I am a person who continually destroys the possibilities of a future because of the numbers of alternative viewpoints I can focus on the present.
Interpretation
This quote highlights how the ability to see multiple perspectives can hinder our ability to focus on the present and move towards the future.
Doris Lessing's quote reflects on the paradox of having a plethora of viewpoints and options. While it can be beneficial to consider different perspectives, the constant analysis of possibilities may lead to indecision and prevent one from fully engaging with the present moment. This suggests that the ability to think critically can sometimes create barriers to personal progress and fulfillment.
In practice
In a discussion about decision-making, you could quote this to illustrate how overthinking can hinder progress.
In the writing process, the more the story cooks, the better. The brain works for you even when you are at rest. I find dreams particularly useful. I myself think a great deal before I go to sleep and the details sometimes unfold in the dream.
Humanity's legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences. At the very simplest, it can be: 'He/she was born, lived, died.' Probably that is the template of our stories - a beginning, middle, and end. This structure is in our minds.
There is a great line of women stretching out behind you into the past, and you have to seek them out and find them in yourself and be conscious of them.
The World War I, I'm a child of World War I. And I really know about the children of war. Because both my parents were both badly damaged by the war. My father, physically, and both mentally and emotionally. So, I know exactly what it's like to be brought up in an atmosphere of a continual harping on the war.
You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn't care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can't be a way of life - the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.
When a white man in Africa by accident looks into the eyes of a native and sees the human being (which it is the chief preoccupation to avoid), his sense of guilt, which he denies, fumes up in resentment and he brings down the whip.
In Italy, the country where fascism was born, we have a particular relation with the Holocaust, but as a turning point in history it belongs to everybody in the world. It is a part of humanity.
The market is not an invention of capitalism. It has existed for centuries. It is an invention of civilization.
Prepare yourself for the coming astral journey of death by daily riding in the balloon of God-perception. Through delusion you are perceiving yourself as a bundle of flesh and bones, which at best is a nest of troubles. Meditate unceasingly, that you may quickly behold yourself as the Infinite Essence, free from every form of misery. Cease being a prisoner of the body; using the secret key of KRIYA, learn to escape into Spirit.
Man lives consciously for himself, but is an unconscious instrument in the attainment of the historic, universal, aims of humanity.
Material possessions, winning scores, and great reputations are meaningless in the eyes of the Lord, because He knows what we really are and that is all that matters.
All that we "know" is what registers on our brains, so what you perceive (your individual reality-tunnel) is made up of nothing but thoughts—as Sir Humphrey Davy noted when self-experimenting with nitrous oxide in 1819, and as Buddha noticed by sitting alone until all his social imprints atrophied and dropped away.
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