And this is barely one half of it

Recently I have been reading books about the mind, including,
Carol Tarvis and Elliot Arsonson's Mistakes were made (but not by me!)
Oliver Sack's Musicophilia
Charles Duhigg's The Power of Habit
Ekhart Tolle's The Power of Now
Alan Wallace's The Attention Revolution
Jill Bolte Taylor's famous TED talk - My stroke of insight

Andrew Soloman's also famous TED talk - Depression, the secret we share
Swami Nikhilananda's commentary on the Bhagvad Gita

 

The over all impression, if it can be called that, has reminded me of two stories from my past: In one, I was a wee little girl and my uncle was showing me and my brother and my cousins the stars; at some point as I wasnt sure which star he was pointing at I tried pointing my torch towards it.
The other story is when either in a science class or thru a science book I learnt that the most solid things are only mostly empty space and a teeny tiny may-be something moving really fast.

Below are excerpts from Richard Feynman's poem, that put it rather well:

 

 here it is
 standing:
 atoms with consciousness;
 matter with curiosity.

Stands at the sea,
 wonders at wondering: I
 a universe of atoms
 an atom in the universe.

 

Then I learnt to doubt my senses, now I have learnt to doubt my mind. I am realising more and more that this is a tool, and it tends to behave in certain ways and it has pretty massive blind-spots and limitations, that it is fantastic at disguising them. That it hates confusions and knowledge vacuums so it imagines knowledge when it can't find it; that attention is a curiosity, at least where I am standing - while some talk about the present moment being nirvana (Jill Taylor's talk for e.g..), Oliver Sack's Musicophilia talks about extreme cases of amnesia where every moment seems the first moment of one's awakening - the person who experienced it found it a torture, and then funny - what is it about humour? Bill Watterson said it via Hobbes the Tiger: 'I suppose if we couldn't laugh at things that don't make sense, we couldn't react to a lot of life.' I think that only one these two is true: either we are constantly making decisions or we are constantly defending decisions and trying to keep regrets and confusions out of our lives, so that they dont keep us awake. I am not certain we know which one it is. 

 

Strangely, we manage okay in a world that that is counter-intutive, we have adapted by learning habits that are now counter-intutive too. Soloman in his talk mentions an experiment where they found that depressed people were found to be more accurate about data than non-depressed people. Swami Vivekananda said long ago that 'extremes appear alike'; and so it is either the depressed or the Buddhas who see the world for what it really is.