Will I Be Happy in the Future? | Eckhart Tolle

Here's my wife and she's better looking than yours. Now you begin to lose the present moment internally when the place you want to get to, whatever that may be, whether it's tomorrow or in five years time or even a few five minutes from now, you lose the present moment and your state of mind becomes somewhat or very dysfunctional when whatever goal you have or destination you have in the future occupies more of your attention than the present moment. So the place you want to get to or achieve one day when I'll become a great this or that, perhaps you have a great idea. Maybe let's say you want to become a rock star. I want to be a rock star. Okay. Well, hopefully you enjoy music and have not just a mental image of who you want to be as somebody important, but you don't enjoy the several years that you need to get there. If you don't enjoy the journey, which is always now, the step you're taking at this moment, if there's a lack of enjoyment, then you have lost the present moment and the place you want to get to has assumed an importance that becomes dysfunctional. So this is already mentioned in ancient scriptures as a teaching. For example, in the ancient Bhagavad Gita. Wonderful. If you haven't read it yet, wonderful ancient Indian scripture, it talks of not being too attached to what it calls the fruit of your action, which is the outcome, which is you project yourself. One day I'm going to be happy. That's the fruit. One day when I get, when people realize that I'm a fantastic human being, I get all the recognition from people, then I'll be fine. When I have those possessions that I need, I won't be happy until I have a private jet. Doesn't have to be big, just a little one. I won't be happy until I. Then I feel I'm fully myself. I cannot be fully myself unless I have a car that's better than most people's cars. And so you strive towards that. And in the meantime you're not happy because you're striving towards a place where that promises some form of fulfillment. Whether you call it happiness or having arrived or this weird expression in the English language, making it. Making what I want to make it. And then you have weird ideas in your mind. An enormous amount of fear arises because you have certain thoughts, especially at 3 o' clock in the morning, you wake up and the mind starts up and a weird word comes. I don't want to be a loser. A loser. Oh my God, I Fear. Maybe I will be a loser. Maybe I'm not going to get this car and maybe I'm not going to become the greatest this or that. Or maybe I'm not going to find the person who's going to make me happy. Well, you won't. There is no human being on the planet that can make you happy unless you find the source of happiness within yourself, in which case you'll be quite happy with somebody. It's likely. But that person will not cause you the happiness except while you are going through the honeymoon period. And that is human beings. You look to human beings. Some future. I need to meet my soulmate. I need to meet my. Or whatever it is. Or maybe it's a trophy wife can show off. Here's my wife and she's better looking than yours because she wouldn't be with a loser, would she? So you. And then of course after a little while, the trophy wife won't satisfy you. And then you have to look somewhere else. In fact, she might make you unhappy and. Or you make her unhappy, you make each other unhappy. So this is very common. Many of you may have experienced as far as looking to a human being to make you happy, you may already have experienced that that didn't work because the very human being that you chose to make you happy only two or three years later or four, five made you unhappy. The very same person whose purpose it was to make you happy. And you signed a contract. So it was all fine. The contract was signed and then something happened that wasn't supposed to happen. The person who's supposed to make you happy suddenly starts making you unhappy and you may not realize that you are making him or her unhappy too. Self knowledge is more difficult than knowing somebody else. So always looking to some future moment and then you realize on a practical level future works. But on a deeper level of finding a true satisfaction in life, you have to look somewhere else. All these things are good. Achieving things is good. Even relationships. Of course, if they're conscious, then all the better. I'm not saying stop looking for somebody to marry, that's fine, but don't look for somebody to make you happy. They always. I don't look at these things anymore. But in the past when people put ads, I sometimes enjoyed reading ads. And when they had newspaper ads for finding relationships or marriage ads, it was always amusing what people were looking for. Nowadays of course, it's all on your phone. It's called Tinder and the hand movement associated with it. Apparently I've never actually looked at Tinder but I know that the hand movement associated with it goes like this. And each wipe represents a human being. Well, that's weird. Very weird. So I enjoyed reading the newspaper ads and sometimes it said looking for woman or man to make me happy. Oh dear, I thought so. The future then what is the future that never appears, that can completely occupy our attention to such an extent that we lose actually the most important thing in life and that is to be at home with yourself in the present moment, to feel where you are, to feel a kind of. This may sound a little strange, to feel a connectedness with being, the connectedness with being. So you're rooted in something deep abiding. There's a deep peace, not a dead kind of peace, but an alive peace. To be rooted within yourself, to be yourself here and now in this moment. Losing that or never discovering it, never realizing even the possibility of this existing in your life, then if you don't find the true meaning of present moment, of the now, which is very deep, as we will see, we will see, it's very deep. Then you live flitting around the surface of life. There's always some future moment to either be afraid of or be attracted to. The future is a two edged sword, as you might discover when you are starting to think and worry, oh, there's the hope that the future is going to make me happy in some way through a human being, some attainment, a possession, some recognition, whatever it may be, or security, ultimate security one day I just want to feel secure. I want to feel secure and they might even sell you life insurance and say you feel really secure, just buy this and you have a pension plan and then I'll be okay, just need a good pension plan. They life insurance of course means you have to die first before anything. So it should be called death insurance security. I'm looking for some sense of security and you look some security in external conditions. I want to have a place. Yes, it's a very human thing. But you may need to live for a while to realize no matter what situation you go into, no matter who you are with, no matter what you achieve in life, always this sense of insecurity, of fear, of insufficiency, of some underlying sense of lack or something not quite right. Always it resurfaces sooner or later, and usually sooner. And so you thought, if you thought, let's say you achieve everything that commonly in our civilization, the media and so on, or the magazines or Internet, whatever, tell you that the highest you can achieve is wealth and fame and then you think, oh, if I only had all that, then I would be a happy human being. I would have security. And of course, many human beings who have achieved it, I have met quite a few that was quite interesting who in the eyes of the world had everything. And they were unhappy. In fact, some of them were more unhappy when they got everything than before, when they still were striving to ach. Achieve those things. They were more unhappy because now, when you have already tasted everything, you no longer have some ideas. Once I achieve that, I'll be happy. Well, you have everything. What can you achieve now? Okay, well, you could think enlightenment. I've got the private debt, I've got all the money that I can do anything, but I'm still unhappy. Okay, if the unhappiness that arises there, if that brings you to the possibility of awakening, that's a good thing. Now, the thing we need to recognize is no matter what you achieve, there's nothing wrong with achievement. But ultimately it's not that is not which is going to give you the this sense of self that you are looking for, that sense of being rooted, that sense of security. Everything in this world is insecure. Ultimately, no matter how secure your job may be, whatever, there's radical insecurity and uncertainty. Nobody knows what the next moment will bring because it can only appear as this moment. What is the future then, that everybody looks to? It's always associated with a thinking. It's a thought. On a deeper level, future is a thought in your head, and you only experience it ever as a thought in your head. That's the only reality future has. Isn't that interesting? It has no actual, immediate existential reality except as a thought that you're thinking about some future moment. But even while you're thinking that thought, it's still the present moment and you don't even know it because nothing can happen that's not in the present moment. And then there's the past. When you think about the past again, where is the past? It's in your head. It's a thought in your head or a sequence of thought in your head. So future and past are associated, intrinsically linked with the activity of thinking. Sa.