This is all an illusion

This is all an illusion.

Do you know who taught me that? Oliver Sacks. In case you don't know who that is.. Oliver Sacks is a prominent neurologist who has written many books containing case studies of some of his very interesting neurological patients. Also, Dr. Sacks is himself an interesting neurological patient. He suffers from prosopagnosia (face blindness) and has also lost his stereoscopic vision due to a tumour in his left eye. He recently announced that he has been diagnosed with terminal cancer.  Dr. Sacks' writing has been vary awakening to me.

In the study of neurology we can learn so much about the experience of being human from looking at what happens to the experience of someone with a brain injury, tumour, or some other kind of neurological abnormality. It is so easy to think that what we see, hear, taste, feel, think and understand are an exact representation of reality as it is, but we couldn't be farther from the truth!

Every part of our experience of the outside world is taken in through our senses and interpreted by our own unique brain. Change something in the brain and you can fundamentally change your experience. Even a normally working brain actively ignores much of the input from our senses and brings to our conscious awareness only the things that it believes are important and arranges them in a way that makes sense to us.

Our inner experience, in the same way, arises out of our unique brain. Our thoughts, memories and ideas about our experiences are based on a framework of understanding that we ourselves have created, based on all the things we have thought and experienced in the past. Sometimes they are not and just arise out of the state of the brain at any given time.

This is most apparent to me when I think about when people suffer from bipolar, schizophrenia, psychosis, depression and other mental illnesses, or when people try medication or other drugs to help bring mental stability to their experience. Their inner world may in no way reflect what is going on around them, but it is not any less "real" to them.

It is easy to walk around every day confidently believing that what we see is real and that what we think is right. But what if what we see is just how we see it? What if our thoughts are just what we think? What does it all mean?

I don't know.

For me I think maybe it means that I get to hold lightly to what I think I know and to my perspective on things.  It means that I get to learn deeply and without judgement about the thoughts, ideas and perspectives of other people. It means that I get to learn about the context of ideas and events so that I can have a deeper understanding of those things.

One of the most important things it means for me is that I get to learn about myself so that I can uncover more of the layers of my own reality and understand how they came to be this way. I hope that in this way I can drop more and more of my unnecessary preconceived ideas so that I can come to a clearer perspective on what is. Sometimes this is called healing.