Looking To The Future

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in the western world we are very very fueled to have a futuristic mind or have a future outlook on life. As young kids we always get the question "what do you want to be when you get older" instead of being asked "how do you want to be now?" And we're taught that to live life, to really be happy in life we have to look towards the future. These inspirational, and propagandized political speeches teach us to keep our mind in the future, to stay there and always have something more on the horizon. But if we do that, if we're always looking to the horizon, how can we ever get to it? If we don't see this moment right now as the point of arrival we'll never be satisfied. We will always be upset with what's going on, we will always be expecting of the horizon to end or to reach a finish line when it never will. …show more content…

This is because if we are thinking in the past or if we are thinking in the future we are imagining. If I go to a job interview, if I am in today's modern mindset, if I am in this egoic attached mind, I will envision getting the job. I will be hopeful of getting the job. This is natural, it's ok to want things or to think things will happen but the problem comes when we ATTACH to that concept, or when we think that that specific conceptualization is the ONLY facet of reality that will or could ever happen. So when we attach to anything, any form, whether it be the now, the past, or the future, we suffer. This is whats known in Buddhism as the first truth, that all CONDITIONED life is suffering. This mental and physical suffering is brought on primarily by our misperception of the now, or our misinterpretation of what's really going on in this moment, which is that we live in a fluid reality, we live in an ever-changing state of being and there is no way around that. There is no way to freeze time or stop what is

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