Buddha - Your Thoughts Determine Your Future

In The Dhammapada, Buddha says, “What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: our life is the creation of our mind.” So according to Buddha, our thoughts determine our future.

And what kind of futures are possible? The Buddha says, “If a man speaks or acts with an impure mind, suffering follows him as the wheel of the cart follows the beast that draws the cart… If a man speaks or acts with a pure mind, joy follows him as his own shadow.” So Buddha is saying that there are two possible futures: a future of suffering or a future of joy. And the future you create depends on your thoughts.

But how do your thoughts determine your future? Well, thought comes before action. Think about it. Before you move, you have to have a thought about how or where you’re going to move. Even if you say, “I’m going to stop thinking and then move to disprove what you’re saying,” you would be contradicting yourself. Because you’re thinking about that movement right now! So although there may be some distance between the thought and the action, the thought always comes before the action. And our actions create our futures—that’s an easy idea to understand.

So if you actions depend on your thoughts, the right thoughts lead to the right actions which leads to joy. But the wrong thoughts lead to the wrong actions which lead to suffering. So how do you have the right thought?

Thoughts arise out of memory. You’re thinking right now, and what are you thinking in? Words, maybe images. And for the most part, these are words you’ve heard, or images you’ve seen, in the past. Maybe you’ve read them in a book or heard someone else say them. And of course, you can combine your memories to create something new. We call that imagination, but that’s a topic for a different video. So if right thought depends on right memory, what determines right memory?

Memory comes from our experiences, and that’s easy enough to understand, so I won’t explain it. So right memory comes from right experience, but what determines right experience?

Experience comes from attention. There are a lot of things going on around you right now. Maybe the sun in shining, the air is moving, the room is warming up, people are walking by, people are working outside, something is going on in India, or China, or Canada, something’s happening on social media, so on and so forth. But hopefully, you’re just paying attention to this video. So you’re not really experiencing all of those other things. Your experience of the world is shaped by where you direct your attention. So right attention leads to right experience. But what determines right attention?

Before I get to that, I wanna return to the quote I read earlier. Buddha said that right thought depends on a pure mind. Now that’s a very interesting term: a pure mind. What does purity mean? Imagine a cup of water. We can call it pure. But once we add some contaminant to it, like food colouring for example, we say it’s impure. It’s lost its purity. So purity is like an original state which can be lost through contamination.

So what is the original state of the mind? When we were children, everything was new to us. We were seeing the world for the first time. Things caught our attention, and we took the time to notice them. And for the most part, we followed our interests, we explored the world, and we voluntarily encountered new things. And because of this, we learned so much. But then what happens? One day, we come across something new that frightens us or causes us pain. We realize that the world can be a scary and dangerous place, and we have to make a decision: do we continue to explore the world and risk encountering the scary and the dangerous, or do we seek security and comfort? If we choose security, we stop exploring the world, and if we stop exploring the world, we stop learning, and if we stop learning, we stop growing, and if we stop growing, we begin shrinking. We start to decay. We become weaker and less capable of thriving.

So let’s go back to the question I asked earlier: what is right attention? It’s attention that comes from a pure mind—a mind uncontaminated by fear.

So the right thoughts lead to the right actions which lead to joy. So your thoughts determine your future. And right memory leads to right thought, right experience leads to right memory, and right attention leads to right experience. And what is right attention? An attention that voluntarily explores the world with courage. An attention that leaves its comfort zone, that follows its genuine interests into the unknown and discovers something new and transformative. An attention still capable of learning and growth. It’s attention uncontaminated by fear.

Who would all the hero’s of our stories be—whether it’s Harry Potter, Frodo, or Katniss—if they never left behind the world of comfort, overcame fear, and voluntarily confronted the unknown world?

So if fear is the ultimate contaminant of attention, how do we remove it? I actually talked about this in another video titled Buddha - Conquer Fear, Become Free. I’ll put a link to it in the description, but before you go, please consider liking this video. And I highly recommend watching my other video on fear, because it’ll pick up where this one left off and really build nicely on top of it.