Don't Let The World Get To You (Of Two Worlds #2)

February 21, 2026

Previously: Of Two Worlds #1: Escape From Reality.

“It’s clear that we all — even the most literal-minded of us — have access to this Other Realm. The question is, how much of your life are you willing to spend in it? And further, how much credence are you willing to give the things you find there?”

When can we access the Other Realm? The truth is that our default state tends to keep us pretty well stuck in the Worldly World. If you consider the Worldly World the only reality, any excursion into the Other Realm will be hampered by this sense of unreality — this desire to return to what’s “real.” You will ask, “What is this getting me, really?” And so the first step is to accept the reality of the Other Realm.

It only takes a simple step of extrapolating the concept of “representation.” We are used to images of things which are not the thing itself: for example, a photograph, a video on a screen, or even a painting. Magritte’s famous painting “The Treachery of Images,” in which a painting of a pipe is accompanied by the words, “This is not a pipe,” serves to illustrate the idea fairly plainly. The image on the canvas is merely a representation of a pipe, constructed using materials that are decidedly non-pipe. The pipe in the painting does not serve the function of a pipe. It is an illusion.

The extrapolation begins when we realize that everything we see, even that which we consider “reality” is a collection of representations. To use scientific terms, our eyes receive stimuli from light, and that light is transformed by our brain into images. The light that reaches our eye is not the object; the nerve that is stimulated by the light is not the object; and the electric signals manipulated in our brain are also not the object. When we touch an object, the nerves on our skin are activated. Etc. None of this provides an actual connection with the object itself; it is all mediated. We are reminded of the famous story of the blind men and the elephant: one man touches the tail and declares it a rope, another touches the leg and declares it a tree, a third touches the ear and declares it a fan, while a fourth touches the trunk and declares it a snake. In truth, our construction of objects is the result of amalgamating the distinct impressions they leave on our senses. These stimuli are fundamentally disconnected; they are only brought together within our minds, via what some might call the imagination.

Now, whether you accept wholeheartedly such idealism or not, it’s clear at the very least that gaining a sense of reality is an imaginative endeavour. Even if you firmly believe that the result of all this reconstruction of stimuli is an accurate reflection of external reality — which is, to a certain extent, a matter of faith — you must accept that none of this is the result of direct transmission, but instead a complex and mediated process.

In this sense, the difference between the representation of a pipe that we conceive as a real pipe, and the representation of a pipe that is a painting, is a difference of degree, rather than kind. Until we reach out and try to smoke the pipe, they share a great deal of similarities. When it comes to dreams, the only difference between dreams and waking life, on a physiological level, is that we wake up from dreams. But who is to say that we don’t wake up from our waking life in the end? Who would be able to tell us? Just as we cannot enter a dreaming man’s dream and tell him he’s dreaming, a man awoken from life would have no means of communicating to us the falsity of our reality.

However, I don’t truly wish to convince you that the Worldly World is false. I only wish to open your mind to the idea that the Other Realm is its own form of truth. My tactic so far has been to lessen the apparent difference between these two realms, although to what success, I can not say.

When examined through the context of my daily life, the primary difference between the Worldly World and the Other Realm is this: the Worldly World is social, while the Other Realm is not. By which I mean, the Worldly World is shared, in the sense that we all agree (to a greater or lesser extent) about what is in it, and this degree of agreement allows us to talk about it in fairly certain terms. I can point at a house that we are both looking at and say, “That house has an interesting door,” and you won’t say, “No… that house has no door, and in fact, on closer perusal, I find that it is not a house at all.” The existence of the house and its door is not in question; instead, we might only disagree on the subjective predicate: i.e. whether the door is, in fact, interesting.

Sharing a social world is a wonderful thing, because it allows us to talk about things like houses and doors without issue. The social world has certain concrete elements, many of which pertain to our physical bodies. We all need food and drink, at the very least, and shelter and other things come in handy too. In the world we currently live in, we need money to get all those things, and acquiring money is an incredibly varied and versatile sort of activity that we all approach in wildly different ways. This gives us a great deal to talk about! If you’ve ever worked with colleagues, you will understand that the necessity of food and shelter can provide conversational fodder for months, or even years, without any added stimulus at all. (“Have you seen the cost of eggs these days? Oh, I forgot; you’re vegan.” “I’m vegetarian, Jim. I’m eating an egg salad right now. As I do every day.”) Beyond these matters, there are material events occurring in the world all the time, every day — they never stop!

This social world provides us with such wonderful things as companionship and even love. (We might argue that love straddles the two realms — perhaps more on this later…) And there’s no denying the myriad relationships between our physical bodies and our well-being. Although the Worldly World is not the only true world, we still must live in it, and this means taking care of our bodies via diet, exercise, fresh air, etc. It also means covering more abstract and yet still essentially Worldly needs such as companionship and validation, although the necessity of these last two will vary from person to person.

All this is great, but it is still somewhat constraining. When my wife read the previous essay in this series, she commented that the Worldly World seems so limited and meaningless next to the infinite nature of the Other Realm. However, finitude is not necessarily worse than infinitude. It’s just a different type of thing. These two worlds complement each other. If we were merely lost in the infinite realm of imagination, there would be no definite concepts at all, no self, no thinking, no reason, and, according to our definition of “things”, nothing at all.

At the same time, without our non-social realm, our imaginative realm, the Other Realm, reality can become fairly dreary. If all our life was merely conversations about buildings and food, going to physical spaces and seeing physical things, seeking social validation and then being overcome with emptiness once we achieve it, then life would no doubt be a dreary thing. This is where Schopenhauer’s pessimism came from: although an idealist (in the philosophical sense), the dreariness of our day-to-day existence convinced him that life was, in the end, a massive bummer.

It’s fairly trite to observe that children spend more time in the Other Realm than adults, for the reason that their understanding of the Worldly World is so limited that they must constantly use their imagination to fill in the gaps. But at the same time, their ability to maintain balance between the two worlds is incredibly poor, causing them to lose emotional control due to flights of pure imaginative fancy or whims of material desire. A childish sense of imagination is a disastrous genie’s wish. But the reason we might wish for such a thing is that adults can become so entrenched in the Worldly World, being whirled around by its gales day in and day out, that they completely lose sight of anything outside of it. This is what leads to the sensation of being trapped by one’s life.

For many, it seems that the solution is material. “Leaving the rat race” by fleeing to a self-sustainable acreage, or even retiring to focus on one’s personal hobbies can seem like the only respite from the Worldly World. But the Other Realm is an immaterial place, so it only follows that the door to it is similarly immaterial. It involves a reorientation of priorities and a reconfiguration of reality. I won’t lie: reconfiguring reality is not the easiest thing to do. It’s up there with perfectly flipping a fried egg without breaking the yolk; that is to say, it takes practice. It takes a lot of failure! In fact, like with many skills, dealing with failure is the main thing you will be practising.

Probably the most difficult thing about accessing the Other Realm is that it takes two things that become more and more difficult to obtain as adult life carries on: alone time and energy. Alone time does not necessarily mean physical isolation; in the right circumstances, one can be alone beside a partner, or with one’s family (although most families make this nigh impossible.) It also does not merely mean physical isolation: if one is physically alone, and yet bombarded with outside thoughts, such as when scrolling through internet feeds, then one is not really alone at all. True alone time involves leaving the social world behind completely.

The amount of interference the Worldly World provides will fluctuate wildly throughout one’s life. A parent with a small child, or an individual whose job or financial situation has become overwhelming, will obviously find accessing the Other Realm more and more difficult. Personally, I find that when I’m sick, or my face is irritated because I forgot to shave, I’m much more likely to lose myself in the Worldly World that exists in my phone. This is part of the balance, and part of the practise of failure. I’m not some sort of monk; nor am I trying to be. We can not remove distraction altogether — and remember that it is not our goal to leave the social world behind permanently, only to gain the ability to do so at our discretion.

The nice thing is that there is a wonderful and delightful aid to reaching this state, an aid that is constantly and cooperatively maintained: that is to say, art. For me, watching a movie or reading a book is the perfect way to pull myself away from the social world, and enter an altered state of mind. Drugs, I find, are too temporary and bewildering to provide long-term success, but your mileage may vary.

Art is a means of expanding one’s boundaries beyond the myopic constraints of an individual life. In this sense, you could call it social, but it’s social in a very different way than conversation. When composing art, we retreat to our own world in order to get our thoughts and feelings in order, and then, when satisfied with the representation we’ve constructed, we present it to others, complete and whole. Conversation, on the other hand, is such a rushed and disjointed sort of thing, composed on the fly using whatever words and concepts come flying into our head, balanced with anxiety over our interlocutor’s patience and understanding. Art doesn’t demand one’s immediate time and attention: we place it before each other and say, “Look into this at your own leisure, whenever you have the time and inclination.”

I stated before that art is means of accessing other people’s Other Realms. This is the realm that we don’t share on a day-to-day basis: the thoughts we have when alone, they way we live in our own house, the whimsies that carry us through our life. We find ourselves able to relate to experiences that only slightly overlap with our own because we recognize the internal feelings that accompany them. We find ourselves able to share our imaginative world, — including the irrational fears and anxieties that emerge not from the Worldly World at all but from some other place, only to become attached to Worldly entities in some strange and tangled way. When we experience art, we expand. We expand beyond the concepts of magnitude or quantity; we expand in directions that don’t necessarily exist, into a realm where such things as space are totally irrelevant.

This does not have to be a temporary phenomenon. We don’t have to be watching movies or reading books all the time in order to get there (although it certainly helps.) What eventually emerges is a realization that we have access to far more than just the things placed immediately before us, and after a certain while, those things start to feel less and less important. Accumulating products and “experiences,” achieving ever-increasing goals and ambitions, “making something of one’s self,” all this starts to feel like a bit of a game. Games are certainly fun to play, as long as we don’t take them all too seriously. Games become a bit of a bother when we lose sight of their innate silliness.

I am much more than my presence in the Worldly World. I am much more than is read by my readers, or seen and heard by strangers, friends, family, and acquaintances. I am a whole big mess of things that some might say don’t exist at all. I am just as big as I always am. I am always the same size! That is to say, I am infinitely large, infinitely expanding, never constrained by anything at all. I have access to all sorts of things, carried to me from hundreds of years in the past or from down the street. And in this sense, this very real and concrete and eminently tangible sense, I am free. And I think this is the feeling that I have always been, and will always be, striving for.