The Limitations of the Predictive Mindset
We live our lives from a situational mindset. We view our circumstances as scenarios which we need to navigate towards future goals. We assess and analyze our circumstances then respond with action. These responses are rooted in carefully calculated predictions about the effect each action will have on our circumstances. Our predictive algorithms are constructed from our past experiences. We learn the consequences of our actions in certain environments and situations. Our predictive decision-making trains us to expect particular outcomes based on past experience.
In this way, the situations we are in dictate our actions. We respond in ways which we predict will keep us safe, foster gain, or facilitate a positive (or at least minimize the negative) end result within the context of any given situation. We predict which actions will lead to outcomes where we are loved and understood. This is how most people live. When we live our lives in this way, we minimize our experiences significantly. We only pay attention to details of our circumstances which are required to make predictions and focus most of our attention on analysis and prediction, while spending little time fully experiencing the moment.
What if we lived for this moment rather than the next? You may be thinking that this is easy to do, or perhaps you believe you already do live in this moment rather than the next. Perhaps you do. There is a simple question you can ask yourself to assess whether you do or don’t. Are you invested in the outcome of situations? It is a simple question. Are you invested in how your relationships develop? Are you invested in the decisions your children make in their lives? Are you invested in your financial situation? Are you invested in whether you are successful? Are you invested in the success of your business? Are you invested in the trajectory of the project you are working on? Are you invested in what others think of you? Are you invested in being a good father or mother? Are you invested in keeping or growing your material possessions? Are you invested in anything?
The moment you are invested, you begin to steer and manipulate outcomes. The only way to do this is to analyze situations, predict outcomes and choose the outcome which gives your investment the best chance to grow. From having your cup of coffee in the morning to paying your mortgage, the decisions you make in your life are based in large part on holding on to these investments and gaining new ones. The more you invest, the more you will predict, and the less you are present in the one thing that really matters; the experience in this moment which is Life.
To live Life fully, you must be willing to lose all your investments. Is validating the past and ensuring investments in your future really living? If you are invested you will never explore and experience life for what it is, you will only ever analyze it against predetermined expectations. The moment offers us an infinite wealth of experience; the well runs so deep it takes your breath away. The movement of life is who we are. We are truly the potential which lives in every moment as we choose our experience here and now. How we live it, how we perceive it and how we relate to it. We are the potential which sits at the edge of an infinite well of possibilities, yet we keep collapsing these possibilities in the same configurations; predictable and safe. We are the gatekeepers of potential, and in every moment we choose to keep the genie in the bottle, infinite possibilities trapped in the endless well of potential.
We are the arbiters of form. We instill limitations on potential so that they may be contained in form to be experienced through the senses. Through our perception and choices, we can create into the world without limit. But, like the man who orders the same meal at a restaurant with an infinite menu, we choose the devil we know. What if we were moved by the moment and let the universe unfold into time; what miracles would we witness? What if we let the note playing in this moment move us to the next note rather than following the carefully crafted sheet music of bias and expectation, cause and effect? Perhaps we would feel life as is, and, like a master sculpture, etch out from the stone of life what was already waiting to be revealed; new and breathtaking.
Instead we predict, act, and predict again. We avoid the “bad” and gravitate towards the “good”. When our emotions are concerned, our prediction algorithms are so prioritized towards avoidance of fear and anxiety that we would choose misery and despair over confronting these two powerful emotions. We are so adept in this internal mechanism, we engage and react to its authority subconsciously. This keeps us trapped in the cycles of predictable behaviors and experiences in our lives, as fear and anxiety are critical to the creation of new experiences.
Fear is a high frequency energy which presents itself with the implosion of any given system. Once the flow of a timeline has lost its charge/ polarity through experience, it has lived its purpose and its awareness can be reabsorbed into the universe. This is fear. Death of experience so that the information expressed within it may be absorbed is what we feel as “fear”. From this information, new possibilities are made available by the expansion of conscious perception. To be born anew, experience must first die. To experience fear is to experience the end of a cycle so that a new cycle may be perceived into existence. For anything in our lives to be transmuted, we must feel fear. Instead, we avoid fear, create new conflicts in timelines which have already been resolved and then wonder why we continue to have the same problems, feelings, and issues in our lives. To understand fear as the completion of a cycle / journey of experience and its correlated emotions, allows you to welcome fear as the energy of integration; as the release of limitation into the infinite. Nowhere is this more evident than in the cycle of our lives leading to our death. The energy of grief is designed to follow so that we can cease motion and create space for a new manifestation of perception; and this is where anxiety comes in.
Anxiety is also another high frequency emotion which shares the same space as fear near the epicenter of observational vortices, however, where death is collapse, anxiety is the expansion. Anxiety is the high velocity expansion of the new, the creation of a new observational system. This is why physically, anxiety feels much like over-excitement or even new love, as your heart pumps, you quiver, butterflies in your stomach, and the future is unknown and filled with possibilities. The creation of a new observation system is a real problem for our prediction-based model of reality. How can we predict when we don’t know the landscape of our new observation system? We cannot. This is why anxiety leads us to incessantly formulate scenarios about the future, because on some level we know that everything has changed (even though it may not appear that way to the prediction machine of the mind). To understand anxiety as the exhilaration of the creation of a new paradigm would allow us to ride this energy with trust and faith, expunging the need to create predictability models in an unknown system, allowing the system to be experienced as new rather than through the lens of the past. The “negative” experience of anxiety is only due to the resistance of expansion, otherwise, without resistance, it is experienced with great euphoria and anticipation. Likewise, the “negative” experience of fear is also due to resistance. Without resistance, fear is experienced as a wonderful release, an unburdening of the self. Whereas grief can just as easily be felt as a tremendous gratitude for an experience lived, and an a powerful reunification achieved.
When you truly understand what you love, your purpose is made clear, and each decision you make in every moment comes naturally without investment in outcome, as the choice in the moment is the outcome itself. In this way, in every moment of your life, you can do what you love and express your deepest truth. This is true presence.
My love is communication; so naturally I wish to nurture it so that it may grow, expand, and become less limited. To me, communication is intimate and constant between all things. Because this is the way I perceive communication, I understand that the most unlimited form of communication is the recognition that there is no need for it. The reason everything is always communicating is that everything is unified. So, in every system, when seemingly disparate parts recognize they are not separate, unity is achieved and communication is recognized in its absolute and limitless nature. So, in all my experiences, I seek to end conflict, to find commonalities, and create formats in which this miraculous unity of all things may be witnessed.
In this way, in every moment, as I sit on the well of potential, I do what I love and fulfill my purpose without investment in the future. There is no need; I am able to do all those things now and always. Because I am not apart from my experience and recognize myself as part of a unified experience, I can always make the choice to resolve conflicts within myself, release judgements and biases which I hold, and, through the examples of my choices, I may lay the framework for these works to be witnessed. This is the apex of free will.
Through the abandonment of prediction as a mechanism to form decisions, we are no longer slaves to our environments and circumstances, but rather our environments and circumstances are the very platform which we may exert our will towards what we truly love. And, in making choices which align with that love, we fulfill our purpose, and no higher level of gratitude will you feel then when you realize that you are given that authority in every moments of your life.
