Mental pictures and memory castles.
Have you ever heard the term, Memory Castle? It is a method used by some genius (maybe ordinary ones as well) to improve their memory. First, they create a mental castle and memories special places in the castle by repeatedly visiting the palace. Imagine you have been to the Buckingham palace. You can memorize several rooms in it and several items. Once the memory castle is built you can use the castle and its items to peg a list of items you want to remember. When you want to retrieve the information, you just have to visit the castle. I am not really a fan of this method, not that I am against it, just it looks too artificial. However, I know it gives good results to anyone who wants to invest some time in this method. What I prefer is methods involving blooms taxonomy.
The focus of this article is mental pictures. If you were careful to compare and contrast you would see this is same as mental objects. However, as we all are different, we understand only the things aligned with our previous knowledge hence, whoever wo does not understand mental objects may grasp the meaning here. I want to remind the true goal of this exercise is to understand the true nature of ourselves, which is essential to get the victory of game of life.
Kaleidoscopes, reflections and how to practice mindfulness.
Now we can go back to our Kaleidoscope example from previous article. If you know kaleidoscopes have reflecting mirrors aligned over each other, so whatever put inside, little colorful particles, will get reflected back on its mirrors and make beautiful symmetrical patterns. Let's analyze this phenomenon.
Compare this to what is happening inside our brains. Let's see what happens when you see something like a famous destination. London Bridge. When you look at the bridge, you would not understand the bridge at all without the prior knowledge. If you were not taught a bridge, if you came from a rural African country, you would see something, not the "London bridge". If you do not have any information, at your disposal in your mind, like a newborn child you would not see anything, just a picture which disappear when you close your eyes. The truth is that was not a joke. That is only what is out there. There is something which create a picture of something in our brain, and the rest of it is just the information that drags along from our information sphere. This is just like the kaleidoscope example.
What is there is some 'thing' which we put inside the kaleidoscope. Everything else is the reflection of our mind, which is not the true, 'thing'. Everyone who see the London bridge will see different things as their reflections are different. And the reflections disappear after some time, more like replaced by different ones, as our kaleidoscope only can show one reflection at a time. To communicate or even understand the 'world' we need these reflections. And truly speaking, the 'world' we see is just a collection of reflections over time. This process happens so fast, we will never know it's happening until someone tell us. Characteristics of these reflections is given in my previous article.
Mindfulness is a continuous process being aware with wisdom not just looking at yourself.
Now, when we associate our values and attach them to mental pictures, absurd right? If you associate some imaginary value to some imaginary 'thing' we are not different from a man with delusions. As mental pictures are not themselves permanent. And again, this doesn't argue there is nothing out there. But just the fact that what we see is not what is there. What we see is a temporary reflection of a temporary status of a continuous process.
Here is an interesting thought, our happiness, sadness, good and evil war and peace, all are attached with these mental objects. So, these values are the ones which create beauty and the beast in our minds. If you really want to understand the world you have to be mindful all the time and the see this process in action. And this is the true practice of mindfulness. Not just looking at a piece of cake and noticing salivation, but to understand the function of the cake and the function of seeing the cake.
If we can understand the 'world' like this, we will be soon realizing the root cause of all our problems. If not, we would be just like the running fox chasing answers to our imaginary problems.
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