“Honesty, virtue, wisdom and a saintly character redound to the exaltation of man, while dishonesty, imposture, ignorance and hypocrisy lead to his abasement. By My life! Man’s distinction lieth not in ornaments or wealth, but rather in virtuous behaviour and true understanding.”  Baha’u’llah

One of the important aspects of transformation work is the ability to use the quality of faith or belief in the future positive state.    The reason that people join a new movement or new religion is because the current reality of the world does not work very well.   What the new religion does is help you believe that the current world with all of its prejudices, injustices, and inequities will change.   You can deal with the unpleasantness of the present by exercising faith that a more positive future is going to happen.

When I was studying Neuro Linguistic Programming, one of the techniques that I learned was to imagine a future state of myself and then communicate with it to understand what it is that I need to do in the present to get to the future self.   The future state already lives inside of us and wants to come out,  but our finite selves can only handle so much change at one time so we tend to need to move through the change systematically.    If you are going for a virtue like peacefulness, for instance, then you can first imagine yourself with peacefulness out there in the future that is much more advanced than you are now.  When you have a good image or a good sense of it, then you can ask the future self with the peacefulness what you should be doing now to get to that state.   Sometimes it is good to have a number like three things you can do now.    The future state may say something like you should learn how to meditate, go out for long walks, or take a yoga class.     When you get the guidance from the inner future self and then act on it,  the transformation takes place and you become a new person.

It is not really the purpose of Day 11 to think so much about how you stay with the guidance over a long period like several months.  Today’s exercise is to imagine your future state, ask it what you should be doing now, and then begin acting on it.