How can I remain in the present without any expectations from the future? || (2016)
Questioner: When I am busy in doing certain activities that I enjoy doing, there are expectations from the future, but no frustrations at present. What is this state? Can it remain forever?
Acharya Prashant: If this can happen, it is a very welcome thing. There are certain actions that produce results, and you might be indulging in those actions to get a specific type of result. But if you are not bound to the result, if the result does not mean the world to you, if the result does not mean your own existence or worth to you, then fine. Go ahead. Do project the result.
Now, expectation is merely a projection. In the normal usage of the word ‘expectation’, when you expect, then you are also afraid. You are afraid that your expectation might be betrayed. Is that not so? Can you expect, without being afraid? Can you hope, without being suspicious or doubtful?
To not expect does not mean that you will have nothing to do with the future. You may still peep into the future; the mind has that capacity to project, to extrapolate. You may still peep into the future, but that movement into the future will have no bearing upon your Core, upon your Essence. It will not shake you up right to your centre. Then you can keep thinking about the future. There is nothing prohibited about the future.
Surrendered to the present, go ahead. Take a bath in memories. Or allow yourself to fly in imaginations about the future.
It doesn’t matter.
Past and future both lose their sting, their harm when you are surrendered to the present. Now memories will not become an alternate reality, now the future will not become an escape.
Now you get total authority to keep thinking about the future because now you will not be needlessly thinking about the future. Now you have the free license to wallow in memories because now you will not misuse that license.
This too is somewhat of a spiritual myth that the spiritual mind has nothing to do with the past or the future. This is bogus.
Firmly tethered to the present, past is fun; future too is good fun.
Q: Acharya Ji, is there something within which is unshakeable, that is observing the disturbance?
AP: We need not say even that much.
When you let the disturbance be, then it is proof that there is something that is undisturbed.
But when you say that there is something within that is observing the disturbance, then you are saying that you are observing (emphasizing on the word ‘that thing’) that thing, observe the disturbance. Otherwise, how would you know? So do not comment on it. Do not say anything about it.
Just be patient with the disturbance. This patience, this capacity to live in the disturbance, is that ‘unshakable thing’.
It cannot be known directly. You cannot talk about it or describe it. It can be known only by its fruits.
