When you think about something, the world changes. Not reality itself, of course, just your experiential world—the virtual world rendered by your organism as an orientational interface for its conscious decision making. This live rendering changes and adapts in response to how you direct your attention. You can zoom into levels of detail, explore and highlight aspects and connections, or shift context for what you’re experiencing, suddenly to see it in new light. The forest you’re walking in can be transformed simply by reflecting on how you know the trees are made mostly from the carbon they capture out of the air, or on all the unseen things you know is going on underground, or on anything else you might know or suppose about nature’s intricate systems. If you know something about physics, you can conceptually zoom all the way in to the atomic level, adding an abstract sheen to your perception. If you know a story set in a forest, you can to some degree transport both yourself and the forest into that narrative frame by a simple trick of immersion.
The enchanted forest
The enchanted forest
The enchanted forest
When you think about something, the world changes. Not reality itself, of course, just your experiential world—the virtual world rendered by your organism as an orientational interface for its conscious decision making. This live rendering changes and adapts in response to how you direct your attention. You can zoom into levels of detail, explore and highlight aspects and connections, or shift context for what you’re experiencing, suddenly to see it in new light. The forest you’re walking in can be transformed simply by reflecting on how you know the trees are made mostly from the carbon they capture out of the air, or on all the unseen things you know is going on underground, or on anything else you might know or suppose about nature’s intricate systems. If you know something about physics, you can conceptually zoom all the way in to the atomic level, adding an abstract sheen to your perception. If you know a story set in a forest, you can to some degree transport both yourself and the forest into that narrative frame by a simple trick of immersion.