This is a consolidated transcript from a past lecture that had accompanying slides. My hope is that the core ideas continue to resonate, despite their somewhat clumsy presentation in this format. Enjoy! -Dalton
Our subconscious mind has a primary directive that overrides almost everything else: survival. From an evolutionary perspective, we needed to make rapid assumptions about our environment and feel strongly about them in order to survive. Is that a predator in the bushes or just the wind? It’s safer to assume it’s a predator.
This survival mechanism is still running in our modern lives, but the perceived threats have changed. It’s no longer a saber-toothed cat in the bushes; it’s a bill in the mail, a text message from our boss, or a disagreement with a family member. Our subconscious, however, often reacts with the same primal fear. If it’s not a life-or-death threat, it’s an ego threat, and the mind treats them with similar gravity.
We are always trying to be right about our assumed worst-case scenarios, and we actively look for evidence to prove them. We take very limited data and draw sweeping, existential conclusions from it. Your car stalls, and the immediate thought isn’t, “I should get this checked out.” It’s a cascade: “My car is broken forever, I won’t be able to get to work, which means I’m going to get fired, which means I won’t make rent, which means I’ll be homeless.”
This is the intellect’s job: it exists to defend the identity that the subconscious has constructed. If your underlying, subconscious story is “I am not safe” or “I am not good enough,” your intellect will work tirelessly to find evidence in the world to validate that story. It will interpret neutral events as threats and minor setbacks as proof of your inherent inadequacy.
This is how past hurt becomes future fear. An experience of pain or failure in the past gets encoded as a story, an identity. “I failed at that business, therefore I am a failure.” The intellect then takes this identity and projects it into the future, creating a fear of repeating that pain. We then spend all our energy trying to avoid this imagined negative future, which ironically makes it feel more real and more likely.
We get stuck in a fight-or-flight state in response to our own minds. We imagine a negative outcome, and then we emotionally and psychologically resist it, trying to run away from the bad future we just made up. When you zoom out, the process is almost comical. We invent a monster, and then we spend all our time and energy trying to escape from the monster we ourselves created.
So, what is the alternative? If the intellect is busy defending a negative identity, how do we break the cycle?
We use the same mechanism—imagination—but we point it in a different direction. You’ve been making up a future this whole time; it’s just been a subconscious, fear-driven, worst-case-scenario imagination. Now, we can begin to practice a conscious, inspired imagination.
What is the most beautiful future you can imagine for yourself? Don’t just think about it; feel it. What would it feel like to know, with 100% certainty, that this beautiful future is waiting for you? Feel that certainty now.
Notice that you’re feeling it now. We haven’t gone anywhere. We’re in the same room. The only thing that has changed is our mind. That feeling—of peace, of excitement, of certainty—is the precursor to that more awesome future. Just as trying to run away from a bad future makes it more real, living with a clear vision of a beautiful future begins to draw it toward you.
Neither future is “real” yet. They are both products of imagination. But one feels like death and pain, and the other feels like freedom and fun. You can choose which one to energize. You can give your intellect a new identity to defend. Instead of defending the identity of “I am a failure,” you can start to build evidence for the identity of “I am a person for whom things work out beautifully.”
This is the principle of Be-Do-Have in action. By changing your state of Being—by embodying the feeling of your desired future now—you change what you Do, and ultimately, what you Have. Your intellect will start to find evidence for this new, empowered identity, and your reality will begin to shift accordingly.