Yoga and Qualia
I stumbled on a personal note I had written a few months back. It was regarding a specific posture which is part of a yogic practice I do regularly. Paraphrasing the note, it said "When you take that posture, focus on your contact between you and the ground, and it will work". That sounds like common gibberish which one would ignore normally. But the problem was that this gibberish was written by me, so I had to test it.
So I tried what was written in that note and yes, it "worked". I knew because it felt great. I was smiling.
There is this word in philosophy I had to discover. 'Qualia'. It refers to "the felt quality of experience itself, which by definition can't be transmitted by description". So "smiling" and "it felt great" is the best I can do to describe what happened lol.
My brain did not and still doesn't agree with this experience. It has found no logically justifiable connection between a feeling of pleasantness and a meager prescription of "ground contact".
And yet, it is as real as daylight on the skin.
Following this thread further, I found that what we call as "understanding" is a map of reality, rather than reality itself. And our map might be severely outdated. If we try to update it, it might make us socially unpopular. And we follow it, it will lead us all collectively off the cliff.