The Thin Veneer of Mind
La delgada capa de la mente
A reflection on how mental representation dominates our sense of reality, and what happens when, even for a moment, that layer falls away.
The Thin Veneer of Mind
A reflection on how mental representation dominates our sense of reality, and what happens when, even for a moment, that layer falls away.
The hallucination of mind is the thin veneer on reality. One way to really prove this to yourself is to ask yourself, and sit with it as an exploration: if I were not able to use or access memory, what would my experience of this moment be?
You would have to remove the entire map, because it is all based on memory. This doesn't mean we function without it. But seeing this flips the balance of what we take reality to be. We started building that map from so young, from the earliest months of life, and over time it became reality. Everything that belongs to the map now constitutes ninety-nine percent of our experience, what we think life and reality literally is.
Relating to images, not to things
We are relating to the image of the hand, the image of the sound, the image of the road, the image of the other person, the image of myself. All mental representation. The mind has this ability; that is why we can talk to ourselves. You can think of the sound of a bird and you will hear it. The mind is doing this constantly with everything, right now.
When the mapping stops
What can happen is that mental representation stops for even a moment, for one second. Gone. And then it comes back. In that second, you can see: oh, that is what reality is.
We can come to this slowly, gradually, through the process of meditation. Sometimes it happens as a sudden interruption. There are different levels at which that interruption can occur, different depths at which the mental mapping can stop.
After the interruption
Once that has happened, it is hard to go back to treating the map as ninety or ninety-nine percent of reality, because you simply know it is not. You know that reality exists before the map even appears. Whenever you then notice the mapping arise, you just know: oh, that is just this one-percent aspect of reality, the mental mapping.
And then something shifts. The map becomes in service of your functioning, rather than being assumed as reality itself. Before that shift, you are in service of the map, constantly preserving its construction. Afterward, it serves you.