Tales and Journeys

Looking beyond the world of information, I discover that there rules a relativism in the world of feelings. This post sees the art in our unique perspectives on all that happens around us.

Look at an object close to you. Pick it up, examine it. What do you see?

And what more do you see?

What does the object mean to you, beyond its mere shape and surface? Our heads don’t know the world when we are born. We gradually learn how to understand it, how to chop it into pieces our psyche can comprehend. So how is it you really interpret the object; what tools are used, and what is the object decoded into, in your head? And your heart?

Okay, so it’s not always that easy to know. But you do have a special decoding process. It’s unique to you, and it’s been fine-tuned throughout your whole life. And it’s in no way limited to individual objects. We all live in the same physical world, but to each of us, everything means something else than to everyone else. So when we think of what the world is, the decoded version is all we know, and that’s what we think the world is. That is not a correct image of what the physical world truly is, but it’s not fiction either, so what is it exactly?

It’s your world.

Many things in the total physical world will never exist in your own. In today’s society many people know about most of the world, but we will never truly understand and feel all there is (hopefully!). We will only ever live in a slice of it. We all have our own separate laws of nature, our own beliefs, truths, ideals, and feelings. And it’ll all be true — per definition — in our own world.

Because of the size of this physical world and the amount of people on it, it can contain numerous individual worlds whose truths are pure contradictions (even ignoring religion). And we may often catch ourselves thinking: “what is right?” Which is because we so often assume that we all live within the very same world, and that all truths are common. The question might even send us into an existential crisis: “have I had it wrong since the beginning?” We might end up being someone else than we were, thinking like that. It’ll mean we’ve effectively changed our own world into something else. It’s possible and perhaps even for the better sometimes, but generally, it’s not necessary.

There is no one universal truth, no one true common world all our minds live in. We all have our own take on the world. In it we’re never misplaced and we’re not mistaken. We can shape our own worlds and decorate them however we please. We can fill our worlds with happiness, or we can fill them with sorrow (and then I don’t mean what happens, but how that affects us and makes us think). Neither is more true nor more right. For what is right and true is also a part of our own world.

Of course, you could say that’s taking it a bit far; perhaps beyond moral, or beyond the limitations of the human psyche. And you’d be right. Because there are limitations to what your own world could and should be. Where the limits are, depends on who you ask, but more importantly it depends on what you’re capable of. Your world has got to reflect your own identity (preferrably including your conscience). And most of the times it will, if you’ve never thought about it. I’d say it’s even possible to find your own identify by realizing what your own world is like. But you might also change your own world to something that’s not you (however paradoxal it might sound, I still think it’s possible), and that might be bad for you. But personally I believe that most of us can live in many different worlds without this problem.

And as if things aren’t complicated enough: nobody can live isolated from everyone else, so there are a whole lot of other worlds we’ve got to pass through each day of our lives. There can also be collective opinions shared by many different individual worlds, and there’s also this monstrous, shapeless, vague lump of billions of individual worlds that one can choose to put to represent the common mind of the whole world. In short, this is a whole science (which has probably been science’d lots of times already).