If you imagine the thought field as a space furnished with your own ideas and perceptions, you’ll notice a rather obvious feature. Some of the objects in that space are larger than others. The size of your mental objects seems to be given by the objects themselves. That upcoming audit is elephant size, while a political crisis in Bolivia is quite tiny…
But of course, there’s nothing inherent about these relative sizes. For a start, the size shifts as you move your focus — like the icons in the “dock” on a Mac computer. Anything you give attention to will swell up in comparison with other objects. Secondly, and more important, the relative size we give to different mental objects is completely arbitrary and loaded by personal values and agendas.
So where’s the functional value in this observation? What I’m calling the sizing of mental objects is a spontaneous and unconscious process. It predetermines the priorities we set. By the time we get to ordering things, this sizing has already happened. And that has consequences. If you look around a room and ask, “Which piece of furniture is most valuable?” the biggest sofa is likely to catch your eye first, even though it may have the lowest value.
It’s actually possible to disrupt the spontaneous sizing of mental objects. First you have to notice it. Then you play with it. Try this now. Take an idea, preoccupation, or image and literally change its size in your mind’s eye. Gather up the entire IRS and shrink it into a little ball on your desk. Plunge yourself into the middle of a vast and turbulent La Paz. Expand and contract mental objects as if you were playing a mental accordion. This doesn’t take time — you can play the game anywhere, in seconds. The effects are profound.
Lao Tzu had something interesting to say on this:
The ego says that the world is vast, and that the particles which form it are tiny.
When tiny particles join, it says, the world appears.
When the vast world disappears, it says, tiny particles appear.
The ego is entranced by all these names and ideas,
But the subtle truth is that the world and particle are the same, neither one vast, neither one tiny.
Every thing is equal to every other thing.
(Hua Hu Ching 32)