The World Outside

The best thing I have learned, and what I try to share with anyone I know, is that life is at its worst when you are filled with concern for yourself, but that life is at its best when you are aware of, connected with, concerned about, and care for others.

The Rumi poem in the first post touches tangentially on this idea. It describes the ignorance of someone who is in his own world, knowing no other world, and contrasts it with an attempt at a description of the full beauty and complexity of, well, everything.

Where this poem holds back a little (even if Rumi, himself, does not always), is that it does not venture further into the idea that the self itself(?) is an illusion. If that is too much for you, then the idea that the self is isolated and separate from all that surrounds it.

Then again, Rumi is hinting, I believe, that however much we might recognize that our experienced world "is vast and intricate" with wheatfields, mountain passes, orchards in bloom, millions of galaxies, and so on, our known world is every bit as pale, in comparison to the reality of all there is, as the embryo's world is pale in comparison to ours.

We are limited in our thoughts, our imaginations, our perceptions. True reality is infinitely more vast and intricate than we allow ourselves to believe.

Instead, we focus only on what we have experienced and, with that, consider our knowledge complete. We allow no possibility that we might be mistaken; we allow ourselves no chance be open to and to experience something better.

In the worst of cases, we close ourselves off not just from curiosity and experience of the wider reality, but also shut ourselves off from experiencing even the reality of other people, remaining in the isolation of that most lonely of places, our separateness, our (illusory) selves.