Inner Worlds
Everyone’s inner world is the one they are truly living in. There are billions of these worlds, each one larger than you or I can imagine.
Culture, then, is the connections between these worlds — a distributed embassy — an invisible armature of intersecting thought.
Minds, after all, are too complex for a singular, shared reality. The best we can hope for as an expanding population of minds — the simplest arrangement — are shared “mental zones.” These are the spaces of exchange.
And in a universe of still-undiscovered complexity, perhaps this is the stuff that binds physical reality as a whole. Maybe dark matter is coherence. Maybe, as the mystics have always said, physical reality is nothing more than the places where inner worlds intersect.
–
When our inner worlds elude us, when it feels hard to inhabit them, we must work to find the dark, quiet, solitary spaces in the here and now. It’s an act of preservation, personal and collective. The world is made of inner worlds — we weaken it when we don’t inhabit them.
The physical world will have all of you without ever knowing you. The inner world is made of you.