The concrete world – what we see, hear, touch, smell and taste – consumes much of our energy and attention. We tend to anchor our sense of truth in the external world, encouraged by the powerful consensus about what it’s like and how it works. The world outside is the same for everyone, and science tells us that it is follows rules that we can discover, a set of universal truths.
These universal truths are challenged when someone else sees a different world. Whether it’s different political views, different recollections of who said what, or different ideas about who does more chores, it is often upsetting to deal with the differences.
If the difference is only about the ouitside world, why would this be upsetting? If the difference is about how much an elephant weighs, it’s not likely to be upsetting, but when it’s about how to spend money or whose family is nicer, it feels different. Why is that? When we see the outside world as The Truth, and when we push our ideas and feelings outside, we align our internal selves with that external truth. It’s very comforting. When we say: “that is upsetting,” “my family is nicer,” or “you’re ungrateful,” we push our ideas onto the world outside just as though we were saying “an adult elephant weighs about seventy-five times as much as an adult human”. Blending our feelings and opinions with the truth of the concrete world gives us comfort but it leads to confusion, fear and anger when we find someone else pushing their thoughts and feelings onto the external world in a way that conflicts with ours: The Truth is The Truth, so why on earth are they saying different?
This is one of the core ideas from which we can set ourselves free: our thoughts and feelings come from and rest in the concrete world.