Does it surprise you that life just keeps happening, balanced on the blunt edge of choice? The challenges of life always deepen to match you at every point, and never stop calling you forward onto an ever-lengthening road. No matter what decisions we make, we know that any resulting bliss or agony will be largely temporary, any new human connection will be mixed with alienation, and any new truth will only provide more ground for uncertainty.
Our deepest internal flaws will forever confront us, and are reflected in every moment. In life, we perceive exactly the challenges we’re ready for, and we will never find a situation that provides lasting contentment, by virtue of how we’re built, not how the world is built. The world we perceive is a projection of ourselves.
Brain scientists, Plato, Heidegger and others agree: we create our world. There is a huge gulf between the messy data that we’re exposed to, and the orderly world we experience. Ours is a world of actions and properties and causation, even though these things are not really out there. The things that we perceive do not exist at all. Man is the measure of everything we know, but nothing at all. If you saw the world from a fly’s perspective, or a tree’s, it would be largely unrecognizable. The world no doubt exists in some form, but it is just beyond our perceptions of it.
What if every aspect of our world is explainable in this way? What if everything we experience is just a reflection of our own yearnings, like a dream? The people we sit near on the train, the flies that never leave our food alone, the latest news never actually happened. I meet the women I do because they represent the beauty I’m ready to perceive and patches on the flaws I hide in myself. We are like genius amoebas, experiencing primitive sensations and creating an elaborate story to occupy ourselves.
I do believe there’s something outside of us. There is a potential to do good and pursue love. Our actions in this created world have some effect on the real world. I suspect that the real world is much more inside us than we realize (we don’t think any part of the world is inside us now), and that actions are only proxies for the real work being done internally-and-in-reality. Life is a fabulous and very-serious game, specifically designed by our own minds out of their encounter with a primordial something. We are offered the opportunity to pursue this woman because she represents beauty, or to help this child as an exercise in providing.
Something in this scares me to the core of my being. I believe that the world runs by scientific laws because I’ve been told it does. But my own experiments in school have more often defied those laws than confirmed them. It is as though the world was knocking on my consciousness’s door, asking to let it defy everything I know. If there’s no science, then no biology, no technology, no civilization. My whole life may be like the delusions of a man in a coma, yet littered with clues of its falsehood and the muffled voice of someone trying to talk me out of it.