[jmcmichael]

The recommendation 'Only live in the now' requires a differentiation between two types of thinking about the past and/or future. One can be involved in thinking about the future in one way, e.g. making concrete plans for achieving goals, remembering important dates - Eckhart Tolle calls this 'clock time'. One can also be occupied in thinking about the future from another perspective - re-enacting stories of guilt and anger from the past; fantasies about success or worries about future failures. Tolle calls this 'psychological time'.

In his book The Power of Now, he writes that we require clock time thinking to actually exist and achieve our goals in life. With clock time, we remain mostly in the present, with our goals and plans presently in our minds while we make logical choices about how to fit all that into the time available to us.

However, psychological time draws our mind away from the only period in time that actually exists: right now. We immerse ourselves into narratives about past guilts or wrongs, and get carried away with the feelings that arise. Or we fantasize about personal narratives of victory, power and wealth. Or wallow in anxious worry about all the horrors that could befall us in the future.

'Only live in the now' means primarily to give up meandering about in psychological time.

Regarding your other points - the past and future technically do not exist. Only the now exists - living only in the past or future would require one to be completely content in living in their own fantasy world.

[kakarot]

That is a good way to look at things.

Some people swear that imagining your future as a narrative, immersing yourself in it, can help you achieve your goals or illuminate flaws with your current plan.

And yet others swear this kind of thinking -- allowing ourselves to mentally reap the benefits of out labor before we actually complete it -- is harmful and satiates us to the point where we don't bother to achieve our goals because the rewards we seek are just an imaginative narrative away.

I find that each mentality suits different career paths and different people; there is no one correct answer.

But as for immersing yourself in past guilt...I find that this happens to me, and my rationality is that I deserve the guilt from my failures and misdeeds. That if I "live in the now" I am doing a disservice to those I may have wronged (even though they may have completely forgotten whatever it was by now and moved on).

I have trouble escaping this negative, self-hating mentality despite knowing it is folly.

It's easy for me to forgive myself for dropping the ball here and there, for missing opportunity, because I understand the power of negative vs positive thought loops. But it feels so selfish when I apply this mentality to my transgressions upon others. What do.

[jmcmichael]

Yes, I've struggled with very similar feelings about guilt over past misdeeds. I agree that feelings of guilt serve a critical function in modifying our future behavior such that we never do the actions that lead to us feeling guilty in the present moment.

However, those feelings of guilt become dysfunctional after we've learned our lesson. After we experience guilt, and resolve never to do again what caused the feelings of guilt, then we can let those feelings go - they've done their job. If they keep coming back, there exist practices which can take us deeper to reveal the obfuscated reasons for their recurrence. No reason to keep torturing one's self after the lesson has been learned.

[olejorgenb]

> But as for immersing yourself in past guilt...I find that this happens to me, and my rationality is that I deserve the guilt from my failures and misdeeds. That if I "live in the now" I am doing a disservice to those I may have wronged (even though they may have completely forgotten whatever it was by now and moved on).

> ...

> But it feels so selfish when I apply this mentality to my transgressions upon others.

I can relate.

I think that a certain amount of guilt is good, but it's not at all obvious how much is optimal. The guilt in itself doesn't help the ones hurt. I suspect strongly it's a lot less than people frequently immersing them-self in guilt employs though. Just accepting that it's a very hard optimization problem in a very uncertain domain is probably a good idea.

The appropriate amount of guilt is just enough to change future behavior. That is assuming the remorsed misdeed actually was our fault and not due due to circumstances out of our control.

The less clear the situation around the misdeed is, the less guilt is helpful. If it's hard to pinpoint what we actually could've done differently it's hard to induce change.

The best apology is changed behavior, etc.

Repeated micro-guilt is probably better than longer sessions of self-loating. (assoc.: spaced repetition) (Again - assuming high certainty about the nature of the misdeed - meaning also an initial analysis of the situation have been done)

Sometimes it's best to simply talk to the one we suspect we hurt :) Not always easy though.

In general it's frustrating how ineffective rationalizing such things is - personally I haven't found a better approach though.

A final assoc: one-line quotes like "Live in the now" is highly (lossy) compressed advises.