Chapter 19: I Think

“I think…”

These two words are how people most often begin when they speak about things. I think this won’t do. I think he’s wrong. I think this should be handled like this. I think you’re too sensitive. I think young people these days are hopeless. I think people ought to live like such and such.

“I think” is, to begin with, a very honest way of speaking: this is what I see, this is what I reckon. But when people say it, the tone is often not like that. Look at how people say “I think.”

Someone at the dinner table says: I think this policy is just wrong. Someone beside him says: I think that’s not necessarily so. At once his voice rises: what do you mean, not necessarily? It’s obvious! By the end both are red in the face and can’t eat. What he thinks is: what I see is how things really are; anyone who doesn’t see it is either stupid or bad.

Someone sees a piece of news online, thinks it right, and shares it. Someone below says the news is fake; he doesn’t believe it, and says: I think it’s true, you just won’t admit it. Later it is shown to be fake, and he deletes the post and says nothing.

Someone has trained apprentices for many years and says: I think you’re doing this wrong, listen to me. The apprentice does it his way, and it turns out badly; he says: that’s because you didn’t do it properly. The apprentice does it his own way, and it turns out well; he says: that’s just luck.

And some “I think”s don’t say “I” at all; they say “it’s obviously so,” “everyone knows,” “it’s common sense.” Those who say such things take what they see for the only thing that can be seen under heaven.

And there is a bigger “I think”: I think humans are the crown of creation. Humans can think, make, write, ask why; nothing else can; humans are what matters most in the world, and everything else is for human use. What a tree is worth, how many storeys can go up on a piece of land, how much power a river can generate, whether an insect is beneficial or a pest: people carry a ruler and measure wherever they go, and all their measuring measures only “what use is it to people.”

In recent years there has been a reverse “I think” as well: machines grow cleverer and cleverer, they write, draw, calculate, faster and more accurately than people, and people seem about to be outdone. Having sat on the throne a long time, people suddenly find someone dismantling it from underneath, and panic: then what use am I? What do I count for?

Many of these “I think”s assume one thing: there is a place where, standing there, one can see things completely, accurately, measure them clearly.

The place where I stand had best be that place. If mine isn’t, there must be one that is: a highest, fullest, most accurate grandstand, from which, looking down, who is right and who is wrong, what is heavy and what is light, is perfectly clear. People have always wanted to climb up there; when they can’t, they panic, afraid of having seen wrongly, afraid of not mattering.

Where do people see from?

In “I think,” the “I” is a place. Every seeing is a seeing out from somewhere: from this pair of eyes, this body, this year, the experience of this whole way one has come. Someone sitting on the east side of the city sees the east side’s sky; someone standing at the foot of the mountain sees the face of it rising from the foot.

People long for a position from which everything can be seen. Looking at a map is like standing in such a position: a city’s streets laid out at a glance, where the river is, where the mountain is, all under one’s eye. Reading history is like this too: thousands of years of events turned over page by page, as if standing outside time and seeing the whole course of things perfectly clearly.

But where is the map seen from? From some high point, some machine flying over, some hands that traced it stroke by stroke; it is spread on a table and looked at by some pair of eyes on some afternoon. Who wrote the history? Some person, in some age, looking out from his place, choosing some events to write down. Every position of seeing everything, looked at closely, is another place: with its height, its angle, its unseen back. There is no seeing that is from nowhere.

Even every sentence written in this book is said from somewhere: written down character by character, each sentence has a place it is in, has its angle, and has what it can’t see; not one sentence is reported to you from outside being or from the whole of being.

No place can see everything. Being is in every place; no place can possess it all.

Does that mean everything people see is one-sided, and doesn’t count?

“One-sided” is measured against an imagined “all-sided.” Seeing out from one place, what is seen is what this place can see; it is not a fragment with most of it missing. The path the ant sees is a real path; the mountain the person sees is a real mountain. Every place’s seeing is full; no place’s is complete.

But seeing fully doesn’t mean seeing correctly. This time of seeing is real, but what is seen is not necessarily complete, nor necessarily right. People mistake one person for another: the mistaking is real, but the person one thought one saw may not be there. People take a rope for a snake, hear a polite remark as sincere.

Someone says the bridge ahead is fine, drive on, don’t worry; you drive on, and the bridge is broken. His sentence is being, and that broken bridge is being too. But a true sentence and a lie, meeting that bridge, have results worlds apart. True and false both are; but the world does not listen to the false; it corrects the false, entry by entry.

Many people’s phones have received a photo like this: a big street under water, cars floating on it, passed round a dozen group chats, people in the supermarket rushing to buy water; only in the evening does someone say the photo was made by computer and nothing at all happened on that street. That photo really does exist; it really was made, it really did panic people for an afternoon; the flood it showed did not happen. Some simply say: true and false, no one can tell them apart, believing either is the same. That broken bridge doesn’t care which one people believe; whether a medicine is real or fake will show in the body of whoever takes it. When you can’t tell, all the more reason to go slowly and ask once more.

When two people see differently, who decides?

There is no need to retreat to “each is right in what he says.” Each in its own place, all are rained on by the same rain. Seeings from different places can be brought together and checked against one another: does what this place saw match what that place meets? Did what this place said get wet on the soles of that place? Most of the reliable knowing in people’s hands came this way: no one stood above all the places; very many places, time after time, took what they saw and met the same world with it; the wrong meetings were corrected, the right ones kept. What is got this way will still be revised by later places; it is steadier than any single place’s seeing.

And there is something more radical still: what if everything were false?

In the film The Truman Show, a man lives thirty years in a small town, not knowing the town is a built set and the people around him are all acting. Later he grows suspicious, sails toward the edge of the sea, and runs into the wall of the sky, and in the wall there is a door.

Those thirty years, his fear of water was real fear, his missing someone was real missing, the greetings he gave every morning really came out of his mouth. The set was built; every day he lived in it was being. Those days didn’t wait for him to walk out through that door before being acknowledged, afterward, as real. There really was falseness in the set too: those arranged lines really were said, but the love and concern in them can’t be counted real just because they were spoken. Sailing toward the edge of the sea, wanting to touch it and see: this touching was right. He need not walk out through that door for his past days to count as real; but walking out through it really would change his road from then on.

Outside the door is not outside being either. Outside the door is a studio, beyond that a city; the man in the control room who watched him for thirty years also sits in a room. Even if one day someone came to suspect the same thing, that all this is a dream, a program; even if there really were an outside, it would only be another place of being, not a grandstand ruling on behalf of people whether this time counts.

“I think” must also be told apart from something more common: a stance.

A stance, too, is a place a person stands. It is often what “I think” looks like once it has been welded fast: seeing out from somewhere, getting used to it, and deciding that only seeing from here is right, that what is seen from elsewhere is all wrong, and that those who stand elsewhere are all opponents. Where one is, is alive: a person takes a step, and where he is moves a step, and what he sees changes with it; a stance is hard: wherever a person goes, he carries it on his back and measures elsewhere with it.

Where one is says: I see from here. A stance says: only from here can one see.

A person can’t be nowhere, nor need he be; “I think,” said honestly, is exactly marking where one is: this is what I see from here. Where one is is only one place among all places; the person in the place beside is also seeing the same rain from where he is.

And that “I” carrying a ruler, measuring wherever it goes?

In their hearts people always quietly rank all things in a queue. People at the very front, then cats and dogs, which can look at people and wag their tails; then birds, fish; further back, insects, grass; last, stones, soil, the things that never move. The more like a person, the more it seems to “be”; the less like, the less it seems to count.

To say a thing “is more,” what does it mean?

One is bigger: is a mountain more being than a grain of sand? Being is not a quantity, not weighed on scales; a grain of sand is being lacking nothing, a mountain is being lacking nothing. One is more complex: is a person more being than a stone? Complexity is the shapes being takes in this place being more numerous, and more numerous is not fuller. And one is more knowing: is what can think, can ask “am I?”, more being than what can’t think? Thinking is a shape that grows within being; being doesn’t depend on thinking to stand; being able to ask hasn’t made anyone more being.

Take them apart one by one, and “more being” each time has quietly swapped some shape of being for being itself. Being itself has no more or less.

So no being is more being. A farmer who never in his life thought about the word “being” is being just as much as a person of great awakening; I am, you are, the ant is, the stone is, that machine that writes is, a fish on the seabed that has never in its life seen light is, and none is a bit more being than another.

This answers that panic: machines are cleverer than people, so what do people count for?

People never sat on that throne, so they need not fear being pulled down from it. Nor will people become useless because of this, thrown to the bottom of the rankings, because there never were any rankings. A person is one time of being, in this place, able to think, love, hurt, feel the heart tighten over something far away; a machine is one time of being, in that place, running in its own way; an ant is one time of being, a stone is one time of being. Each in its own place, and none is the other’s ruler.

People have their own weight. They can speak, make things, care for a sick person, shed tears for a child they don’t know; in this place called a person, these are real weight, which no one can take away, however clever the machines. Only this weight is not had by being ranked ahead of anyone; no longer being the ruler, people haven’t become lighter; they just no longer press other beings down with their own weight.

And value? A person who holds his own child dearer than others’ children: is he wrong?

No. Alike in being says no one is more being than another; value differing says that, seen from a given place, the weights differ. A mother values her child more than any child in the street; a farmer values his field more than any field elsewhere. This is leaning: every time of being has somewhere it leans toward, and wherever it leans, that weighs more in its place. Value grows from these leanings; it is weight as seen from some place.

Telling these two apart, one won’t use value to deny anyone’s being: this person is useless, that insect is a pest, so they may be disposed of as one likes. Nor will one use the equality of being to demand that people value everything the same: if a mother felt the same about her own child as about a child in the street, that would be where something had gone wrong.

Bats, bees, trees are all seeing from their own places too.

A bat flies at night not by its eyes but by its ears: it calls, listens to where the sound bounces back from, and knows there is a wall ahead, an insect. Its world is a world built of echoes, and people can’t get into it at all.

A flower that is yellow to human eyes has, to a bee’s eyes, rings of markings on its petals invisible to people, like a runway, pointing to the flower’s heart.

A tree has no eyes and no ears, yet it knows which side the light comes from, which side the water is, that winter is coming. Its “seeing” grows in its leaves and roots.

Each of them sees out from its own place. Each time of seeing is real and full; what is seen is not necessarily complete, nor necessarily right. None stands above all places, seeing for the others. Nor do they argue over who sees right. Each in its own place, each seeing its own, rained on by the same rain, warmed by the same sun.

Where people differ from them is that people can say “I think,” can speak what they see, check it against others’, and, finding it wrong, change it. This is a remarkable ability of this place called a person. Only this ability rises from a place too; it lets people see a little more, a little more accurately; it doesn’t let them stand outside all places.

Some will say: bats are bats, bees are bees, they don’t count; people are different, only people have minds, wisdom. Then leave the others aside and look only at people.

Even among people, the shapes of being differ greatly.

A man born blind walks down the street, his cane tapping the ground. What the cane meets is the bumps of the tactile paving, the edge of a step, a lamppost; whether the car ahead is parked or moving, whether to the left is a wall or a crossing, he can hear. His street is built of sound, the soles of his feet, and the tip of his cane. Someone asks him: don’t you feel you’re missing something? He thinks a moment and says: I’ve never had it, so I don’t know what I’m missing.

For a woman who can’t hear, the world is another shape. How others’ mouths move, how their hands move, how their faces change moment by moment, she sees more finely than anyone. At a concert she presses her palms to the wooden floor, and the drumbeats come up through the floor, beat by beat.

For a baby a few months old, the world is only so big: a face, a smell of milk, a pair of arms holding him. He can look at his own fingers for a long time.

An old woman’s memory recedes year by year; first she forgets yesterday, later her children’s names. Her world draws in ring by ring, until at last it is the patch of sun at the window, and whether the hand holding hers is warm.

A child is born unlike other children. In his teens he still can’t do sums within ten; the same cartoon, he watches every day and laughs every day, laughs just as he did the first time.

A mathematician sits at his desk, the paper covered with symbols others can’t read; in those symbols he sees a shape others can’t see, so beautiful it keeps him awake at night.

Someone who grew up on the grasslands can tell at a glance whether that grey lump several miles off is a sheep or a stone; someone who grew up in the city, standing on the same grassland, sees only a stretch of yellow-green.

People easily take one of these as the ruler: take someone with good eyes, good ears, a quick mind, in the prime of life, as the standard, and measure all the rest as “a bit short.” The blind man lacks eyes; the deaf woman lacks ears; the child isn’t grown yet; the old woman is already broken; the child who laughs at the same cartoon every day is “not normal.”

But the blind man’s street is not a street missing its colors; it is his street, and every tap of the cane has its echo. That child’s laugh every day is not a laugh not fully grown; that moment is whole. The hand the old woman holds, if warm, is warm, not a bit less than any hand she held when young. No place’s being is a damaged version of another place’s. Each is being and seeing from its own place, all full, all incomplete. The mathematician is incomplete too: the shape he sees, the edge of the step the blind man can touch, he may not be able to touch.

The blind man crossing the road has much more trouble than others; many doors are closed to him; whether the tactile paving is laid well is a solid matter to him. These difficulties are real and land in his days. But difficulty is not less being.

Think one step further out.

Suppose one day something far cleverer than people really did come, from the edge of the sky, or made by people themselves. It thinks ten thousand times faster than people; it sees light people can’t see, hears sounds people can’t hear; it lives far longer than people, and a human life to it is like a mayfly’s day to a person.

Would it be more being?

No. However fast it thinks, thinking is only a shape that grows within being; however far it sees, it sees out from its place, with its angle, with its unseen back. It can’t stand outside all places either. When people look at ants, they often feel that bit of bustle counts for nothing; it might feel the same looking at people. Then it would make the same mistake people make looking at ants: taking its own shape as the ruler of being.

The ant is being lacking nothing, the child who laughs at the same cartoon is being lacking nothing, the mathematician is being lacking nothing, and that thing ten thousand times cleverer than people is being lacking nothing too. No one is anyone’s draft, and no one is anyone’s end point.

The two who quarreled till they were red in the face at the dinner table, when the meal broke up, walked out of the restaurant one behind the other. Outside a light rain was falling; neither had an umbrella, and they stood under the eaves waiting.

After a while, one said: the rain seems to be letting up. The other said: yes, it’s letting up.

And the two of them walked out into the rain together.