If we are to understand flourishing in life and dying in a manner that befits the flourishing, we will need to understand ‘world’ differently. This is so, even if only because to face our fears around death, we need to understand what we fear losing – our world.
This is a big topic, and I want to make a tiny start. Today, after musing on the uses of the English word, I will give a couple of Pāli quotes, to indicate an unusual approach to the word ‘world.’ The way I want to use it, here, is to indicate the flow of what you are experiencing. In this way, just as far as human beings are concerned (that is, leaving aside all the other sentient creatures) there are seven billion life-worlds on this one world (planet). Two humans meeting in a cafe, are two worlds interacting.
One of them says, “How are things going in your world?” This means: How’s the state of affairs in your existence? Right? This is more general, I think, that the meaning I am pointing to, but it’s related. There’s your world of meaning and my world of meaning.
Here are some other uses – with meanings that I am not using. One common use of the word is to mean: planet. That is invoked in H.G. Wells’ book title The War of the Worlds. Or, it can mean ‘heaps’; as in, “I think the world of him.” But, if I want to tell the whole world something, I probably mean ‘all the people‘ on the planet. If ‘the world is against me,’ it means everybody. Or, we can talk of the world of politics, or of art, or of online gambling. These point to collectives, cultures. There are many more uses. What a bewildering array, if you’re trying to learn English!
However, in the context of becoming self-aware, and in the context of practices of dying, such as the Dissolution of the Element Meditation, there is a simple meaning (or at least, one we can start with): the flow of whatever you are experiencing, at any moment. That’s the world. To distinguish it, I will use the Buddhist word for ‘world’: Loka. That’s the Pāli word translated as ‘world’ in the Samyutta Nkāya translations below.
I am experiencing, right now, the sound of a convection heather, the tap of the keyboard, and have various pains and other sensations in my body. The temperature of the room, my thoughts appearing and disappearing in experiential space, my feelings, and so on. All this is my present world of awareness. When they see someone die, many people try to think what has happened to the world of the dead person. Has it ceased, or does it have some other kind of existence, now?
Of course, my ‘loka’ includes a lot that is implicit, but I have only six avenues of describing what is in my loka: seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, bodily sensing, and cognizing:
“That in the world by which one perceives the world and conceives conceits about the world is called ‘the world’ in the [Buddha]’s Discipline. And what is it in the world with which one does that? It is with the eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind.” (Samyutta Nikāya 35:116. Translator: Nānamoli, [my parenthesis].)
“‘Void world, void world’ is said, Lord; in what way is ‘void world’ said?”—“It is because of what is void of self and self’s property that ‘void world’ is said, Ānanda. And what is void of self and self’s property? The eye … forms … eye-consciousness … eye-contact … any feeling … born of eye-contact … The ear, etc …. “The nose, etc …. The tongue, etc …. The body, etc …. The mind, etc …. any feeling whether pleasant, painful or neither-painful-nor-pleasant born of mind-contact is void of self and self’s property.” (Samyutta Nikāya 35:85. Translator: Nānamoli)
Don’t worry about what the speaker is saying about the world (ignore, for now, all that about the self and voidness). I would just like you to notice that we can use ‘world’ to mean: your experiencing.
Why am I asking you to consider this? Because, the world (human society) is groaning for want of attention to our (individual) life-world. The mindfulness training in the Buddhadharma is about attuning to one’s present moment experiencing; that is, to one’s lived world, one’s loka. Using that framework, we pay attention to
a) all that is associated with bodily form,
b) feeling-tones – the values of pleasant, unpleasant, and neither pleasant, nor unpleasant,
c) the qualities of the states of our psyche (or: mind, if you like),
d) the dynamics of a, b, and c; in terms of specific important qualities, and their workability.
This is my field of responsibility. No-one else can do it for me. This is why it is said that one’s family will be of no help, when one dies. Why? Because you will be experiencing the dissolution of your own world. Isn’t it this – our world, which we have been managing, working with, shaping, all our life until now – isn’t it our world that we are afraid of losing, at death? Loka is the life of an individual human being.