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Filed in Tibetan

The Experience of Change

Interview with H.H. the Dalai Lama

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This interview was conducted by Daniel Goleman, a psychologist who writes for The New York Times and the author of Emotional Intelligence (Bantam).


DG: Does cultivating attention play a role in this?

HH: It does play a great role. If you have more attentiveness, if you have a fuller sense of presence, then it will make a great deal of difference in how you experience your life.

But then, you find that if you analyze time very precisely, there is no present, in a real sense of the word; only past and future, no present I The sense of present that we have is a conventional notion. Even if you employ a computer or some other instrument to divide time and analyze whether there was a present or not, you would find that there isn't. "Present" is a relative term. While in experience there seems to be nothing but the present, we actually experience only the illusion of the present.

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