The World We Live In (eBook)

I. HUMANS, THE WORLD, AND CONSCIOUSNESS

My World and Your World

We all live in a different world, and each one of us in their own. And yet, none of these worlds is the reality. We argue and squabble over right and wrong, about what we should do and what we must never do, about what the ›truth‹ is. And we do this because we all see life and the world differently and simply assume that our view is the right one. If you were to place four people in the same room, each facing one of its four walls, they will each see a different room. Their experience of the room is shaped by their position in it, and thus differs from all the others in the room. Where one sees a wall from the front, the other sees the same wall from the side or not at all if they are sitting with their back to it. The room feels different depending on the corner one is sitting in it. And though no view is wrong, none is complete.

We all each see from a different perspective, from a different position, and each one of us only sees what we can see from that point of view. The term ›view‹ is very accurate here, as in the point from which you view. In most cases, and especially when it comes to things that are important to us, we regard this view for more than just our view. We regard it as the right one, if not the reality or the truth. Ifyou are humble and know, or at least are willing to admit, that your view depends on your point of view, your position, and looking from that specific preceptive, you would not place your view above those of others. On the contrary, you would accept the views of others and incorporate them into your own so as to expand your view of the world and yourself.

To see what this means for your view of the world and the people around you, here is a small test. If you have siblings, ask each one to describe your parents. What is (was) your mother like? Your father? What were their strengths and weaknesses? What was their relationship with each other like? How did they treat the children? And so on. You will soon see that each child has different parents, and each one has a different family, even though it is in fact the same family. And yet, in most cases, each one of you will insist that their version of the story, their view, is the right one, that their assessment of their parents is correct, and that their childhood was exactly how they perceive it.

You can do the same thing with your life partner or with colleagues from work or with friends. You will find that everyone sees the other person differently. This applies not only to the general picture that one forms of others, but also to the description of factual events, that is, things and processes that are seemingly objective. They all have two sides – The factual reality and the image that appears in the eyes of the observer.

I have known my wife for over fifty years, and for 45 years of those years we have lived together. Even when we talk about events that we both experienced together, our experiences and stories often diverge considerably from each other, sometimes to the contrary. And this is all the more evident when we are describing or assessing other people. In the meantime, we manage not to argue about it, and instead accept each other’s perspective as their view of the issue2, which is very gratifying and enriching. But this was not always the case. For many years we constantly argued – and at times quite intensely, especially if there was a third person present. Feeling misunderstood, each of us then withdrew into our own worlds. Only love could bridge our differences, but the non-understanding remained. Our worlds are not and will never be exactly the same. For someone like myself who harbors a deep longing for a truth3 we can all agree on, this was a particularly hard pill to swallow.

And this does not just happen between different people, it also takes place within us. Our world (our view of the world and ourselves) is constantly changing, and this change is for the most part gradual and hardly perceptible, though at times it can be quite sudden and violent. The way I saw my parents as a child was very different from the way I saw them at twenty, and even more different than the picture I had of them at sixty. Today I also have a very different view of the world, including the factual world, as well as very different ideas of what is good and important and right. And I also have a different picture of myself, of who I am, what I can do, and what I want. If you were to paint these images or photograph them or project them as a film, you would get to see completely different worlds. I believed different things, thought different things were right or good or wrong or evil or beautiful or ugly or important or indispensable or indifferent or possible or impossible or true. The way I see the people around me or how I view time and its events is constantly changing, not only because the world is constantly changing, but also because I am constantly changing. The same is true of my self-image.

None of these images is false per se, but none is ›right‹ in an objective sense either. They are both false and ›right‹. A child cannot have any view of the world other than that of a child, and that makes its view ›right‹ for a child. But this view is also limited and if you hold on to it your life long, you remain mentally a child. For example, it is important for a child to have someone care for it. So, when this is the case, life is good for the child and when this is not the case, it is bad and even terrible for it to be abandoned and left to care and fend for itself. For an adult, it is quite the opposite. If an adult holds on tightly to the need to be cared for, the adult remains emotionally and mentally a child. That means, what is right for a child is in no way right or appropriate for an adult or even a teenager. Teenagers view themselves and the world through the lens of adolescence, as that is what adolescence demands of them to leave their parental home (to free themselves from their rules and restrictions) and to find their own place in life. And this is what determines their perspective and thereby their view of the world, their feelings, and their judgment over what is right and what is wrong. An adult that starts a family and must care for children will yet again be in another position and develop a new perspective. With each of these life stages, we enter a different world. We can find agreement by acknowledging and accepting each other’s perspectives and not declare them as false. In the case of the life stages of childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, however, unlike the previously mentioned example of the room, it’s a matter of growth and development. Every new stage encompasses more and is higher and wider than the one before it. When it comes to real growth, the higher (and later) stages of life include and encompass the previous ones, that means adolescence encompasses and includes childhood, and adulthood encompasses and includes both. Every life stage emerges from the one before it. It is thus both a wider and higher development – but only if the previous one is integrated and not rejected.

The child view of the world, the world of fairy tales and sorcerers, of belonging to parents and a family (in general, to something greater that carries, protects, and cares for us), etc., is perfectly right for a child and therefore ›true‹ for it. That is why it should not be denied to children, in an attempt to teach them openness, or taking personal responsibility or freedom to make choices and decisions. In adolescence, this world shatters into a thousand shards and that is the way it has to be. If you truly want to become an adult, you have to gather these shards and piece them together to see what new image will emerge. It will completely differ from the one you dreamed of as a teenager.

You become an adult when you absorb and include your childhood and adolescence within you, exactly as they were – without judgment or even the desire to change it or want it to be different. With every step we take into the world – from birth, puberty, adulthood, the several stages of aging until death – our world not only changes but it also becomes wider and bigger. If we follow this in consciousness, our mind also expands and becomes larger and more comprehensive. This also means that an older person can understand a younger person, but a younger person cannot understand an older person, because the younger person has not yet had the experiences or, to use the same image, has not yet entered that world. From this, we can derive important insights both for the relationship between the generations and, above all, for the inner growth of every human being, which I will present in this book.

The existence of different worldviews or images of the world is something that affects not only individuals, but also entire cultures, and it does so in two ways. First, cultures – and thus the people who belong to them – differ in manifold ways. The Chinese, for example, think in images because their writing is based on pictographic characters. Abstract thinking is foreign to them and not as easily accessible as it is to Europeans. And because they learn to write not by combining 26 meaningless characters, but by copying and understanding several thousand characters, each of which represents a holistic image, they do not consider the act of copying a bad thing. Also, the way they think is based on the deep philosophy of yin and yang, which are understood as complementary polarities and not as opposites, so they (like the Japanese and Koreans) do not think ideologically,...