Do I see the world, or do I make it?

When disgust isn’t in the bug, and softness isn’t in the bunny—where is it?

Some reflections begin with silence. Others start with a scream. Press play if you’d like to begin where this one did.

Photograph by the author. A self-portrait taken through a circular mirror or lens, partially obscured, capturing the act of looking while being looked at. A quiet study of perception, framing, and presence.

A bug in the room

A regular Tuesday morning. The sun enters through the windows partially, casting soft glows on the wall. As usual, I went to the basement to practise my yoga. As I turned on the lights, vacuumed the floor, and got ready for my workout, I reached for my yoga mat. There it was: an enormous silverfish. The most grotesque-looking bug I can find, other than a cockroach. I screamed and ran for help.

My husband and I were perplexed as to how this bug got into our house, since I had sealed almost all the holes and drainages. Later on, the bug was taken care of, and of course, I did not resume my yoga practice.

Where fear comes from

Bags of thoughts slowly pile up in the quiet that follows the clattering. What happens when something crosses our line? How does it alter the way we think? Does a boundary offer real protection, or only the illusion of comfort? I can tell you, these bags keep piling up, slowly, building a fortress.

Let’s set aside the idea of invasion for a little and consider the shape of the boundary itself. It might not be as visible as a salt-drawn circle. Like a membrane stretched over the self, it quietly repels what doesn’t feel like home.

In the past, I’ve touched on how our perception of the world is built through interaction via the senses. So how do our senses respond to objects that fall outside of that shield?

In the bug homicide scenario, my fear has exploded exponentially based on several reasons: first, the look of a multi-legged creature; secondly, the idea that it was lurking in the dark; lastly, this bug is not part of my family or things I am familiar with.

Our system of belief is like a mature tree, deeply rooted in the mind. Foreign ideas arrive like construction crews, eager to build a road that cuts right through it.

The grotesqueness of the bug, an outsider hiding in a dark corner of the house, triggered the shield. A protection protocol kicked in. The body responded with what it knows: denial, fright, or flight. In my case, it wasn’t subtle. I took off.

The illusion of objectivity

The common theme in all of this is that the trigger is external. We internalize these external phenomena, and anything that doesn’t conform to our worldview becomes foreign or unpleasant.

In a book I recently read, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me), the authors discuss a compelling idea: naive realism. Coined by social psychologist Lee Ross, it describes the belief that we see the world as it truly is. And if others see it differently, we assume they are misinformed, irrational, or biased.

If I were operating from naive realism, I would think the bug is disgusting simply because it is, and believe everyone should agree. That disgust would feel universal. Yet some people find bugs fascinating, even keep them as pets. If that’s true, then the feeling isn’t in the bug. It’s in the mind.

What if it’s all projection?

What if what we fear in the world is what we’ve projected onto it?

Our vision is stitched from memory, culture, and past experience. Fear doesn’t arrive; it’s shaped from within. (The bug still frightened me, but maybe it wore my mother’s face, or came from a film I once watched alone.)

These reactions quietly trace the outlines of our boundaries.

Boundaries we can’t see past

What if we build boundaries to feel safe or to stay close to those who share our values, but those same boundaries become walls we can’t see past?

Heart Sutra

Form is not separate from emptiness. Emptiness is not separate from form. Form is emptiness. Emptiness is form.
Feeling, perception, formation, and consciousness are also like this. Shariputra, all phenomena share this empty nature.

If we borrow the lens of the Heart Sutra, we begin to view the world differently. A flower does not exist on its own. It leans on sun, rain, and soil to become what it is. Nothing holds a fixed nature.

Each thing is shaped by how it is received, and how others meet it, over time.

A bunny appears

Not everything unfamiliar is feared. For instance, I don’t find the bunny who visits our backyard scary or invasive, probably because I used to have a pet bunny. My memories and experiences shape how I see this visitor.

Categories and their cost

So far, we’ve followed a simple encounter—bug meets person, fear rises—and watched how a single moment holds layers: memory, belief, projection. It may seem like the fear came from outside, but it never truly did. What appears external is shaped by the internal, and what we carry within gets mapped back onto the world. This quiet looping forms the basis of how we see—and where we draw the line between “me” and “not me.”

And if we think of the world as a vast ocean of knowledge and ideas, how do we navigate that sea?

According to Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me), our brains categorize information to process it more efficiently. But categorization also leads to dualism.

The divisions of me and you, inside and outside, good and bad—these arise from the same mental sorting system. The barricades we build help us move through the world, but they also make us cling to identity and certainty. We lose the ability to see from another angle.

But what if we stop sorting, even for a moment? If we strip away these projections and look directly at the world, what remains? What is the real source of fear, of otherness, of what we call the external?

In the Heart Sutra

No field of vision, no field of sound, not even the field of thought and awareness. No ignorance, and no end of ignorance. No aging and death, and no end to aging and death.

Peeling the onion

Perhaps when we look from the center, free from the filters of sensation, we begin to see the true shape of reality. Not as fixed, but as relational. Not as isolated, but as interdependent.

Liberation from fixation is like peeling an onion, layer by layer.

With each layer removed, meaning loosens. Dualism softens. Even the grasping of cause and effect begins to dissolve.