Tracing Linearity by David Filippone
LOK Ex 13 – Inventing the PastÂ
I remember when I decided to retire after having worked for decades. It involved prior planning and preparation, and resulted in some major changes in my life in terms of what direction my new activities would be aimed, and it also involved intending continued financial survival and improvement of the quality of my time.
Reading the above paragraph I see the structure of time in the way I composed it; putting past planning against projections of future intentions while standing aside to observe. When I start ‘dropping’ memories, tracing back to the time prior to actually retiring, to just prior to ‘deciding’ to retire, to the point of how I was feeling, I recall the ‘I am here‘ and some of the associated complex of emotions, along with the continuous frenetic pace maintained for years up until that point. This was an aggregating structure of pleasant and increasingly unpleasant memories. When I look for validation of “the accuracy of what is remembered“, it’s the underlying memory of that complex of consolidated emotions, and the ‘I am here‘ of ‘then.’ My ‘bystander’ perspective now, looking back on that time, is quite exaggerated and elongated compared to the bystander perspective during the actual experience back then. Looking back now does not have the same emotional content.
If I transport myself to ‘back then‘, I become more in touch with those emotions and thought structures. I get a ‘taste‘ of what it was then, the frustration, the feelings of being trapped, and the projections of freedom and a new order. There was a growing dissatisfaction with the way I thought things were, and a corresponding desire for what I thought should be, and a great deal of this was based on the characterizations I was making to myself about the way things were.
While I don’t regret retiring at all, and enjoy what I’m doing, the past that got me here was my own construction in time and space, my personal story or invention validating ‘I am here‘.
LOK Ex 18 – Projecting the Future
Several months ago I had a knee operation, and while I’ve mostly recovered, leg strength and balance had not returned to normal, and more recently I twisted my ankle and fell, which further aggravated the knee. That is the memory; “the future that has not yet come” is the projection that I might one day become an invalid, which also plays on fears of becoming infirm, of depending on others, fear of the unknown, and notions of death. Now I ask, how does fear color my memory of the past event? It seems to anchor the memory as a fear-based event, one in which I can use as a justification for current, circular fear based thinking.
The exercise tells us to reverse the exercise and imagine future events, and then distinguish what is based on past memories: I could imagine the image of what I feared above, becoming an invalid. When I look in this future for what is not based on the past, if I look calmly, I find an openness with that basic feeling of ‘I am‘, and a sense of a glowing awareness without many specifics at all.
David
