Start Over Every Morning
Actual reality is not the same as the pseudo-reality that distress recordings present to us. The actual situation may sometimes be very difficult, threatening, or even deadly, but it can be faced and, almost always, coped with well if it is seen for what it is.
It is the false pictures offered by the distress patterns and their encrustations in the oppressive cultures that dismay us, and defeat us if we allow them to.
The distress recording, in effect, presents a projection of some past disaster or danger as if it were the reality of the present. This often keeps us from accurately estimating and handling whatever real difficulties are present. Acting en masse on us from their accumulations in the cultures, distress recordings and their social accumulations have even insisted that the past determines the future.
This is completely untrue. It was one of the great achievements of RC to clarify that the moving line of present time absolutely divides the determined past and the free-choice future. We know now that each instant can be seen as the beginning of a brand-new future—uncompelled by the past; open to our free decision as to what viewpoint to adopt toward it, what goals to pursue within it, how rational, how inspiring, how decisive to make it.
From page 11 of “Start Over Every Morning,”
in the book Start Over Every Morning