{press play}
The Relationship of the Organism to Its Environment
The Ego Boundary. The ego boundary is not a fixed thing. If it is fixed, then it again becomes character, or armor, like on the turtle. The ego boundary is the differentiation between the self and the other.
1. The two phenomena of the ego boundary are identification and alienation.
2. So inside the ego boundary, there is generally cohesion, love, cooperation; outside the ego boundary there is suspician, strangeness, unfamiliarity.
3. The polarity of attraction and rejection: of appetite and disgust. There is always polarity going on, and inside the boundary we have the feeling of familiarity, of right; outside is strangeness, and wrong. Inside is good and bad; right and wrong is always a matter of boundary, of which side of the fence I am on.
4. The wish to change is based upon the phenomena of dissatisfaction. Every time you want to change yourself, or you want to change the environment, the basis is always dissatisfaction.
5. Hate is a function of kicking somebody out of the boundary for something---alienation, disowning.
If some of our thoughts, feelings, are unacceptable to us, we want to disown them. There are many of these kinds of ways to remain intact, but always only at the cost of disowning many, many valuable parts of ourselves. The fact that we live only on such a small percentage of our potential is due to the fact that we are not willing---or society or whatever you want to call it, it is not willing---to accept myself, yourself, as the organism that you are by birth, constitution, and so on.
You do not allow yourself---or you are not allowed---to be totally yourself. So your ego boundary shrinks more and more. Your power, your energy becomes smaller and smaller. Your ability to cope with the world becomes less and less---and more and more rigid, more and more allowed only to cope as your character, as your preconceived pattern prescribes it.
A living organism is an organism that consists of thousands and thousands of processes that require interchange with other media outside the boundary of the organism. So something has to happen to get through the boundary, and this is what we call contact.
We touch, we get in contact, and we stretch our boundary out to the thing in question. If we are rigid and can’t move, then it remains there.
When we live, we spend energies; we need energies to maintain this machine. This process of exchange is called the metabolism. Both the matabolism of the exchange and of our organism with the environment, and the metabolism within our organism, is going on continually, day and night.....
The important thing to remember and to understand is that AWARENESS, per se---by itself and of itself--- can be curative. Because with full awareness you become aware of this organismic self-regulation; you can let the organism take over without interfering, without interrupting; we can rely on the wisdom of the organism. And the contrast to this whole pathology of self-manipulation, environmental control, and so on, which interferes with this subtle organismic self-control.
Our manipulation of ourselves is usually dignified by the word "conscience," which is nothing but a fantasy, a projection onto the parents. The "road to hell is paved with good intentions," and any intention towards idealistic change wil achieve the opposite---the New Year’s resolutions, the desperation of trying to be different, the attempt to control oneself, and so forth.
If we are willing to stay in the center of our world, and not have the center either in our computer or somewhere else, but really in the center, then we are ambidextrous---then we see the two poles of every event. We see that light cannot exist without non-light. If there is sameness, you can’t be aware anymore. If there is always light, you don’t experience light anymore. You have to have the rhythm of light and darkness.
{Artist of Life ~ Bruce Lee}
{all images linked}
