Remember how a little while ago I was thinking about time? Well, I was saving up the absolute best bit. Not only is the best bit about time, it’s the best bit – my favourite, juiciest insight – from doing the Landmark Forum.
“The main presumption of existence,” according to Laurel Sheaf, a Landmark Forum Leader, “is that life is one thing after another.” We think that time is a
one-way, no return, take-your-lumps deal.
For example, we live our lives assuming that it’s our past – our education, our parents, our culture, our good and bad experiences, and so on – which determines who we are in the present.
We read the story of our lives in retrospect, as it were. “Oh, I’m no good at swimming,” we might say, “because my parents didn’t take me to lessons early enough.” Or, “I can’t speak in public because I embarrassed myself in school that day.” Or, “I’ll never have a happy marriage because my first one didn’t work out.”
And it doesn’t have to be “negative” experiences. For example, we might say something like, “I always make people laugh, ever since that day when I was at my best friend’s party and I told that joke that everyone loved.”
Laurel Sheaf quotes Tom Robbins on the point,
we become frozen in that glad ice, turning ourselves into living fossils for the remainder of our existence.
We automatically assume that our past is what determines who we are in the present. And yet, this is not the case. What determines who we are in the present is not our past; it is our future. It is the future we’re living into that determines who we are being in the present. As Laurel Sheaf says,
What inspires us, and what moves us, or what stops and defeats us, is essentially due to how we see the future in front of us.
For example, last week I made a decision to go to France in May on a long dreamt-of Grand Perfume Tour. Straightaway, I became someone who was excited at the prospect of a holiday, someone who was inspired at making something happen that was not going to happen, someone to whom it might matter on what days the International Perfume Museum in Grasse is open, someone who might suddenly notice an advertisement to visit the frankincense plantations in Oman on the way, someone who might start telling clients I’ll be unavailable in May, and so on. Yet on the day before I made that decision, I was none of these “someones.”
Sounds too simple, huh? Or wrong. Or dumb. Yet this is how existence works. So how is it that we don’t notice this normally? How is it we all seem to be under the same delusion that it’s the past (not the future) that determines who we are in the present? Well, that’s a story for another day, or for anyone who does the Landmark Forum.
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Interesting. Several thoughts pop to mind:
1) The ancient Greeks thought of us walking backwards through time–eyes fixed on the past, blind to the future.
2) The Hindus/Yogis/Buddhists think of our cumulative pasts (this and past lives) as, in effect, determining our present. Samskara, Karma, etc.
2) Modern psychology (eg Dan McAdams) thinks of identity as narrative, ie life-stories that we invent for ourselves, which is backward-looking.
So you’re absolutely right: We’re totally trapped in the past. But how could we possibly escape from it, if we don’t know the future? To tell life narratives in the future tense is to speak in probabilities and scenarios. “I am somebody who might become a bestselling author.” “I am somebody who will not become a best-selling author.” It’s quite hard to build an identity on that.
What was their answer?
Ha ha, that’s precisely what you’ve already been doing, and doing very successfully: building your identity on being (not becoming) a best-selling author.
For example, one day a few years ago you had your insight about Kipling’s “If” and its application to life. In that moment you stepped into “possibility” (Landmark uses this word in a special way, not in the way we normally use it which, as you implied, is something like a “maybe, one day, someday” proposition). In that moment, you started “being” a best-selling author because of the future you were now living into. As a result of that “being” you now had IN THE PRESENT, you started “doing” things consistent with being a best-selling author (eg, writing a proposal, researching, getting an agent, starting a blog, etc) and as a result of doing these things you started “having” what a best-selling author has (eg, invitations to debates, book advances, lots of readers of your blog, etc).
That is, it’s your “being” in the present (which is determined by the future you’re living into) that gives you “doing” and then “having.” Note, this sequence is the reverse of how we normally think life works (which is “do” then “have” then “be”). Sgx
Be, do, have.
Wow. And I’ve (allegedly) been doing it right!
:) If you’re worried you’ve got it down pat, never fear! There’s always another one or ten areas of our life where we’re not doing it. Sgx
In the Landmark Forum, was the phrase, “playing the old tapes”, used?
To act as if there is a promising future, rather than being paralysed by the past, one must get out of one’s rut, or stop “playing the old tapes”.
You are doing it one way, by changing your life through an act of will. The other way is when adversity strikes us – the “disaster” spoken of in Rudyard Kipling’s “If”.
A disaster throws us out of the rut of habit, makes us throw away all our old assumptions, so that we become new people.
The late San Francisco longshoreman, Eric Hoffer, wrote much about why people change, and particularly how people in their millions, changed after they arrived on America’s shores from the “Old World”.
The huddled masses, tired and poor, became, metaphorically overnight, forward-looking entrepreneurs, new people with heads held high. It was this transformed energy of the newly-arrived millions, which made America into what it is today. The same would apply to pioneers to new lands anywhere.
They abandon their old selves, and become new selves.
War changes people. Think only of how much the post-1945 world was different from the world pre-1939. Soldiers returning in their millions to civilian life were no longer content with things as before, because their experiences in war had changed them.
They came back as new people, and the world transformed as a result.
Landmark doesn’t use the phrase “playing the old tapes.” And the concept of changing one’s life by “an act of will” or “getting out of one’s rut” is completely foreign to Landmark’s method. Landmark is in the business of transformation, not change, and transformation happens in an instant and does not involve work or striving.
The example of migrants to the US is a good one. It illustrates how it is the future which gives us who we are being in the present. These people suddenly found themselves with a future free from oppression or hunger or poverty, for example, and this had them be people of joie de vivre and energy and dynamism and plans and businesses, and so on. SGx
This makes me think about things differently and I am always grateful for people who give me that gift! You are right. Even if I’m the person who was left paralyzed by an accident, who I really am is how I will cope with it, adapt to it and make the best of it. Sort of reminds me of Victor Frankel and some aspects of Buddhism.
Hi Thomas. Thanks for dropping by. Yes, there are lots of connections and parallels with people like Victor Frankl and with Buddhism. For example, some of the content of the Landmark Forum is based on Heidegger’s ontology and Heidegger was taken up in a big way by the Zen Buddhists of Japan (presumably because they saw a lot of their own beliefs and practices in his ontology). Sgx