Yesterday morning, as we sipped coffee together, Robin and I were talking about the mind. I mentioned a talk about the brain I’d listened and the theory that the brain constructs and projects its own reality.
As she was commenting I had a sudden and strong feeling,… no, not a feeling, but an experience of anatta. Anatta is one of the three characteristics of existence (impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, no self). Anatta means “no self” or “not-self.” There is no self in the created or the uncreated, the teachings say.
I realized in that moment that what goes on in my mind is a fabrication, a mental construction of reality. What I think is not me, not who I am. The experience came and went quickly. But it was extraordinary.
Two questions have arisen. First, what does it mean? Second, how has it changed things for me?
Many thoughts have been swirling around the first question. My mind is a busy workshop where the raw materials of existence – thoughts – are assembled into what I think of as me. I am a creation of my own imagination. That doesn’t mean I don’t exist and the material world doesn’t exist. I do, it does. What’s not real is what I believe myself to be. A belief is just another mental fabrication, a thing manufactured by my imagination.
When my daughter was very young, we spent a lot of time together, some of which was watching televisions programs like “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.” Fred Rogers was a gentle man who seemed to understand just what it was like to be a child. He spoke to children as though they were not dumb little kids who need to be entertained, but little people with growing minds who had questions that needed answers. No baby-talk. No condescension. Part of his show involved what he called the Neighborhood of Make-Believe. Children love to make-believe, to pretend they are in a world of kings and queens and talking animals.
Little people grow up to be big people, and at some point they move from the neighborhood of make-believe into the neighborhood of reality. We flatter ourselves that we know what’s what. We know the truth.
But we don’t. We live in a world where we make believe that we are special, unique, in charge. Or the opposite. Stupid, mediocre, oppressed.
The ego (what did my ego look like before Sigmund Freud was born?), the ego is so busy in its workshop, building, building, building. I strive to make something of myself, to discover myself, to assert myself on the world. This is who I am, pay attention to me. I’m important.
What I saw in my brief moment of understanding was my own little neighborhood of make-believe. I also saw the futility of of trying to maintain the facade. My little “man behind the curtain” has been exposed.
How has it changed things for me? Today, I don’t know. I will attempt to answer that question next time.
2 Comments
Interesting post. All too often, this theory of mind-creating-reality is interpreted as solipsism–the belief that the world is literally created by mind.
More accurately, I think, what this means is that our perception of reality is always a mixture of mind-plus-objects-in-world. You cannot separate mind from the world.
A teacher explaining the concept of annatta to me put it this way: “It’s not that there is no such thing as “you.” But rather than a “you” that lies behind your experience, creating it; it is experience that creates “you.” You aren’t separate from your experience, but ARE your experience.”
Right, Mercurious. I think the world is interpreted by mind, not created by it. And, as you suggest, the perceiver and the object of perception must come together for awareness to take place. But one’s interpretation of self – and everything else in the world – is skewed. That’s delusion.
Thanks for the comment.