Creating the World

David Bohm, or was it Gregory Bateson?, I can’t remember and I’ve never been able to track it down, but one of them (I think) once said: The mind creates the world and then says ‘I didn’t do it.’ I read this somewhere, remembered it months later, then went back to try and find the exact quote and couldn’t. Maybe it was Krishnamurti or Ralph Waldo Emerson? No it was Einstein I think.

It’s funny, the cult of the quote in which we live. We collect fragments of meaning like shells on the beach. We gather the wet and glistening objects of beauty on our walks by the ocean or as we listen to some authority spout off in a TED talk or in a Dharma talk. We bring them home and keep them in a plastic bag in a drawer until we begin to wonder where the foul smell is coming from. Or perhaps we wash them off and carefully arrange them on our dresser or put them all in a jar. They are a lovely and inspiring reminder for a few weeks or months, but eventually they fall into the background and become invisible.

I myself am a stone collector and an incorrigible underliner of books. On my various adventures I have brought back more stones than I care to think about. Each stone and each phrase, picked up in a far away location is a treasure that, in the moment, represents some part of the beauty and poignancy of life. But everything, including precious stones and shells and quotes, seems to have a shelf life—an expiration date. They slowly (or quickly) pass from meaningful marker to more of the clutter of our lives.

Maybe the secret is to give everything away. When I received transmission as an official Zen teacher, my transmitting teacher gave me a beautiful green silk rakusu along with some other objects from his life and practice. When I asked him about what he had given me, he said it is best to give things away that we still have an attachment to—where we feel a little tug of resistance in the act of giving.

I loved the green silk rakusu so much that I eventually gave it back to him. And I still miss it sometimes. Perhaps it is more alive for me in having given it away than if I had held onto it.

But there are some quotes and teachings that stay with us—that seem to capture some important aspect of how we understand our world. The particular words coalesce the meaning that we have uncovered ourselves. But whatever meaning it is, it has to be re-uncovered again and again to retain its vitality and capacity to guide us.

Bohm (and I’ve found two people on the internet who agree that it was him and not Ram Dass), when he said: The mind creates the world, then says ‘I didn’t do it.’ was pointing to the fact that the world outside of us that seems so solid is actually created by the perceptual processes of our minds.

Perception is a creative, not objective process. It involves both data from the world (photons of light bouncing off objects in space), receptors in the body that resonate in some way with that data (the rods and cones in the eye that are stimulated by those photons), then, the brain itself which magically produces a coherent image of the world from the bits of light, sound, taste, touch and smell it receives.

We are not privy to this construction process, it happens beneath the level of our consciousness. To the everyday mind, what we’re seeing is simply what is there, we are just neutral observers receiving information. But when we look more closely, we can begin to see some of our part in this creative process. Many of us have had the experience of being certain that we understand another person or situation, then, when we learn more, we find out that the situation is actually quite different from the certainty we felt.

As Stephen Covey once wrote (and I know for sure it was him because I have it underlined in my dog-eared copy of his book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People) We see the world not as it is, but as we are, or as we have been conditioned to see it.

For all of us, to begin to become aware of this unconscious construction business is essential to living fully in the world. Without some awareness, we are helplessly trapped in the bubble of our opinion. While this can be comforting, it is ultimately unsatisfying and limiting. So we can begin to be suspicious of our certainty, to listen to others with more attention and to investigate what is really going on in these mysterious lives we have been given.