The Present Moment: ~ 1970-07 J.G. Bennett

Description

excerpt:

“There is a way to look at something we have not yet put into this picture we are developing -and that is, “what is it that makes all this work?”

In the simplest state it is the will of a man who says, “I am going to start this enterprise and can grow with it; I see ahead and I will commit myself to carrying it through.” In that way he creates a certain fatality which then comes into existence with certain compromises in fact which he is not able to control and this vision becomes reality.

Every one of us has this capacity for turning visions into realities, but some of you do it on a smaller scale; some of you do it on a bigger scale. What is required for this is the quality that we describe like decision, commitment, will; it’s these particular qualities and the conditions under which they are able to operate that we want to examine now.

First of all, my decision depends upon the content of my mind and my past experience ­what I remember -the traces of my past life as left in me. This applies to me as an individual; it applies to a group of people; it applies to an incorporated body. That is, it carries with it at any given moment a trace and we call it a trace of the past; we talk of memories of the past. None of us knows what the word past really means in the sense we don’t know whether the past exists or doesn’t exist. All we actually know is that we have got something that we call memory that we feel ourselves influenced and constrained by what we know and by what we don’t know. This is merely one element in this decision making or exercise of will.”