“Space: the final frontier. These are the
voyages of the starship Enterprise.
Its continuing mission: to explore strange
new worlds; to seek out new life and new
civilizations; to boldly go where no one
has gone before!” (Wikipedia, 1966).
If you ever watched the TV ‘Star Trek’ series, you heard those words. We likely wouldn’t even have thought about them. We would not have paid much attention to those words at the time, we were anxious to see that night’s segment.
But today we are still waiting for that ‘next segment’…but not just an upcoming TV show, but upcoming ‘segments’ of our lives.
Do you ever stop and really look at yourself, where you are? I mean, do you actually pay attention to what you are doing and saying? I don’t know about you, but I don’t much, so I often must stop and tell myself to pay a little more attention. Like me, most people do not. Too often we’re focused on what we have to do that day, and if we try to listen to ourselves, we’ll find ourselves saying words like I ‘need to, ‘gotta do’ ‘must get this done by’ , etc., and we seldom pay much attention to anything else. It is understandable because there is much to do, but if we never think beyond that day, we may get stuck in a rut for a long long time.
So, it might be worth taking just a few minutes each day before we get going to remind ourselves of our goal today, this week, this year and what the ultimate purpose is for all our life’s work. I know that is asking for a lot…because most of us are in a fog in those wakening moments. But if we start doing it daily, we are training our minds to focus… just focus. We can start the process by simply trying to recall any dreams we might have had the night before or see if we can remember snippets of things that may have popped up in our sleep. Then we can look at what any of those dreams or ‘snippets’ were about. If we try to remember them as we begin each day, we may begin to discover more about ourselves and our ‘inner workings, what may be an integral part of our purpose.
I will give you an example of how that may work:
In Denver we love sports, the modern-day versions of the gladiator games of 2000 years ago. We dress up in Blue and Orange for the Broncos and cheer for our team…all part of a very long heritage that will probably be around a thousand years from now. We root for our team, carry talisman ‘good luck charms.’ When we think of the team we are inspired by their force and tenacity. We admire players and ask them what motivated them to persist until they reached their goals, and they almost always said they were because they dreamed of it or actually saw it in their dreams.
Interestingly, like many of us, they may have done something they thought helped them attain their dreams—such as, wearing ‘the same game socks every game, carrying mementos for good luck. Most of us in our lives pick up a trinket, find a lucky coin, something that we keep that makes us smile and reminds us of something.
Even if there is just one thing we’ve kept over time, we may want to take a look at it again with a fresh look beyond what exact memory is associated with it. Nothing may come at first, no other thoughts, but let if we let our mind ramble, other thoughts may then come to mind. I am hoping, somehow, you will keep notes of what you come up with because over time, when you look back at them those thoughts may reveal a few new and startling discoveries.
At some point you may begin to realize you are getting pictures in your mind, symbolic messages of past dreams or aspirations that have been with you subconsciously for longer than you realized. If Carl Jung was right, there is indeed a collective unconscious, you were getting those messages from the time you were conceived!
There remain psychologists who may still question the possibility of a collective unconscious; the truth is our lifetimes are ‘schools’ for learning and discovering things that were unknown decades ago. We continue to learn more about them daily and often we uncover threads of the past that may have always been present through our lives. What many of the physicists and philosophers suggested about ‘past, present, and future,’ were not conjecture.
For now, if that seems too strange to believe, ask yourself, why?
Daily we are told about discoveries of how our universe is just one of thousands of galaxies millions, perhaps even billions of years old that are still out there in space! These discoveries should make us wonder why we should doubt that, like our universe, could time seem to exist somewhere concurrently?
I like to think our minds are kind of programmed through generations to believe that we only live in the present tense, so we don’t even try to think backward or forward through time—we don’t believe we can. But what would happen if we allowed ourselves to open the possibility that we could? It would be like subscribing to new streaming networks in our minds! Again, those thoughts, dreams, and things we are drawn to today could be reminders to us of what we have known in the past or events that have happened in the future.
We absolutely know that we inherit genetic characteristics from our parents and families. That is certainly one way we acquire traits and inclinations, but what if we did also inherit signs, stories, and treasures from deep in the past?
If we are still alive, then we are. continuing our mission “exploring new worlds” of our past and futures and hopefully going where we continue to discover ‘new worlds’ and led by our life’s purpose.
The real point here is to start paying attention to what we are thinking beyond that quick note or message we jot out. We re good at connecting the dots… if we allow ourselves to see them.
