Thank you for the feedback to my latest blog post about how the past is not the future.
There was one interesting question if there is a way to explain the topic in a more formal mathematical way. And yes, all our minds do not work in the same way, and since it is my fundamental belief that there is no right or wrong way of seeing our world, I looked into it and want to share the results with you:
The mind’s way of thinking in this situation is that a person A makes an experience. Since person A has no knowledge what so ever in this example, we will call this person A0 at the beginning of the experience. The experience we will call Ex and because it is the first experience of this kind, we will call it Ex1. Let’s say for the better understanding of the fact that Ex is a horseback riding lesson. And this horseback riding lesson ends with person A being thrown off the horse, which for person A is a negative outcome.Now the mind stores that A0 and Ex1 have a negative and not desired outcome.
For this example we assume that two years later the same person will have another chance to experience Ex (horseback riding) and the above dialog might have taken place, preventing the person to actually do it. The mind remembers Ex and remembers the negative outcome and basically warns person A to not get into that danger.
The problem with this is, that the mind is calculating on a wrong basis. While A0 and Ex1 had a negative outcome, they actually produced a person A1 with the experience from Ex1. So the person after having Ex1 is different from the person before. So the equation two years later would read that person A1 will have a second time the experience Ex, therefore we call it Ex2. The mind has no data what so ever for A1 and Ex2 and interpolates that it is similar to A0 and Ex1 having the negative outcome.
This association can only be wrong, because person A1 now knows what caused the negative outcome in Ex1. This might have been that the horse got scared because the radio played something suddenly loud, or any other conscious or unconscious reason, so person A1 can be prepared.
The problem is just that the mind did a flawed interpolation, just for the sake of avoiding danger. This avoidance with danger has a price. The price is freedom. If the mind avoids danger, it also limits itself in expressing freedom, by limiting the experiences it allows us to have.So the answer is:
A0 + Ex1 != A1 + Ex2
Please keep that in mind and help your friend, or the person you are with to not limit themselves by avoiding danger, but to be open to new experiences.
