Echo Chamber of mind
- Mar 14
- 3 min read
Have you ever been inside an echo chamber? A small, room would not do. For that matter even in an Auditorium they try to avoid echoing of sounds by making the walls rough. However, in a large empty room with roughly flat walls, echos are inevitable. Sometimes you might find echo in most unexpected places like an abandoned quarry, often by suprise.
I can remember, in my childhood, I often would face this unexpected phenomenon, in an empty hall. A regular abandoned school building was there next to our house, and when spoken inside this the sound would echo. It was, a short distance, yet we could hear the echo. Just the other day I realised how much echo chamber is a representation of my own mind. Now, after reading about information sphere and prisoners of mind, I am sure anyone interested in mindfulness would understand the following analogy.
Echo chamber of mind.
Often when we compare our minds we would imagine a chamber. Like a one in a prison. It is a good analogy. Yet not complete. You have to combine it with an echo chamber. And what echos in the chamber of the mind are not sounds but thoughts. Often it is your own thoughts about past and future. I can see this happenning again and again, from morning till night, I see the thoughts echo. Sometimes I get tired of hearing of them. You may wonder, that is not completely true.
Of course it is not a complete picture, but you have to agree it is close enough one. We can add more detail. Imagine someone outside the echo chamber, would not hear what you echo in your own mind. Yet, they are able to reach you inside right? It is like the walls of your mind are sound proof. Although you can hear own echos nobody can, and it seems the walls of this echo chamber is one way gate for sounds, pictures and everything else. All the six senses have their own gates to inside, but with one way valves.
One way Echo chamber of mind.
Now this is more closer approximation. Consider what is happenning. Sounds and views will enter your brain, and echo through the walls and the CPU in your brain would recognise these echos. And during so called living, so many things have entered our echo chamber, and it seem they echos, till we die. But some echos are short lived, the ones you do not recognise and amplify with further thoughts would die, in matter of minutes. Others will slowly fade. Some echos would combine with others to created auto amplified echos. Although we assume echos are our own creations, they are really not. If you permenently close the doors for half an hour, which is impossible task to do, echos will eventually fade away and you will recognise the inherent nothingness of the self. It is not the sound of Silence.
There are some more subltle features we can add to the one way echo chamber to complete the picture. As such, the internal echos can be made into meaningful outputs to put in on display. Like, a poster outside the chamber. I can write a poem, article, do a speech, or make a statue to do this. But there is a glitch. Nobody would ever know, what echoed inside my echo chamber, what they would experience is only their own echos. The echos also depend on internal structure of the chamber which are called our "nature". This is our subjective reality. And only in mindfulness we can see all the features of whats going in these echo chambers.
Our values, our hopes, aspiratios and dreams, are everything recorded in these echos. And they will last only as long as they echos. Which is even not with our control. Think about this, which part of it is under our control? It is just observing echos!
And that is just simple explanation of mindfulness. Which is not another meditation.
Sometimes echoes/thoughts escape the inner brain and are perceived by someone outside. Do you consider this kind of sharing of thoughts a feature or a bug of the brain?