The future is the ultimate attainment

The future is the ultimate attainment – whatever you think that attainment is in any moment of life. The future is the highest attainment of people all around you.

For average people the future can be tomorrow or fifty years later. It can be a pleasure waiting for them, or a plan to be fulfilled or an accomplishment to be reached. But these are not future. People who think in these ways, throughout many incarnations, finally figure out that the future is beyond all these.

Buddha spoke about the future to some of his disciples. He said that in the future they would be Buddhas, thus polarizing their consciousness to that attainment. But this attainment is reached through a life lived in failures, in successes, in defeats and victories. The human soul matures through all these experiences and eventually discovers that all his relationships and events must be used for the attainment of the future. All his accomplishments must be performed for the future. All his emotions must be dedicated to the future. All his thoughts will be concentrated toward the future. Nothing in his activities will draw him back to the past.

The future-oriented consciousness is a firm consciousness. There is commitment, concentration, devotion, dedication, and total surrender to the future. Doubt, confusion, remorse, defeat, failure, depression all belong to the past. They cannot pass to the world of future.

Daily you can hear the conversations of people. Mostly they talk in terms of the past, for the past. To shift the tendency of being occupied with the past is very difficult. Most of our emotions are anchored in the past. Most of our thoughts are impressed by the past and present. Shifting to the future needs Herculean labor, and it is the sign of those who are ready to enter the path of future.

For average man only the past exists. The present is the pool in which he swims, dressed in his swimming suit of the past. The future is essential for only a few years because of his pains and pleasures or fears of death.

The thought of future is a panacea for all ills and pains and sufferings because it shows how they are momentary events in comparison to the future.

All life is the battle of two forces: those forces that work for the past and those forces that work for the future. For instance, political events are the result of these battles.

In all fields of human endeavor we see the tragedy of these battles. Even in the religious field, which is supposed to be preparing people for the future, its leaders work for the past. By occupying themselves with the past, the future glory cannot manifest in that field. Religion commonly is not a progressive field or new revelation but the story of the past. This is why the world cannot progress. Tradition, religion, political idealism, past-oriented philosophies drag us to the past instead of to the future.

Future is the victory over glamors, illusions, and maya. Maya is identification with matter. You become one with the matter side of life. This is the heaviest identification that one can develop.

Future is emancipation from all that limits you in the three worlds. It is in a sense an advancing freedom from all limitations – a kind of nirvana which keeps you all-expanding.

The future is pursued on the path of joy, through joy. A time will come when pain and suffering will cease, and joy will be the driving power to the future. The closer you get to the future, the more joy you experience.

-Torkom Saraydarian

Leadership vol.5