the world within us
in the previous post (https://darky.bearblog.dev/the-world-around-us/), i asked you to look outward and question whether the coffee cup, the screen, or the person across from you truly exists as you see them which pretty much left us with the realization that the world around us is an edited script, a private movie directed by our own blindspots.
but if the map of the outside world is a flawed, personal construction, what happens when we turn the camera around? what happens when the director looks in the mirror?
there's a quite famous experiment in psychology involving just a plain, simple mirror. a person sits in a dimly lit room, staring at their own reflection for just ten minutes. now, within minutes, something strange happens. the face begins to warp, the eyes seem to shift, features stretch, and for many, the face in the glass ceases to feel like their own. it somewhat becomes a stranger or maybe that same person but with a mask on. but why? well, the brain, deprived of external stimulations, begins to misinterpret itself. it proves a haunting truth that we are so unfamiliar with our inner landscape that when left alone with it in the dark, we even try to question our external appearance.
neuroscience calls the body's internal mapping as "interoception" i.e. the brain's constant, silent dialogue with the heart, the gut, the lungs. however, emotionally, we treat this inner terrain like an old attic. we label a sudden tightening in the chest as "anxiety" because that’s the narrative we have memorized, completely ignoring that it might just be excitement, or grief, or simply a body trying to breathe. as the essayist Anaïs Nin beautifully put it, “we do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.” if that is true for the outer world, so is it for the inner one. we don't experience our emotions cleanly, we experience the theories we've learnt about our emotions.
we spend our entire lives running away from the internal weather, building walls of noise, scrolling, and constant movement just to avoid sitting in the quiet room. we treat that as an unknown territory which has to be conquered, managed, or medicated, rather than a space to be observed. we mistake the thoughts passing by as our identity often forgetting the fact that just the clouds passing by the sky doesn't define the sky.
the irony about humans which seems pretty funny to me is that we're desperate to be understood by others yet we remain deeply unaware of who we truely are. we travel to places to experience and explore what we truely like without actually knowing what we truely want :)
if the world around us is an illusion then the world within is the abstraction constructed by that illusion. everything we love, everything we hate, everything we do is being manufactered by something inside of us.
i would like to end this blog with a question i.e. if you stop telling yourself who you are, then who you actually are?