CHAPTER FOUR
OVERCOMING TIME
So much has been written about the importance of staying present. I
could cite statistics on everything from distracted driving to divorce to
support the notion that people have a really hard time staying in the present
moment. Let me add to that body of knowledge by expressing this concept
in quantum terms. In the present, all potentials exist simultaneously in the
field. When we stay present, when we are “in the moment,” we can move
beyond space and time, and we can make any one of those potentials a
reality. When we are mired in the past, however, none of those new
potentials exist.
You’ve learned that when human beings try to change, we react much
like addicts, because we become addicted to our familiar chemical states of
being. You know that when you have an addiction, it is almost as if your
body has a mind of its own. As past events trigger the same chemical
response as the original incident, your body thinks it is reexperiencing the
same event. Once conditioned to be the subconscious mind through this
process, the body has taken over for the mind—it has become the mind and
therefore can, in a sense, think.
I just touched upon how the body becomes the mind by the cycle of
thinking and feeling, feeling and thinking. But there is another way in
which this occurs, based on past memories.
Here is how it works: You have an experience, which has an emotional
charge. Then you have a thought about that particular past event. The
thought becomes a memory, which then reflexively reproduces the emotion
of the experience. If you keep thinking about that memory repeatedly, the
thought, the memory, and the emotion merge as one, and you “memorize”
the emotion. Now living in the past becomes less of a conscious process
and more of a subconscious one.