"Because we demand a future, we live each moment in expectation and unfulfillment. We live each moment in passing. In just this way the real nunc sans, the timeless present, is reduced to the nunc fluens, the fleeting present, the passing present of a mere one or two seconds. We expect each moment to pass on to a future moment, for in this fashion we pretend to avoid death by always rushing toward an imagined future. We want to meet ourselves in the future. We don't want just now--we want another now, and another, and another, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. And thus, paradoxically, our impoverished present is fleeting precisely because we demand that it end! We want it to end so that it can thereby pass on to yet another moment, a future moment, which will in turn live only to pass."
Ken Wilber in No Boundary
2 comments:
So basically, he's saying that there is a disturbance in the space-time continuum, and the disturbance is us?
These statements about human time-boundedness and our yearning to escape to some unattainable future (since we can only live in the present) get tiresome after a while. They appear trenchant, but they're mostly meaningless upon even modest analysis. For instance, what about all the carpe diem exhortations? All kinds of folks are living for the present these days, considering how we intuit there may be no future worth planning for.
There is a disturbance in my bodymind (spacetime?)- namely that my mind (time?) is taking up most of my awareness, to the point where it is projecting images of my body over actual awareness of my body (space?).
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