The lens of time - A matter of perspective

The lens of time - A matter of perspective

We all share an interest in understanding why we are so vulnerable to whims of nature and destiny. Can we really know what the future holds?  Our ability to navigate the future is currently enjoying a surge of interest that is supported by a growing field of research.  Larry Dorsey book on Power of Premonitions is an indication that this interest is entering the mainstream.

And the verdict is in! Now there is abundant scientific evidence that people can know about future events before they take place. However, there is some debate about how accurate those predictions really are.

I remember many years ago, when I began to explore the future events in my life. One day I was stressing out about a new babysitter.  I had arranged for her to take care of my kids starting the following week, but I had a nagging sensation in the pit of my stomach that she would stand me up. Did that mean I needed to look for a backup? What if I was wrong and she showed up, but I had gotten someone else. Then I would be letting her down. I wasn't sure what to do.

My friend and colleague Enke, a young woman from Kazakhstan, who came from a long line of native shamans, watched me with a puzzled look. "Why are you stressing out so much?" she asked. "Why don't you just check ahead of time? You know, you can look into the future and see what the outcome will be.  I just don't understand.  You work with energies, but you never check ahead.  It's very strange to me that someone like you wouldn't do that. Me, I always look ahead."

She was making a good point.  I had looked into the future as part of my intuitive healing sessions for things my clients would usually ask about - will the relationship eventually work out, or which college or career choice to make.

But I hadn't thought of doing it for myself, when dealing with such daily concerns in my own life as the reliability of childcare.  "Ok, so what would you do in this case?" I asked her.  "Tell me how you do it."

"It's simple", she said. "In order to investigate the outcome of the event, you need to get the right perspective. For example, imagine stepping outside your house and crossing the street, so that you can see your entire house, and up and down the street. Now extend the timeline to Monday and see whether she is coming down the street, and entering the house.  Maybe you can even see her on one of the floors talking to you or the kids."

I visualized as she said, and saw no one. And when Monday rolled around, the street was as quiet as it had been in my imagination. The babysitter stood me up. She called me early in the morning telling me that she had found another job. This was a letdown, but the kind that highlighted the importance of our ability to decide what to do, based on our reading of the future.

Modern physics assures us that the unpredictability of the future is a mirage.  Remember my gut feeling that I would be stood up? All of us are continually led and supported with gentle nudges from the universe. The whispers of the future into the present come through in the form of intuitive subliminal directions. But if you are like me, you may need stronger confirmation.

When I imagined the street, I chose the right perspective for viewing the future - one that provided the visual confirmation for something that was too subtle and uncertain to interpret otherwise. I discovered a conscious creative practice I could use, from then on, to confirm unconscious hunches.

It was hard for me initially to switch my brain into this new way of thinking.  It was giving me quite a nasty headache -- to believe that the future is already formed and known, and that I could navigate it as freely as the memories of the past events in my life.

Choosing a wider lens

My lessons on the importance of perspective continued as I worked with Enke. As in many other indigenous cultures, her Kazakh tradition believed that the underlying reasons for many painful family situations and for much physical and emotional suffering can be uncovered by investigating entanglements and blocks in the ancestral family tree structure.  Resolving those entanglements and repairing the tree are crucial steps taken towards healing.  In other words, the act of repairing a multi-generational past by choosing a different outcome in the past will assure the well-being of the future generations.

Together we were spending hours traversing the branches of our clients' trees looking for the sources, the root causes of their ordeals.   Working with the tree was another turning

point in my learning the importance of the focused consciousness needed to achieve the desired result.

I was thorough and thoughtful in my investigations, yet in comparison to Enke, quite slow. It would happen only too often, that while I was still scrutinising all the details of the family dynamics on one particular branch, she was already reporting what had happened two or three generations before, having traversed both maternal and paternal branches.

"How did you get so much information so fast?" I wondered.

"Why are you so slow?" she would respond impatiently. "Please hurry up", she nudged me.  "It seems like you are always looking right under your nose, stuck in one place. But then what you see is small. Pull away, step back, take a bigger perspective and you will see more at once."

The story of six blind men and an elephant teaches us about the degree to which results vary, depending on how we investigate our reality.

My friend was recently choosing a new camera - looking for the one with the best lens, he told me.  You too can choose to equip your consciousness with the best lens you can master.

If your lens provides a golf-ball sized focus, limited only to your immediate experience, you can only act based on that limited awareness.

If you have a wider lens of awareness that encompasses not just viewing, but changing, the past, present and future, you have opportunities to act and create the right change at the right source, at the right space and time.

Larry Dorsey talks about the fact that the future is not set in stone and fixed.  The past, present and future are interconnected. We all know that actions taken in the present can modify the future.  Now we are discovering that not only can we predict the future, we can also change it by re-writing and healing the past. Just practice choosing a focus where the past, present and future of your experience all merge into one point of attention.

Yuliya Cohen

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...the future is already formed and known, and that I could navigate it as freely as the memories of the past events in my life.

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