The World as a Story

It may be that the hardest thing for us humans to do is to turn the container of our lives on its head.

Virtually every human being who has ever lived has considered the world to be the container in which one lives one’s life. Clearly, we believe, we come and go while the world remains. That’s just common sense; it’s completely intuitive.

But consider the possibility that we have it backwards. Consider the opposite: that we are the container in which the world appears. Exploring this possibility requires that we relinquish our identification with our bodies and think of ourselves as our consciousness, our awareness. Everything we observe is a picture formed in our brains from electrical impulses delivered by our senses. In this view, any object we’re observing lives in our awareness, in us, as a description of what we’re witnessing.

So now, we can ask about the implications of living in this possibility, as if what we think of as the world is actually a story, a description which we’ve accepted as being real, as if the description is the real world.  This idea is opposed to that of living in a world that exists independently of ourselves. 

Let’s take a step back.  We human beings believe that the conditions in which we find ourselves determine our experience.  Looking at things from that perspective, a primary purpose of action is to change conditions. This is one of those unexamined assumptions that seems so obvious as to be invisible.  Clearly, we human beings use action to fix things that are broken, to make things happen, to change our experience, and hopefully the experience of others, for the better.

However, let’s explore the possibility that we are interpreting sensory stimuli according to a description that we’ve already accepted as real and which therefore functions as a filter.  This filter allows only those perceptions that confirm and validate what we already know about the world. 

Any description that we believe in carries within it a certain, limited range of options.  Suppose, for example, that I describe myself as unworthy of experiencing true financial abundance.  That description carries within it feelings like “I haven’t worked hard enough,” or “I don’t have the right education,” or “I wasn’t born in the right place or the right time,” or something like that. The set of options consistent with my belief in unworthiness doesn’t include a story such as “All you have to do is follow your heart and your passion and things will always work out for you.” 

This different story, one I can tell if I dispense with this belief in unworthiness, can be expanded to read, “If you follow your passion you will wind up inventing, writing, or otherwise offering something that other people will find valuable or useful.   You will do it because it feels good to do it, and abundance will follow.”  There are people who believe in this possibility and who find it manifested in their experience.  But the possibility of following your heart and your passion is not available if you consider yourself unworthy of life’s abundance, in whatever form that might take. 

The filtering principle I speak of implies that however much action you engage in, you can at best only trade one limited option for another one, all within the range of options dictated by the description you have accepted as being real.

Ok, what would be the purpose of action in a world that mirrors your description of it?  What would be the purpose of acting in the world if the world you perceive is actually a story, a description of what you observe?

Since the conditions you encounter are simply reflecting your description of the world, consider that the world itself doesn’t need to be fixed.  Consider that the same is true of the content of your life experience. 

The circumstances you face aren’t actually causing your experience; it’s the story you tell about yourself that does that.

If you accept that proposition, then what remains is for you to act for the enjoyment of being in action, to revel in the sights and sounds of the world, to love being and interacting with other people, and so on. In other words, in this alternative interpretation of reality, we really can act simply for the joy of it. This flies in the face of so many cultural dictates we can barely hear it. But it is enormously freeing if we can come to realize, or make real for ourselves, that nothing in our lives is broken, and nothing in our lives needs to be fixed.