Every choice you make brings a possible future into your reality. When you choose without thinking about possible futures, the futures you choose are like your past, and your experiences become familiar and predictable.
For example, each time you react angrily, you choose a future with distrust, resentment and pain in it.
Your future does not have to be painful
Even if you have reacted angrily in the past, you can respond differently the next time by not speaking in anger, even while you are enraged. Each moment offers you an opportunity to bring a different possible future into your reality. Not even your nonphysical Teachers know in advance what you will choose when you become angry, or jealous, or frightened. If you have the courage to feel your anger, jealousy or fear without acting on it, you bring a future into your life that is very different from the future that shouting, withdrawing emotionally, or using your fists would have created.
You can change the possible future you will bring into your reality in any moment
When you choose possible futures of harmony, cooperation, sharing, and reverence for Life, you create authentic power.
When I began writing The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics, [Cygnus code 090810, £9] I was an angry, resentful, and sexually addicted young man. I raged against the world, which I felt was unjust, especially to me. I thought only about myself, and I worried mostly about paying rent, affording food, and finding sex. Because of the Universal law of attraction, my friends were also angry and resentful, and we took what we could from a world we disdained. I saw myself as an admirable and gallant victim of an uncaring world. This life was painful, but it was all I knew.
One day I was invited to a meeting of physicists at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in Berkeley, California, and I decided to go. That decision brought an unexpected possible future into my reality. The physicists there discussed questions such as, ‘Does consciousness create reality?’ Their conversations exhilarated me, but to my surprise, I discovered later that I could not re-create them, so I eagerly began to read, trying to understand what I had heard.
I went to the next meeting, and the next, until I became a regular. Slowly I began to comprehend some of the concepts that excited me so during the first meeting – such as ‘complementarity’ and the ‘uncertainty principle.’ As I pondered the paradoxical data that confronted the founders of quantum mechanics fifty years earlier, I was surprised to discover that the development of quantum physics was unfolding in me as if I were there. ‘If THAT is so,’ I would say to myself, ‘THIS must be so!’ and then discover that one of the pioneers of quantum mechanics had thought the same. Most were even younger than I was at the time they created quantum mechanics, and I felt a kinship with them.
My own healing
As I read, I realized I would not remain interested in physics indefinitely, and so I decided to write a book for those who, like me, had no knowledge of science or mathematics, but wanted to understand quantum mechanics. The Dancing Wu Li Masters was that book, and it was also my first gift to others because, until then, I had lived my life only for me. When I wrote, I always pictured a reader who had as much or more intelligence than I and who had a deep interest in quantum physics.
I visited the physics library at the University of California at Berkeley and the used book stores near the campus often, and each time I found books that helped me understand more, and write more. Each time I worked on the book, I forgot to worry about the rent, to be angry, or to think about sex. The manuscript grew steadily for eighteen months and the day before it was published, it received a rave review in The New York Times. Then it won The American Book Award for Science, was reprinted by every book club, and translated into sixteen languages.
Since that time, I have become interested in people and written four books on authentic power, including those I wrote with Linda. I no longer see myself as a victim, I have explored the power of choice, and I am still exploring it. This future was unlikely for the young, angry, sexual addict who came to a meeting of physicists out of curiosity. Its probability was almost zero. Almost, but not quite.
Writing The Dancing Wu Li Masters did not heal my anger or my addiction, but it gave me experiences of life without them. When I was not writing my fears returned, but when I wrote they disappeared again, and I was fulfilled, creative, and joyful. If I had ignored the opportunity to meet so many fine physicists, or the discoveries I made with them, or the book I was inspired to write, I would not have brought into being the future that led to my present.
I did not come to terms with my sexual addiction for another twelve years. I continue to make the best choices I can when I am angry, and in the process, anger has become a smaller part of my experience. That is how responsible choice works - decision by decision. I brought possible futures into being, and they brought me to Linda, The Mind of the Soul, and you.
My past is not my future
(unless I choose it)
Say these words to yourself with the energy of commitment: – ‘My experiences are not limited to what I have created in the past.’
– At any moment I can choose the possible future I will bring into my reality.’ Write your options in your journal. Decide how you will choose differently next time. Then imagine yourself making this healthier choice, and write what you learn.
From The Mind of the Soul, copyright 2003 by Gary Zukav and Linda Francis, published by Simon & Schuster.
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