Any Experience – Our Mental Construct

 

Daily we go through a range of experiences, including happiness and sadness. All experiences occur in our minds. Our bodies cannot produce any experience as evidenced during local or general anesthesia, when sensory signals are blocked from reaching the brain. Are these experiences real, or simply our mind’s construct? Let’s investigate.

Every experience starts with a ‘thought’, that may be triggered by what we perceive through our five sense organs or by delving into past memory or by  exercising our future imagination/anticipation. This thought may draw our attention to itself. Our attention is like a flashlight – it illumines whatever it is directed to. When we allow our attention to feed this thought, it grows into certain emotion that produces corresponding experiences.

Clearly, any thought from the past memory or future anticipation cannot lead to ‘real’ experience, because past is ‘dead’ and the future is not yet ‘born’. Such an experience is simply made-up by the mind. If we stop the mind from indiscriminately drifting into past memory or future anticipation, we will stop having such experiences. This doesn’t mean we don’t use the power of our memory and imagination. It simply means that we need not live what is already dead or not yet born through indiscriminate thinking which produces experiences of happiness, sadness, anxiety, fear, etc. We must use our memory and imagination as tools to solve a problem at hand or develop a future strategy/plan.

This leaves us with the ‘present’. The problem with the present is that it cannot be captured. It is so fleeting that by the time you catch it, it is gone. We see something and claim that I am seeing it ‘now’. In reality, the process of light reflecting from an object, entering eyes, and creating a mental picture of the object causes a certain delay, however small it may be. That means, we can never claim that I am seeing it ‘now’. The same thing goes for all the other sensory organs through which we ‘perceive’ the present.

Our perception, therefore, is never in the present and never accurate representation of what is ‘out’ there due to the inherent limitations of our sense organs and the medium in which they operate. Any thought arising out of this perception is further conditioned by our many beliefs, biases, and memories. Further, we must pay sufficient attention to this thought to create an experience. Therefore, it is clear that this experience is also a creation of the mind, and not a reflection of the ‘truth’. This also explains why different people react differently to the same situation.

So, what happens in the present and how do we deal with it? Is there a possibility of ‘real’ experience, not born out of mind?

This is a matter of subjective enquiry.

Even though mental perception is never a reflection of the present moment, we cannot deny our own presence in the present moment. Finding our own presence in the present moment is, perhaps, the only ‘real’ experience. And, if we are able to have this experience moment to moment, then this moment turns into eternity – beyond time, space, and causation. We realize our true self and live in eternity.