Egocentric Subjectivism and the Universal Consciousness :: Philosophy Research Papers

Egocentric Subjectivism and the Universal Consciousness It was at the beginning of my vacation that I realised the world was not all it appeared to be. Up until now, I had always accepted that the world was a collection of material objects independent of myself. As I sit in the airport lounge waiting for my flight, it now seems that everything I see is nothing more than a series of images projected in my mind. The lounge is like a stage set and people, like characters in a film, pass by and disappear. The world, or rather my world, is simply that which exists in my mind, but has no material existence in my mind. Does that mean that the objects of the world have no existence outside my mind? My understanding of existence is what my mind reasons it to be. Even if someone tells me what existence is to them, I must still consider their comments in the context of my own knowledge and interpret it as what existence means to me. For example, a passenger in the airport lounge complains that a flight delay will lose him a valuable contract. I know what the loss of a contract means, but only because I can relate it to my own experience of a similar situation. I then make an assumption that it means the same to him, but I cannot be certain of that. I can only know what existence means to me, and it is egocentric subjectivism that takes this to its ultimate limit. My world and everything in it are dependent on my mind for its existence and without my mind that world would not exist. Despite this reasoning, it does seem that I am moving about within a three-dimensional world. Movement itself can be illusory depending on what is believed to be stationary. When I arrived at Zurich I boarded a train and waited to travel on to my destination. A train on the next track also stood waiting. Before long we were off and I watched the carriages of the other train swiftly disappear from view as we gained speed. As we passed the last carriage, I saw that we were still in the station and realised that it was the other train moving and not ours. However, when the train made its way around the mountains and up into the Alps, it did seem as if there was a three-dimensional space through which it moved.