The obvious explanation for the world we experience is that the world, with its bright green leaves, rough stones and icy rivers is out there, and we apprehend it through our senses.
But this view of reality, which philosophers call naïve realism, feels shaky on scrutiny.
For, when we see a bright green leaf, can we really say that the bright green belongs to the leaf and not to our experience?
We know now that dogs probably see the leaf as a dull yellow or brown, and bats may experience the leaf through sonic textures pertaining to its shape. Insects may see in the leaf a dozen colours we’ve never seen[i].
The best way to account for the differences in the ways that the objects of the world can be experienced is to say that the objects do not themselves have the qualities that we experience, but rather that the inherent qualities of the objects are received and apprehended by our sense receptors in a particular way.
The leaf is not bright green objectively. Rather, the leaf has objective properties such that the light it reflects is perceived by our retinas as bright green.
This is a mouthful, and our brains – being adept at avoiding work – revert constantly back to the naive realist view of the world, dissolving any difference between our experiences and reality.
So, we stamp onto reality that leaves are bright green, and taxes are bad and good-looking women are mean, while forgetting even for ourselves that leaves are bright green to me, and taxes are bad in my opinion, and good-looking women are mean in my experience.
It is a pity that we take our experiences to be reality. Not because this is imprecise or politically incorrect, but because it creates a false dichotomy between subject and object.
This disconnects us from parts of ourselves and diminishes our ability to create our world and transcend the rules we’ve created for ourselves.
When we truly separate ourselves from our naïve realism, we can start to see that everything in our world is particular to us.
Everything in the universe of your awareness is happening only to you and only for you.
The bright green leaf is not something out there in the world that your vision grabs on to. The bright green leaf is your own peculiar creation, enjoyed only by you, created in response to some stimulus received by your brain or retina.
Sure, my brain or retina may respond to the same object in the world to create my own version of the bright green leaf. But that is not the same leaf of your experience.
What I experience as bright green may look like orange in your world and as long as I reliably see all bright-green objects in your orange, we’ll be none the wiser.
So, it is truly more honest to say that the world we experience is particular to us.
We believe ourselves to be conscious subjects and ordinarily think of subjects as enjoyers of experiences.
We think experiences happen to us.
But it is more accurate to say that subjects are creators of experiences, and enjoy the experiences they themselves have created.
We do not grasp the objects of the world in our experience. The objects in our world cannot be brought into our experiences any more than a tree can be brought into a painting of a tree.
Rather, we subjects are creators of the greatest multisensory experiences on the planet. We create experiences, taking as inspiration the physical stimulus of our environment.
Seeing ourselves as the creators of our world can have astounding consequences for our material and spiritual lives.
It may no longer be appropriate to separate ourselves from the world we experience. For we are not merely the subjects of our experience, all the objects of our experience are also part of us.
The wrinkled grandmother, or the abject teenager walking past you are as much a part of your experience as you yourself are, and your capacity and responsibility for their wellbeing may be transformed if you notice that their being unwell is created, in part, in your experience.
Not everything you experience can be changed by you. But when you allow that reality can be different from your experience, you do two things.
First, you empower yourself to experience the world more creatively. Second, you give reality – and especially sentient beings – the opportunity to surprise you in positive ways by allowing things to be more, and better, than they appear to you today.
The world you experience is the world you create. And while it is true that the world happens to you, it is also true that it happens for you and because of you.
In a very concrete sense, there is no difference between you and the world you experience.
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ENDNOTE:
[i] An intriguing example outside of the visual spectrum:
Computer programs can now recognize thousands of smells, differentiating objects by their floral, musky or sweet smelling qualities.
But computers do not experience the smell of a grape in the way we do, they are simply drawing connections between the molecular structure of the grape and its corresponding odours.