You are certain that you live in the real world, and that you perceive it accurately. You are wrong on both counts. Let me tell you a story about myself that took me twenty years to understand.
When I was a senior at St. Stephen’s College in Delhi, ragging – what you would call hazing – hung in the air like weather. One afternoon I came upon three burly sportsmen tormenting a slight boy, a brilliant mathematics honors student who lived somewhere on the far side of the ordinary social signals the rest of us read without thinking. I was incandescent. I strode in, pulled him out from among them, marched him to my room, and sat him down to work through differential equations.
For more than twenty years I carried that afternoon as one of the ‘good’ things I did. I had rescued a helpless boy from his tormentors. It was a high point of my life.
Decades later, by one of those unexplainable cosmic coincidences, I met that same man again. We had lunch in the college cafeteria for old times’ sake and caught up with each other. We spoke of many things, and at last he raised that afternoon himself. “Srikumar,” he said, “Do you remember…” and he brought up that incident.
“Of course I remember,” I told him. I straightened myself and sat back in my chair waiting for him to thank me. I was going to tell him that it was no big deal.
“I was having such a wonderful time with those seniors,” he said. “Why did you break it up so rudely?”
I was flabbergasted. For twenty years I had lived in a world in which I had rescued a victim. For those same twenty years he had lived in a world in which a delightful afternoon of horseplay among friends had been shattered by a self-righteous senior who did not understand what he was looking at. Two worlds. Two complete, coherent, deeply felt worlds. And neither of them was the real one.
We comfort ourselves with two beliefs, both false. The first is that we perceive the world as it is. We do not; we perceive a reconstruction of what we think we saw, and that reconstruction is riddled with error. The second is that memory is a camera, faithfully preserving what happened. It is nothing of the kind. Researchers have taken children whose histories they knew in detail – from parents, from diaries, from friends – and quietly slipped in one false memory: that the child had once been lost in a supermarket. More than half later “remembered” it. Pressed for detail, they supplied it lavishly – how frightened they had been, who finally found them, what was said. Every bit of it invented, and every bit of it felt as real as anything that had truly happened.
Mark Twain said it best: “I have suffered a great many tragedies in my life, most of which never happened.” We laugh, because it is funny. We should also grow quiet, because it is true.
Now hear the good news, for there is a great deal of it. If you genuinely lived in a real world, and that world were not to your liking, you would be trapped in it with no recourse. But you do not live in a real world. You live in a construct – assembled out of your mental models and the ceaseless chatter of your mind, the stories you tell yourself and have told yourself so long that you mistake them for reportage. And a construct, unlike a fact, can be taken apart. The very thing that sounds like bad news – that you cannot perceive reality – is in truth the door to your freedom. Whatever in your construct brings you suffering, you are entitled to dismantle and rebuild. And when the new construction also wears thin, as it will, you may dismantle and rebuild again. And again. For as long as you live.
The man I “rescued” taught me this though I don’t know if he recognized the great teaching he was imparting. It took him a single sentence and me two decades to hear it. Examine the world you are so sure you live in. Then ask the only question that matters: who built it – and who, therefore, may build it differently?
Peace!
