See Your Future Self: How to Practice Living in Your Ideal Reality

This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "Reality Transurfing Steps I-V" by Vadim Zeland. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.

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If you were living your ideal life, how would you behave? How would you feel? What would your mindset be?

According to Vadim Zeland, infinite versions of reality exist. Furthermore, you can train yourself to control which version of reality you live in. One way to do this is to redirect your energy. This involves identifying what you want and then practicing living in your ideal version of reality.

To learn how to see your future self, consider this brief discussion of Zeland’s technique along with a related idea from the book Psycho-Cybernetics.

See Your Future Self

Once you’ve identified what you want, it’s time to see your future self and practice living in your ideal version of reality. Zeland says that your reality is simply a reflection of your emotional frequency. This means that the only way to experience the version of reality that you want is to consistently transmit a frequency that matches what you want.

Zeland explains that the most effective way to attune your frequency to what you want is to imagine how you would think, feel, and behave if you were already living in your ideal version of reality. Consider the type of person you’d have to become and how your lifestyle would need to change to fit in with this ideal version of reality. Then practice thinking, feeling, and behaving like this vision of yourself now.

For example, in your ideal version of reality, your body is sleek and toned. You imagine that you feel proud of your appearance and have adopted specific habits that energize you and help you maintain your figure. Therefore, you choose to focus on feeling proud of your appearance and adopting those specific habits now.

Visualizing Your Ideal Life

Like Zeland, Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics), argues that the more you imagine or practice thinking, feeling, and behaving as if you already have what you want, the more likely your desires are to come true. However, while Zeland claims that this method works by aligning your emotional energy with what you want to experience, Maltz claims that this method works by aligning your self-image with what you want to experience.

Maltz explains that your subconscious mind—the part of your brain that dominates the majority of your unconscious thoughts and emotions—learns from your habitual, conscious thoughts and feelings to create your self-image. Your subconscious mind then influences you to think and behave in ways that reflect this self-image, and it actively discourages you from thinking or behaving in ways that are inconsistent with your self-image. Maltz goes so far as to say that your subconscious mind sabotages your conscious attempts to change your habitual thoughts, emotions, and behaviors.

For example, if you habitually think that you’re out of shape and need to exercise more, you’ve trained your subconscious mind to include being unfit as part of your self-image. As a result, your subconscious mind influences you to automatically think and act in ways that keep you from exercising. It might influence you to think thoughts that make you feel powerless to adopt a healthier lifestyle or it might encourage you to remain sedentary. Additionally, it may sabotage any attempt you make to become fitter—for example, influencing you to procrastinate about joining a gym.

For this reason, Maltz argues that you can’t change your experiences unless you consciously change your self-image and retrain your subconscious mind. He suggests that you can achieve this by regularly visualizing yourself behaving in ways that align with what you want and who you want to be. This is because your subconscious mind doesn’t know the difference between imagination and reality—it can only react (by creating changes in your self-image) to what you imagine to be true.
According to Maltz, visualizing what you want is the most effective way to overcome the self-sabotaging influence of the parts of your self-image that prevent you from living your ideal life. As such, this practice will train your subconscious mind to become more comfortable with the feeling of who you want to be—which will help you practice living your ideal life, as Zeland suggests.

See Your Future Self: How to Practice Living in Your Ideal Reality