Our Future Selves

Twenty years ago, I created a flyer in which I said, “The myth of modern psychology — its focus and truth — is that our lives are determined by our past: our personal history, wounds and childhood experience. But the ancient world contends our lives can be guided by something else — our destiny, accessible if we follow the voice of the spirit and the calling of our souls.”  I deeply resonate with this, and for 40 years part of my mission in guiding vision quests has been to bring the ancient teachings into the modern world. I believe that we are here to find and fulfill our potential, to follow a deeper calling and become someone that only we can be – our future self.

Ancient wisdom also instructs us that, “Energy flows where attention goes.” One upshot of this is that if we’re really here to find and fulfill our potential, it’s time to mitigate our modern tendency to gaze backwards in neurotic infatuation with our trauma. If we do, that’s where we’ll go. We’ll be stuck there, and all the sad consequences of our wounds and personal history will become our future as well as our past. One result of this is that the heroic journey of our lives will not be taken, and there’s no tragedy greater than that.Crying and laughter are nearly identical physiological responses that can sweep past the rational mind to overwhelm and disrupt its carefully constructed agendas. The great mythologist, Joseph Campbell, remarking on the two great forms of Greek theater—Tragedy and Comedy – noted that the Greeks regarded comedy as, by far, the superior genre. Tragedy reflects a universal truth — everything dies — and tragedy gives shape to the difficult emotional journey through the human experience of sadness and the unavoidable necessity to grieve. Comedy, however, points toward something larger. It evokes something eternal that endures behind the rise and fall of circumstances, yin and yang of fortune, and the ebb and flow of our personal calamities.

Campbell used the metaphor of a lantern or lamp to compare these two genres. A lantern symbolizes a vehicle for the illumination that flows into and through the world. Tragedy recognizes the hard fact of mortality, that every candle or light bulb eventually burns out. And yet, light itself is eternal; it can neither be created nor destroyed. Comedy recognizes the immortality of the light. Forms perish, but what moves through the forms continues, and when we identify and connect with the light which shines through the forms, a new adventure is always waiting for a new – transformed, revitalized, updated – self, ready to hear its call.We have a future self. Everyone who has lived a few decades on this earth knows that he or she is not the same person that he or she was at age four, as a teenager, or in their twenties. If we’ve had children, we are not the same people we were before we had them. The individual who once excelled in athletics isn’t the same as the person after his or her second knee has been replaced. All of this could be seen as a tragedy, and we could choose to live our lives filled with regret looking back at who we once were, but for many — the wise at least — the “golden years” can be the best of our lives. Yes, we have each had many past selves we’ve left behind and can’t return to … but it is equally true that our younger selves always had a future self or selves — one of which is the person we’ve grown into today.

Whoever I am today, in two, ten, or twenty years I will be someone else again. That realization can be hopeful and inspiring, for it means there is something to look forward to. Instead of looking back and grieving the loss of the young man I was while hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, it matters profoundly who I am now because my thoughts and actions today will shape the life of the person I am becoming. That (my) future self deserves the best life I can help create for him. That’s worth signing up for, and I want to get up and start!