Notion of Growth

Author(s): Hermann Kuhn
Publisher: Crosswind Publishing Germany

Page 34

THE NOTION OF GROWTH
17
And they are perfectly right: What they describe is their reality. It is one of the many possible answers.
Yet what about the following situation?
Every second billions and billions of stimuli meet our senses - the color and structure of the walls, the hardness of the chair we are sitting on, the different scents we smell, the sounds we hear around us, the dry taste in our mouth, some vague uncomfortable sensation inside our body, worries and thoughts that zip through our mind, some unrest, emotion so fleeting that we are unable to assign it to any concrete experience - all this and much more reaches our inner and outer sense-organs. And how do we react to this? We close out this whole universe and direct our entire attention towards the rows of black letters on the white paper in front of us - and actually not even towards the printed words, but to the meaning that kind of surfs on top of the black letters and just happens to stimulate our mind.
So now where is our reality of working, eating, drinking, sleeping, etc.?
Out of the billions of impulses presented to us second after second, we select a minute amount of material that we allow to get through to us, to our awareness. We couldn't possibly attend to all the rest because it would overwhelm our consciousness and block us completely. We have to select. And this selection-process is so subtle, so automatic that we hardly ever notice it. Only sometimes, when we abruptly come out of deep concentration, we become aware of how much of our surroundings we had closed out.
Now, we might think that this type of selection is something we handle quite well, for example when we decide to read a book, to drive a car or to attend a lecture, - these are all activities that require a certain attention, a certain presence of mind.