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subscribe Tell a friend QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS - 11TH QUESTION OJAI, CALIFORNIA
2ND QUESTION & ANSWER MEETING - 8TH MAY 1980
'HOPE'
What do you mean by the future, what is future? If one is desperately ill, tomorrow has meaning; one may be healed by tomorrow. So one must ask, what is this sense of future? We know the past; we live in the past, which is the opposite movement; and the past, going through the present, modifying itself, moves to that which we call the future.
First of all, are we aware that we live in the past - the past that is always modifying itself, adjusting itself, expanding and contracting itself, but still the past - past experience, past knowledge, past understanding, past delight, the pleasure which has become the past?
The future is the past, modified. So one's hope of the future is still the past moving to what one considers to be the future. The mind never moves out of the past. The future is always the mind acting, living, thinking in the past.
What is the past? It is one's racial inheritance, one's conditioning as Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Catholic, American and so on. It is the education one has received the hurts the delights, as remembrances. That is the past. That is one's consciousness. Can that consciousness, with all its content of belief, dogma, hope, fear, longing and illusion, come to an end? For example, can one end, this morning, completely, one's dependence on another? Dependence is part of one's consciousness. The moment that ends, something new begins, obviously. But one never ends anything completely and that non-ending is one's hope. Can one see and end dependence and its consequences, psychologically, inwardly? See what it means to depend and the immediate action taking place of ending it. Now is the content of one's consciousness to be got rid of bit by bit? That is, get rid of anger, then get rid of jealousy, bit by bit. That would too long. Or, can the whole thing be done instantly, immediately? for taking the contents of one's consciousness and ending them one by one, will take many years, all one's life perhaps. Is it possible to see the whole and end it - which is fairly simple, if one does it? But one's mind is so conditioned that we allow time as a factor in change.