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THE NOTION OF GROWTH
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joy etc. are implied without needing to be specifically mentioned.
All events that happen in the present also express everything that brought about their appearance. Origin, content, emotions, associations, projections, concepts, - all this resonates within us as well when we observe an event. That we are mostly unaware of this is simply because we never put our attention on this comprehensive aspect of the present and the immense potential it offers.
In the Western hemisphere we focus mainly on the fleeting aspect of the present. We see time as a line that comes from an infinite past and runs into an equally infinite future. In these seemingly gigantic masses of past and future the present takes up such a minute point, it seems almost a miracle that we perceive it at all.
Yet this again is only a concept. It is only our very idea of time that produces this devaluation of the present. We arbitrarily take that part of the present we feel familiar with and define it as 'the past'. We take our expectations and hopes and define it as 'the future'. The little that remains we either assign to the present or discard it because we don't know where to put it. It is only this concept that makes us regard past and future as so important and domineering that we allow them to overshadow major sections of our present.59
59 We usually even define ourselves on the basis of our past. We take
bygone experiences and project them into our future. We regard events as inevitable only because we are familiar with the way they happened in the past and because we want to believe that they would do the same in the future.
The statement e.g. 'I am unhappy (now)' describes a negative experience in the present. The experience might be over in a sec
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