Karma v Living in the Present

Written by Mathew Naismith

I think most of us realise we can’t live in the past but can we just live in the present without learning form the past? Recently I came across a post about being in the present, the thing that struck me is it said about the past being obsolete, once we learn to live in the present does this make the past obsolete?  The following was my reply…..

There is a cliché to this, if we can’t learn from the past how are we going to learn in the present, we will make the same mistakes over and over again which human history shows quite plainly.

The only reason we have a past is to learn from it, what would be the point in having a past otherwise!! I do believe however not all realities have a past or future, life’s always conducted to the present moment, that is not the case for us however. I don’t believe we are at that point in being able to live just for the present, we are getting slightly ahead of ourselves I believe. Yes I believe we are collectively entering into this phase but we must be aware in not getting ahead of ourselves. Again if we can’t learn from the past it is obvious we are not going to learn from the present, this is karmic, we can’t avoid this karma, karma is there for us to learn from.

We are getting ahead of ourselves in many areas  which is actually a good sign we are entering into this new phase of only living for the present, however we must beware we are getting ahead of ourselves  otherwise we will never get to only living for  the present, it will always be at arm’s length.

To me it would seem we haven’t learnt from our past collectively so how can we go onto the next phase of our conscious development at the soul level to living in the present?  It would seem to me we can’t mainly because we haven’t collectively payed our karmic debt, this is obvious due to the fact we haven’t still learnt everything from our past. We are still making the same mistakes so we still have a karmic debt to pay and the only way to pay this debt is to learn from our past.  This is very much in line with our own karma; we can’t go on unless we have learnt from our past lives. 

Can we then live in the present while learning from the past? Yes I believe so.  Learning from the past is different to living in the past though, learning from the past is karmic but living in the past is living old karmic debts that are already payed.  So how can you tell the difference between karma that’s already payed to karma that isn’t?  Are we still using the same destructive mentality than we did a thousand years ago collectively? In a lot of ways no but in other ways yes, warring is a good example of this and so is slavery and so on. Actually we have boosted a number of old destructive mentalities so really at the collective level we still have a fair amount of karma to pay before we go on collectively to the next phase of human spiritual development.   Yes we can seemingly achieve the next phase of living in the present but this is only at the personal level, none of us are about the personal but the collective and I do say seemingly because living personally in the present is transitory.  Anything that is personal is transitory because the next life you live you will be right back to paying the collective karmic debt again. If you keep living in this personal transitory state from life to life, you haven’t assisted the collective to pay it’s debts and if you haven’t helped in this how is your own karmic debt payed?

All we really need to do is be aware of the collective karmic debt and do our best to clear this debt.  We also need to remember, we have all helped to create this collective karmic debt in our past lives, past life recall is a good way to clear this debt personally, so the past isn’t obsolete after all until we pay our debts personally and collectively. You could say by clearing our own personal debt we are assisting in the collective debt, to me that would be correct in my assumptions however living personally in the present while thinking the past is obsolete isn’t the way to go because we still haven’t paid our collective debt.  

As long as there is a collective debt to pay, personally living just in the present isn’t going to help the collective at all and will only help prolong this karmic debt paying.  Try not to ever think while living in the present the past is obsolete, it’s not as long as there is a karmic debt to pay personally and collectively.  True spirituality has never been about the personal self, it’s has always been about the collective, the collective self.