Chasidut su Salmi 16:8

‎“I place (shiviti) Hashem before me, always” (Tehillim 16:8). Shiviti is an expression of equating. ‎That is, every matter that arises before a person must be considered as equal. This is true when ‎others praise or denigrate someone, and so too with all other matters. Similarly, regarding food, ‎whether eating delicacies or anything else, all should be equal in one’s eyes, because the evil ‎inclination has been removed from him entirely. Whatever arises, a person must declare, “This too ‎is from Hashem, and if it is proper in His eyes, etc.,” and all of a person’s actions should be for the ‎sake of Heaven, although from the individual’s perspective there is no difference [between good ‎and bad events] at all. This is a very high level.‎ Every person must serve Hashem with all their strength, for it is all necessity, for Hashem desires ‎that people serve Him in every way. Meaning: there are times when a person engages in ‎conversation and is unable to learn Torah. At these times, a person must maintain focus on ‎Hashem and perform [Kabbalistic] yichudim. And when a person is going on the way and is unable ‎to pray or learn as usual, and one must find other ways in which to serve Hashem, one must never ‎be distraught about these things. Hashem wishes to be served in many ways, and therefore He ‎grants the opportunity to travel or converse in order to serve Hashem in that way. “Commit your ‎deeds to Hashem, and your thoughts will be established” (Mishlei 16:3). Everything that occurs, a ‎person should think that it is from Him.‎ It is appropriate for one to ask Hashem to always grant what Hashem knows to be in one’s best ‎interest, and not what a person thinks based on their own mind. It is possible that what is good in ‎one’s eyes could be detrimental. As such one should cast everything, all of one’s matters and ‎needs, upon Hashem.‎

“Blessings upon the head of a righteous man” (Proverbs 10:6). This is why the Talmud begins with Tractate Blessings (Berakhot), for it is the essence of everything: “Know the god of your father” (Chronicles I 28:9), and afterwards, “serve him,” for you have to know for whom you are serving. This is why a person says a blessing before each ritual act, to dedicate all of his actions to God, as the verse says, “In all your ways, know him” (Proverbs 3:6), as Maimonides wrote. This is accomplished by making the blessing, as the rabbis said the requirement [in terms of necessary age for making a blessing] is a child who knows to whom he is blessing (Bavli, Berakhot, 48a), as opposed to the rest of the mitsvot which have no requirement of knowing to whom one is making the blessing, such as phylacteries or the like. It is clear that the essence of a blessing is the knowledge of to whom the blessing is being made, and blessings were instituted for this purpose. This is the beginning of entering into Torah, as the verse says, “The beginning of wisdom is the fear of God” (Psalms 111:10). Fear of God is achieved through “I have placed God before me always” (Psalms 16:8), as Rabbi Moses Isserles wrote in a comment at the beginning of Oraḥ Ḥayyim. This explains why all blessings begin with direct, second-person, address (lashon nokhaḥ), because right at the beginning of the blessing God must be present (nokhaḥ) before a person’s eyes, as if God is standing in front of and commanding him. The conclusion is in third-person, because God immediately disappears, as the verse says, “Over his nestlings he hovers” (Deuteronomy 32:11), making contact and then moving away, as is known.

For example, in Hakhsharat haAvreikhim we already began to introduce ourselves to this avodah, by recognizing ourselves and the laws of our souls, to conquer them—especially in Chapter Nine, where we spoke of how since our natural law is that when we look at one thought, it dissipates, therefore we should use this law as well when a thought interferes with our thoughts during prayer—that we should look at the foreign thought, seizing it in our minds. Now, we might add to this, that through this knowledge we can identify another weakness which we sometimes encounter in our avodah and, by recognizing its foundation, know also how to heal it. As is known from the holy books, one should envision the Tetragrammaton before one’s eyes, in the sense of ‘I place God before me always.’⁵⁸⁴Psalm 16:8. It is a bad omen for him if one wants but is unable to do so; and in an manner which seems designed to frustrate, the more he wants and tries to do so, the more difficult it becomes. It is difficult for him to even see the image of one letter, as he worries about this, his forehead starting to sweat and yet he is unable. And yet, do you not already know from Hakhsharat haAvreikhim that even the most familiar image of your father or brother or son which are always in your imagination, including now—when you begin to think ‘What is now in my imagination? The image of my father. I want to imagine it well. Is his image truly in my imagination?’ then the image will weaken in your imagination and cease completely. The more you want and try to imagine it the more it disappears. Therefore, when you fashion a familiar image in your mind and begin to think ‘What is now in my imagination? I want to fashion it well’ etc, thereby strengthening his consciousness and human intellect, then his imaginative faculty becomes weakened and completely passes away.⁵⁸⁵It is only by understanding this psychological truism that a hasid can realize that at some point, the way to achieve meditative focus is by avoiding meta-cognition of the meditation itself.