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Learn to Plan for Tomorrow but Live for Today By Saha Nathan
Hope for tomorrow can lead you to overindulge today. You might tell yourself that you need not feel guilty over what you do now because, in the future, everything is going to be okay., and “this is just for the moment.”
This is a trick of the mind, and the great masters warn against it.
We hope for something when we do not have it now.
If you are indulging in sex, you might respect a person who has become celibate. You may worship him, making him your ideal, thinking that someday you are going to be like him. If you then hear a rumor that he is indulging in sex, your respect is instantly gone. Your ideal must be your opposite; only then does it give you hope.
You can marry someone with great dreams and hope, and the greater your dreams and hopes, the greater the potential for frustration.
An arranged marriage is unlikely to fail in the same way as a love-marriage, as the arranged couple has fewer hopes and dreams.
If you enter into a love-marriage, you may expect much but soon become frustrated. You might immediately start thinking about another person. You may even say to your spouse, “I am not interested in any other woman,” but you have already become indifferent to her, you cannot convince her that your statement is true. The moment that you become indifferent to her, she will likely assume that you are interested in someone else. You say to yourself in frustration, “This person is not for me. I have chosen a wrong partner.” Your internal conflict increases, and you actually may try to find another partner.
You can go on that way ad infinitum! You could marry every woman on earth, and still you would be thinking, “This one is not right for me.” The truth is that it is not the woman or the man who is frustrating you. What frustrates you is your passion, your desire for something different.
If you can come to understand this cycle, the constant craving that perpetually takes you in and out of relationships, you will become wise. You will no longer try to change things; you simply cease trying to possess what you desire.
We can only define words in terms of their opposites. If I talk about light, and you ask me what light is, I say that it is “not darkness.”
If someone asks you what mind is, you might say “that which is not body.” If someone asks what body is, you have to say, “That which is not mind.”
All these terms are circular and, therefore, basically meaningless. You cannot know anything about the mind, nor can you know anything about the body. When I ask about the mind, you define it in terms of the body, and the body is undefined. When I ask you about the body, you define it in terms of the mind, which is itself undefined.
Events cannot be denied. You can only close your eyes to them and try to escape. You can become inattentive to them, but they are always there hidden, waiting for the moment that they can assert themselves. So if you deny suffering, if you say that you are not going to choose suffering, you have actually chosen it. And now it will always be around, waiting to show up in your life.
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