There is something I began to notice in Cambodia that has become so obvious and it stayed with me more persistently than many of the extraordinary things that happened there. My mind was wrong surprisingly often.  Not stupid or irrational. Simply wrong. It would look at a person, a place, a sensation or a choice and produce an interpretation almost instantly. Then reality would continue unfolding and reveal that what I had taken for knowledge was often only a very fast story.

I had always thought of myself as someone who questions things. My professional life trained me to do exactly that. I work with law, privacy, compliance and risk, fields in which assumptions are expensive. I want evidence. I ask what supports a claim, what we actually know, what we are inferring, what we may have missed. That part of me did not disappear when I entered Cambodia, and I am glad it didn't. But the trip exposed something more subtle than ordinary gullibility or bias. A critical mind can question the world relentlessly while remaining remarkably unquestioning about the framework from which it is doing the questioning.

I began to see that the mind does not always seek truth first. Very often, it seeks coherence. It wants the next thing to fit with the things it already knows. It wants the person in front of me to correspond to the category I have already assigned to him. It wants my reactions to remain consistent with the woman I believe myself to be. It wants cause to lead to an understandable effect, sacred things to look sacred, dangerous things to look dangerous, desirable men to look like the men I desire, wisdom to arrive through forms I recognize as wise. When something refuses to fit, the mind experiences not only uncertainty but irritation. Reality has violated the filing system.

I watched this happen with a Cambodian man assigned to take me through the jungle on a motorcycle. I looked at him and had an immediate reaction: This one? This is my man? He did not fit my internal image of the kind of man I would choose to carry me through something frightening. Within minutes I was trying to supervise the way he drove. He knew the road. I did not. Yet somehow my lack of knowledge did not prevent me from having opinions about his competence. Later, after he had safely taken me through the jungle, returned for me before the others, driven me down the mountain through pouring rain, and met my eyes with a tenderness I had never anticipated, the original category became almost embarrassing. Nothing about him had changed. What had changed was the amount of reality I had finally allowed into my assessment. I stopped having opinions at one point. 

The same thing happened in Angkor Wat in a much funnier way. During our symbolic walk through the temple, there were two possible directions. Before I knew what they represented, my body pulled strongly toward the left. Then I heard that one direction represented the Path of Pleasure and the other the Path of the Master. I believed I had chosen Pleasure, and my mind immediately began protesting. Really? Pleasure? We came all the way to Cambodia for this? We could become Masters, receive knowledge, acquire some spiritual medals, and instead we are going after pleasure? I continued left anyway. That evening I discovered that I had misunderstood the directions. Left had actually been the Path of the Master. You would think my mind would have been delighted! It wasn't! Its response was essentially: Great. So once again I got cheated. I wanted pleasure. I laughed when I heard it because the mechanism had become too obvious to ignore. My mind had not needed the correct path. It needed a path about which it could have an opinion.

That moment changed the question for me. I had spent enormous amounts of energy in life trying to make better choices, understand myself more accurately and find the right interpretation and through that somehow find clarity. All of that has value. Discernment matters. Critical thinking matters. We make real decisions with real consequences. But what if some of the internal conflict I had attributed to choosing incorrectly had another source entirely? What if there is a function of the mind that can generate dissatisfaction under almost any outcome because dissatisfaction allows it to continue comparing reality with an alternative? Through these processes I saw that clarity will never come! EVER! 

Choose A, and B becomes attractive. Choose B, and A acquires all the qualities you sacrificed. Stay, and freedom becomes precious. Leave, and belonging becomes precious. Work, and the mind imagines rest. Rest, and it begins calculating everything you should be accomplishing. Become disciplined, and it longs for spontaneity. Become spontaneous, and it worries that you are wasting your life. Even the “right” decision cannot permanently solve a mechanism whose job is to keep generating comparisons.

This is where the issue becomes larger than indecision. The mind builds coherence by organizing enormous amounts of information into categories. It has to. I could not function if every chair, stranger, smell, road, facial expression and bodily sensation had to be encountered as an entirely new phenomenon. Past experience allows me to recognize patterns quickly. It protects me. It makes ordinary life possible. The problem begins when recognition quietly becomes certainty. 

I recognize something, therefore I think I know it. I prefer something, therefore I think it is better. Something makes me uncomfortable, therefore I think something is wrong. Something resembles a previous experience, therefore I assume I already understand what is happening. And somewhere in that sequence, perception becomes conclusion without announcing that it has crossed the line.

I saw this most clearly when I returned to Vietnam after Cambodia. I had passed through Vietnam on my way in, and my first response had been intensely negative. Things smelled bad. The environment felt dirty. The food looked unappealing. I was uncomfortable and evaluating constantly. A little more than a week later I came back through what was essentially the same world, and I was almost shocked by my own response. Food smelled wonderful. I wanted to taste things. The environment felt alive and interesting. People who had previously registered mainly as unfamiliar suddenly became visible to me as people. Vietnam had not undergone a national transformation during my week in Cambodia. Something in the observer had changed. And that exposed one of the smallest linguistic tricks the mind performs, one that I now find fascinating. It removes the words for me.

• This smells unpleasant to me becomes this smells bad.
• This food is unfamiliar to me becomes this food is bad.
• I am uncomfortable in these conditions becomes these conditions are terrible.
• I do not find this man attractive can quietly become this man is unattractive.
• I don't understand this experience becomes this makes no sense.

The change is tiny. Grammatically, we barely notice it. Psychologically, it is enormous. My internal response has become a property of the object. I wasn't lying when I disliked Vietnam the first time. My discomfort was real. My senses were real. My preferences were real. The mistake was subtler: my perception had been presenting my preferences to me as facts.

That distinction matters because the solution is not to distrust perception. I don't want to live that way either. If something feels dangerous, I want access to fear. If somebody repeatedly behaves dishonestly, I don't want to philosophize myself out of seeing it. If food smells spoiled, I am not going to eat it as an exercise in transcending judgment. Filters are necessary. Distrust has a purpose. Experience teaches us things for good reasons.

The question is whether the filter remains available for revision. A protective filter can save me when something is genuinely wrong. The same filter, left permanently in place, can screen out experiences that are safe, pleasurable and worth receiving. And because I experience the world through the filter, I may never know what it removed. I simply experience the resulting picture as reality.

This became particularly interesting when I started looking at the identities I carry about myself. I know what kind of woman I am. Or at least I thought I did. I am intellectual. I am highly educated. I am skeptical. I like cleanliness. I like certain kinds of men. I have particular standards. I am serious about my work. I am spiritual, but I don't want to surrender my critical mind. I am independent. I am capable. Every one of these statements contains something true. Together, however, they can also become a remarkably effective border patrol. New information approaches the border and is asked for documentation.

Does this experience belong to the woman we already know? Does this desire fit her? Would she do this? Would she believe this? Would she want him? Would she behave this way? If the answer is no, the easiest response is to reject the experience rather than revise the identity.

That is why my shalaven mattered more than a funny nickname. I had an image of a mature, respectable, spiritually serious woman, and this playful creature who liked male attention, flirted shamelessly and occasionally became jealous of men she did not even want did not fit the file. For years the contradiction seemed to require a decision about which woman was more truly me. Cambodia offered a different possibility: maybe the contradiction was information. Maybe my model of myself was simply too small.

The same thing happened at the other end of the spectrum with experiences I could not explain. At Bayon my body reacted in ways that were completely unusual for me. During practices connected with the elements, physical events around us seemed to correspond with what we were doing. At Angkor Wat a hornbill landed on the central tower at an extraordinary moment. A local woman arrived under circumstances that were difficult for me to dismiss emotionally and equally difficult to convert into anything I could prove. My old categories offered two comfortable options. Either declare the events supernatural and construct an explanation, or remain rational and reduce them to coincidence. I eventually realized that both responses solved the same psychological problem. They restored coherence. “I know this was a sign” closes the question. “It was only coincidence” also closes the question.

“I don't know” leaves the door open. And maybe that is why I don't know can be so uncomfortable. It is not an absence of intelligence. Sometimes it is the point at which intelligence has reached the edge of the available evidence and refuses to manufacture certainty simply to relieve the tension. However... I know that I DO know. Deep inside myself, I have an answer. My being already responded... 

That became one of the most important things Cambodia gave me: greater respect for the space between perception and conclusion. I can notice something without immediately knowing what it means. I can take an experience seriously without turning it into proof. I can feel attraction without constructing a relationship. I can experience fear without automatically concluding that I am in danger. I can recognize a pattern while remaining willing to discover that this particular person, place or moment does not belong to it. Maybe this is one of the harder forms of awareness because there is very little drama in it. It does not give me a new belief system. It actually takes some certainty away.

And I think this is where the idea of “knowing yourself” becomes more complicated than I once understood it to be. We are told to know who we are, know what we want, know our standards, know our boundaries. I believe in all of those things. But there is a strange danger in becoming so certain of who I am that nothing unfamiliar is permitted to tell me otherwise. Maybe sometimes what I call knowing myself is only knowing the story that has remained consistent enough for me to recognize myself inside it? If I already know exactly what kind of woman I am, I also know what she can desire. If I already know what love looks like, I know which forms of love to disregard. If I know what wisdom looks like, I know which teachers not to hear. If I know what safety looks like, I know which hands not to take. If I know what spirituality looks like, I know which experiences are too dirty, sexual, ridiculous or ordinary to belong inside it.

A coherent identity feels safe partly because it reduces the amount of reality I have to negotiate. But reality has no obligation to remain coherent with my biography. And this is the question I brought home from Cambodia: if every new experience has to agree with what I already know, how will I ever discover something I don't? I don't want to abandon discernment. I want something more difficult? Discernment that remains permeable? A mind capable of saying: Based on what I know, this is what I currently think, while leaving enough space for the next piece of reality to change the sentence. Maybe truth requires that space?  Not an empty mind. Not a mind without standards, memory or judgment? A mind that can survive being wrong?