Rewrite the Past, Rewrite the Present, Rewrite the Future: Change it all by shifting one key thing in your cognitive process.

When you look back at the memories in your past, are they mostly good? Are they mostly bad? Are they somewhere in between? When you go about your day, do you notice all the good things around you that are happening to you constantly? Or do you get tripped up by the one thing your co-worker says to you that is slightly less than sensitive?

How about this: when you envision the future, do you imagine (and expect) a beautiful, fulfilled tomorrow? A beautiful next week? What about next year? Five years? Ten years? Or does your vision consist of more of the same old drudgery: less fulfillment, more pain, slowly eroding into a faded shadow of things that once were?

What if I told you that I could accurately gauge your tendencies (whether towards the negative, or the positive) in all of these areas with just one question?

Where does your focus lie?

Some of you will have heard of something called the "law of attraction". While I wholeheartedly believe in this phenomenon, I will not be talking about it from a spiritual point of view, but a scientific one. And although I believe in the spiritual as well (and have had profound experiences with such), I think this standpoint offers a palatable perspective for the broadest range of readers.

In fact, this is where the spiritual crowd and the scientific crowd converge and have a party. Everything the (real) prophets, the gurus, the prayerful, and the hard-core meditators have been saying for years, has finally collided with information that the scientific community has also had for years.

The basic premise for the law of attraction is this: where you put your focus, you get more of in your life. The exact point in space and time where this spiritual concept collides with science is in the realm of the Reticular Activating System, or RAS. The Reticular Activating System is part of your Central Nervous System (see: brain). It starts at the very top of your spinal cord, and extends upwards about two inches, and it's only slightly larger than the diameter of a pencil. It literally controls what information gets into your conscious mind, and what information stays out of your conscious mind.

This means that, depending on how your RAS is programmed, you will either notice and be thankful for all the good things that happen to you, and around you throughout your entire day, or you will block out every single positive thing, and focus on the one proverbial splinter that ruins your entire day. This focus extends as far back into the past as you can remember, the present moment (which you may or may not be present for, to varying degrees), and as far into the future as you can imagine. Hence, the title of this post - you'll see why later.

So, how does one's RAS get programmed, you ask?

Through your own belief systems, I answer. This is the simple answer, by the way. The more complex answer has to do with going wayyy back into childhood to the belief systems your parents carried. In short, from an early age, you were conditioned to believe basically how your parents believed. Not exactly, (because you can think for yourself, thank Heaven), but basically. You also had many different experiences that radically moulded, shaped, and formed the belief systems you carry today.

And these belief systems program my RAS how?

By predisposing what you're going to give your attention to. Whether positive events, or negative events. This is called a cognitive bias. We all know that one person in our lives who basically just waits for the next bad thing to happen to them, and lets everyone know about it. We'll call this person "Negative Nancy". (Love to all you Positive Nancy's out there, we know there's more of you in the world than the other kind.) Some of us may be lucky enough to know a true optimist who always expects the best is yet to come, even though they just found a $100 bill on the sidewalk, gift wrapped with their name on it and a note from Jesus "just because". We'll call this person "Positive Pete". (He's a great guy!) So what happens when Nancy or Pete finally stumbles upon something even remotely similar to the predisposed cognitive bias that they've both programmed their RAS to operate by? They say to themselves, "see, I knew it would turn out this way, it always does," and thus the cycle continues, whether optimistic or pessimistic. And what a vicious cycle it can be! Read on.

Let's talk about the cycle.

The cycle happens in everyone. For some, the cycle serves their best interest. For others, depending on how the cycle is programmed, it serves their doom! The cycle is something that's known as a feedback loop. A feedback loop occurs when the output of an amplifier of some kind is fed back into its own input, reiterating and re-amplifying the signal to an infinite degree. The most basic example of this is when someone takes a vocal microphone, and points it straight at a speaker by which the signal from that microphone is being amplified. It creates a LOUD squealing noise that everyone in the building becomes privy to.

In the cases of Pete and Nancy, they are the amplifiers, their respective belief systems and subsequent experiences are the signal, and the cognitive biases by which their RAS's are programmed are the channels through which the signal passes. This is known as "confirmation bias", or the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one's existing beliefs or theories. For example, if you have a bias towards, say, the idea that nothing in life goes your way, the three or four traffic lights you don't make on the way to work will confirm that bias, even though you hit seven or eight green ones. On the other hand, if you have a bias that says "everything in life seems to go my way", then each green traffic light you hit will confirm that bias, and the red ones won't find a way to put a damper on your day, even if you hit more red than green.

A better explanation of the function of the RAS.

Since we're already alluding to audio signals and live sound equipment, we'll use the function of a very simple piece of the audio signal chain to describe pretty accurately how the RAS operates in a VERY similar way. The audio filter. Across the audible frequency spectrum - from 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz - depending on the frequency of a particular sound or instrument, you will hear different tonalities. For example, a "tsk, tsk" sound is somewhere in between 4,000 Hz and 12,000 Hz. A "boom, boom" sound is probably anywhere from 20 Hz to 200 Hz. When you play your favorite song on iTunes, you're hearing a full-spectrum audio signal that contains everything from 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz. All the "boom, booms", the "beep, beeps", and the "taa, shh, sss's" at once. (You didn't know this was also a lesson in onomatopoeia, did you.) When you apply a filter to that full-spectrum audio signal, you can effectively cut out a particular band of frequencies. You could cut out everything from 1,000 Hz and above. Or you could cut out everything from 800 Hz and below. You could even cut out both at the same time and leave yourself with only a narrow band of frequencies (in between 800 Hz and 1,000 Hz) to enjoy your tunes within. (Try it out, if you're fancy with an equalizer. If not, you can just take my word for it that it sounds lame.)

This filtering is exactly what the programming of your RAS does. The outside world is sending you a full-spectrum signal full of beautiful and glorious information at all times - 24/7/365 - , but through years of reiterating belief systems through cognitive biases positioned in negative feedback loops, your RAS has been programmed to filter out everything except a narrow band of information that you have been feeding from constantly for years, and has left you malnourished, weak, and in need of more. You've been listening to the full-range soundtrack of life through the keyhole of an 800-to-1,000 Hz 4-pole band-pass filter, and the longer you reiterate the same belief systems, the narrower the band gets. (I'll let you ponder how healthy that becomes in the long-run.)

So how do I rewrite the past and all that stuff?

When you travel back in time through your memories (many of which you've forgotten consciously), you can change the record of the past. All the memories of past hurts, past traumas, and past offenses. It doesn't mean that it didn't happen, but it does. However you remember it happening is what's true for you, because you believe it. So, very simply, all you have to do is change your viewpoint on past experiences. Do you let them dominate your life, and control your present and your future? Or are they something you learned from, have been broken by and then healed from, and can now help others through? When you come to the latter, your perspective on the past changes from one that controls you and victimizes you, to one that empowers you, no longer holds you back, and propels you forward.

When you begin changing the programming in your RAS, you can start going back to the past and shifting it.

So, how do you reprogram your already negatively biased RAS? Enter our services. (Jk, but for real.) Actually there are a few different paths you can take that lead to the same or similar desired end. Some of them better and quicker than others. The better ones dig the deepest into the root causes of why you act and feel the way you do, and allow you to actually change the programming that causes it. Some form of meditation is absolutely part of it. (Obviously, an open mind is essential.) In our program, we give you techniques and intentional meditation practices that will begin to unlock your unconscious mind. We are also developing a practice that will strap rocket boosters on this process of changing your unconscious programming. It's very powerful so get ready!

Meditation is a very intentional and direct route for reprogramming your RAS. I would say it's essential. But there is something beyond just meditation that is absolutely imperative that you implement, and that is being conscious of your thoughts all day long. When a negative thought comes up, you have to learn to catch it every single time it comes, and challenge it with a better narrative. Maybe that first negative thought turned into a 2-hour string of negative thoughts, which manifest in the form of a bad mood. Or maybe that bad mood turned into a month's worth of negative thoughts. Maybe 6 months! Maybe that negative temperament turned into 20 years of being biased towards negativity, and now you've finally awoken to the damage it has been doing in every area of your life, and you want to change it. Great! It's never too late. Get on the road to life, and get off the road to death. Begin challenging the narrative that has plagued your life with pain on top of pain, and choose a different, more positive one. The choice is every single day, and every single time those negative thoughts come up. Challenge them with the truth! This conscious act of your will, coupled with meditation, is a powerful combination for facilitating change.

Now, the future.

In this process of changing the past, you're also changing the future. You're changing not only your bias towards past events (past pains, people who have hurt you, anything that's holding you back like this), you're also changing your bias for future events, and how you expect them to turn out.

AND,

You can now begin to create a more positive future. You do this through visualization. You begin to frame up the life you want down to the very detail, and when you get this right, you will have the pleasure of stepping into the book of your life and walking in its reality. It involves two things: where you believe you're going, and the effort you're willing to put into getting there. You can have all the will-power in the world, but if you haven't created a road map for getting there, and you don't believe it's attainable, you won't. So if you're interested in learning how to do this, and you're ready to hit the ground running, schedule a call with us. I warn you, it is only for those who are sold out to the change, and ready to leave their old, broken lives behind. If that's you, do it! If it's not you, and you're comfortable with where you are in life, and not interested in growing past mediocrity, here's the link for Netflix.

Finally, the present.

Without the present, the past becomes the future.

Remember that.

None of the work you put into trying to reconcile your past will be effective without your presence in the now. And no amount of visualizing your future will become reality without your full, undivided presence in the now. Everything is happening right now. The past and the future. If you're stuck reminiscing about the past, the glory days, or how it was better before, reality will happen without you, and you’ll miss everything that now has to offer, because you’re looking through a lens of the past that only sees what was good back then. If you're constantly worrying about your future, what's going to happen tomorrow, how you wish you were in a better place and hope one day it will come, everything is happening without you, and you will also miss the good things happening around you, because you’re looking for the wrong happy things to be thankful for. (This is one of the root causes of soo many problems that people deal with.) The now is where you occupy the past with the truth, instead of letting it control you. The now is where you occupy the future with your will about what it will look like, and control it. The now is where you exercise that control, because it's the only thing you have control over, and if you're off in la-la land, something else has control over you. That is how it works.

To conclude.

Remember what we talked about? The narrow, 800-to-1,000 Hz band-pass filter that's been over your RAS for so many years? Letting so much of your present moment slip by into unconsciousness and running on auto-pilot. Driving your life in a direction you don't want it to go.

Taking an objective view on your life and staying in that objective viewpoint (as opposed to the narrow-minded subjective viewpoint that so many people have), will serve to widen that band-pass filter. The longer you do this work on yourself, the wider it will get. Wider and wider until it's not filtering out anything anymore, and you're hearing the beautiful, full 20-to-20,000 Hz spectrum of the soundtrack of life.

Would you like that?