I seem to live in my imagination. You are just more aware than others. We all live in our imaginations.
If you think you can do anything, if you believe there is anything you can count on, that is your imagination. Imagination is reality, but your imagination may be running away with you. Imagination can serve you or tyrannize you. What makes the difference is to what degree you can effectively anticipate things.
Anticipation starts with awareness. No matter what, reality continues to inform you and present you with experiences of an infinite variety. From this immeasurable range of experience, we have to pick those things that best serve our interests. But we cannot of our own power reconfigure the current moment. What is evident to us now is the truth as it applies now. Everything that could ever exist exists now.
Is this why some people live and do things seemingly so effortlessly? They have high awareness and hence good anticipation? Yes.
Like a ninja, I guess you can practice your anticipating skills through martial arts, right? This is why ninjas are thought of as having almost supernatural powers, and yes, martial arts are only possible through anticipation.
Dancing is good practice too for that. Learning to dance with a partner. It is excellent practice. This is also why I have used dancing so often as a metaphor.
How do you anticipate better? You anticipate better by being mindful of the whole process. This is why Zen archery is very slow. They ritualize it so they can fully examine each step. They can later do the whole process very quickly if need be, but the process is awareness, identification, anticipation, action.
1. Awareness. 2. Identification. 3. Anticipation. 4. Action.
So I covered awareness. You have to be willing to accept exactly what your awareness presents to you now. This is often challenging for some people. They call the resistance to awareness, denial.
I am a good musician and can play with other players well. The rest of my life is not so hot. Yes. One can be skilled in one area of anticipation and not yet apply it well to others, but this is also why many musicians became rather charismatic people in general. Learning from experience.
Is it that musicians become charismatic or is it that musical talent and charisma emerge from the same root? They emerge from the same root, but become split by poor attention, thus the second step is identification.
The key realization is that everything that can happen will happen because of what is possible now, but we often don’t recognize some factor in our current state or situation clearly for what it is so we get lost. Lose opportunities to create our desired outcomes.
What causes us not to recognize things? Unskilled anticipation. We pick up the skill of anticipation naturally, like we do language. The two skills are actually related, but with denial and stress induced defensive habits our awareness of our environment becomes distorted so we lose opportunities to follow progression patterns. Anticipation and language relate as we give things names with the belief that we understand what they are and how they behave.
Developmental progression induces language recognition in the developing infant. Memetic patterns are inherited from parental interaction that impart an anticipation structure. Sensory aversion are genetically influenced, and this manifests in behaviour though not necessarily in the exact same behaviour as the parent.
Is that what gives the baby the instinct? Like to suckle and to grab? No. Some of it is just sensory response.
Instinct is not the same as anticipation? Instinct is the same as compulsion. Compulsion influences the anticipation skill, but doesn’t confine its development.
Now even if you didn’t want to take the skill any further, you could get very good at identification and watch processes unfold into outcomes in every part of life. But most people are unwilling and even unable to leave everything they encounter alone. This is where the actual state of anticipation kicks in. To create an outcome we cannot target anything as it is now.
You can’t achieve an outcome by targeting a situation as it is now. You have to be able to anticipate where it is going, and how your actions can have an impact on its unfolding expression, which brings us to action. Specifically right action, perhaps in the Buddhist sense, but that is a topic in itself.
Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.
Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~