On Mannequins, Portraits and Karma: A Prelude to Ethics

Here we begin with a question put to your memory. Have you ever seen a portrait where the eyes of a person being portrayed seem to follow you? As you move from one side to another the eyes follow as if the person was actually looking at you, or so it seems. Some might even think it creepy. Now, have you ever been, say, in a store or a place where we might find a mannequin? Have you ever said "excuse me" to a mannequin? Have you ever perceived a mannequin as a living person, even if it was just for a split-second? How are two situations like this possible? What might this tell us about our human experience? What must be happening for that experience to occur? What might we learn about experience that will help us, at the very least, to minimize the difficulties that we face as sentient beings?

A look at these experiences may function as a heuristic opening a door to the realization that it is in and through our own experience that other living beings become what and who they are and bear the meanings they appear to embody. In a very immediate sense, sentience may be granted to a mannequin. It does happen that we may perceive an insentient mannequin as a sentient being, a person. Or we may perceive a painting as being haunted when its eyes appear to follow us as we move through a room.

The sentience-granting function of our own pure form of subjectivity, i.e., the manner in which we feel alive as the I-am sense, is immediately attributed as the sentient other or, as Edmund Husserl has said, "constitutes" the other, by our own sense of self-existence at that very moment. All others, in this sense, live through us. We are truly the "lights unto the world(s)." This process lives in each and every conscious moment of our existence. In one critical but obscured and forgotten sense, there is the experiential possibility of seeing that the sentient other--and this includes more than I will state here--is, in a very real sense, an embodiment of your own pure form of self or radical subjectivity.  


What the others are or become is granted or imputed by our own repertoire of beliefs and concepts that have been historically given by the past (incarnate) acts of others and our own contributions. This repertoire or storehouse of knowledge results from the prior incarnate acts--including experiences which are also acts in their own way--of sentient beings. This past lives within us and functions to constitute our present experience in our intention-filled acts toward an anticipated future. All acts are incarnate and remain with us in fractal-like sediment of a living past. In this sense, the past may be said to live in each act seeking fulfillment as intentional acts. This is what is called by Buddhists and Yogis karma. The past is alive constituting the present toward an anticipated future. These intentional acts not only constitute present circumstances but the living others in our experience. Who people or other sentient beings become (their what) is the doing of living past acts (karma) as incarnated in each and every circumstance we face.

At this point, it almost goes without saying that the circumstances we face result from past acts. We face these circumstances intentionally. Not as free agents willing what is but as embodiments of past acts that aim toward.  Our desires, i.e., intentionality, will organize the circumstances based on what either fulfills or thwarts the intentions. The future is an intended future that lives now as experience moves as time. Time, in this sense of the term, is synonymous with the ephemeral movement of experience structured by past actions of body, speech, and mind. Each moment is organized by the past toward an intended future and as an evanescent appearance and disappearance of phenomena--including the composition and dissolution of self-senses. These self-senses also incarnate ephemeral time ever appearing/disappearing. Selves are movements in dynamic meaningful circumstances organized within the appearing and disappearing intentional movements of experience or living. As the Buddha suggested, we may note five continually aggregating meaningful movements of perceptions, feelings, consciousnesses, intentions, and objectivities--intentionally structured ephemeral aggregations of experienced elements of earth, water, fire, air, and space, rise and fall as meaningful and intentional experience. As time, as experience, this happens too fast for the conceptualization process to account for. It attempts in vain to picture or freeze into ideas or concepts that either take stock of ephemeral experience in their fabrication or unintentionally overlook the manner in which experience occurs, based on axiomatic historically driven presuppositions that give rise to deleterious outcomes, i.e., suffering. One of the major axioms in place is the notion that we are a self within a material universe that exists independently of its constituting and dynamic elements. We ignore karma at our peril, as should be evident by now.

A careful look at the conceptualization process itself reveals it to be one ephemeral element of the movement of experience as time. Concepts rise and fall in relation to circumstances and their ephemerality and their historical constitution are overlooked in favor of attending to them as referential. What they say about becomes more important than what they mean and are. The danger of the about is not seen as they perform well for the notions of self and world that they seem to refer to as a result of mistaken usages of their heredity.

Of course and as always this examination will remain incomplete for readers to make of it what they may. History, intentions (intentionality), prior acts will not only weigh in

This is an unedited version.