Future Addiction
Americans are addicted to the future. Our entire concept of progress is based upon this addiction. If the here and now is unsatisfactory, we believe that we can improve and get better; yet we are never really satisfied with what we have. Even if we attain the goal we started out with, we still want to go farther–buy more stuff, make more money, earn more respect. We graduate from high school to go on to college, from college to a job, from a job to retirement. At every stage of our American lives we look ahead to the next big thing. Our thirst is never satisfied, so we continually long for the future.
The thirst is tanha, and the dissatisfaction it causes is called dukkha. Buddhism is so appealing to America because it solves a problem that faces every middle-class citizen today. Life is suffering, even when we are never truly unhappy. The solution is to live in the moment, not the future. “If you live in such a way that you continuously deny the present moment, it means that you deny life itself.” When you always believe you can rectify your dissatisfaction at some future moment, you never live in any moment at all. You live for the future until the future no longer exists. You die never having lived at all.
Enlightenment is the goal, not of the future, but of the present. It is beyond happiness and unhappiness because it is living without the sadness in knowing that this moment will end or the anticipation of some future moment. We forget ourselves, our egos, and become fully involved with the current moment, the Now. Eckhart Tolle preaches equanimity–approaching all moments in life equally because we are exactly the same. We are always present, with no investment in the moment. When we are constant, the moment can no longer affect us. We give up our yearning for change, our addiction to the future. This state can be reached temporarily during a monk’s meditation, a runner’s concentration, or even a software engineer’s “flow.” Enlightenment is to be always in this state of equanimity or mindfulness, escaping dukkha once and for all.
Star Wars shows how this manifests itself even in popular American culture. Qui-Gon says to his young apprentice in Episode I, “Don’t center on your anxieties, Obi-Wan. Keep your concentration here and now were it belongs.” Obi-Wan retorts, “Master Yoda said I should be mindful of the future.” “But not at the expense of the moment,” is Qui-Gon’s sage reply. Obi-Wan’s own padawan, Anakin, shows his failure in his own addiction to the future. He is completely consumed by the belief that he can change things. He suffers instead of accepting, full of tanha, and therefore dukkha. Only at the end of his life does he live completely in the Now. He accepts that he cannot evade death, that he cannot change the future; he asks his son to remove his helmet. He no longer lives for the future, and so in his last moment he reaches enlightenment.