179. If your dating has a goal you’re creating your own suffering

Most of us, most of the time, are looking for something more. In the dating world that’s easy to see. Most of us don’t date freely, with the idea of just enjoying the moments when we’re together with someone, as we’d enjoy a pretty sunset. No, most of us are dating with a goal in mind. And we’re always checking to see if our goal is being met. We can put any name we want on that goal – marriage to the right person, getting compliments on how we look that night, or any other label. But those labeled goals all fall under the heading of “happiness”. We want more happiness. Of course more happiness implies a future doesn’t it? As we search for more happiness we’re really saying that this, right now, isn’t good enough. We’re saying, “I’m not happy now but if only I had this (put any name you want on it) I’d be happy.” So the very search for happiness is the creation of unhappiness.

When you stop to think about it, however, that idea, that thought, that there should be more happiness can only happen in the present moment. This moment is the only moment we ever live. Thoughts of “more” and thoughts of “future” only happen in this moment. There isn’t any other time. Or another way to say it: Time doesn’t really exist except as a thought.

So what do we do to ourselves when we focus on wanting more happiness, which could only happen at some projected future time? In simple terms, we suffer as we feed that thought that happiness is “out there”. Actually, what we’re doing is taking a memory and projecting it into an imaginary future. Anticipating or expecting something in the future can only be based on memories of the past. Without memory we’d have no idea what anything in the future could look like. So, in reality, thoughts of the future are just thoughts (memories) of the past projected forward, like a movie projected on a screen. The next scene, our futurizing thought, has already happened. It’s already on the film roll and just hasn’t gone past the light and the lens yet.

Since this imagined future we project is only a dressed-up memory it really has no life. Our picture of our imagined future was alive at one time, when it occurred, but now it’s dead. Meantime, when our heads are filled with those dead, past memories we see as a better future we’re missing the real life that’s right in front of our faces – animated, vital, vibrant, colorful, and full of energy in this moment, right now.

This present moment is home. Past and future bubble up as thoughts but if we simply let them show up and disappear again, as all thoughts do, they don’t cause us to suffer. Attach to them, however, and we hurt, while denying real life just as it is!

Copyright © 2007 Chuck Custer