Vinaire's Blog
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Reference: Postulate Mechanics
Here’s something interesting: your mind can do two very different things — it can look, and it can think. And they are not the same!
When you look at something, you just notice what’s there. You don’t need words for it. You don’t need to figure anything out. You just… see it.
Thinking is when your brain starts adding stuff — like labels, opinions, or ideas. That’s a whole different thing.
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Imagine you walk into a room and you look at a chair. Really looking means you just notice the chair — its shape, its color, the way it sits there. That’s it.
But most of the time, your brain jumps in right away and starts saying things like:
All of that is your brain thinking, not just looking.
Here’s the big secret: you don’t have to stop those thoughts. You don’t have to push them away or make your mind go blank. Just notice the thought — like saying to yourself, “Oh, there’s my brain labeling things again” — and then keep looking.
When you try to force your brain to stop thinking, it actually makes things worse. It’s like trying not to think of a pink elephant — now that’s all you can think of!
The goal is simple: look at things without expecting anything. Don’t try to find an answer. Just see what’s there.
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Try these four mini-exercises. You just need the room you’re sitting in right now.
Exercise 1 — Notice labels
Look around the room. When you look at something, does your brain instantly say what it is? Like, “that’s a lamp” or “that’s a book”? You don’t need to stop it. Just notice that your brain is doing the labeling thing. Cool, right?
Exercise 2 — Notice opinions
Look around again. This time, notice if your brain says something like “that lamp is pretty” or “that lamp is ugly.” Your brain is now judging! Don’t stop it. Just notice it happening.
Exercise 3 — Notice decisions
Look around one more time. Does your brain say things like “I want that” or “I’d never buy that”? That’s your brain jumping ahead and making choices! Again — don’t stop it. Just watch it happen.
Exercise 4 — Notice all thoughts
Now look around and just watch whatever thoughts pop up. They can be labels, opinions, decisions — anything. Don’t push them away. Just notice them, like you’re watching clouds float by in the sky.
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Every object you see has a kind of “mental picture” that goes along with it in your mind. That mental picture is what your brain uses to understand the object.
When you practice really looking — noticing both the object and the thoughts your brain adds — you start to see things much more clearly. You see what’s actually there, not just what your brain expects to see.
That’s the beginning of something pretty powerful.
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Reference: Postulate Mechanics
Some very smart thinkers in history believed that your mind and your body are two totally separate things — like oil and water that can never mix. This idea is called dualism (say it like: “doo-al-iz-um”).
But other thinkers said, “Wait a minute — mind and body are really just two sides of the same coin.” That idea is called monism.
Here is the big puzzle: if your mind and body were completely different and had nothing to do with each other, how could they ever talk to each other? When you feel scared, your heart beats faster. When you stub your toe, your brain feels pain. They clearly do talk to each other. So something must be connecting them!
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Think about temperature. There is hot, and there is cold — but there is also everything in between: warm, cool, lukewarm. There is a smooth gradient (a slow change) from one to the other.
The same thing is true for mind and body. They might seem very different, but there is a smooth gradient connecting them, made of substance.
What is substance? Substance is basically anything you can sense — anything you can see, hear, feel, touch, or think about. The three main kinds of substance are:
These three form a kind of ladder, going from the most “solid” (matter) to the least “solid” (thought). They are all connected, just like the rungs of a ladder.
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“Real” can mean two things:
Think of it like a big puzzle. The very first piece — the starting piece — is called a postulate (say: “pos-chew-lit”). A postulate is a basic idea you accept as true and then build everything else on top of. Like in math class, when the teacher says, “Okay, let’s assume this is true — now what follows?”
Everything else in the universe flows from that starting piece. And for something to be truly real, all the pieces of the puzzle have to fit together without any gaps or contradictions.
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Here is the answer from this book:
So mind and body are not totally different and separate. They are more like different flavors of the same ice cream. That is why they can affect each other.
When your thinking gets very complex and active, that creates what we call consciousness — your sense of being aware. When your body gets very complex in its movements and systems, that creates agility and life.
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Mind and body are not the same thing — they are different. But they are not completely separate either — they are connected through a ladder of substance (matter → energy → thought).
Saying they have nothing in common is like saying hot and cold have nothing in common — it just ignores everything in between. The mind can never truly exist all by itself, completely cut off from the body.
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Reference: Postulate Mechanics
Have you ever looked up at the sky and felt like it goes on forever? That feeling of “forever” and “everything connected together” is actually where the idea of God comes from. People noticed that the universe is enormous — maybe infinite — and that everything in it seems to work together like one giant, amazing machine. That’s the starting point for thinking about God.
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A very long time ago, people in ancient India wrote poems called the Vedas. In these poems, they talked about many different gods — gods of fire, wind, sky, and water. But here’s the cool part: they also said that all these gods were really just different names for one big truth underneath everything.
Think of it like this: imagine a giant diamond. It has many different sides, and each side sparkles differently. But it’s still one diamond. The ancient Indians saw their many gods the same way — many shining sides of one truth. They even had a saying for it: “The Truth is one; the wise call it by many names.”
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Buddhism came from some of the same ideas, but it asked a different question: why do people believe in God in the first place?
A Buddhist teacher explained it this way: people feel scared and want to be safe, kind of like how little kids feel safer when a parent is nearby. So people invented the idea of God — a super-powerful protector who watches over them. Buddhism says this comes from fear and not fully understanding how the world works.
Buddhism also doesn’t believe in one all-powerful God who created everything. Instead, it teaches that everything is connected and always changing.
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The idea of just one God — and only one, with no others — didn’t appear all at once. It grew slowly over a very long time.
Way back in the Middle East, people first prayed to one main god but still believed other gods existed. Over hundreds of years, that slowly changed. By around 500 BCE, after a group of Jewish people went through a very hard time (they were taken away from their homeland to Babylon), their leaders came back with a firm new idea: there is only one God, the creator of everything, and no other gods are real at all.
This one-God idea was later passed on to Christianity and Islam, which together have billions of followers today.
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This book (called Postulate Mechanics) starts with an ancient Indian idea: reality has three qualities — substantiality, awareness, and oneness. The whole book builds on that starting point.
The book sees the idea of “one true God” as a kind of shortcut — people took the amazing, complex oneness of the universe and turned it into a simple person-like God. That can be easier to understand, but it might also miss the bigger, more wonderful picture.
The book also points out that after the Jewish people returned from Babylon, having a single, strict God helped their leaders keep everyone united and following the same rules. One God, one law, one people — it’s a powerful idea for building a community. But the book suggests that believing only your God is the real one can actually get in the way of truly understanding how wonderfully connected and complex the whole universe really is.
The big takeaway? Humans have always sensed that everything is somehow one — and they’ve tried to explain that feeling in different ways across different cultures. This book tries to explore that oneness without the shortcuts.
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Reference: Postulate Mechanics
Have you ever tried to think about everything — every planet, every star, every thought, every feeling — all at once? That’s what this chapter is about. Some people call “everything” the universe. Some people call it God or the divine. And almost everyone agrees on one thing: it goes on forever. That “forever” is what we call infinity.
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A long, long time ago, a thinker named Anaximander had a big idea. He said there must be some original “stuff” that everything is made of — and that stuff has no beginning and no end. Everything comes from it, and everything goes back to it.
Later, a philosopher named Spinoza said that God is that stuff — and that stuff is the universe. In other words, God and nature are the same thing. Another thinker, Leibniz, said that God keeps creating things — kind of like how the sun keeps shining light without ever running out.
In this book, “stuff” means anything you can sense — things you can touch (matter), feel as energy, or think about (thoughts). The biggest, most powerful kind of thought is called a postulate — a deep, foundational idea. Those postulates are where the divine lives.
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Have you ever stared up at the night sky and wondered: does space ever stop? A Greek thinker named Archytas asked the same thing. He said: if space had a wall, you could always stretch your hand beyond it — so there can’t really be a wall. Space just keeps going.
Newton said space is like a giant invisible box that goes on forever in every direction — flat and endless.
But this book has a different idea: space isn’t really empty. Space is just how big things feel. When you fill a room with furniture, the room feels different than when it’s empty. Space is like that — it changes depending on what fills it: matter, energy, or thought.
Even “nothing” isn’t really nothing. To imagine an empty space, you have to think about it — and that thought is already something filling it up!
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Infinity means something that never ends — no finish line, no stopping point, no edge. It has its own symbol: ∞ (it looks like the number 8 lying on its side). A mathematician named John Wallis came up with that symbol.
Think of it this way:
This book says infinity is a big idea that we attach to the universe, to God, and to our deepest thoughts. It connects three huge things:
They all go together, like three ways of describing the same amazing, endless mystery.
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The universe is so big, so deep, and so full of wonder — and infinity is just the word we use when we run out of words.
Reference: Postulate Mechanics
Have you ever said “I did that” or “That’s mine”? That little word “I” feels very real. Some people believe that this “I” — the part of you that thinks and feels — lives forever, even after your body dies. They call it a soul, or atman.
But is that actually true? Or is it just something we tell ourselves because it’s comforting?
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Your sense of “I” is the feeling that there is a “you” inside — someone who thinks your thoughts, feels your feelings, and gets credit or blame for what you do.
This feeling of “I” is real. You definitely feel it. But it can also cause big problems. Thinking too much about “me” and “mine” leads to selfishness, jealousy, anger, and pride. In fact, most fights — from arguments between friends all the way to wars between countries — come from people being too stuck on their own “I.”
But here is the big question: does this “I” keep going after you die? There is no real proof that it does.
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When you were born, you got a lot from your parents — your hair color, your height, maybe even how easily you get scared or stressed. Scientists have discovered that parents can actually pass down some of the effects of their life experiences through something called epigenetics (epi-ge-NET-ics). That’s a fancy word for tiny changes in how your genes work — not the genes themselves, just how they get “read.”
So if your grandmother went through something scary, some of that stress pattern might have been quietly passed down to your mom, and then to you — without anyone realizing it.
This is why some feelings or fears can seem to run in families. But this is NOT the same as your “I” living forever. It just means experiences leave echoes in your DNA for a few generations, like footprints in sand.
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The Buddha noticed something interesting: people really, really WANT to believe they will live forever. It is scary to think that “you” might just stop existing one day. So the idea of an immortal soul is very comforting.
But wanting something to be true does not make it true. The belief in an eternal “I” is really just a story we tell ourselves — what philosophers call a postulate (POS-chew-late), which means an assumption we accept without proof.
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The Buddha taught that you are made up of five ingredients:
None of these five things, alone or together, is a permanent, unchanging “you.” Everything is constantly changing. The “I” you experience is more like a campfire — it seems solid and real, but it is actually just fuel, heat, and light all working together. Take them apart, and there is no “fire.”
Here’s a cool way to think about it: imagine you are looking at a tree. There is the tree (the object) and there is your looking (the awareness). The tree exists in one world. Your looking — your pure awareness — exists in a different world. The sense of “I” only shows up when you confuse your awareness with something out there, like thinking “I AM this body” or “I AM these feelings.”
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Nirvana (nir-VAH-na) begins the moment you clearly see that the “I” you have been protecting and worrying about is not really a solid, permanent thing — it is something your mind constructed, like a story or a habit.
When you notice this, something opens up. You feel lighter. You are not as stuck. That is the beginning of nirvana.
And the more you keep noticing these mistaken ideas — about yourself and the world — the more that lightness grows.
The big takeaway: The “I” you feel every day is real as an experience, but it is not permanent, not eternal, and not truly separate from everything around you. Seeing this clearly is the beginning of wisdom.
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