In the old days, if someone asked why the ocean was blue, they may get a satisfactory answer, “God made it so”. Now we are usually satisfied with a longer explanation like this, “The light of a particular frequency range hits our eye, and then the brain somehow makes you feel the sensation blue”. But how? Where is the missing link between the brain and sensations that happen in the space of experience?

Self is a reference to the imaginary experiencer of the thoughts and sensations that we experience. Other people, as we know them, are representations that we built in our minds. We construct characters based on our memories of other people. Memories are interpretations of what we noticed. These characters have personalities. They have our thoughts and feelings attached to them. In the same way, we construct a character for ourselves.

I was fortunate to work closely with a philosopher and got introduced to some ideas in philosophy. I came across this mind-blowing idea called Idealism. This post will require a large amount of open-mindedness. It’s about what consciousness is. I will talk about the common misconceptions of Idealism and why I disagree with some mainstream ideas. Then I will try to introduce Idealism. Some of the following ideas will seem very controversial to a 21st-century mind, but I think they offer a plausible and useful point of view, if you take it slow.

When I was a kid, I was happy, peaceful and healthy all the time. Now I have to try. I was going to complain about life, then realised it’s because I was an extremely lucky kid. Recently, I seem to get irritated quite easily, and only reach a peaceful state of mind when I put aside time to really try. Still, I think it’s good progress that I learnt to notice how peaceful I’m feeling, and use the agitation as an alert to know when I should calm my mind.