The Choice Machine If you were to take a little time to reflect on who you are in the present moment, you might find that who you call you—right here and right now—is a collection of ideas, stories, and memories of so many people, places, and things that have been a part of your journey thus far.

You don’t agree?

Well then, consider this.

Briefly close your eyes and envisage your favorite food. Picture it on the plate, the bone or the stick, or however it represents itself. Now take a mouthful of this culinary delight. Taste it, smell it, feel its texture in your mouth—and engage all your senses in this experience. In your mind’s eye, feel each mastication, then swallow it and follow its gentle route down your throat into your stomach. Savour the enjoyment, and when you’re ready, open your eyes again.

Well done! You just time traveled.

You see, your consciousness can’t be in more than one place at the same time, so the fact you managed to divert your attention and thought to another place and time where you were experiencing your favorite food, indicates your consciousness managed to convey itself to the past or future and succeeded in experiencing that food while your body was still rooted in the present.

This experience now forms a part of who you consider yourself to be and of how your life is.

You had to reflect on the memory of your favorite food and connect to the flavor, sensation, and texture to form the image of your opinion that this dish comprises your favorite food.

Did you realize all of this happened in the past?

Even if you’d had the dish in front of you at this moment, by the time you ingested the food and made the cognitive connection to the emotion making it your favorite, you were still returning to a prior experience—or multiple experiences—of eating it.

You were returning to a memory or memories of the past so you could place the food into your perceptions in the present, and this all goes well beyond food, of course.

Every single aspect of your life which you use to reflect or consider who you are relates to the past. Everything.

I could even say that every thought you consider is based on a past event or action stored in the memory banks of your mind. Therefore, it’s fair to say that your state of being is based on the totality of recalling past experiences, creating the basis for your understanding of who you are.

Since that’s the case, if you truly want to transform your life, it all comes down to creating an immediate future vision of who you want to be—and setting in place steps to accomplish your life goals.

But it’s always the memories of past events and occurrences that form the basis for your self-perception, and so the memories upon which you define all your experiences come from somewhere deep within the mind.

Further, the experiences that form these memories— later to be called upon—are the result of your own, individual life journey.

Your own journey will have started at a point in time when—of all the possible paths available—you stepped into a timeline associated with the trajectory leading to the outcome you experienced. But selecting that path, too, did not happen by chance. Whether consciously or subconsciously, you made a choice to follow that route.

Whether it’s a choice you’ve made to go left or right, or it’s something you regretfully said, or whether it was staying in bed five minutes longer, accepting that date, or indulging in life’s many non-essentials, every single one of these choices came about as the result of selecting a path, the outcome of which became an experience. That experience became a memory, forming the basis of your identity and how your self-image came into being.

That means most of the time, who you are is a memory of who you were. Why? Because as you look back on your experiences, love or admiration for a certain person could stem from a positive experience shared with them. Likewise, people you dislike or choose to avoid could derive from an unpleasant experience aligning to what you know as dislike.

Well, true freedom comes in being no longer enslaved to the sways of past memories and reflections that are charged with emotions. This is a big part of the work that’s required in Alchemic Life Creation.

When you do the work to gain emotional freedom, you can use tools to effectively change the patterns of who you are right at this very moment. You can achieve this by examining what engendered your journey and experiences—the ones that formed the basis of all the beliefs and visions you hold for yourself.