Friday, November 15, 2019

A-prehension

Entities that experience through the senses 
but have not yet realized Buddha-hood are
called sentient beings. These beings exist
in a state of apprehension, meaning their 
egos, (survival instinct in animals), get in the 
way of prehension, seeing things as they are,
in order that ego may survive and/or be 
augmented by the perceived phenomena.

The survival instinct, which develops naturally
into ego in humans, is a governor or limiting 
factor, whereby the ego struggles to fit 
experience into the dogma of it’s beliefs, and
learned assumptions. The ego fundamentally
suspects it doesn’t exist, from which 
apprehension springs, and also is the seed of
enlightenment, bodhicitta. From the desire to 
understand springs philosophy, dogmatic 
religion as well as scientific materialism, none
of which are helpful in knowing anything much.

Feeling separate, alienated from our lives is a
symptom generated by this apprehension that 
arises from the belief in a self. It is the seed of 
enlightenment because it is the inspiration of 
the beginning the Buddhist path, the path of the 
dissolution of the illusion of ego. 

Some people say: “What would I do without 
ego?” In Freudian terms, a healthy ego is the sign
of a healthy psyche. In reality, the illusion of self
is the only fundamental problem that human 
beings have. Without it, there is no time lag 
between prehension, intellect/intelligence, and
action. A dancer, a rap poet, and a professional 
basketball player don’t have to think before they 
act. In fact, they wouldn’t be able to perform 
those functions if they tried to think about them 
at the  same time. Actors cannot be in character 
and  refer back to themselves (“how am I doing?”) 
at the same time. Sometimes actors have the 
problem of not being able to get out of character.
Their character becomes their ego. A complex
recognized by Freud, called the “Jarry complex”,
was named after the actor who adopted his
character, Pere Ubu, and wandered the streets of
Paris as that character. George C, Scott had a 
nervous breakdown after playing Patton. Daniel 
Day Lewis had problems after “Gangs of New 
York.” 

Unenlightened humans have personalities, 
characters, that they have developed over the 
course of their upbringing. It doesn’t matter if 
that character thinks they are the greatest 
person in the world, or the most miserable 
wretch. Whether positive or negative, any 
flavor of self reference is just ego delusion. 




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