I have been observing how, recently, my mind has many thoughts about what could happen in the future, or what hasn't happened yet. Thoughts about whether the future is secure, what will happen if I do this or don't do that. And I can see how people who are under that spell of thoughts can literally live in the future. Someone in meditation session had described it as: having a list of problems to solve and going through the list before allowing mind to settle. Does one really need to solve all their problems before the mind is settled? Well, maybe not, though at times it does feel as though one needs to solve everything before the mind is fully relaxed.
I find that it is helpful, in these situations, to stop and realize that the 'future' I am seeing in the thought actually hasn't happened yet. By feeding energy into the thought, I 'create' the future, but the future I am experiencing is still just a present thought. Furthermore, what I am thinking is often a projection of some anxiety, often from a previous thought or experience. To give an example: I may be worried about not being able to meet a deadline in the near future, or not being organized. However, that worry often is a repetition of some past thought that arose before, such as seeing myself falling behind in some area of life. If I let go of the idea that I am falling behind, the future also seems less intimidating. But instead of trying to address the thought from the past, I try to correct it through this idea called 'the future'. In reality, isn't the future just a reflection of the past? Otherwise, where else would one's ideas of the future come from, including one's fears and hopes? I would even go further to say that the future is 'the past that never was': meaning, all the doors that were closed behind me through some choice I made (or didn't make) often gets projected into this future realm where those doors could be re-opened. Yes, it would be a source of great hope, but it would also be re-opening the wounds of closing doors.
Years ago, I remember owning a book by scientist and writer Arthur C. Clarke called Astounding Days: A Science Fictional Autobiography. The cover pictures the author in a kind of garish space suit, surrounded by all sorts of futuristic superheroes and fantastic inventions that appear to somehow 'streamline' life. The book also explored how Clarke felt to be at the vanguard of a lot of the technologies that a few privileged people enjoy today, such as radio, satellite, radar, etc. Interestingly, many of the technologies that Clarke describes were invented in times of war. The futures that many of the writers of Astounding science fiction magazine had conceived always seemed to be a seamless and had a dreamlike quality to them, as though pointing to a future paradise: robots as housecleaners, clean rocket fuel, gardens on Mars, easy colonization of planets, etc. Yet many were written in a time when America was in the Great Depression. I ask myself, how can something so beautifully smooth be imagined when the world was in the throes of two wars and a depression? More specifically, why did 'the future' at that time always get depicted as something 'smoother' than the past or even the present? Perhaps it is because the future always tries to resolve or even hide the unresolved aspects of the present moment. In that sense, thoughts about the future have a very sharp and urgent power to them: we must get to the moon now, we must push the boundaries, be the first, etc.
In Chan, there is an expression: something like, there is no future, no past, no present. It means: all the thoughts are equally coming from the same source. It's not that people are rushing headlong into the future, because the 'future' is just a special kind of thought that arises supposedly pointing to a distant time to which the mind is 'moving'. But I wonder: does anybody ever really reach the future? If I reflect this way, the future and its possibilities loses its bite, and it becomes more manageable to deal with possibilities as possibilities, not things that have already happened or 'will' already happen.
Clarke, Arthur C. (1990), Astounding Days; A Science Fictional Biography. New York: Bantam
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