Your brain never actually replays a memory — it reconstructs it, each time, from whatever materials happen to be present. This is not a flaw. But it does mean that the felt certainty you have about what a past experience means is partially a product of your current mood, what you ate, who you spoke to this morning. The 11th-century Indian philosopher Abhinavagupta, writing about perception and aesthetic experience, made a structurally identical point: cognition is not retrieval but re-creation, shaped every time by the emotional 'coloring' (bhāvanā) the mind brings to it. The practical upshot is unsettling and useful in equal measure — the mental models you trust most, the ones that feel like bedrock, may have quietly shifted without your noticing, simply because you keep reviewing them through a slightly different lens each time. Today, when you catch yourself saying 'I already know what I think about this,' that certainty is worth a second look.

What would someone observing you conclude about which mental model you rely on most — and when did you last test it against evidence rather than just confirm it by using it?

Drawing from Kashmir Shaivism (Indian philosophy of perception and consciousness) — Abhinavagupta