Shrinking and Expanding Worldview
When we were a child, our worldview is constrained on what we know about the world and inevitably so do our desires.
Recently I found out that I have inguinal hernia, it’s a condition where the intestines burst through an abdominal wall and its showing as an out of place bulge on my lower abdomen. Initially, only a relatively small number of activities hurt, as days went by, every time I needed to move my left leg, it felt like there’s a sting of multiple needles stabbing my groin. I needed to think about how I needed to sit, needed to think about how I could walk, and needed to think how I could lie on my bed without hurting. I can’t at all lay my body facing down. It has been the most humbling experience of my life.
I thought about how simple my desires had become.
The constant physical pain that tormented me every time I moved taught me that, in every present moment, all I wanted was to not suffer.
That was it. I only wanted that.
My worldview had shrunk to the point where my only concern was:
"How can I move myself without hurting?"
I have become a simpleton.
And it made me realize — in the most rhetorical way — that most of my suffering could have been easily avoided if I had just had a smaller worldview. I no longer cared about my performance at work, or what people thought of me, or what I should do over the weekend. In the most biological sense, there was no spare currency of energy for my brain to think about those things. My entire mental bandwidth had collapsed into a single thought:
"What the fuck is a hernia, and why does it hurt so bad? What the fuck can I do to make it stop?"
As I’ve just recently taken a painkiller, I have formulated this thought and how beautiful the concept is.
In one line:
People who worry themselves to death are victims of a body and brain too "smart" for their own good.
To fully understand this concept, one must admit that you are not your brain, rather you are what emerges out of it. To say that you are your brain is the same as saying a movie is just pictures flashing really fast — missing the story, the emotions, the entire experience it creates.
To say that you are your brain, is the same as saying that a song is just vibrating strings, or that a flock is just individual birds. It misses the point that something richer, more intricate, and alive arises when the pieces come together.
To say that you are your brain, is the same as saying that you are every thought that you formulated, you are not. You are the observer of your thoughts and your thoughts are heavily constrained and sustained from what you know and care about the world. And what you care about the world can shrink.
When I was a child, my desires were simple, shaped by feelings — by how things had made me feel before.
Nothing much has changed since then.
I want cookies and not brocolli, simply because cookies taste good and brocolli doesn’t.
I want to play football but not getting bullied, simply because it feels fun and getting bullied feels awful.
I like being around my friends and dislike being alone.
Everything came from lived experiences — trying something, feeling something, and building a best-guess map of what I liked and didn’t like.
As we grow older, our capacity to understand the world explodes.
And as our minds expand, so does our burden.
Now, we can worry about things we would have never even known about before.
We can virtually shoot ourselves in the foot using our brain.
Charles Bonnet Syndrome.
As we grow older, there’s chances that we can develop some sort of visual impairments, when our eyes have seem to lose its bodily function, to see. To put it simply, we may be able to receive 100% of what our eyes can handle, but that may not be always the case. Say catharacts for example, as our visions gets blurry due to the defect on our eyeballs. Our brain may develop a sickness that its neurons are not quite satisfied with what the eyes have to offer. The neurons in the brain to process vision may fires signals that does not reflect what we see of the world. It may forces itself to see hallucinations. Objects and figures that are not there.
This is not a sort of grim punishment, it’s just the way it is, a phenomena that happens—sort of just happens.
I believe, all pain can virtually be meaningless. Or perhaps, all pain are inherently meaningless.
As I try to sit comfortable and is unable to due to my hernia. I grow weary and frustrated. It seems all so meaningless. Like a poorly written joke that has latches onto me and try to make sense of the meaningless situation. It does not need to explain its reasons to exists and causes pain and frustration, however, I need to deal with it.
It applies to all sorts of pain and tragedy, it does not need inherent meaning to exists, but it needs to be dealt with.
Take a heartbreak for example, the fault that would be registered depends entirely from the thought observer—the meaning of the occurence as well.
Of all life as well.
It is inherently meaningless by nature-stance.
A wolf pup that is just born, does not need to ask meaning from its parents.
A bacteria that just suddenly exists due to “reproduction” by dividing itself.
As much as nature dances its way in to drive a male and female wolf to produce an offspring, does not correlate to the dad’s saying to the wolf pup that it exists because it wants his genes to be passed down. It exists because its only natural for the dad and mom to gravitate towards each other. The wisest would for the wolf-dad to say “because I wish for the best and only the best for you kiddo.”
We are at most times, are too smart for our own good and it shows in so many levels of our worries, the intricacies of our worries, it folds into ourselves and shoot ourselves in our own damn foot.
We create our own myths to soothe our worries and re-paints our myths where it matches our narratives, we forego quests to search our soulmate and when the moment seems picture-perfect, we convince ourselves that she is indeed destined wholly for us, and when push really comes to shove, we convince ourselves otherwise—that she is not meant for us, and what meant for us, is something else entirely, and may not have brought to our puny little world yet, we simply have not seen her yet.
We form countless beliefs on what we think the world is, who created our world, and be entirely convinced by it. We called them divine beliefs, who we are supposed to devout our life into, who we are supposed to deem our life valuable.
Though, what I want to stress or bring about the importance of is, the fact on how malleable it is.
The ability to create narrative and beliefs, be entirely convinced by it, and to live by it. To let what we believe or care about the world, let us do certain things that we wouldn’t otherwise do.
This image represents what I think we go about our “world”.
We are able to care about so many things and it grows exponentially when we turn adolescent, then what we care expands depends entirely to ourselves and varies to one person to person, it can care so much about work, career, money, friends, family, the fucking moon, elephants, animal behaviors, how the sun is created, the metaphysics of quantum particles, et cetera. But knowing that one day, all the cognitive ability to care about things will soon deteriorate, not limited to cognitive ability, but also movements, walking will feel more of a painful thing than to a chore or a sport, it simply is just taking more conscious energy than how it used to. You will grow weary and become and more selective about what you care, until one day, you care about nothing at all.
This also applies when you are sick, think about having a fever, all the worldly worries appear to ceases to exists, all you can care about is your sickness, a sort of attention-mobility has become to be so dense and concentrated that you only care about your well being, not because you don’t care about other things that you previously care about, it’s just because you physically and mentally are not able to care about other things than the sickness that is currently latching onto you. Attention collapses. Everything feels like it has only happened yesterday.
Here’s an intersting thought experiement.
When we were children, we have many friends from school, same applies in high school, university, and the great shift began after graduating university, we come to see even less of “used to be friends”, friend groups are reduced to a good handful. This phenomena will just going to keep happens until there’s no one else, or hopefuly a handful still. Life, each to its own—somehow like a third-party entity manages to strip everyone with everyone-else apart, this is not a punishment, but rather, a some sort of poor-written joke only for those who curses it, for the wise-mind, it’s just the way it is.
Everything feels like it has only happened yesterday.
It doesn’t matter how much you wish things to last forever, I couldn’t even wish that the way I walk and sit would remain that way forever, as I just woke up with a bulge near my leg area that just sits there and feeds me pain everytime I move it, I couldn’t do anything about it mentally other than to be wise about it. I’ll have my surgery on monday and this pain will be over, I can’t say most things that induce pain within me can just be lifted up like how a surgery can help me, however, being wise is always a choice.
Being wise doesn’t necesarrily mean caring less, it means taking a conscious choice to what matters in an otherwise meaningless occurences or situations. As much as a wolf-pup getting born is as meaningless as a leaf falling from a tree from senescence, or how a sunset sometimes makes the sky looks pink, its as inherently meaningless as everything else is.
It just seems to matter and meaningful only due to how things make us feel.
This is another article yet seemingly like an argument that I formulated that if all pain can virtually be meaningless, and meaning from such occurences that breed pain can virtually be anything that we can thought of, how can it be different than anything else that happens to us and our world? Isn’t everyone just an existentialist by core?
Being wise doesn’t necesarrily mean caring less, it means taking a conscious choice to what matters in an otherwise meaningless occurences or situations.
So true ❤️