Hope, your imaginary future is causing hopelessness with life as it is now. As your life now is undeniably your only existence, hope for something else is depleting and not; as most believe, sustaining or uplifting. Hope is a desperate attempt to cope with the reality of something whilst avoiding it. This is a distraction from dealing with what needs to be addressed or maturely accepted in order to understand it and personally develop through it.
Hope is just a form of comparison between what you have or are and what you idealize for or wish you were. Through hope you cause yourself dissatisfaction with life and yourself now, undermining the value in your life now, whilst keeping that value hidden from yourself by the illusion and distraction of hope.
The instrument (thought) which you are using to recognize and experience the present is both inadequate and reactionary. As it is the past, it therefore interprets your life now, according to your past, not as your life is now, again blinding you to the value and personal significance already within it.
How the future exists in our lives
The goals you are interested in are hopes about the future. They potentially distract you from your living experience now. This can have the effect on you of feeling unfulfilled and dissatisfied with your life now, and therefore entice you to create an emotional investment in and dependency on a non-existent future.
It is both essential and correct to restrict goals to the purely mechanical plans or goals in life and not use these as a form of escape from how you feel in the present reality of your life. Then, even though you may have these goals, you can remain connected to the reality that is your life now and therefore remain fully available to respond to the real demands of your life as they unfold.
As your future is to a small extent a continuation of your present, responding fully to your life now is all you need to do and all you can do. Responding to your lifes needs or demands fully in the present, minimizes what unresolved or neglected aspects become a problem in your future - if you have one. But if you are lost in hopes and fantasies about a future, you will avoid and neglect the needs or demands of your life now, creating problems for yourself and others now and in your potential future.
The so called mind (which in this case is the activity of hopes and dreams) does not have the power or influence over your life as thehope gurus of the world may have conned you into believing. In fact the influence the power of the mind does have is to distract you from the raw realities of life, causing you to overlook the value in and the personal significance of your life, rendering you dissatisfied no matter how skinny, wealthy, popular, sexy or clever you are. This is the power of the mind - its phenomenal effect on the individual and the masses for distorting, avoiding and denying reality.
The only way any future can come about is in the present moment. However, the present as you see it (through thought, which is memory) is shrouded by images of your past and depleted by your hopes of a better future, preventing you from experiencing the fulfillment available here and now.
In the present moment, what is in operation are your views and behaviours from the past. Through these views and behaviours, your past is superimposed over and recreating itself in the present, again blocking your experience of or contact with the fullness of your life as it is now.
In the actual or physical now there is no past in operation, and therefore no future either. For the past is purely academic-psychological and the future is merely a projection of this.
Apart from purely mechanical planning, your future thoughts or hopes are no more than these memory projections which are the remains of the past.
Reality is living life anew as it unfolds without previously formed perceptions intruding and interpreting your life.
Stuck in the past through security
Driven by the constant demand for security you express the same behaviours (the past as the present) repeatedly, and you continue now as you were in the past. This creates a false sense of secure familiarity in the present. The security gained from this repetition only masks a deeper insecurity.
Why do we do this? To feel secure, even if it hurts. Maintaining behaviours or situations even though they hurt us is due too, both our hopeful and yet hopeless attempt to avoid the sorrow we believe may come if we lose what little we have. We don't realize that by avoiding our insecurity we are unknowingly prolonging it by the act of avoiding it. For these reasons we continue as we are even though nothing changes.
We don't know what else to do.
We are caught up in the unconscious duality of our insecurity driving our desperation for security.
The solution
The only way out of this is to stop denying our insecurity, stop pursuing or trying to maintain its opposite or any solution and live with the reality of how it feels to be you. In this there is no duality, no alternative, only the single solitary inescapable truth of you as you are with no escape in sight. This is the action you can take to free yourself.
Until we cease avoiding our immediate reality and the feeling of ourselves as a part of that, we will remain confused and in sorrow.
Sorrow
Wanting to be free fromlife's sorrows is the only sorrow there is. There is no other sorrow. Actual sorrow itself does not include the desire to be free from it. What you call sorrow is just one of the many sensations of living. When you call a living sensation sorrow you then try to be free of it. But how can you be free from living? You are the living. Life is made up of all sensations. Preference or bias, wanting one part of your life without the rest of it, is causing your distress and sorrow. Your reaction to sorrow keeps you stuck in sorrow.
When you label a living expression, you frighten or overwhelm yourself. You then invent goals to give yourself hope, and escape dealing with the truth and demand of living. Don't do that. If sorrow is there, it will be felt inside you, some place in your body. Feel it as it is. Do not avoid how it feels, by thinking on how you don't like it, or how you want to feel. Do not wish whatever triggered your sorrow didn't. Don't indulge the reactions to sorrow or any other feeling.
You have to accept what you can't change and sometimes, let it change you. Feel the impact it has inside you and eventually, in its own time, it will burn out. But if you react to it, you will get caught up in your mental drama and lose touch with the true felt sense of sorrow within you. That prevents it purging or healing and prolongs your suffering unnecessarily. The same goes for every hurt, every experience, every sensation.
Seeing today as it is now, demands something of you now. Seeing tomorrow (the goal) only involves hope or postponement. Hope prevents you really living now. Hope and labeling prolongs sensations beyond their natural duration, creating what you call sorrow. Left alone by thought the body will naturally absorb or release every sensation, preventing its prolongation, thereby no harm can result from inside of you.
Being physically still, you will notice there is the constant movement of sensation throughout every cell - every part of you. When you stop reacting to those sensations, you no longer create a distraction from your living experience, but become, as is natural, involved in the overall experience of your life, however that may currently be or feel inside of you.
New books by Matthew Meinck will be available online in 2012
© 2011 Matthew Meinck All rights reserved.
Disclaimer: The reader of this document acknowledges that they take full personal responsibility for their response to the contents of this document. The author and any related parties disclaim any liability whatsoever, to the extent allowed by law, from any liability for any consequence of the response that the reader has to the contents of this document.
Matthew Meinck is an original thinker, an explorative ground-breaking natural health practitioner and educator, published author, meditation mentor, problem solver.
After 7 years as a monk his attempts to expose the hierarchy and hypocritical belief systems got him expelled. He went on to demystify enlightenment and meditation, enhancing its massive benefits and developed the most effective commonsense approach to meditation in existence today.
For over 25 years he has established his reputation by achieving unprecedented results as a natural health practitioner. He approaches mental and physical health as one integral condition and has successfully treated over 30,000 people.
New books by Matthew Meinck will be available on line 2012