Inner  Frontier
Fourth Way Spiritual Practice

 

Inner Work


For the week of October 10, 2005


Creating the Future

Our primary responsibility as human beings is to create a better future, for ourselves, for our children, and for the generations of coming millennia. The future that will take care of itself would be immeasurably impoverished compared to the future we might intentionally create. An immediate difficulty, though, lies in how to define a “better future.” Because of the wide disparity among people’s views of this and because our personal situation is best known to ourselves, we can only look to our own conscience for decisive guidance on the choices we make and the approaches we adopt. Furthermore, conscience is our one innate tool for connecting with the future, for conscience enables us to foresee our actions and their consequences.

Changing the present is difficult because so much is fixed, subject to constraints and momentum from the past. But the nano-scale uncertainties of the present evolve into the large scale uncertainties of the future, making the future the natural field for our creative action, whether in creating our own soul or in creating a “better” world. Of course, the creative action aimed at the future, can only be taken in the present and is best taken in presence.

But besides the different possibilities for any given moment of the future, we also face the wildly different scales of future time, from days and weeks to centuries and millennia. The longer the time scale we expand our perception into, the more responsibility we naturally feel.

Choice, decision, practice, repetition, commitment, adaptability, intelligence, and passion are the means for creating the future. We make choices and decisions affecting the future. We carry these into the future through practice, repetition, and commitment, all tempered by the unexpected developments we encounter. Toward the latter we adapt intelligently to maintain our commitment for the future and to take new opportunities as they arise. But if through passivity, inertia, and momentum, we allow ourselves to be carried along the stream of time, then we rob our future of its higher possibilities. Inner peace and the consciousness of being are intended as our platform for truly human action, not as ends in themselves.

The issue is not whether we fear the future or look forward to it. If we love, then we care. And if we care, we play our individual role in contributing to a better future, for ourselves, for our children, and for the societies of the long future. And for that we consider the various levels of the material, the social, the natural, and the spiritual, on smaller and larger time scales. For the material, the social, and the natural levels we envision the possible scenarios unfolding over time and we take the appropriate steps. If we wish for spiritual freedom, a loving heart and a meaningful life, we follow the path of practice on all these levels.

For this week, examine your own relationship to the future. Are there decisions you are neglecting to make or to carry out?


     

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