The future
I can't recall the number of books I've read on mindfulness. Hundreds. As well as Steeming on, I do 20 minutes candle meditation daily too. But one of the great finds of neuroscience is that humans have a key feature over all the other species on earth: they can plan and try to see into the future.
Dean Buonomano, a neuroscience Professor at UCLA has recently published the book 'Your Brain Is A Time Machine'. In this book Buonomano says that humans have the ability to step outside both space and time with their brains, and thus are able to span both future and past.
The 'wise men' brain
Humans are different from animals in the sense that they can 'time travel' mentally within their own brains.
There are some instincts that are hard wired like sex for example. This can indeed have future consequences, and sometimes we engage in this without caring as to what will happen in nine months time.
Even the word homo-sapien means 'wise men' in Latin, so being able to plan for the future is definitely an inherent human skill.
Neuroscience is not quite sure where this planning goes on in the brain, but we know that the pre-frontal cortex is involved in this higher cortex function
One of the downsides of all this time travelling is that it can be tiring. Revisiting a broken heart for example can be very tiring indeed. Even the loss of a loved one can also keep us trapped in the past.
Mindfulness allow us a break from this time travelling, as we disengage from the world for 10 or 15 minutes. We essentially close the book of our mind for a rest. This helps boost our overall mental health, and it stops us from truly monkeying around. But failing to ever see the future would not be human so it seems mindfulness can only ever give us so much.
Happy meditations :)