The present is what is most important. It is for this reason that the primary name of Hashem is י--ה---ו--ה a name which indicates that He is always in the present.
What does it mean to be in the present? It means to succeed in focusing on the present to the extent that one has no thoughts on anything other than what he is involved with at this moment. The reason we spend so much time thinking about the future and the past is because we are not fully invested in the present. Since we aren't completely immersed in what is occurring now, our energy becomes scattered and we jump to day dreams of the future or reminiscences of the past.
The fact that we are experiencing time, the past and the future, shows how weak is our grasp on the present. If we felt the richness of the present, there would be no room to be feeling anything else. Olam HaBa, the World to Come should not be understood as day after day with no end for all eternity. That isn't eternity, it is past, present and future with no end in sight. Eternity is above any concept of time. It is a state of always being in the present until there is no feeling of any other time, past or future.
We don't mean to say that the past is unimportant. We need to learn from the past, to know where we are coming from and where we are heading. The future is important as we need to use the present to set ourselves on a productive path for the future. But both past and future are tools to direct the present, anything else is memory and fantasy. They are important, but only as a means to the primary, and one cannot allow them to define the present. They need to be used where they are helpful, and pushed away when they limit us.
ח"ת פ"א
What does it mean to be in the present? It means to succeed in focusing on the present to the extent that one has no thoughts on anything other than what he is involved with at this moment. The reason we spend so much time thinking about the future and the past is because we are not fully invested in the present. Since we aren't completely immersed in what is occurring now, our energy becomes scattered and we jump to day dreams of the future or reminiscences of the past.
The fact that we are experiencing time, the past and the future, shows how weak is our grasp on the present. If we felt the richness of the present, there would be no room to be feeling anything else. Olam HaBa, the World to Come should not be understood as day after day with no end for all eternity. That isn't eternity, it is past, present and future with no end in sight. Eternity is above any concept of time. It is a state of always being in the present until there is no feeling of any other time, past or future.
We don't mean to say that the past is unimportant. We need to learn from the past, to know where we are coming from and where we are heading. The future is important as we need to use the present to set ourselves on a productive path for the future. But both past and future are tools to direct the present, anything else is memory and fantasy. They are important, but only as a means to the primary, and one cannot allow them to define the present. They need to be used where they are helpful, and pushed away when they limit us.
ח"ת פ"א
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