I think the title of this post is also a title of a book by J. Krishnamurti, but I didn’t get my topic from that. In fact, I got it from a book called Opening the Hand of Thought, by Kosho Uchiyama. And in one of those serendipitous ways, I recently read an unrelated book, Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert, a Harvard psychologist, that connected directly to the “thought in hand.”

A relevant excerpt from Opening the Hand of Thought is:

Usually people assume they are born onto a stage or into a world that already exists, that they dance around on stage for a while, and then leave when they die. Actually, though, when I am born, I give life to my world as well! I live together with that world; therefore, that world forms the contents of my self. Then when I die, I take the world with me; that is, my world dies with me.

The relevant excerpt from Stumbling on Happiness is:

The three-and-a-half pound meat loaf between our ears is not a simple recording device, but a remarkably smart computer that gathers information, makes shrewd judgments and even shrewder guesses, and offers us its best interpretation of the way things are. Because those interpretations are usually so good, because they usually bear such a striking resemblance to the world as it is actually constituted, we do not realize we are seeing an interpretation. Instead, we feel as though we are sitting comfortably inside our heads, looking out through the clear glass window of our eyes, watching the world as it truly is. We tend to forget that our brains are talented forgers, weaving a tapestry of memory and perception whose detail is so compelling that its inauthencity is rarely detected. In a sense, each of us is a counterfeiter who prints phony dollar bills and then happily accepts them for payment, unaware that he is both the perpetrator and victim of a well-orchestrated fraud. As you are about to see, we sometimes pay a steep price for allowing ourselves to lose sight of this fundamental fact, because the mistake we make when we momentarily ignore the filling-in trick and unthinkingly accept the validity of our memories and our perceptions is precisely the same mistake we make when we imagine our futures.

To me, those two statements are a succinct summary of the Buddhist teaching on how the mind works – on how it ends up tangled in its own concepts.

The things I do not perceive in my world simply do not exist for me. The scope and substance of existence as I know it came into being with my first consciousness, and will die with my death. The world as I know it will die when I die. That’s not hyperbole. That’s an actual fact.

We live in a personal world, only able to shrewdly infer from our own minds what the world of others must be like. We cannot do the Vulcan mind meld to transcend the gulf that separates our world from others. Our minds learn to do reasonably well in dealing with others’ worlds, but it is critically important to understand that we are only imaginatively tripping through our own mind when and if we conclude we know another’s.

We as human beings mostly do not live in any directly real world. Our mental world is mostly an imaginative state of being, spun by the very fine human brains we have inherited genetically. In a somewhat ironic way, our very fine brains can in fact remedy their own fraud. Dedicated, careful, honest mindfulness can gradually help us distinguish the difference between reality and our own stories built out of wishes, hopes, fears, guesses, memory, and the remnants of sensory input that elude filters put in place to make life simpler for us.