The Philosophy of Everything 2e — Part III: On Psychology

After I had looked hard at what was actually there, I could not go on without looking at the thing that had been doing the looking all along. Every claim I had checked, every picture of the world I had pulled apart, had passed through one instrument before I ever got to weigh it. That instrument was my own mind. And I had never once turned around to examine the instrument.

This was the third thing I had to figure out. What is a mind actually made of. Why do no two people, handed the same world, come out of it the same. Why is one cruel where another is kind, one settled where another cannot sit still. And underneath both, the question that frightened me most: can a mind be taken in hand at all, or does it simply run a person for the length of a life. I wanted to know whether the will could be freed from whatever had been pushing it around. Or whether the thing I called "my choice" was only ever the loudest habit, speaking up first.

This one has a name you already know. We call it psychology. But not the psychology of the clinic, the kind that gets sent for only after something has gone wrong. I mean the older, wider thing the word used to point at. That is the study of the mind itself, which belongs to philosophy and not to medicine. It treats the mind as more than the wiring of the body that carries it.

And it is done the same careful way as the first two steps were. It is not done by making things up, but by staying inside what can be checked. It means looking patiently at how a mind works, in order to understand why people turn out as differently as they do.

It matters more than it sounds. The mind sits behind every single thing a person does, the good and the bad alike. A mind left untended does harm. This is what this book has been calling bad karma, and the harm grows, in time, into suffering. (Karma is the old word for our thoughts, words and actions, and for what they bring back to us.) There can be no better world while we leave unimproved the one place any of us actually has a say over, which is ourselves. Nor can there be one while we refuse to learn to live awake and free.

This is not a small private repair. Until enough people understand the mind well enough to take it in hand, the better world we keep describing stays a place we point at and never reach. Some still call that world heaven, except that this one would be built down here, on this earth, by us.

So this was the part where the work turned around and faced me. Mastering the mind is the third step towards freedom. The first step was clearing the lens, which meant learning how to know. The second was using the cleared lens to look at the room. The third is the strangest of them: turning the lens on the one who is holding it.