We all live in a private world. A world that we ourselves created in our mind. Or may be, we don’t create it. The mind just creates based on the input and various experiences that it gets.
But we all live in a private world nonetheless. A world that’s really our own. There is a world that I live in. And there is a world that you live in. We might have similar things in our world (like elephants, jigsaw puzzles, mother etc) but we have our unique copies of things. The elephant in my mind may be similar to the elephant in your mind but it is not the same elephant. In fact, it’s not an elephant at all. It’s just an image of an elephant. A projection if you prefer that world.
All these things apart, the main point I want to make is that my world is not same as your world or anyone else’ world. As a generalization, everybody lives in his/her own world created by his/her own mind.
But then, we don’t continue living in our own private worlds. We keep calibrating our worlds against the worlds of other people so that we are in sync. We learn to calibrate very early in life. So that everyone calls a lion a lion and nobody calls it a cat. This is required if human beings need to or want to interact with each other in any meaningful way. Imagine if the lion in your world is a mouse in my world, can we have a conversation?
So, we learn to calibrate our own private world that exists only in our mind with other people’s world that exists only in their mind.
Unfortunately, I find that we take this need to calibrate too far. To the extent that we don’t leave space for many private worlds to exist at the same time. If you don’t call God Vishnu and instead you call it Allah or Jesus or whatever else, you are wrong. Because in my world, God is Vishnu and my world has to remain calibrated with the worlds of other people. Whenever our mind finds conflicting world views, it assumes that one is wrong.
And I ask why? Why do the conflicting world views have to be reconciled into one? A lion cub can be cute and dangerous at the same time. None of these world-views is wrong. If we are blessed with our own private copy of the worlds that exists only in our mind, why can’t we celebrate differences in these private worlds?
Why do I have to calibrate my world with the worlds of other people and have the same view of things around me? And why should you?