A. The Skull and the World Made by Mind There’s a story in Zen about a monk named Won Hyo. He’s traveling through the night and stops to rest in a cave. It’s dark. He’s thirsty. He finds a bowl of water, drinks from it, feels refreshed, and falls asleep. When morning comes and light enters the cave, he sees that the bowl was a human skull filled with stagnant rainwater. Maggots. Decay. He vomits. But then something happens. He laughs. Because nothing changed. The water was always what it was. His experience—the peace, the comfort, the disgust—came entirely from how he saw it. His perception made the thing. That’s the insight that begins all of this: the mind shapes what we experience. Not just mood. Not just opinion. Our entire felt world. This might sound like basic cognitive psychology, but it’s deeper. It’s not that we see things through bias, or that we project onto situations. It’s that we live inside those projections and mistake them for reality. That confusion—between wh...