The Present
"If you want to know your past, look at your present experience. If you want to know your future, look at your present action."- No idea who wrote this
Teshuva season is great. It provides us with opportunities to question who we are and how we live our lives. It challenges us to re-examine our values, our attachments, and where we place ourselves in the world. Our focus expands and our minds are able to see new solutions to problems we could not overcome the previous year.
However, teshuva can also be overwhelming. We are tasked with examining all of our past mistakes, told to dig out all of our inner conflicts, and rectify all of our inter-personal relationships. In the upcoming year, we are challenged to find ways to transform and re-focus ourselves, to commit ourselves to keeping more mitzvot, to learn more, to give more, and to become better in every other way.
We either give up because the process of teshuva is too daunting, or we confidently go through the ten days of repentance with a resolve to transform ourselves only to fade fast. At best, we make small changes that do little to actually affect who we are.
All of which makes this quote speak so much to me. Self knowledge is much more difficult to attain looking back at our past because our memories distort everything (spend a year doing neuroscience and you will be shocked to the extent that our brains distort everything). We play detective with our past year trying to identify where exactly we went wrong which is dangerous for two reasons: 1) It is an overwhelming amount of information and 2) The things that we even remember from the past year are generally biased towards a particular self narrative. Very likely, our conclusions will be rooted in a false self perception and will not yield any new insights.
If we listen to ourselves (I wrote about this before: Listening To Ourselves) we can become much more aware of who we actually are. We can learn to notice our own defense mechanisms, frustrations, anger, and other emotions that we quickly push to our unconscious and identify the root causes of our conflicts. Those can serve as starting points for our investigation to better understand our past.
Rather than chasing our unconscious and our memories for insights that will likely to be distorted, we can learn to let our unconscious come to us. That in my opinion, can be a much more effective step towards self knowledge, and a lot more manageable. It does not ask us to do anything other than simply tuning in to our present experiences.
And in terms of the future, when we envision grand changes for the future we often times fake ourselves out by simply projecting out a facade (see Noticing Facades). We decide to take on a new identity, whether it is "the religious one", a "kind one", a "learner". Because the teshuva process challenges us to re-examine "who we want to be", we cannot help but project a kind of person that we want to be, and to begin chasing that vision. The problem is that these visions are almost never rooted realistic goals. They generally stem from a sense of insecurity or a fantasy and always involve our imagination. A teshuva process that is centered on becoming a certain kind of person can be ineffective and even counterproductive because it will have us chasing facades. It can also lead to self dishonesty since we might actually try and convince ourselves that we really are that person.
By focusing on our present action, we slowly remove ourselves from our fantasies of becoming a certain kind of person, and we move towards a focus on making the best possible decision in the present. It withdraws our mental energy from our imaginations (which is the primary operator when we envision our future), and re-directs our energy towards our cognitive faculty that will examine the future consequences of our present actions.
The other advantage of simply focusing on our present action is that it becomes a lot more manageable. Rather than being asked to make widespread changes to our whole lives, we can simply focus on one moment at a time.
The challenge, of course, is to truly listen our present experiences when our mind is constantly making so much noise. And the challenge, of course, is not to get carried away by exciting visions of our future; to simply focus our minds on our present action. But the road to getting there is taking one moment at a time.
Teshuva season is great. It provides us with opportunities to question who we are and how we live our lives. It challenges us to re-examine our values, our attachments, and where we place ourselves in the world. Our focus expands and our minds are able to see new solutions to problems we could not overcome the previous year.
However, teshuva can also be overwhelming. We are tasked with examining all of our past mistakes, told to dig out all of our inner conflicts, and rectify all of our inter-personal relationships. In the upcoming year, we are challenged to find ways to transform and re-focus ourselves, to commit ourselves to keeping more mitzvot, to learn more, to give more, and to become better in every other way.
We either give up because the process of teshuva is too daunting, or we confidently go through the ten days of repentance with a resolve to transform ourselves only to fade fast. At best, we make small changes that do little to actually affect who we are.
All of which makes this quote speak so much to me. Self knowledge is much more difficult to attain looking back at our past because our memories distort everything (spend a year doing neuroscience and you will be shocked to the extent that our brains distort everything). We play detective with our past year trying to identify where exactly we went wrong which is dangerous for two reasons: 1) It is an overwhelming amount of information and 2) The things that we even remember from the past year are generally biased towards a particular self narrative. Very likely, our conclusions will be rooted in a false self perception and will not yield any new insights.
If we listen to ourselves (I wrote about this before: Listening To Ourselves) we can become much more aware of who we actually are. We can learn to notice our own defense mechanisms, frustrations, anger, and other emotions that we quickly push to our unconscious and identify the root causes of our conflicts. Those can serve as starting points for our investigation to better understand our past.
Rather than chasing our unconscious and our memories for insights that will likely to be distorted, we can learn to let our unconscious come to us. That in my opinion, can be a much more effective step towards self knowledge, and a lot more manageable. It does not ask us to do anything other than simply tuning in to our present experiences.
And in terms of the future, when we envision grand changes for the future we often times fake ourselves out by simply projecting out a facade (see Noticing Facades). We decide to take on a new identity, whether it is "the religious one", a "kind one", a "learner". Because the teshuva process challenges us to re-examine "who we want to be", we cannot help but project a kind of person that we want to be, and to begin chasing that vision. The problem is that these visions are almost never rooted realistic goals. They generally stem from a sense of insecurity or a fantasy and always involve our imagination. A teshuva process that is centered on becoming a certain kind of person can be ineffective and even counterproductive because it will have us chasing facades. It can also lead to self dishonesty since we might actually try and convince ourselves that we really are that person.
By focusing on our present action, we slowly remove ourselves from our fantasies of becoming a certain kind of person, and we move towards a focus on making the best possible decision in the present. It withdraws our mental energy from our imaginations (which is the primary operator when we envision our future), and re-directs our energy towards our cognitive faculty that will examine the future consequences of our present actions.
The other advantage of simply focusing on our present action is that it becomes a lot more manageable. Rather than being asked to make widespread changes to our whole lives, we can simply focus on one moment at a time.
The challenge, of course, is to truly listen our present experiences when our mind is constantly making so much noise. And the challenge, of course, is not to get carried away by exciting visions of our future; to simply focus our minds on our present action. But the road to getting there is taking one moment at a time.
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