Reaching Your Essence - 014 Focusing On One Goal

Focusing On One Thought

We will try to learn a little more about the Yechidah and add on another path which we can use to reveal the inner point.

One of the fundamentals which the Baal Shem Tov taught is that a person throughout his life, in his service to the Creator, needs to learn how to use just one thought at a time.

It’s possible that a person is involved in serving Hashem, and is always involved in doing good things; he is always growing spiritually, but he has a problem - his service is built on all kinds of good things which he is doing, and this will just confuse him. Man is like Jacob’s ladder, and he grows step-by-step in his ladder of growth, but along the way, there can be things which throw him off; or it could be that his beginning was based entirely on something that can throw him off.

For example, all of us experience the bad middah of anger sometimes, and we would like to uproot this. We also have other bad middos which we want to get rid of very badly, as well as a certain good middos which we want to acquire, such as having a good heart, etc. We are looking to acquire many good middos; either we really want to get rid of our bad middos, or we are building up good middos. What happens with many people? People work on too many things at once: overcoming anger, acquiring patience, acquiring happiness, acquiring zeal…as a result, people take on too much than their abilities are capable of. All of these matters are important to work on, but if a person works on too many things at once, he goes into overdrive.

Whatever gains a person has through this, he still harms his soul in the process. He places his soul in stress. Just like our body can get stress, so can our soul get stressed, when we give it too many things to work on.

The inner attitude to have is that a person should involve himself in only one thing at a time. The simple way to begin this is to make sure not to do two things at once. No more multi-tasking. People think they save time when they multi-task. But it causes more harm than good, because it harms the soul, by fracturing one’s focus.

So this is the first step: when you do actions, do one thing at a time. If you’re talking, don’t do something at the same time. If you’re doing something, don’t talk at the same time.

How many thoughts does a person go through since the time he gets up until he goes to sleep? An endless amount. People have all kinds of thoughts and fantasies in one day. In one day alone there are thousands of thoughts we go through. But the true kind of life to live is totally the opposite of this!  The truer way to live is that a person should just let one specific thought fill him the whole day, and that will get you closer to the inner point of the soul.

The Yechidah comes from the word yachid, from the word echad (one), because it is reached through focusing on one thing alone.

Practical Focus and Deeper Awareness

This does not mean, of course, that a person should wash the dishes one day and do nothing else, and that the next day he should only do the laundry, and that the next day he should only eat and the next day to drink. Life is full of many actions we need to do. When you go shopping, you should buy everything the house needs not limit yourself to buying one thing alone. We do not mean for this at all.

Rather, the inner point as is as follows. When we think, we have two kinds of thoughts. We think about what we have to do or if we shouldn’t do it. The other kind of thought comes from our soul.

To illustrate, when you wash the dishes and you are thinking, you are using the first kind of thought. You are thinking about what has to get done. But when a person wants to get married, he might think about this all day and lose sleep over it. This is a deeper kind of thought than your usual thought. It is a thought coming from the soul, and it makes you involved with it all day.

Rav Hutner zt”l once remarked that a person is saying Slach Lanu and all he is thinking of getting a shidduch. He wants to be forgiven for sins, but solely as a means to get his shidduch, because all he thinks about is his shidduch. The only thing that bothers him is that he find a shidduch.

Similarly, a person all day might worry about paying his debts. He thinks all day about money, not because he lusts after money, but because he is nervous about repaying his debts, and that is why he thinks about money all day.

This is actually an ability that comes from the innermost point of the soul: the ability to be focused. But to our chagrin, it is not revealed in our spiritual matters, and it is instead only used when it comes to material matters, or in our stressful problems of life that bother us. We are very focused on the day we marry off a child, but on a normal day, our thoughts are scattered and unfocused. Our thoughts are usually not coming from the soul – they lack inner vitality to them.

Focusing On A Thought of the Soul

Thus, a person should get used to thinking one thought during the entire day about a certain spiritual point that is important. This thought should be about something which is within your level, not about a point which your soul has no connection to.

A chosson thinks all day about his wedding because it has relevance to him; his soul is thinking about his marriage, thus he thinks about it all day. The more a person is involved with something, the more can think about all the time.

Examining What We Want

We need to learn how to think all the time about a thought that our soul is already thinking about. Most people are unfocused in their thoughts because their soul isn’t connected to their thoughts. Therefore, if we want to learn how to think of one thought all the time, it needs to be the kind of thought in which our soul is already there. We can all identify thoughts that our soul feels connected to and thoughts that our soul doesn’t feel connected to.

A person has many things which he wants: children, a shidduch, source of living, health, etc. Make a list of what you want and which one you want more than the other. Whatever we want the most is what we think about the most, and the less we want something, the less we think about it.

So a person needs to identify what he wants the most. When you identify what you want the most, you will be able to think about it all the time.

If a person, let’s say, wants children more than anything else, now what? Should he go running around to doctors and think all day about wishing to have children? All he will do is become frustrated. So what kind of desires are we referring to that a person should discover? We are not talking about desires that are outside of us. Our outer desires are endless, and there is nothing we can to get them. So you can’t focus your thoughts on any desire that comes from outside of yourself, because all it would is scatter your thoughts even more, making you anxious and frustrated.

If a person wants children more than anything else, and he would be told that he will need his feet amputated and then he will get children – and he refuses – that shows that his deepest wish is not children. He values his health more than his children, because he is not willing to give up his health for his children. When he’s healthy, he’ll say he wants children more than anything else, but deep down, he wants his health more than having children. So although he claims that his greatest desire in life is to have children, it is not the innermost desire a person can have. Even his health is not his innermost desire, because the soul wants things even more badly than the things that our body wants.

There are thousands of desires that each person has. A person has to look into himself and ask himself what his deepest desire is, and then, he needs to identify if it is an outer desire, or an inner desire of the soul.

Wanting Vs. Really Wanting

Let’s say a person says that he wants to acquire patience more than anything else. How can we tell if he really wants this or not? How much time all day does he think about it? When was the last time he thought about this – two weeks ago? He might claim that he wants patience more than anything else, but he doesn’t live with this as a conscious awareness.  He gets caught up with other things in life. He says that he wants this more than anything, but he doesn’t think about it and doesn’t try to get it – which shows that it is not what he wants most.

When a person does discover what he wants more than anything, he needs to schedule his day around trying to get it. Without getting into details of how to do this, the point is that a person’s schedule should be mainly centered around this goal. After you see how much time you are willing to spend on it, make it into the goal of your daily life.

A person might say that the main thing in his life is to learn Torah. After all, that’s what Chazal say. But does his daily life reflect that? Another person says that the main goal of his life is kindness. How much time of the day does he practice kindness with others? He usually gets caught up with his family and job. If it would be the main goal of his life, he would try to actualize it every day in his life.

If a person who has no goals in life at all, that’s another problem. But even when someone does have value for certain things, he also doesn’t always pursue what he values. People tend to give excuses why they don’t pursue their goals. But excuses do not build you in life.

The Chofetz Chaim said that Torah and mitzvos are called garments (levushim), as the Zohar says; they are like our clothing. A person might come up to Heaven after he dies and claim that he didn’t learn enough Torah and do the mitzvos and he can have the best excuses, but they will tell him, “You have very good excuses. But the fact is that you don’t have any clothing on you.” If a person is walking through Tel Aviv and he is not wearing his clothing, he might give the best excuses in the world, but the fact is, he’s not wearing clothing. It’s inexcusable, no matter how many excuses he gives and no matter how much he claim that it wasn’t his fault.

Excuses cannot build our life. If a person says that his life is about a certain goal but he does not pursue it, he will not develop in his life. The daily schedule of a person has to reflect what a person values. Otherwise, a person will never reach what he values.

This is not philosophy. It is to live, practically speaking, about what you value – and to schedule your day around trying to get it. Don’t do this because I’m telling you so. Let this decision come from yourself – you need to decide, personally, what you really want of our life, and to let your goal carry over into your daily life.

This is how you work on focusing on one thought. It is by knowing about what you mainly want, and then by trying to get it on a daily basis, with conscious awareness that you’re trying to get it.

Centeredness

For example, let’s say a person feels that the main thing he needs to work on in his life is acquiring a lev tov, a “good heart.” If that is what he feels is the most important quality to have in life, then he should take this seriously and let it become his constant thought throughout the day.

Such a person should live by his ideals and greet each person with “Good morning” – he should greet every person, with no exaggeration. We all say “Good Morning” to each other, but it is often without awareness. If you consider lev tov to be your main focus, then when you say “Good Morning”, say it with intention that the person should really have a good day.

The Alter of Slobodka would work on this. Once he was seen practicing saying “Good morning” to himself when no one was around. When asked why, he said that it was because he was trying to acquire a lev tov and put himself in that positive frame of mind. His main focus of the day was on acquiring a lev tov.

From morning until night, be focused on one point. You do many things in between, but as long as you are focused on one point, you entire day will be connected through this one ‘string’ that holds it all together.

When a person build a house, it has to be built sensibly. The bricks must be stacked in a certain way. They must connected properly. There are people who do many wonderful things throughout the day, but their actions don’t connect. There is no structure in their life, nothing connecting together all the good actions they do.

How can a person think only one thought the whole day? Isn’t this impossible? How does our life allow this when we have so many things to do? 

It means for a person to do each thing he does with an awareness: “I am doing this because of one reason alone [fill in the goal that you are aiming for]”. It can be about a goal you consider the most important, or it could be about the desire to reveal your Yechidah. But in whatever you do, you must do each action with awareness that you are trying to get to your goal.

To give an example, let’s say a person is working on improving his patience. How can a person think all day about patience? It means as follows. He gets up in the morning slowly and calmly, and he walks slowly and calmly. (Most people, unless they are very lazy, run). When he eats, he should do so calmly, and when he thinks, he thinks calmly. He does everything in this calm way, slowly getting used to the middah of patience. (This is a very high level to be on.) The whole day by him should be all about patience.

The same goes for a person who feels that the most important thing is to doing things enthusiastically. All of his actions throughout the day should be about improving this area. He should do things quickly. All day, he should view his actions as being a means of getting himself to move quickly.

It is hard for a person to know where to improve on first, for any normal person who looks deeply into himself and makes a self-accounting.

Many people want to grow spiritually, but they don’t reach their goals. Why not? It is because they don’t think about what their most important priority is that they want to grow in. They don’t clarify how much they should really work to acquire a certain point. They just take one point in spirituality and work on it, seeking to grow in it – but they don’t work on this point throughout the day.

In order to improve, it has to be a point which is very important to you which you consider to be priority. It’s not enough that you consider it important; it has to be what you consider to be the main thing you want to work on. It has to be thought about throughout the whole day. You can rest of course; you are allowed to rest between all the goal-oriented actions. But don’t try to work on other areas except for the main point you are working on, and make sure that you return to focusing on that goal after you get up from taking a break.

When people don’t focus on what they really want to work on, they start working on a bunch of areas of self-improvement all at once, and they aren’t focused on what they really want to work on; and this leads to giving up on ever growing at all in anything.

Improving Our Actions and Thoughts

So we need to focus throughout the day on what we do, and on what we think.

When it comes to our actions, a person shouldn’t do two things at once. Be focused on what you do right now. Do one thing the whole day and be focused on it. Of course, the house is noisy and can hamper your focus. I can’t solve this problem. But you should still strive for this goal.

When a person isn’t focused on what he’s doing at the moment, it seems that it’s just a lack of paying attention to what he does, but really it is a much bigger problem – it makes him lose his soul.

A person should improve his thoughts by only doing actions that are done with thought. He should do every action throughout the day with the same awareness. The point is to do something, then stop, and then continue to do it. It helps you become consciously aware throughout the day of why you live. Most people are not actually trying to get to the goal of life, even though they can know what it is.

In Conclusion

So when you get up in the morning, the first thought in your head should be about the goal of the day. This should be clarified to yourself before you get up.

This is how we access the Yechidah: by doing one thing alone. Man was created “individual”, to show that he must involve himself with one thing alone – that all of his actions should be directed to one goal alone. It is a conscious awareness throughout the day of what goal we live for.

When you live this way, there is almost no need to make a self-accounting at the end of the day, because you will already be living with a conscious awareness and you will be well-aware of your successes and failures as they happen.

So you have to figure out which area in spirituality you consider to be the most important to work on, and then upon discovering what it is, you should focus on that area the whole day. When you get used to thinking like this, and when you concentrate on one point throughout the day, you will be able to reveal what you truly want. This is the thought you need to think about what you get up in the morning throughout the rest of the day as well.

We really all have one will - the desire to become attached to Hashem. Why is it that we want other things? It is only because we are unfocused. Once we developing the power of inner focus and we remain focused on one goal throughout the day that we want to acquire, we will draw ourselves closer and closer to want the innermost desire of the soul, which is the desire to do Hashem’s Will.