TAKE #10.  Predicting the Future

If you have become convinced through your own peak experiences that we are all one in Consciousness and Consciousness is the only reality, you have probably begun to open to paranormal experiences such as telepathic messages, communications from spirits, awareness of energy flows, and the like.

Teachers of Enlightenment call these the “siddhis.” They are “supernatural” powers, and teachers of enlightenment consider them distractions on the path and caution their students not to become caught up in them. As spiritual author Santatagamana explains, “[A]n enlightened being is not under the illusion of being a doer or performer of actions (including siddhis),” because he is “devoid of a personal self, and only a self-deluded person would believe in ‘I do this miracle, . . . etc.’ These are merely egoic statements.”

That said, we do experience paranormal effects and abilities as we progress on the path, and if we don’t allow our egos to take over, these nonordinary powers, for example, communication with spirit guides, can help us on our path. (Instructions for getting in touch with a spirit helper are provided in Blog #6, Thinking with the Big Mind.)

An enlightened person is aware that Consciousness is the only reality, and that material reality is not only the manifestation of that Consciousness, but participates in It as an indivisible part — as one with It, just as our eyes and hands are one with our bodies.

There is nothing “lesser” or “unworthy” in being in a body and playing a part in the physical world even though sometimes we want to escape material reality because of its inevitable suffering. Still, most of us value the material world for its beauty and love, and the ecstasy of sensing, moving, doing, and relating to other living beings.

The more we grow in understanding that all beings are connected, in fact are one with each other in the Consciousness of All-That-Is, the more we see that our suffering comes from a feeling of being separate from that Consciousness, and the more we desire to fully unite with It.

We become Bodhisattvas, people who are able to reach nirvana but delay doing so out of compassion in order to save suffering beings. We care about the human race; in fact we care about the destiny of all beings, including our living planet itself.

Because we care for this life of material manifestation, we want to see it evolve toward a more beautiful and peaceful state of being. Knowing that intention can guide what happens, we are drawn to envision a more integrated, harmonious future for our planet and its creatures. As the dominant species with vast power to affect the lives of other living beings, we humans have a special responsibility to intend and envision such a future.

It’s up to us to predict, envision and champion a future in which we, our descendants and “all our relatives” as the Lakota people say, can thrive and enjoy life.

A way to Predict the Future

Luxuriating in bed on a Sunday morning, half dozing, with no urgent reason to get up, I heard an intense but strangulated voice bark out, “Predict the Future.”

I don’t like to predict the future because I’m well aware that the future changes. How many times have self-proclaimed messiahs predicted the end of the world on a specific date — and when the day came, nothing happened?

But I know it’s possible to predict the future because I once had a predictive dream — about a minor event. In the dream, I saw the words, “Evans” and “Israel” carved into a stone tablet. I had recently separated from my husband, whose first name was Evans, but I had no personal connection with Israel. The next day at the office (I was still working as a patent attorney at the time), the dream came true. I received an unexpected letter from an attorney in Israel about an inventor whose last name was Evans.

The dream wasn’t earth-shaking, or even very interesting, but I thought it might have held the simple teaching that it is possible to predict the future. And because the words in my dream were literally “set in stone,” I felt there must also have been a teaching about whether the future was really “set in stone.” Although I didn’t know it when I had the dream, it was already “set in stone” that I would receive the letter. It was, after all, in the mail on its way to me at the time. The fact that I would receive it was certain, just as once a ball has been thrown up in the air, it is certain it will fall down to earth.

So even though I don’t like to make predictions because most of the future isn’t set in stone, and even though I don’t take “orders” from my spirit helpers, considering them more as wise friends and advisors than all-powerful bosses, I decided to give it a try. There had been so much energy and urgency in the voice, as though it was struggling to speak against an opposing force trying to silence it.

I was also motivated to predict a utopian future because when we envision good futures (and urge others to do the same), it helps bring them about.

I had no idea how to generate a prediction, but as I sipped my coffee and watched the Sunday morning news shows, an idea popped up to cut out pictures from magazines and arrange them in an order that might suggest a prediction.

I had a pile of old New Yorker magazines in a basket, so I got down on the floor with a pair of scissors and, without thinking much about what they might “mean.” began to randomly cut out interesting-looking pictures. Thirteen seemed enough.

I didn’t call in any helping spirits, still feeling the presence of the spirit who had spoken that morning — but I did turn off the TV. I laid out the pictures on the rug and arranged and rearranged them until they “looked right” and told a story. There was an obvious central character, a picture of an adolescent boy looking perplexed about life. I placed influences from the past below him, future situations above him, and contemporary influences beside him.

It was fun, and surprising how quickly and easily a narrative constructed itself as I moved the pictures around. Here’s the story that emerged:

The Prediction Story

Once upon a time there was a boy who felt lonely and alienated, seeking an identity for himself, trying to imagine and tune in to a future self he could believe in and work toward.

He was heir to a past in which his forefathers had risked their lives and the lives of their sons to demonstrate superior skills and daring, and of course, to set an example for the boys to be just as daring — or foolhardy, as their mothers might have said.

In this past, humans of this sort had tamed and asserted dominance over many animal species by convincing the animals, through feeding and caring for them, that they were better off being dominated.

The boy was also influenced by long-dead ancestors from the deep past, ancestors fully in touch with the miraculous nature of their recent emergence from the creative void of unbeing, strong in their sense of mission to love and create in their turn the beautiful world in which they found themselves.

The boy struggled with himself, knowing neither who he was nor who or what he wanted to become. There were many paths open, careers in the world that would give him a sense of place and certain identity — musician, waiter, builder, athlete, intellectual . . . . 

But his mind and emotions were stretched nearly to breaking in the strong polarity, widely shared within the consciousness of his culture, between freedom and bondage. On one side, the known occupations of adulthood felt stifling and confining. He longed to see himself free and proud, striding into an unknown future, beholden to none.

He could be an astronaut, he thought — but a free astronaut. Not for him to be confined within a space suit, one automaton among many, performing prescribed tasks the metal-and-plastic robots hadn’t yet been engineered to do. Never! He would swoop freely through space in his Superman suit, on heroic missions of his own choosing.

He was smart and good at math, and his parents thought he’d make a fine scientist, a doctor, or next-best, a medical researcher. But he saw that as a trap. Scientists were people who discovered iron-clad rules all objects had to follow, turning what they touched to dead matter, collapsing the myriad dimensions of reality into three, or better yet, squashing them down to two, until the world was dead and lifeless. And when the world had been reduced to unfeeling, inanimate matter and sterile equations, the scientists would begin to turn their blighting gaze on themselves, fixing their living flesh, their spontaneous thoughts, and hopes and dreams, like bits of killed tissue, onto microscope slides to be studied and classified.

Meanwhile, as humans became more numerous over the planet, pushing into wild habitats where animals used to roam free, human-animal encounters would happen increasingly often. Stories of people maimed and killed as they swam in the seas, hiked in the mountains, or left their homes to take out the garbage would become commonplace. Human children would regain their fear of wild places and have nightmares of being eaten by tigers and wolves, as viruses, germs, and fierce parasites overran whole populations of decadent humans whose life force proved less strong than the attackers’ will to live.

At this point, when the future seemed most bleak and the boy could find no inspiration in his dreams of freedom nor see a future in any of the paths his society held open for him, he turned inward toward the deep past of his first ancestors, connecting to the vision of life on Earth they had awakened to so long ago, when their evolving minds began to present them with visions and imaginings of things their hands could do to make life easier and more beautiful.

Back then, the boy thought, they didn’t have to strive to make money by depriving others of the means for survival. There was enough for all, and when there wasn’t they would share what they had, and the weak and old would voluntarily hold back in favor of the strong, like the grandmothers and grandfathers of the Inuit peoples of the far North, walking out on the ice floes to die so as not to consume food needed for their young ones. It would be good, the boy thought, if we could live this way now.

He was aware, of course, that there were a few important men influencing the flow of food, water, air, clothing, shelter, and all things needed for human survival on the planet, which seemed to shrink as the number of people competing for sustenance exploded. Many of these important men had little or no empathy or care for others. They were psychopaths and narcissists, so brain-washed by the prevailing vision of a dead, mechanical world of material things that they cared for nothing but their own survival, finding ways to measure their “success” by the number of objects they owned, the number of sexual encounters they could script and perform, the number of people they could hurt, and the number of insincere compliments they could extort from others. The boy could feel the hollowness of their existence and he vowed he would never be like them.

He had always felt alone because his age-mates in school repeatedly rejected him as weak, weird, and unsuccessful in the games adolescents play of status, dominance, and popularity.

But as he matured, growing out of the painful cauldron of middle and high school, he encountered other deep thinkers in college and formed bonds of friendship. He understood then that the world was more than an arena of cut-throat competition. It was also a world in which cooperation with others was not only possible, but a powerful force for creative change. The world could be made beautiful, he realized, alive and full of reciprocal love as it had been for the first people.

He shared his vision with his friends, and was surprised and heartened to find they were already thinking along the same lines. Like philosophers of old, they spent hours talking about how a vital society could be formed, what moral precepts, taught to children, would sustain it, what organizations and events would feed it, what protections were needed for those with talents in arenas other than the greedy accumulation of wealth.

He shared his ideas with his classmates in college, and afterward with people he encountered in daily life as they searched for ways to survive in a world rapidly turning its paying jobs over to robots. And the more he shared, the more he began to detect a vast, underground swell of similar sentiment and will to collaboration, cooperation, and mutual kindness, originating not only within the minds and hearts of the young people of his generation, but arising up through them from a deeper place — as a force he thought of as divine.

He had long believed in a Greater Consciousness shared by all beings, but now he could sense it as more than mere awareness. It also had power. It had will. And its will was for the unification of all life on Earth in a harmonious ecosystem whose primary thrust was the creation of beauty and minimization of suffering.

He was no longer stuck in the polarity that said he must either be bound or free, but not both. He was experiencing how each being supported each other, freeing them to be more uniquely themselves. Some loved working with children, freeing mothers to use their talents for music, art, management or medicine. Some liked working with their hands, others with their brains, others with emotions and spirits, others with food, others with healing. No one felt trapped in a job they hated, but rather free to express their deepest nature.

In due course, the boy, now grown, found a like-minded woman, both beautiful and kind, and married. They had two children and brought them up to respect the Earth and all its creatures. He was full of gratitude to be alive to see and be part of this Earth transformation, and worked to establish communal buildings and settlements with optimal numbers of people for interacting and sharing the chores of living.

There was plenty of meaningful work. People who wanted to program and repair the robots that took care of the less popular chores were as busy as they liked, and there were other tasks for people who thought they could do a better job than the robots and wanted to bring mindfulness into daily life. 

Because of the ease of communication and the pervading kindness of the new human generations, telepathy, the sharing of thoughts and emotions, became a major mode of interacting with friends, relatives and even strangers. It naturally spread to the animals, first to domestic pets, cats, dogs, birds, and hamsters, and then out into the wild. Some people became specialists in communing with animals, and the animals rapidly evolved into co-creators of the Earth’s environment, with voices that noticeably strengthened year by year, as they devised and suggested new ways to play their essential parts in the ecology of the entire Earth’s biosphere.

The plants, too, shared in this communion, and in the beautiful, sacrificial way of their kind, made their medicinal properties known to people and animals who suffered from various diseases.

Population control turned out not to be a problem as people learned to connect with the Earth’s will (Gaia), and rely on her promptings for bringing new children into the world.

When the boy became a grandfather and respected elder, he looked back on his life and saw that it was good; and as he died, he blessed his descendants to continue to live in the peace and harmony of a beautiful and welcoming Earth.

Exercise in Predicting the Future

Collect some magazines.

Pray or call in a helping spirit if you like.

To enhance an altered state of consciousness you might play a recording of shamanic drumming.

Cut out pictures from the magazines of things that catch your interest. Ten to fifteen pictures should be enough.

Lay the pictures out on a surface and arrange and rearrange them to tell a story about the future.

Write the story.

(If the future you predict is dark and painful, try cutting out more pictures and arranging them into a story that solves the problems you predicted.)

You can also use this method of cutting out and arranging magazine pictures to tell a story for coming up with creative solutions for your own life problems or those of others.

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Reference:

Santatagamana, Turiya - The God State: Beyond Kundalini, Kriya Yoga & all Spirituality, Real Yoga Series, Book 5, independently published, 2018. (The author, Santatgamana, is someone who prefers not to reveal their identity in the ordinary world. Their website is realyoga.info.)