Every person lives in different worlds at various phases of their life. Our feelings, conceptions and perceptions may vary in each of those worlds. Parents look at many situations unlike their children; a reversal of their own much earlier experiences. In youth we saw things from simpler points of view than we do in our later years. For many people, the world in their hometown was, and may still be, distinct from that in the place where they now live. Our level of awareness, tastes, needs, and desires evolve as we progress through stages of our lives. In mundane living, priorities are not constant.
Within each stage of life, people move between diverse worlds. Our roles and behavior at home and among family might deviate greatly from those at work and with our associates. The worlds of buyers are often unlike those of sellers; we all live in the first and some of us in the second, too. Our position as an expert or, at least, an experienced person in certain aspects of life may be reversed in other areas. Hobbies and other personal interests bring people into enjoyable worlds outside work requirements and family obligations. Also, shifting moods and concerns, ours and others’, can modify the same worlds from day to day. Situations do change, like it or not.
Our worlds can also be affected by fluctuating states of our being. When we are emotionally balanced our vision of life is better than during, or after, traumatic experiences. A person with a sound mind may become delusional during mental illness; even our imagination can take us into different worlds. When our bodies are healthy our outlook is usually brighter than during a sickness or after an injury. A handicapped person may approach our worlds from perspectives altered, often outside of their control, from those of people with no such disability. Many other individual factors affect our experiences in each world, too. The physical world itself alters from day to day.
Buddhism teaches that there is no continuing self, just the fleeting skandhas. To some extent, psychologists and physiologists would agree. Skandhas are the five aggregates of all human beings: bodily matter; sensations; perceptions; mental formations; consciousness. “They are constantly in the process of change and do not constitute a self.” Psychologists say that our mind is always in a state of flux and the make-up of our psyche varies each moment. Physiologists attest to the ever altering state of our body: cells are dying and then regenerated continuously, following DNA patterns which make the modifications appear to be gradual. Trauma can speed the process.
Christians, Hindus, Jews, and Muslims - as well as most Buddhists in daily life - accept continuity of self, while acknowledging changes in the emotions, mind and body of each person. Also, to a greater or lesser degree, they do accept presence of a soul in each human. They do not all agree, however, that the soul has the essence of the divine, as most mystics believe. Most people live in their immediate emotional, mental and physical self, or skandhas, but some include various levels of spirituality to make life more meaningful for them.
Those people who believe in the soul* usually also believe that it provides the vital or spiritual energy needed to make all aspects of our self function. The more prominent is our soul, in theory, then the better person we will be. The soul, however, is elusive; it cannot be specifically identified. Mystics intuitively know