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 stan… - Ken Wilber

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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 stans, 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.

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About Ken Wilber

Kenneth Earl Wilber Jr. (born 31 January 1949) is an American author who writes on psychology, philosophy, mysticism, ecology, and spiritual evolution. His work formulates what he calls an "integral theory of consciousness". He is a leading proponent of the integral movement and founded the Integral Institute in 1998.

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Also Known As

Alternative Names: Kenneth Earl Wilber II Kenneth Earl "Ken" Wilber Junior
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Additional quotes by Ken Wilber

Human beings undergo psychological development. At each level or stage of development, they will see the world in a different way. Hence, each level of development has, as it were, a different religious belief or worldview. This does not make God or Spirit the result of human development; it does, however, make the ways in which humans conceive of God or Spirit the result of development. And this is where it gets really interesting.

Thus, to see all memory as present experience is to collapse the boundaries of this present moment, to free it of illusory limits, to deliver it from the opposites of past vs. future. It becomes obvious that there is nothing behind you in time nor before you in time. You thus have nowhere to stand but in the timeless present, and thus nowhere to stand but in eternity.

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