The World Doesn’t Revolve Around You! …Or Does It?

“The world doesn’t revolve around you.”

We’ve all heard this saying.

I’ve even had it directed at me a few times in my life, if you can believe it! 😅

I think we can agree that it is a widely accepted maxim that it is an error to think of one’s self as the center of the universe.

After all, we are surrounded by billions of other humans, not to mention all the animals, nature, planets, galaxies, and an infinite, ever-expanding universe that engulfs us, making these little human lives we are living look very puny and insignificant, indeed.

However, the theme that keeps being brought to me this week is the intimacy and peculiar experience of subjectivity.

Due to the fact that I am privy to my own thoughts alone, I am audience to my own interior world, and no one else's.

I am, in a very immediate way, the center of my universe.

I am, at least, the central location of my awareness of the universe.

Amazingly, I am surrounded by billions of other “centers of awareness” who are enduring or enjoying the exact same predicament.

Medieval Connections

As if in colorful contrast, a quote from the 14th-century Dominican Friar, theologian, and mystic Meister Eckhart came to my mind:

“God is an intelligible sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.”

This quote suggests several things to me:

(1). Unlike us individual creatures who are each a center of awareness unto ourselves, God’s Awareness is nonlocal; that is, not limited to one particular center, but transcends and includes all within itself.

(2). Unlike the temporary and private nature of these subjective experiences we are having, God’s Awareness is infinite. There is no boundary in time or space to God’s Awareness.

(3). God, though above and beyond us in significant ways, is also, in some way, knowable to us. He is somehow present in the interiority of our “private” experience of life. Nothing is hidden from Him. And He is not hidden from us.

🤯

I know. It’s wild. Like the grandest game of hide and seek unfolding in the glorious theatre of time and space.

Perhaps even more wild are the two seemingly separate and very different forms of media that inspired this week’s musings, included below.

Inspirations

(1). Honestly, the first inspiration that got my wheels turning for the subject of this week’s post is the latest Dave Chapelle show on Netflix. It’s called “The Dreamer.” He tells a bizarre story at the end…basically, the point of the story is that we are all dreaming and are dream characters in each other’s dreams of life.

(2). The second inspiration really collided with the first one in a neat way. It was on the back cover of a clever book I came across this week at Barnes and Noble called “The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.” It’s a dictionary of made-up words for emotions we all feel but don't have the words to express.

The word featured on the back is sonder. Here is the definition of sonder:

Sonder: (n.) the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

Yeah... If you need me, you can find me pondering the implications of this paragraph.

Of course, my ponderings lead me to contemplate the mystic side of things- to seek the source of this magnificent gift, this blessing and "curse" of subjective awareness.

I call this source, this infinite well of awareness, God.