Papañca evolves from the smallest moments of sensory experience, but acquires a life of its own and then takes over sensory experience as a tool of its own perpetuation. When a sense impression impinges on consciousness, a minute binary emotional reaction occurs, which leads to some bit of perceptual construction, then reasoning. Without some awareness …
The Abhidharma is vital in this way because it explains everything we can experience without needing to refer to a self or personal agent at all. Complex emotions and other psychological experiences that we knit into a self are composed of mental factors that surround the quick, basic action of consciousness touching on an object. …
The Abhidharma Helps The Self-Concept Feel Useless Read More »
Because the early Buddhists could see psychological processes with such finesse, they could see time processes microscopically and astronomically compared to us. Our scale of psychological and time perception is conveyed in our language. We describe thoughts and feelings and moods that are usually on the scale of minutes. We can take this down by …