A curious thing about our time is that we normally have a clear picture of our pasts than our futures (thoughts)! This is so because we have already experienced the past while the future is always an uncertainty. Like we saw before, the psychological time is the same as the other 2 arrows of time in its flow being unidirectional (from the past to the future).
Such working of thoughts means that the psychological time, though linear, can be paused and the mind can be made to live the past again (past thoughts made to form the mind). Or, it can think of a vague future and return to the present anytime. This means, if we can think of an alternate past with precision, it must be equally possible for us to think of a desired future with precision. But, this is not what we see, and quite unfortunately, it is very hard to achieve such a feat. The reason is that the past memories were already lived through with the details (every minor one of them) recorded by the brain to be lived again.
But in case of the future, we can’t usually foresee the situation we can face or experience later on in our lives. Our subconscious doesn’t even know how we might look like or where we might be sitting in or how much weight we might gain in the next hour or day or even a month. With so many factors involved in the shaping of the future, the energy (space-time continuum) works in a very complex way trying to create (or have created) a balanced future.
The human subconscious which is a tiny fragment of this universe is not capable of comprehending every minor detail of events that are used to shape a future or guess what the already existing future might be. (This is why we can’t be sure if we have changed our future or not!) All the events happening across reality has several layers of information merging together to form a clear picture of the universe. Each of these layers requires a unique perspective to be understood and it is humanly very hard to understand all these perspectives at the same time.
But, we don’t stop from thinking about our different futures, do we? The reason is that our minds can never stay put in the present (that is why it is called the mind in the first place). We had seen earlier in the previous chapter how hard it was to stop thinking when we meditated. In the expectation of the future, our subconscious takes up details from the present and forms a vague picture of different (possible and impossible) futures that can happen.
This process is similar to the dreams where our subconscious randomly coalesces the memories and forms images. Whereas when we are awake, the process is under control, allowing the subconscious to shape up a desired thought as a future. It can be said that thoughts are controllable dreams, while dreams are uncontrollable thoughts!
We dream about our futures, and we plan for each and every one of them. But, the events that follow are seldom what we think of. However complex our dreams about the future might be, the actual future we face is as surprising as the past we had lived through.
Changing our future is possible by constant vigilance of thoughts, but understanding the entire length of the future, in the present, is hard, impossible even!
