Why the Inner World You Imagine Might Not Exist
We often think of our minds as having “hidden depths.” It’s like picturing a vast ocean beneath the surface of our everyday thoughts, full of deep feelings, secret desires, and fixed beliefs that shape who we are. We imagine we can look inside ourselves through something called “introspection” or that therapists can help us dive deep into this inner world to understand our true selves. But what if this idea of a deep, inner world is actually a trick our own brains play on us? What if the mind is, surprisingly, “flat,” and what we experience is all there is at any given moment? This is the core idea behind the perspective explored in the book ‘The Mind is Flat: The Illusion of Mental Depth and The Improvised Mind’ by Nick Chater.
The book suggests a different picture: our minds are incredible improvisers, constantly making things up in the moment as we go along. Think of it like a skilled actor performing without a script, or a fiction writer creating a story chapter by chapter. The surprising part is that the character they’re creating, sentence by sentence, action by action, is us.
For example, we often believe that emotions well up from deep inside us and then cause physical reactions like a racing heart. But it might work the other way around. We feel physical signals (like a racing heart, which is quite vague) and then our brain interprets what that signal means based on the situation we’re in. Our emotions, then, are also real-time interpretations, not just raw feelings bubbling up from hidden depths.
Why We Seem Consistent
If we’re always improvising, why do we feel like we have a stable personality and consistent beliefs? Our brains work incredibly hard to make each new improvisation fit with the ones that came before. We try to stay “in character” with the story of ourselves that we’ve been creating. It’s like a fiction writer trying to keep their character consistent throughout the novel. This desire to be consistent is real, but it comes from trying to link our present actions and thoughts to our past ones, not from consulting a fixed inner blueprint. According to Chater, our minds build on the “precedents” of our past actions and thoughts, creating a unique “tradition” for each person.
What Does This Mean for Us?
Realising that the mind is a relentless, real-time improviser, always creating our sense of reality, choices, and feelings from snippets of experience, can be surprising. It challenges the idea that there are deep, hidden parts of the mind we need to uncover.
But this isn’t a negative view. Instead of being creatures driven by unseen forces, we can see the mind as an incredibly creative machine. Our everyday thoughts and actions are acts of invention. Our “character” isn’t something fixed and buried deep inside, but something we are constantly shaping and reshaping, one thought and action at a time, like co-authoring our own life story. This view can be liberating, suggesting we have more influence over who we become than we might think, not by digging into hidden depths, but by focusing on how we improvise in the here and now.
According to the message of nonduality, just as a screen remains present throughout a movie and is not changed or stained by the images appearing on it, awareness remains constant and is not affected by the changing experiences it knows. While we may feel like we are a continuously changing person or an amalgam of body and mind, this changing experience is known by the same unchanging awareness. The ‘person’ or ‘separate entity’ is viewed as an appearance or modulation in awareness, an illusion in the sense that it is not what it seems to be, but its substance is awareness itself.
So, the next time you wonder why you did something, or what you’re really feeling, remember your brain isn’t reading from a secret script. It’s improvising, drawing on the vast, unique history of all your previous improvisations to create the story of you, one amazing moment at a time.
