I'm going to predict the future

I'm a psychiatrist by profession, and I'm interested in helping my patients build better lives for themselves. One of the most effective ways that I help is by teaching a process I like to call "envisioning". I'd like to tell you about it. There is no better way to let you know about it than to both lead you through it and to demonstrate it. I plan to do both here.

Let's start with you. Imagine yourself doing something in the future in a particular situation that you really want to have happen. Imagine it in complete detail. Imagine the entire story around it. Allow yourself to imagine every aspect of it in as much detail as you can possibly conceive. Don't be afraid. Try it. That is the first step. Once you have done that, you can begin the second step -- exploring what negative emotions interfere with making that vision a reality.

You might be surprised that their exist any negative emotions that could get in the way of your realizing your vision. If you're new to this process and you envisioned great success or great wealth, I imagine you will likely say that there were no feelings that contended against realizing your vision. You might be surprised to learn how many contrary feelings lurk underneath. For example, if you have any conscience at all, you will find that envisioning something that has the potential to even just inadvertently hurt someone you know will naturally introduce some negative feelings that you have to at least recognize. Those feelings can potentially undermine the successful achievement of your vision. If you can spot where the emotional obstacles are, you can begin to envision the story around them, if necessary, or come to accept those feelings and change the original vision.

I've been practicing this technique only a little while, since about January 2016. It significantly contributed to all the developments that occurred in the story I summarized in my first post, which can be seen here: https://steemit.com/holocaust/@pianopsych/the-story-of-delej-if-it-wasn-t-completely-true-it-would-make-for-great-fiction.

This time, I would like to take you with me on a journey through my next vision, so now I will envision and share the details with you.

My next vision involves a piano piece I am only now learning to play. I call myself PianoPsych because both piano and psychiatry are important to my posts. Right now, I am learning to play Beethoven's penultimate Piano Sonata, the Sonata number 31 in A-flat major, Op. 110. It is the middle of a trilogy of the last three Piano Sonatas. It is an extraordinary piece of music, published on Christmas Day in 1821. Some have said that it is Beethoven's clearest presentation of his feelings for the divine. I am thrilled to be learning it.

I am going to envision now and make a prediction.

I envision that I will be performing Beethoven's Piano Sonata #31 in January 2018 in the end-of-semester recital for the Piano Interpretation and Performance Seminar at the New England Conservatory. I envision that I am going to be extremely pleased with the YouTube video of that performance. I envision that I am going to send a link to that video to Scott Adams (the Dilbert cartoonist) and his girlfriend, the very pretty Kristina Basham along with a link to this post, explaining why I am sending it to them. Taken together, the video and this post will demonstrate to both of them that I have successfully mastered this art of envisioning.

Some of you may feel that what I've chosen to envision is a very modest outcome. The good thing about a relatively modest vision is that I am unlikely to have many feelings that would interfere with making that vision a reality, but I should tell you that the vision doesn't feel modest to me. If you have ever done any public speaking or performance, you know how nerve-wracking it can be. To envision that you will be very pleased with your public performance and to declare it in advance is to put yourself out there in a very public way that can end up disastrously. I know. In 2003, I had a meltdown on stage during an amateur piano competition. It took me eight years before I would consider playing again in public. Part of the way that this process of envisioning developed was out of the ashes of that horribly humiliating experience. I'm sure I'll tell you more about that in future posts.

I owe you some sense of why this vision is important to me. There is no sense envisioning something that isn't really important, because then you can't recruit all your positive feelings about it.

Scott Adams and I had a brief interaction in August 2016. I credited him with my winning First Prize in the San Diego International Piano Competition for Outstanding Amateurs. You see, I had carefully read Scott's book "How to Fail at Almost everything and Still Win Big" and I applied its envisioning principles to my life. When I won, I sent him an email, and he responded:

I have continued to envision other outcomes since that one and I have shared with Scott some of those developments. He has not responded to any other emails, and I suspect I've become an annoyance, but I haven't let that thought get in the way of my continuing to reach out to him. After all, one of the important points he makes in his book is to push past embarrassment. He urges his readers to be like a thief and steal from an embarrassing experience every lesson it has to teach.

At one point, I decided to also reach out to Scott's beautiful girlfriend, Kristina Basham. Kristina has a Twitter account with many followers. She posts seductive pictures of herself, but she endeavors to be regarded as more than just a pretty face and body. She advertises herself as a classical pianist and violinist, and that she also plays the cello, flute and clarinet. She has posted a video of herself playing Beethoven's Für Elise. I tweeted a comment to her in response to that video that can be seen here:

I sent that tweet on 5/22/17, but received no reply from her.

Unlike my previously ignored posts, I envision I will interest both Kristina and her boyfriend Scott in this initiative I am doing to concretely demonstrate how Scott's system works.

There's much more detail to my vision and many side stories along the way, but if I get too specific, I run the risk that I will influence some of the other people in the story if by chance they read about it here. I will share along the way what happens once it is safe enough to know that I didn't unfairly influence the outcome.

I very much realize that my prediction might end up wrong. Let me tell you now how I will interpret that. I will say what my mother has always said: "It wasn't meant to be." I go one step further than she does. I trust that I will be able to interpret meaningfully the reason for why it wasn't "meant to be" and that knowledge will better inform me about the Character who decides what is really "meant to be."

I trust that I already know something about this Character. I call him God, but I suppose you could call him/her something else. I also capitalize the "h" in "him" or he when I write about God as Him, or He, using the personal pronoun. I know that might be uncomfortable for some of you reading my post. You can imagine it differently. I take great comfort in knowing that many solid people who knew Him before I did liked to use these ways to talk and write about Him. It may seem old-fashioned, but I don't care about that. I care about what works.

Here's what I know about God. I have some sense of what is Goodness, Truth, Love, Beauty, Honor, Peace, Justice, Mercy, Reason,... and I believe all these good things issue from God. My understanding of these things is imperfect, but not completely wrong, and that helps. I can envision being in a relationship with God. I can direct thoughts to Him and I can position myself to listen to the still small voice that addresses the part of me that wishes to be most attuned to Him. You might say it is "all in your head" and I would respond that it is at least all in my head. It may be that there is something outside my head that conforms to this inner reality. If so, I don't do any disservice to what is going on outside with what I am choosing to do inside my head.

I have reason to believe that God actually exists and wants nothing more than to be in a relationship with me (and you, of course). I speak to Him with my declared envisioning (call it Prayer if you like), and He speaks to me with the events of my life. (This thought is not original to me. I am familiar with it through my reading of Martin Buber, the great Jewish Philosopher and closet mystic).

I'll be following up with more posts as I get closer to the outcome date. Today's date is August 7, 2017, so the outcome of my predicted event is about five months away. This post serves to document what happens along the way and the progress of my envisioning. Welcome to my world!