In dreams I have seen and felt such beauty, glimpses of the eternal spring. Much more than a light, a substance of honor, depth, forgiveness and endless love. Shrouded under ethereal trees. Entrance to the eternal garden. The strength of stone and the elegance of a far mountain river, one that is enveloped in the majesty of the pure high mountain decorated with sun beams and snow of crystal white. Yet as these dreams may be, the glimpses are as rare as the waking world. I may exist in differing states of consciousness, and throughout my body and soul move vapors of heavenly wind, but the light everlasting only reveals in tiny sparks through the mind. This life is labyrinthine, the soul is endless. From everything into dust, from moments into forever. And could it be all within a moment, everything we know might change, releasing into spirit. It is enough of a sustenance. In the afterglow we taste sweet nectar, and our hearts move within the dream. Our far away rainbow that shimmers through a glass darkly. Our moment of time. The promise of grace. 

A woman, tired from standing all day at her job, is stepping onto a train somewhere in Europe in the evening, bustling by her are other people who are heading home from work. Someone bumps into her shoulder rushing by and knocks a bag she’s carrying out of her hand causing things to fall everywhere. The person doesn’t say sorry or even knowledge what just happened, and instead darts to the other side of the train to take the last open spot she was heading towards.

“Hey!” she says towards the man, but he ignores her as he walks on and sits down. He doesn’t even as much as glance back. She looks around hoping for looks of sympathy, but everyone has their eyes glued to the phone and nobody bothers to help her pick up the things that had fallen out of her bag. For a moment she considers going to confront the man as she puts the things back in her bag, but as she does so she thinks “What’s the point? People are just disappointing, he wouldn’t even care that he treated a fellow human in this way.” The train starts moving, it’s cold mechanical functions through the metal and steel around her. She reaches up to the handrail and looks out the window at the people walking by and she is left feeling empty inside, and feeling like she lives in an empty world.

Then to her surprise, for a brief moment, she sees a child walking carrying a big stuffed animal of a pink flamingo outside the window. Instantly her mood changes at seeing this, because the flamingo reminds her of one that she had as a little girl which looked identical, and seeing it brought her back to an earlier time in her life when she felt happy and the world was innocent. In fleeting passing of the train she noticed a bright smile across the child’s face, and suddenly the world felt like there was good in it again.

In the story above I illustrate how things that happen to us can influence the way we feel about the world, and how good and bad events can change our outlook. Whenever the woman was mistreated by the other passenger, she started to see the world as empty and meaningless, but the image of a stuffed flamingo reminded her of a different world feeling that gave her hope. The concept of a “world feeling” is something distinct from the general sensation of life that a person may experience at any given moment or a mood. Rather, it is a feeling about the nature of the world and our place in it, and our place in it as informed by our beliefs about the main principles that are at the core of life and existence.

Depending on your beliefs you feel very differently about the world thus connect to people with similar outlooks more easily. Beliefs influence moment my moment perceptions about everything around us. It informs out interpretations, emotions, and subconscious reactions to what happens to us. Beliefs create what can be called a worldview, which is a model we use to evaluate and interpret life and the world.

Take for example the world feeling a tribal people would have a few thousand years ago. In their world, they have no concept of science as we do today, no thoughts of how the stock market is doing, bank account balances, or anything we know of in the modern world. Instead, their world feelings are informed by a completely different set of assumptions about the world. When they saw the mighty thunderhead of an approaching storm, it is rain being sent by the gods, and it is viewed as a spiritual event manifested in physical existence, something we modernist can scarcely comprehend. To them, rain coming isn’t just something sent from the a god metaphorically, but it is a direct presence of something this god placed in their reality. While everyone today is aware of the popular tribal belief of the gods sending rain, I don’t think many of us truly comprehend the significance of how it felt to the people back then or in tribes that still hold these beliefs today.

Inversely, since the dawn of the scientific revolution and development of post-modern thought, there has emerged a very different world feeling that is nihilistic or sees no intrinsic meaning in the world. The popular conception of the scientific worldview is that which postulates the notion that God doesn’t exist, and that everything can be explained away using the scientific method and reduced to matter and laws of the universe. I won’t get into my thoughts on the viability of this worldview in this post, but suffice it to say that compared to the tribal person the world feeling is very different. To the scientific reductionist, the rain storm is not the manifestation of a god, it is simply vapor traveling through the air creating condensation. The cloud, no matter how beautiful it may be, is of no different value than a person. And said another way, a person is no more valuable than a cloud.

I think that your average person in the modern world doesn’t have much of an understanding of worldviews that go too far beyond this. In general, most people don’t ever think about the subject all that deeply. But there are a plethora of different worldviews and world feelings that exist and are very influential. One of these would be the concept of romanticism.

Romanticism was and is a metaphysical movement that was primarily a reaction to scientific materialism. I call it a metaphysical movement as an attempt to get at the heart of what it truly represents, but it also does take the form of literature, art, religion, nationalism, architecture, music and film, some of which had good and negative effects depending on the context. But for the sake of this post I will focus on high level understanding of as it relates to the world feeling.

The world feeling of romanticism is one which looks at the world around us and sees within it meaning while also being informed by the rationalism of modernity. Different from the tribesman who sees the thundercloud as a pure burst of divine manifestation, and from the reductionist that views life as meaningless matter interacting with other matter, the romantic infuses the meaning that the tribesman sees with the world as our rational mind knows it and integrates it into a holistic worldview. Within it is strong emotion, a sense of meaning and a depth to life. It creates a world feeling of life being a type of art that we are involved in through participation, full of both joy and sorrow.

With romanticism, it could be said that the fusion of rationalism and spirituality is what forms a different and unique world feeling. This I realize is an oversimplification, but hopefully it is also a helpful model for understanding how it reflects a certain sensation.

World feelings are much more wide ranging and varies than this, and so broad that they can never truly be all categorized. Also, the unique nature of our own souls influences our world feeling and colors it differently for everyone.

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Your own world feeling matters greatly, and depending on what you believe, it will completely change the experience you have on this earth. Everything you experience is informed by it, from sensation we have when seeing a thundercloud to way we feel when traveling on a train. It’s also important when it comes to evaluating broader cultural trends, because when we realize that everyone is shaped by a certain world feeling, we can better assess the motivations behind certain events and opinions we see discussed around us. It also will shape who you are and the type of person you become.

We should all ask ourselves what our world feeling is, and whether or not it conforms to the beliefs we profess. Sometimes there may be a contradiction between our world feeling and our beliefs, and anytime we find such a contradiction, it can be a gateway towards valuable introspection.

I am going to start a series where I discuss a particular work of art and engage in off the cuff storytelling about it. To start I’ll begin with the painting below of a person walking down a snowy street in the twilight.

Painting “Snow in Vladimir. Twilight” by Evgeny Vagin

In the painting the white snow is draped over the buildings on a simple street that looks to be nearby a wooded area. Out of the lamp light is a rustic glow, and overlooking the town are the towers of what look to be two churches. They seem to be watching over the town as if providing protection. The person in the painting I feel is in a sense of contemplation as he or she walks along a quiet street.

I imagine inside of the buildings nearby people are having conversations over dinner, laughing, or reading a book in their own thoughts. Perhaps the building directly to the right in a business of some kind, and in the upper story of the building is a desk where the shop owner has closed up for the day. Objects lay in suspended wait for the return of the owner tomorrow, as still and quiet as the ice outside. For some reason a couple of days ago the owner brought his cat over but got mad at it after it jumped on the desk and knocked over the coffee. I imagine that the store owner rushes in and out regularly with thoughts consumed about business and money, completely unaware of the beauty that is outside their shop.

If this stranger walking on the street were a real person, you might wonder what sort of thoughts were going through their mind. I’d like to think nothing trivial, and nothing too deep either. Maybe just a simple appreciation of the stillness, an exhalation and a moment of recognition about being alive. A wondering glance goes into the trees to the left as the glow of the lamp post contrasts the darkening thicket that is descending into its sleepy night as the twilight fades. The person in the painting walks on and then reaches their destination. In my mind they are on their way home after running an unexpected errand. When they arrive they get on with things and the moment is gone, only a memory and impression in the mind.

In the early 2000s as young man in my first semester of my bachelors I was attending a community college while living by myself in a small efficiency apartment on the south side of Austin Texas. One night in late October or early November was taking a night class at an old high school which was probably built in the seventies or earlier. It had that old school feeling that anyone born before 1990 likely remembers, and indefinable quality pasted in the manilla colored walls. Not exactly musty, but a little bland with a strange energy moving through it, maybe the energy of people who had once roamed the hallways with thousands of things on each one of their minds. One night after class let out out I had a conversation with a classmate about the course assignment and then we started into small talk until it became later. After saying goodbye and parting ways, now almost 10pm, just about everyone had left except for the night staff. I walked through the old hallways and out the door feeling an eerie emptiness of the building.

Moving through the double doors I entered the sidewalk hearing the door click behind me and a low rolling thunder moving hauntingly in the sky somewhere in the distance. Because of the difficult parking situation at the time I had parked my car far down another street, and at first it was only lightly sprinkling so I decided to walk it. It was about to rain, I could tell, but I thought I could get to my car before the downpour. But sure enough, after getting some distance from the building it started to rain down with a sudden crack of lightning. I was far enough from my car that if I ran towards it I would be soaked and my books would get wet. It just so happened that there was a small wooden shack nestled in trees and brush nearby that I often passed walking to the school. To avoid this torrent of rain I ran under the shack and took shelter here. I stood there alone in this small little shack as the rain dropped outside. Thankfully this was 2003, years before smartphones (back then I didn’t even have a flip phone), so I didn’t automatically check Facebook or my text messages as people would today. I say thankfully because such an instinctual action common today would have caused me to miss out on a vivid moment. Instead, I stood there alone in that long mysterious night taking shelter as the water pattered on the ceiling above, not knowing who or what may be around me or how long I would be there. There was even something slightly scary about this old shack at night. It was small enough to tell for certain that I was alone in it, but dark enough to spark instinctual feelings of caution inside of me, as if claws might reach out from the dirt to grab me. To be honest, I found it kind of fun at eighteen being caught in a rainstorm living on my own.

There was no door just an open area so I stood near the entrance. I looked around as the rain fell, concrete buildings in the distance, a stairwell, dark bushes and a chain length fence over a sharp hill drop. It was a place I had never been before, a situation I had not seen. Over time my mind started to enjoy standing there and looking at the rainy scene before me. I was a small town boy, and here I was stuck in my first rainstorm in the city. You may laugh, but to me at the time it meant something, and I was having fun.

At some point I began to be fixated on something very small and innocuous, yet enchanting. A small distance from where I stood was a simple street light shining a golden halogen light into the pavement, and center of the light draped across a small puddle on the ground. Here before me was dancing gold, a hidden treasure nestled in everyday life. There was something about it that captivated me, I almost didn’t want the rain to stop. Sometimes exotic and eternal in this old rainy gold. In this representation was my mind’s heart was opened to a feeling carried down through the ages. There I was, present in life, with hidden treasure discovered before me. It was beautiful, and I believe something in that moment changed me, if only in a small way, forever.

Forth while, time came into the stars

Quivering over the immense eternity

Then came unsorted small white houses

Time clicked by in tiny hours

Came and depart forever

And behind the passing, lay shreds of life 

The etchings marked in memory

Love bathes inside of us burning forever

Under sunny Saturdays, brandishing passions

Through family, friends, and the search for meaning  

As our works cannot conqur

Though they be full of gold 

Pure shining through autumn leaves

Heavy sour struggles over humid hills of bore

Driving by red tomatoes, and industrial efforts

And swirling dream-stuff, secretly inside of you

Their manifested works create

Feeling too often, fallen like fantasies

Discontent angels breathe

Over old contenents of yore

Wavering memories of ancestors

That elegantly scatter

Into green rolling hills 

And creaking home floors

Tumbling gusts approach

To scatter all and make anew

Still alive, is my love for you

In this wilderness, this celestial wisdom

We have dances like charades of mind 

All around misleading 

We’ll move into these grassy starry fields

Hand in hand we yonder go

Years far into the future

You’ll wonder what has become of me

As I’ll think of you

Remembrance in our sleep 

Time moves on

Banches of a tree twice so strong 

Like efforts we made to belong

Weighed down by the world

Bathing soft 

In gentle sunlight

A truth I see in you

These days, we made it through

I hardly know how