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THE NOTION OF GROWTH
we all encountered situations - often with intense frustration - where words are entirely inadequate to convey more complex meaning.
The names and expressions used on the plane of articulation can be quite unrelated to their real meaning. Modern advertisement for example likes to use the expression 'You save ... dollars' in an attempt to motivate us to buy a certain object. Yet when we accept this offer, we primarily experience a loss of money and not an increase in our savings account as the word 'save' really denotes.
- The plane of mental structure (sthapana). On this plane we build and maintain the ideas and concepts that form our personal reality. Here our selection-process takes place. Here we chose from the constant barrage of billions of inner and outer stimuli those few impulses we permit to get through to our awareness.
The mental structure within us determines how much of reality we perceive and how clear or distorted it appears to us. Our mental structure contains the preconceptions and patterns we position like a filter between our consciousness and the objects and events we selected for perception.
On this plane we e.g. perceive someone who would be judged ugly in a particular social environment as the most beautiful person in the world - if we are in love with him or her. Here we determine whether we see a glass as half full or half empty, i.e. whether we generally interpret events as conducive to our growth - optimistically, - or as a-pessimistic - confirmation of a general decline.
Our preconceptions and patterns may even be so far removed from the existing reality that we perceive the en
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