Where is the world? Is it just your internal experience?

Where is the world? Why does knowing this matter?

At first, it wouldn’t seem too controversial to say that the world is ‘out there’ and we walk around in it, having an experience.

But is that the case?

We really need to know what it is too.

Without realising, we seem to attribute some other quality to ‘the world’.

Think about what you are referring to when you say ‘the world’.
Are you referring to it’s co-ordinates within space time, its place in the solar system? The thing you walk around in/on?

I don’t think so…

What we take for granted when we use the term ‘the world’ is that we are also referring to events that are happening. There is an element of story to the world.
When you break this down further, you realise we are reducing ‘the world’ down to events happening, but from a human perspective, either as one big story or as a collection of billions of individual stories.

So in terms of what is the world we can try at some answers:

The world is a human-centric one.
The world is very fluid in its definition.
It connotes a story, a sense of history.
The world encompasses all that’s happened and puts all of our individual experiences and understandings into one edifice under one title – the world.
The state of the world is the state of all the affairs that either concern us or are in our awareness.

So, if we can deduce that when we say the term ‘the world’ we are referring to our experiences of the world, and our interpretation of events, then surely when we ask ‘where is the world?’ we have to answer with…..

……the world is taking place inside us.

We are not walking around in the world. We are walking around on The Earth

We seem to have somewhere got confused between The Earth and The World. The World has a metaphysical, mental aspect to it. It’s brought into existence by our thoughts about it.

There are many spiritual practices and traditions that actually take THIS for granted (that the world is what we project, based on our interpretations which are all internal).

Buddhism calls it MAYA which means illusion. The world, the story of it, the affairs, is a collection of projections which are all subjective.

So the world is purely a mental construct and it’s also our biased perspective. In fact it’s all about perspective.

So surely now when we conceive of ‘the world’ or even say the words, we can acknowledge that this is largely what is happening inside the boundary of our body rather than outside of it?

The world, history, civilisation as we know it may not even exist. This is possible because nothing about it is fixed or definite, which would obviously make sense seen as it’s a construct of our differing and changing perspectives.

And what’s the point of knowing all this?

Well, let’s say we are dissatisfied, unhappy, or suffering on some level. Do we not mostly act as though we have to make changes externally to make it stop?

Realising that the world is dependent on how we interpret experience, we can begin a reality-inducing journey of self inventory. If we can understand how it is we see the world then we can alleviate suffering.