A simple way for me to free my tree is to focus on something other than me.
I could focus on you, for example.
But I don’t know who you are. So when I focus on you, I can only approximate you, using a mental image of you that I have created.
Right now, you are the person reading this sentence. That’s all I know about you. I have no other information.
Maybe you stumbled on this post when you were searching for something else. In that case, you yourself know nothing about me. But you may be probing consciously or subconsciously or unconsciously for a sense of the person who wrote what you are reading.
“Is this writer a man? A woman?”
I’m a man.
“How old are you? Are you a native speaker of English? What’s your accent? Is the way you write similar to the way that you normally speak? Do you know enough about the way the mind works to differentiate between ‘subconsciously’ and ‘unconsciously’?”
Maybe you have read everything that I have written so far on the theme of NowHow. In that case, you may feel that you have some sense of who I am. You may have your own mental sketch of who I am.
But I know nothing about you. I can sketch an outline of a head, but that’s it.
I can only guess about your reasons for continuing to read. Maybe you find my writing infuriating, and you enjoy being infuriated. Maybe you find my writing entertaining, and you enjoy being entertained.
I am making the assumption that you enjoy what you’re reading, even if it infuriates you, because almost no one wants to do something that they hate if it involves no reward.
What is the reward that I seek for thinking about you?
A higher probability of survival.
That may strike you as a wild and pretentious statement, although I should point out again that I am imagining an imaginary reader’s possible reaction, and that reader and possible reaction exist only in my imagination.
But I do believe that historically, individual human beings have improved their chances of survival by thinking from the viewpoint of other human beings when the individual believes that those other human beings are relevant to the individual’s survival.
“A mind for the other” is in fact a necessary precondition for the establishment and long-term success of any community. A group of friends. A village. A city. A nation. The world. A residential community. A class at school. An academic society. A town council. A corporate community.
In Canjeez terms, “a mind for the other” is: 相手を想う.
想 has been a theme of these posts since the first post, when I mentioned the Japanese verb 想う(omou): think about.
The を before 想う is used in Japanese to identify a grammatical object. What comes before the を is what we are thinking about. In this instance, we are thinking about 相手.
相 (correspondence), outlined here, presents an image of the senses (distilled into an image of the mind’s eye: 目) engaged with the world around us (object of attention: tree: 木).
相手 is a glom of 相 and 手. 手 is hand. In this context, “hand” denotes a person, just like the hand in farmhand/stagehand/hired hand.
相手 is used in Japanese to denote the other person that you deal with in any context. The corresponding hand. A functional mirror of me.
Is that you?