We Can See Only What We Can Think

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

We are grateful to Rupali Bhuva for offering this hand-made painting for this reading.

Fortunately or not, everything we do is led by our thinking. There's just no way around it. Even if I say, "I'm going to stop thinking and let feeling be my guide" -- that's a thought. Like the first step of a journey, it may pass unnoticed and forgotten, but you know it must have been there. If we are going to transform our basic capacities, we'd better begin with the most basic of all: the one that helps us choose and guide all others.

We may despise any reliance on thought as unromantic; we may suspect our thinking of being limited and culturally determined; we may complain of thinking as inadequate to its task of understanding this world and directing our behavior. What we can't do is avoid it. Each of these critiques is itself an example of thinking, and indeed dwells in an ocean of thinking. When we question thinking's authority, we haven't escaped it at all, since the process by which we could doubt it is (again) thinking itself.

A patient walked into my office one day and stewed in the juices of this problem for a few minutes. "I'm sick of my whole mind," he said. A lawyer, he relied on clear, critical understanding for his business life, and he knew there was something wrong with his very ability to think. "I'm always angry" he said, "and I know it's because I'm always judging people. I mean, people do such stupid things. But criticizing them is making me sick. I wish I could get away from my thoughts and be at peace. We got back from vacation in Florida this week, and it was good in a lot of ways, but even when I'm fishing on a sunny day and everything's going well -- the water is great, the boat is great, the fish are biting -- still my mind is constantly racing and worrying. I might as well be at work. Then when I am at work, it's nothing but distractions. You know, when I was fresh out of law school I could focus on a brief or a letter or whatever it was and really get into it. Now my mind is either judging, worrying, distracted, or a little of each. I swear it would be better if I could just stop thinking altogether for a while. And here I am, criticizing myself too much! It just won't stop."

Eventually he came to see that what he really wanted was not no thinking, but more concentrated and livelier thinking. It wasn't so much that he wanted to shut his mind off. He wanted his mind to be clear. Instead of getting lost in anger and worry, he wanted to be able to focus. He sensed that his style of understanding had become both hardened and splintered when he needed it to be supple and whole.

Maybe our thinking, as much as our bodies, stands in need of exercise. We worry about our physical health, and spend fortunes to improve it, but do we ever apply that kind of self-improving zeal to our ability to think? Our minds, like our bodies, need a combination of flexibility and strength, qualities that are unlikely to return unless we do something.  [...]

Most of the time, most of what we call thinking is a maze of distractions. But thinking, whether clear or muddy, is not something added to our reality like a sprig of mental parsley adorning the main dish. It is what makes the substance of the world for us. We all know this in a general way, and most people can admit that they tend to live in a narrow zone of mental habits. But the role of thinking is more primary and pervasive than we generally realize. For what we call "reality" in normal consciousness — even the stuff of the world around us — is itself only our own past thoughts. Let me explain. 

When we see a car, or an oak tree, or a cloud, we see them according to the thoughts we ourselves, and our whole society, have already thought about these things. In other cultures, dominated by other thoughts, they are seen differently. Adults teach them to children through language. The children learn these language-given concepts and see the world accordingly. There isn't any other reality for you than the concepts you have acquired or those you now acquire in the very act of perception. 

Someone who has never learned the concept of writing will see a written page as a sheet of paper with black marks on it. We know that archaic cultures see the world differently. They live a reality largely alien to our own, shaped by thoughts we can only translate askew as we try to fit them into our standard assumption of a physical world "out there" with minds observing it. Analysis of the Homeric texts has shown that the ancient Greeks understood colors differently and therefore saw colors differently.

When we dare to take this view seriously—and anthropology is full of examples to confirm it—we begin to realize that there is no world for us outside our thinking (or our past thoughts) about the world. Our very seeing, hearing, touching, and so on — the categories by which we anchor what is real to us—are permeated with concepts particular to our culture, language, and personal history. We can see only what we can think. 

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Michael Lipson is a teacher and author. Excerpt above from his book, Stairway to Surprise.