Each of us creates our own World

The quote in my previous posting was credited to Talmund. I also found references attributing it to Anais Nin. In any case, in reading more about that quote, I came across another, credited to Anais Nin.

"Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born."

This is a sentiment that rings true to me. Several weeks ago, while listening to the audiobook version of Eckart Tolle's A New Earth, I was struck by the truth in the following passage from chapter 10:

"Those two movements, the outgoing and the return, are also reflected in each person's life cycles. Out of nowhere, so to speak, "you" suddenly appear in this world. Birth is followed by expansion. There is not only physical growth, but also growth of knowledge, activities, possessions, experiences. Your sphere of influence expands and life becomes increasingly complex. This is a time when you are mainly concerned with finding or pursuing your outer purpose. Usually there is also a corresponding growth of the ego, which is identification with all the above things, and so your form identity becomes more and more defined. This is also the time when outer purpose--growth--tends to become usurped by the ego, which unlike nature does not know when to stop in its pursuit of expansion and has a voracious appetite for more.

And then just when you thought you made it or that you belong here, the return movement begins. Perhaps people close to you begin to die, people who were a part of your world. Then your physical form weakens; your sphere of influence shrinks. Instead of becoming more, you now become less, and the ego reacts to this with increasing anxiety or depression. Your world is beginning to contract, and you may find you are not in control anymore. Instead of acting upon life, life now acts upon you by slowly reducing your world. The consciousness that identified with form is now experiencing the sunset, the dissolution of form. And then one day, you too disappear. Your armchair is still there. But instead of you sitting in it, there is just an empty space. You went back to where you came from just a few years ago.

Each person's life--each life-form, in fact--represents a world, a unique way in which the universe experiences itself. And when your form dissolves, a world comes to an end--one of countless worlds."