How the world around you is a construct of your mind
Imagine there’s a tree in front of you and it has green leaves and a brown trunk.
Let’s try to illustrate how you observe this tree from your eyes.
The tree absorbs light which actually is electromagnetic radiation containing infrared, visible and ultraviolet light.
Then it emits out some of these absorbed radiation, the rest would be converted into heat, will be used in photosynthesis etc.
Human eye would only be able to sense the radiation which is in the range of visible light and our brain constructs the image based on what our eye could sense. If we look at the electromagnetic spectrum you can see how little information our eyes could actually receive.
Below image shows all electromagnetic waves emitted by the tree.
As you can now see, although the tree emits lots of light waves the image of the tree which is built by our brain is limited to what the eye could process.
If you look more into the picture you would understand that the tree does not have green leaves or a brown trunk but rather it emits green and brown light which our brain would interpret as a tree having green and brown color.
In reality the tree would actually have no color, it would absorb all the energy from a source which in this case would be the sun and would emit energy.
If you construct this into a picture you would understand that the tree should actually be black like a black hole which absorbs all the light but unlike a black hole it emits absorbed light where our brain interprets it as the object having its own colors.
But how do we know what we see is green or brown ?
Universe does not have colors labeled to the electromagnetic spectrum, rather we have labeled specific sets of energy frequencies as green, brown, white etc.
In simpler terms we know green is green because we have been taught or learned at one point in our lives that you should recognise it as green. If we forget what we know for a moment it’s all energy waves that we receive and everything else is interpreted by our brain.
Now we can understand that the color we observe is actually a construct of our brain.
Next question would be, although the colors are a construct of our brain still there is an object, the tree in this case which we can see, is it a construct of our mind too?
Let’s discuss.
To understand this, think of a wall built using bricks. This object you identify as a wall is actually bricks grouped together. If you take these bricks apart you won’t identify it as a wall but you will see a set of bricks.
This theory can be applied to the tree as well. The atoms which this tree is built on were formed by the energy released during the big bang. The energy eventually cooled sufficiently for a separate process to occur whereby that energy formed into individual protons, electrons, nucleus and then atoms. These atoms combined is what we identify as the tree.
So like the set of bricks we identify as a wall, what we identify as a tree is actually energy.
Similarly with colors the universe does not have these collections of energy labeled as a tree, a wall or any other form. We know that tree is a tree because we have been taught or we learned so at one point in our life. But again if we forget what we know and try to think about what we sensed we would understand that it’s the energy that we sense that has been interpreted by our brain as a tree.
Now apply this to every object you see, including what you identify as “You”. You can understand that all this is energy which we receive and is interpreted by our brain as different objects.
This is the same to the rest of our senses as well, not only seeing, but what we feel, what we smell, what we taste are all energy and everything else is a construct by our brain.
