There Is No World Out There, It’s All Happening in Your Brain

As a Matter of Experience, You’re the One Creating Reality.

As a matter of experience, everything is just appearing to you. You don’t know if what is happening is happening to any other; your brain is generating the things that appear to you in consciousness. All your senses are a way for your brain to perceive the world, but still, it’s your brain's perception that is reflected in consciousness.

How the Brain Perceives and Interprets

While your brain tries to make the best interpretation of the world that it can, it isn’t necessarily the right interpretation. It is just the interpretation apparent to you. Everything is just electrical signals going from your brain through your nervous system and back, and can naturally have hang-ups and specific shortcomings. Everything is interconnected within your body. The body tends to twitch sometimes. All the involuntary things that are done by our brain to our body just happen out of nowhere and are not something we can consciously control. We have no free will when it comes to this.

Free Will — an Illusion?

Investigating free will, we can question if we have free will to do anything. Free will is something that people think they should be obliged to have. They think free will is a human right. But free will is an illusion; you were deemed without free will already the day you were born. Your features, place you were born and place you grew up weren't because of some of your preferences as an infant. First, when you grew up you could start to make choices based on your preferences. Choices that already have been clouded by the things that have happened before — where you were born, who’s your parents and where you grew up. In this matter, we have little free will to show for when it comes to our own life.

This can be incredibly freeing and humbling. Knowing that none of us has free will and that everyone has their first take on life can be an eye-opener when it comes to compassion both for ourselves and others. Emotions are also just appearing to us, and it can be quite beneficial for our happiness to start feeling our emotions fully. Our emotions are signposts that tell us if something is right or wrong. We should see them with compassion and let them be.

Getting Closer to Experience

The experience we are having can always be investigated and taken a closer look at. This is why we meditate, to get closer to our true selves. This self is consciousness, what perceives everything that is out in the world. Keeping your identity small will help you find the way to reaching the state of being found in consciousness. If you let yourself look for consciousness you will find that what you call your ‘self’ is completely centerless. There is no center to consciousness, not in your head or your body. You can aim attention at things but you are not aware from there. There is simply awareness arising from that part of your body.

The Implications

All you’ll ever have is the experience from your point of view, and we should aim to do the best that we can with what we have access to. This is always possible as we can always choose our next step from our previous experiences. Even though the premise is based on the fact that we have no free will, we can do our best with the cards that we’re dealt. Perception is reality, and everyone’s perception is different. This makes you neither more nor less the person you are if anybody else says that you are another type of person. With so many perceptions, you just have to go for what is appearing to you and let that be your north star. Nobody can judge you or put labels on you if you don’t allow them to. This is the great realization of egoless and centerless attention.