas of the future and play with them.
And it genuinely looks like that information (or at least some of it) is coming from the future; like it's being beamed back or something, or you're being transported there to check it out.
But that's not possible.
Someone correct me, but I'm not sure there's any mechanism in the known universe that allows us to receive actual data from the future. Like, any data.
Not a shred.
The future, such as we know it (i.e. the experience of it we have), is completely unknown. Yes, there are patterns and there are predictions but that's not actual data from the future.
It's worth slowing down and just sitting with that for a moment.
😐
When the mind is creating future stories, it has literally ONE source of data at its disposal: The past.
All the stuff it's accumulated: 📦
It doesn't have any other data to go on (other than what's streaming in through our senses right Now).
Therefore…
Why is this important?
Well, it kind of crops up quite a lot, that's why! All the time, in fact.
Myself and a client were exploring it, just this morning.
Something had happened to them (in the past) and it meant that the mind was creating all sorts of scary stories about the future for them. (These concerns were entirely justified, given what the mind had experienced and the data it was going off.)
But the content of those stories wasn't really the issue. It was more that the mind was giving its predictions a legitimacy they simply didn't have.
The imagery genuinely seemed to be endowed with at least some aspect of future knowledge. But, as we discovered when we slowed right down, 100.000000% of it was created from the past – not one iota of it was actually from the future.
And that makes a huge difference.
Because the future is genuinely unknown. It's pure potential.
Which is why they make it perfectly clear to you, when you're about to invest in the stock market:
“Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results.”
Quite!
💝
Giles
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Giles P Croft
Predictions, unpacked!