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18
Hermann Kuhn
But let's see what our consciousness is doing with us and how little we control this process.
How often while reading a book did we have to go over one particular paragraph again and again because our attention was drifting to some other subject? We wanted to read, but our selection process directed our attention towards something entirely different. Certainly, - the words reached our eyes, but they didn't get through to our awareness. Something was closing the book to our attention, even though we didn't want to.
How often are we driving a car with our thoughts here, there, anywhere, but definitely not on the road? Did we ever ask ourselves who actually is steering the car?
How often did we attend lectures - just remember school, - and our awareness wandered far from what the speaker was presenting? - Who or what made us leave the speaker's words and let us drift into a different world? It certainly wasn't something we controlled.
And these are only rather trivial examples. How often did we reject our intuition though it was yelling at us and later proved, it was dead right? How often did we follow our intuition? But who or what made that pro or con decision in each single instance?
What makes us draw back from risks, - or go for it? What motivates us to do things we do not want to do? What makes us say a glass is half full as do the optimists, or half empty, as do the pessimists? Who or what made all these myriad decisions that brought us to our present state? - Was it really the 'I' we seem so familiar with?
But what about those two, three important decisions in our life where we knowingly chose one particular path over so many others, - did we really have as much control as we
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