Mind Opener

This page describes the idea as comprehensible, precise and imaginable as I could.
This is a very tricky train of thought. Your mind will come with many arguments of why this can't be right. So far the arguments of my mind and the many people I have discussed this with turned out to be incorrect or less logical than this idea. If you think you have a clear reason as to why any of this isn't true or as probable as I think it is, or if you have any questions at all, please contact me. Let's begin.

Everyone who wants to find some truth in this world, will have to start somewhere. Without taking any chances or without making any assumptions at all, you simply have nothing to go on. And this very first step is also the most uncertain step. There is no reasoning prior to reasoning, no justification for where you start. Every theory, understanding, or knowledge, started off somewhere. No matter how long we think, life will remain a mystery if only for that first step we take. But that doesn't mean that we can't at least try.

Personally, I have attempted to start off with as little as possible. The idea was that in order to come to the most probable idea, I had to assume as little as possible so it would contain the least uncertainties.

The first thing I noticed as I sat down alone in a room, was that everything that occurred to me, was something that I experienced or thought of. When I tried to think of something that I didn't think of, or to see something that I didn't see, I failed to do so. Now that I write this it sounds so logical, but in practice it was a weird unnerving experience. There was nothing I could experience, outside of my realm of perception. I always saw it, smelled it, felt it, tasted it, heard it, and or thought of it.
In fact, anything I didn't see, hear, feel, taste, smell or think of, was non existent to me. It wasn't there, or anywhere. I couldn't form an opinion of it, or do anything with it.

As I went on, I began to discover that it were not my 'physical' senses that determined my experience, but it were my thoughts. For example, if I were to be convinced of there being absolutely no chair in front of me, and I would still see a chair in front of me, the chair would be there as an optical illusion. The only way my perception would surmount my thought, was if I had determined that to be the best approach to reality.
What I deemed real wasn't about what I saw or heard. It was even simpler than that. It was merely about what I thought to be real.

You might think that there is nothing wrong with this picture so far. It's perfectly explainable by our most common ways of thinking. Of course I can't see more than I see, or think of more than I think of at any given moment in time. I am just a simple being in a gigantic world, limited to my faulty sensory input and the childishly simple motion picture that my brains fabricate from that mess. The reality I pursue is nothing more than me trying to make sense of it all.

But something was wrong. Hard as I tried, I could not bridge the way I just discovered to look at this world, to the way I used to look at this world. I could not find any reason whatsoever to assume that there is more to it, than the world being exactly as I think it is.

Sure, daily life pointed to a more common way of thinking. I would constantly encounter new things, surprises, things I knew nothing about. And sometimes I made mistakes. I thought I saw something, and then it turned out to be something else entirely.
The first few times that I noticed this, I thought that I had found the reason to throw this idea out of the window. Yet this annoyingly simple idea of this world being as I think, turned out to be the most resilient thing I have ever encountered. Every occurrence that should have allowed me to toss this silly idea away, turned out to be more evidence to the contrary. The moment I got surprised or found out I made a mistake, they too happened to be part of my experience, and exactly as I thought.

This can still be explained from the common point of view. You could say that this idea of reality only seems to be logical to me because of my personal limitations in perception and thinking. The idea that one person comes to believe that the world is constantly exactly as (s)he thinks it is, can be easily explained by others when they realize that the person knows no more than what (s)he knows.

But if you entertain that thought, you have to realize that this common view is not the most probable, but the most normal. It assumes an objective reality and many peoples faulty versions of that reality, and that there is more than what you think to be there.
If I am correct, then there is no more logical explanation of the world than that reality is as I think it is. Simply because it assumes so little and appears to be correct in all circumstances.

It took me several years of being reminded of this little idea, to realize what it meant if the world is exactly as I think. It means that in all likelihood the world is my mind, the collection of my thoughts. That every change in the world is a change in my mind. And that when I change my mind, I change the world.