The World as a Mirror
It has been written, “As within, so without.”
This phrase is considered by some to be a Universal Law, informing us that the outer world is somehow a reflection of our inner world. It’s often interpreted in a moral context, in which a person’s life experience is determined by how good we are, or how well we embody somebody’s ideas about what a human being should be or how we should behave.
When I hear the phrase “As within, so without” in that moral context, my mind always conjures some moral authority that’s outside myself, either singular or collective, some uber-observer that’s watching me and sitting in judgment of my thoughts and actions.
However, the problem for me is that I long ago rejected that idea of the external judge, and so it became incumbent upon me to come up with some other interpretation of “As within, so without.” It would, of necessity, lie outside of the domain of moral judgment and authority, and it would need to explain a mechanism by which the external world could change its behavior depending on how I changed my thoughts and actions.
For me, that interpretation arises in the domain of a purely scientific understanding of the relationship between the observer and the observed.
The classical interpretation of this relationship is that a human being is born with various forms of sensory apparatus and a brain capable of assembling sensory input into a more-or-less accurate picture of what’s actually “out there.” The problem for me was that when I studied quantum physics all these many years ago, I found out that our collective best efforts to understand the physical world led to a world view which calls into question the very idea of a world that’s “out there,” and even of the existence of a location called “out there.”
In the classical understanding of the world, everything is composed of the smallest possible building blocks, usually called fundamental particles. These particles are complete in and of themselves, and are not composed of smaller, more basic things. They exist in and of themselves, apart from any observation or measurement of their properties.
In the quantum domain - in what is called quantum theory - the building blocks of which the world is composed are described by the likelihood that any particular measurement of their properties, such as present and future location, will yield any particular result. This theory implies that those building blocks do not have discreet locations until they’re actually observed. And beyond that, the theory actually says nothing about the external world itself but only about what we are likely to observe when we’re looking at it.
The insights in the preceding paragraph have led me to understand that none of us has direct access to what we think of as the external world, because all we have is our perceptions of the world and the stories we tell ourselves about those perceptions.
Nowadays, when I hear the phrase “As within, so without,” I remember that “without” is simply an idea, part of the description I have adopted to explain what I see, hear, and so on. I understand that there is only “within,” because my perceptions, and their description, lie entirely within myself… and that is all there is. There is no need of a mechanism that connects within and without, because they both have their being inside me, and you, and all of us. That’s why the world is a mirror. We are literally looking at our description of the world. The world itself is, and must always be, a mystery to us. At least while we are here in these amazing bodies, reveling in the sights and sounds of a magical world.
