The answer is in the question !
What is an individual ? The word individual means indivisible, unified, healthy. Yet we are fragmented beings, divided and conditioned by words, images and memories. We have been operating from a full hard disk, in the past, and there is nothing virtuous about what we do. It even seems that everything we touch becomes a source of conflict and suffering.
We are the content of our consciousness, that is to say fears, traumas, knowledge, experiences, certainties, ideologies, wounds, fears etc. We are an accumulation of sensations linked to the past and to memory.
Therefore, these conditionings dictate everything we do. We might as well say that we are what we have been, and that we will be what we are, slightly modified. The past modifying the present, and the present altering tomorow. So we are prisoners of time, of the past. This is how "traditional" thinking works. It would therefore appear to be a form of fatalism, right ? On closer inspection, we can observe that thought gives rise to the ego, to images and the fragmentation of the latter. Because it functions from the known, and can therefore only generate the known.
But should it be so ? Is it possible to free oneself from psychological time and the ego ? Is it possible to be of the present moment, which is new and unspoiled ? Yes it is possible, and that is in total attention alone. When we understand the psychological mechanisms linked to the construction of the ego. When the ego is silent and we understand the disorder generated by the latter, then we discover what order is. That puts an end to time and traditional thinking. Then a quality of attention is possible, and a new form of unconditional action can emerge.
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