Hi guys. Keith here.
“The Eternal Now of Dog Time” is a concept that has literally saved my life.
I’ve owed Bonnie this class for the vault for a long time. I know that, while I may have mentioned it from time to time, I’ve never deeply spelled it out for anyone.
But since I’m, right now, working on tools that may help the Expansive Capacity masterminders care less (June 2021), I might as well lay it out a bit more officially so I can show you how good a tool it is for caring less about some things.
Dogs don’t have great emotional memories. They mostly live in the here-and-now. When you’re potty-training your puppy, you can’t discipline the puppy unless you catch it in the act of doing its business. If it’s too far after, the dog has absolutely no way of connecting its action with the punishment.
When you do discipline a dog, it will be scared of you for about 10 minutes, then it doesn’t really remember the punishment.
Now, you can habituate the scared emotion if you are mean regularly enough, but the truth is that dogs don’t hold on to the past very well. They live in a temporal space called “the Now.”
Let’s all be dogs for a moment.
Let’s understand that we can choose to focus on, and live in, the now, the present, the place where the past is fuzzy and the future isn’t even a blip on our radar.
Here’s an example of how cultivating a relationship with the eternal now of dog time helped me…
Imagine a younger me, filled to overflowing with self-hatred, self-loathing, a knowing in my heart that I was worthless and the world would be better off without me… decades of evidence of the truth of these feelings… even when I had good days, they wouldn’t last.
I was headed for suicide. What saved me was the adoption of a concept from dog time. On a day when I was feeling pretty good about myself, I applied the concept. Erase the past. Erase all concept that the past is a thing. Wipe the slate clean. Ask the question, “Today, right now, in this instant, am I a worthwhile person?”
Answer: “Yes, in this instant, you’re good; you have value.”
Okay, great. If that’s true, then everything in the past is what brought me to this instant and so must be judged on its whole to be a good thing. Whatever brought me to this instant made me what I am, which is good.
Okay, stop concerning me with what brought me here (care less about it) because here I’m good.
And then the goal becomes not fixing anything that’s in the past (because it’s unfixable, being that it’s in the past), but instead working to keep the “right now, I’m good” idea going forward, moving forward, getting better….
If I live in the now of dog time, I only seek to make “good” better, grow the good into something better, add to the positive as I move onward… the past is made irrelevant, chosen to be irrelevant.
We can see that by living in the now, we choose to let go of (care less about) the events of the past.
Be like the dog, live in the now.
-k.