I'm going to predict the future - conclusion

It didn't work.

My prediction didn't occur. My vision didn't become manifest.

It sure looked like it was going to work. Sometime after my all my prediction posts but before the event, this banner featuring a handsome picture of me suddenly appeared outside Jordan Hall, the grand music hall of the New England Conservatory where I'm studying as a continuing education student:

Even the caption of the poster ("Ever timeless and forever new") worked perfectly with my vision. I was deeply encouraged.

But it wasn't enough. The way I had envisioned the event did not come to pass. In fact, in many respects, the opposite of my vision happened. For example, in my vision that I posted more than six months ago (https://steemit.com/self-help/@pianopsych/i-m-going-to-predict-the-future), my teacher approaches me afterward to congratulate me on my outstanding performance. In reality, due to a medical emergency, she couldn't attend the recital. In my vision, I imagined playing the entire Beethoven Sonata #31, but in reality I only got to play the last half of it due to time constraints. In my vision, I imagined I would be extremely proud of the video, and in reality I'm only a little proud of it. You can see it here:

In my prediction post of August 2017, I considered that my experiment in predicting the future might fail. I wrote an escape clause: "I very much realize that my prediction might end up wrong. Let me tell you now how I will interpret that....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.'"

So, it's time to begin to do some interpreting.

First, some context. I am a psychiatrist interested in writing about the workings of the mind. I think my profession has been hijacked by too materialistic a view of what the mind is. Most of my colleagues see the mind as an epiphenomenon of the brain. I strongly disagree with that notion and believe that a more productive way of getting to happiness and a sense of fulfillment and joy is to return to recognizing the preeminence of mind over brain. I eventually hope that my collection of steemit posts will form the basis for all of what I have to say about this subject.

To that end, I have chosen to conduct a daring experiment and to blog about it. I was motivated by what I gained from reading Scott Adams’ book "How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big." In case you don't know, Adams is the author of the Dilbert cartoon strip and, more importantly for us, has been a student of the field of persuasion for many years. In his book, Adams suggests that we have the capacity to use the techniques of persuasion to self-persuade. I have been trying to do that, and it led to some of the successes detailed in my first post (https://steemit.com/holocaust/@pianopsych/the-story-of-delej-if-it-wasn-t-completely-true-it-would-make-for-great-fiction). I decided I would openly conduct an experiment by making a prediction and use the blog to show what happened to my prediction. I would demonstrate how my mind works by taking you on that journey with me starting with my initial prediction.

Those of us who enjoy consciousness and a first-person self-observing experience of the world know that we have a rich internal life thinking about all the things we think about. We all nurse our little individual perspectives and employ confirmation bias to uphold our individual world views. Adams makes this point and I strongly concur: One can harbor lots of strange ideas without getting into any trouble. In that way there is a tremendously wide spectrum of possible ideas that can occupy a mind without having a deleterious effect on interactions with the world outside the mind.

Let's call these perspectives we employ -- these benign idiosyncratic personal lenses that we use to view our world -- our schema. I’ll make this claim: Your schema is entirely responsible for how you experience the world. If it’s a good one, you’ll enjoy your life. If it’s not, you won’t. Since I’m enjoying mine, I thought it might be good to share.

Here’s my schema, in less religious language than I have formerly employed:

We live in a vast simulation created by a much greater mind than ours, and we can communicate with the creator of our simulation. We communicate by directing our minds toward the creator, and the creator communicates back to us through the events of our life, which are mediated to us through our minds — both through our perceptions and interpretation of those life events, and through our intuition. Our task is to learn how to succeed in this simulation.

What does it mean to succeed in this simulation? I guess it could mean whatever you want it to mean. For me, it means that the events I envision become manifest.

It certainly didn't work in this case, and I have a lot of learning to do, but I've already taken it in a different direction, and you can see those results here. I gave a talk today on Managing Stage Fright and included this vignette about the results of a positive affirmation:

In that same talk, I also talked about Scott Adams and discussed the role of his book in my having had a positive affirmation come true:

Thanks for reading.