PAST IS PROLOGUE
A dull imagination deprives the subconscious of delight, inhibiting color from otherwise rich varieties of conscious, spontaneous experience
RECUR, REVISE
The stories we believe and repeat about ourselves in the present are often narrative interpretations of past events, that for future events function like instructions; our scripts.
Invariably, what 'runs in the family', or 'always happens to me', or 'is just that way', repeats one way or another, because the script is unchanged, and so preserves a version of the story that supports emotional attachments to a predictable outcome—good or ill; a prophesy, or wish fulfilled.1 Securely, or insecurely.
Like DNA expresses genetic inheritance, our subconscious expresses a narrative inheritance. Like body and character, disposition toward narrative expression is natural and necessary, because without expression we could not consciously edit and revise.
An edit at rest remains at rest and recurs eternally, until acted upon by an editor
EMPLOYED IMAGINATION
From start to finish we live our lives in a moment. Just one. This one; the present. In-between future and past, the present is our interface where we observe, edit and revise our stories consciously—adjust the arc trajectory of our lives—and where we employ imagination.
An employed imagination helps us resolve continuity errors, abandoned arcs, and plot holes that have increasingly over the years required us to suspend disbelief and take for granted what is apparent and convenient; what is seen for all that is actively yet in shadow.
What is unseen, and perhaps inconvenient to our established canon, nonetheless is, and is yet a powerful manifestor to an employed imagination.2
An employed imagination delights the subconscious with newly refined, expressive material. An employed imagination helps break narrative cycles that we have inherited and those we have invented, long redundant and run over our lives.
An employed imagination can feel from the future in the present tense—in the moment. And delights the subconscious with creativity and curiosity for rescripting, to integrate what is yet.
A dull imagination deprives the subconscious. Undelighted and rigid in sensibility, the subconscious amplifies and projects the unchanged scripts and tropes of the past in the present and forwards; a past that shares the present with a dull imagination can only generate familiar problems with idling dissatisfaction and inflammation.3
FRIEND-ZONE THE PAST
Busyness and seriousness can provide escape from the joyful horror of imaginative rescripting of the past to support changed beliefs and attachments that enable the future we desire.
The future likewise the past is potentially a source of feedback to the present. Imagination employed, we can open an emotional dialog between events that elucidates unchallenged beliefs and their attachments.
Our needs in the present tend to satisfy past-developed beliefs and emotional attachments. To create the future we desire, must feel that future more genuinely than we feel the past; so our needs in the present satisfy future-developed beliefs and attachments.
We cannot just think our way through, where desire requires definitively that we also feel the future
Seduce the future into the present. Employed imagination enables us to feel and allow the spontaneous and vivid influence of unrealized desire. Seduction is partially an intellectual act; making love, hardly.4