How the Future Feeds on the Present

And maybe what I can do about it!

Predictions of past hurts can predict future hurts. When I fear a future of pain, I am robbed of my present focus. When I’m attending to a possible pain-filled future, that future is feeding on my present. Fear can’t feed on present experience, only on what doesn’t presently exist. My attention on fear increases the likelihood of my need to validate that fear.

Because I need to be right, I’ll tend to confirm my fear predictions through confirmation bias – increasing my trust in those predictions. This makes my future more likely to be fulfilled in fear.

We humans are notoriously poor predictors of our futures, yet, we do it with confidence. We trust that we know how things will go and how we’ll feel in the future because our trust in past predictions resulted in our present situation. When facing my present, I tend to fall on the past as if it were the present

What About Attention?

I have precious little attention to spread around. Of all that I could be aware, I am actually aware of a tiny fraction. 100% of my attention is aware of the tiniest subset of 100% of all that is. My predictions, based on this tiny subset, must be less than 100% accurate because I’m always short some data. I make most of my predictions on almost no data at all – based almost entirely on my trust in my senses, other people’s senses, and my education, all of which is data-short.

Due to my need to be right, I’ll fudge the data. Maybe I’ll outright lie to myself to feel more secure – as a defense against bad things happening. A prediction of bad things happening in the future sends me on a wild goose chase to defend against harm. And yet that harm is a prediction – one based on incomplete data that I “fill in” to make complete.

The more energy in the form of attention that I devote to trusting my prediction, the stronger the impact of fear upon my present. This makes attention key to a solution. What I attend to in the present, is what gets done. Focusing on fear, robs my present of energy required for action – and less gets done.

How Can I Bust the Fear Feed on My Attention?

First, realizing that predictions are just that – predictions based mostly on incomplete data – releases me from the trust I’ve placed in them. Predictions are NOT the truth – they are the workings of my imagination – and so, really should not be trusted. QUESTION predictions.

Next, FOCUSING ATTENTION ON WHAT IS HAPPENING in the present, redirects my energies away from unproductive fear based on imaginary probabilities to certain productive present action. This means doing an action right now that is firmly in the present – like making an inventory of my current physical sensations. What do I see, hear, feel – right now?

In this way, fear based on trust in an imaginary prediction gives way to solid, sensory-based, relatively certain present action. It may also bust a long-held, high-value fear and return precious energy for use elsewhere.

Attention Feeds My Fear

What I give attention to grows! I have a problem-solving mind. And because of this, my mind seems to forever need problems to solve. Sometimes I feel I’m creating the very problems I then must solve.

In my First-Second Degree of Illumination bubble awareness, I focus my attention on that which I fear. I fear what and who I perceive “I’M NOT.” It’s automatic and a problem that must be solved!

That fear adds a perceived value to what and who “I’M NOT”- a value I feel I’m missing. Problem! I may feel I gain a sense of being complete when I add that perceived value to an external substitute – like a loved one, pet or new gadget. Yet, that sense of wholeness is a temporary condition that convinces me that the addition completes my value. Problem solved! Or have I just created another problem?

Each problem I think I’m solving creates a drain on my energy and resources. This drain I call a fear-feed on my attention. Because I feel dependent on external value, I always have this unwhole problem to solve. This distracts my attention from those interests that validate my wholeness. I can take charge of my attention and focus it where my consciousness takes me – beyond measurable value.

A thought has no feed value without attention. The objective of fear is to capture and feed on my attention.

In bubble awareness, I associate fear with survival. In this survival state-of-mind, fear offers me a way to silence my need to survive by convincing me to accept and follow a simple equation:

Me + Not Me = Wholeness

In bubble awareness, fear rules my consciousness. I imagine someone or something holds a value I perceive is missing in me, a value I need in order to feel complete. Once I attain that which I believe completes me, I enjoy a high of feeling OK. Yet, after a while, that artificial high wares off and I’m back to feeling fearful and incomplete. More than anything I want to feel whole and complete, yet fear pulls my attention back to the “I’m Not” problem that I feel needs solving.

Beyond Fear

While I keep my imagination firmly locked within bubble awareness, I continue to allow the fear process to nibble away at my energies until my body and mind can no longer sustain the feed.

One cannot escape bubble awareness using bubble awareness. One cannot use fear to cure fear. I must look elsewhere. I must look within… take charge of my attention… and…

Imagine beyond…

Fear and Anxiety Response

William T. Gibson, a Caltech postdoctoral fellow and first author on a study investigating the possibility that fruit flies may experience fear analogous to humans affirms, “…flies have four fundamental drives just as humans do: feeding, fighting, fleeing, and mating.”

He examined fear in flies by looking at the fundamental building blocks of fear, which he calls “emotion primitives” –

  1. First, fear is persistent. If you hear the sound of a gun, the feeling of fear it provokes will continue for a period of time.
  2. Fear is also scalable; the more gunshots you hear, the more afraid you’ll become.
  3. Fear is generalizable across different contexts, but it is also trans-situational. Once you’re afraid, you’re more likely to respond in fear to other triggers: the clang of a pan, for instance, or a loud knock at the door.

Read more Fear and Anxiety Response

Fear and Feeding

I can’t recall a time when fear was not an influence in my life. To me, life is born into the world through the forces of instinct and need, it’s called survival.

Need is the result of perception, a state of want that’s influenced by fear. Fear has an influence at the unconscious level of thought which in turn can influence creation. Nature, which dominates all levels of consciousness, drives the continuation of life. Built into every generation is a need to continue life through its offspring. A species’ survival relies upon this fail-safe measure to defend against unforeseen circumstances that could cease their continuation – extinction.

And yet, extinction is a natural effect of change in the form of evolution. Life evolves. As some species evolve into new species, others pass away into extinction – sometimes en masse.

Read more Fear and Feeding