The Dioramic Approach is a way of examining how worlds take shape within experience: how they acquire coherence, become inhabitable, and eventually appear as reality itself.
A diorama is not my model of the world. It is my metaphor for how a world appears.
We usually speak as if we encounter a world that is already there, complete and independent, and then interpret it from our particular point of view. The Dioramic Approach begins elsewhere. It starts from the observation that experience never presents us with a neutral collection of sensations to which meaning is only added afterwards. Experience already appears as a structured world, shaped through perception, embodiment, memory, language, identity, culture, expectation, mood, and context.
A lived world is therefore not merely encountered. It comes to hold together. Objects stand in relation to one another, events unfold within a sense of time, people appear with identities and intentions, and certain distinctions become so familiar that they cease to be noticed. What feels immediate and self-evident is already organised in a particular way.
The diorama as a way of seeing
A diorama presents a constructed scene as though it were simply there. It has a point of view, a framing, a distribution of light and shadow, a sense of depth, and a careful selection of what is shown and what remains outside the frame. When these elements have been assembled convincingly enough, the construction recedes from attention and the scene begins to function as a world.
The Dioramic Approach carries this intuition into lived experience. It asks what happens when the worlds we inhabit every day are approached in a similar way: not as illusions, but as configurations whose organisation has become largely invisible because it works.
Scientific worlds, spiritual worlds, political worlds, social worlds, psychological worlds, and personal worlds all arrange experience differently. Each foregrounds certain features, pushes others into the background, and establishes particular ways of distinguishing what is relevant, true, dangerous, valuable, normal, or possible.
Even the ordinary everyday world, in which one cooks, shops, answers messages, walks the dog, or pays bills, may be less a neutral background than a remarkably stable configuration. Its stability allows us to move through it without continually asking how it is being formed.
How something becomes real
To say that worlds are organised is not to say that reality is fake, that nothing exists, or that everything is merely invented. The point is more modest and more demanding: whatever becomes real for us always appears under particular conditions. It becomes visible, meaningful, and actionable through structures of perception, memory, embodiment, language, habit, valuation, expectation, and interpretation.
The familiar question What is real? therefore remains important, but it is joined by another: How does this appear as real? The second question does not abandon reality in favour of subjective opinion. It shifts attention towards the conditions under which a world becomes coherent and convincing in the first place.
A belief, theory, moral position, spiritual teaching, scientific framework, or self-image never appears entirely on its own. It belongs to a wider field that gives it weight and intelligibility. Certain assumptions are already in place. Particular forms of evidence are trusted. Some experiences are treated as meaningful, while others are dismissed, medicalised, spiritualised, or ignored.
Once that wider field becomes visible, many apparently endless disagreements begin to look different. People may seem to be arguing about isolated propositions while actually inhabiting differently organised worlds. Their standards of evidence differ, but so do their emotional investments, their ideas of self and causality, their understanding of time, and their sense of what can count as obvious.
The conflict is therefore not always only between opinions. It may also be a conflict between configurations.
Examining a lived configuration
A dioramic analysis pays attention to how such a configuration is assembled and maintained. It asks what has been placed in the foreground, what remains in the background, and what functions as an unquestioned support. It looks at the distinctions that organise the scene and at the kind of self, world, time, and causality that those distinctions imply.
What is presented as natural, and what is framed as deviant, secondary, primitive, irrational, or invisible? What counts as progress, failure, danger, truth, depth, salvation, or freedom? Which experiences are intensified, and which are neutralised before they can acquire significance?
These questions can be directed towards a religious worldview, a political ideology, a scientific model, a social role, a trauma pattern, a philosophical position, a technological environment, a work of art, a relationship, or a personal identity. Each can be approached not merely as a collection of statements or objects, but as a world that organises experience in a particular way.
This organisation need not be complete or internally perfect. A world only needs to hold well enough from within. That is why partial worlds can nevertheless feel total. They do not ordinarily announce themselves as constructions. Their framing becomes difficult to see precisely because it has become familiar and effective.
Worlds from within
Scientific practice, for example, does not consist only of theories. It includes instruments, measurements, procedures, institutions, trained forms of attention, and shared standards of evidence. Spiritual traditions likewise involve more than doctrines. They establish particular understandings of self, illusion, presence, awakening, suffering, and liberation, together with practices through which those understandings become experientially compelling.
Political and ideological worlds organise values, threats, loyalties, and imagined futures. Technological environments shape what can be seen, remembered, shared, measured, and desired. Personal biographies may gradually harden into worlds of their own, silently determining what feels possible, shameful, inevitable, or deserved.
None of these worlds has to be consciously chosen in order to exert its influence. We inherit many of their structures before we are able to name them. We learn how to perceive and interpret within families, institutions, languages, histories, and technologies that are already functioning around us.
The Dioramic Approach does not claim to stand outside all such worlds and judge them from a neutral position. There is no balcony above experience from which every configuration can be surveyed without participating in another configuration. Dioramic analysis is itself a way of looking, with its own concepts, emphases, and limitations.
Its value lies not in escaping every world, but in making world-formation more visible.
Construction without relativism
The idea that worlds are constructed can easily be mistaken for relativism. If every world is organised, one might conclude that all worlds are merely subjective and therefore equally valid. The Dioramic Approach does not draw that conclusion.
Worlds can differ greatly in coherence, openness, flexibility, explanatory power, ethical consequences, and their ability to respond to what resists them. Some are brittle and self-sealing, organised in such a way that every contradiction is absorbed as further confirmation. Others remain corrigible, allowing experience, evidence, and encounter to alter their structure.
Some worlds clarify; others distort. Some intensify fear, dependency, exclusion, or unnecessary suffering. Others create greater room for complexity, revision, responsibility, and care. To say that worlds are constructed is therefore not to say that every construction is equal. It means that worlds can be examined structurally, compared, criticised, loosened, and changed.
It also means that a world may be inhabited with greater awareness of how it holds together. Such awareness does not dissolve the world or place us outside it, but it may make its apparent inevitability less absolute.
Without a final metaphysics
The Dioramic Approach does not offer a new final metaphysics. It does not claim to reveal what reality ultimately is behind all appearances, nor does it replace one absolute with another. It remains with appearance, though not in the sense of treating appearance as superficial or unreal.
Appearance here refers to the entire field within which anything can become present, meaningful, nameable, and inhabitable. That field includes bodies, objects, memories, languages, relationships, institutions, moods, concepts, and expectations. It is already rich, structured, and consequential.
The approach therefore resists two related temptations. The first is to treat one particular world as absolute and self-evident. The second is to expose that world only in order to replace it with a supposedly higher or more ultimate one. Rather than making another final declaration, the Dioramic Approach asks how final declarations themselves become convincing.
In this respect, it develops near the intersection of phenomenology, world-formation, language, social construction, and nondual inquiry. Like phenomenology, it begins with lived experience rather than with a world imagined entirely outside experience. It shares phenomenology’s attention to perception, embodiment, time, meaning, and world, while placing particular emphasis on the assembled and stabilised character of what appears.
Social construction approaches show how shared worlds are maintained through language, institutions, roles, repetition, and collective habits of interpretation. The Dioramic Approach draws on this insight without reducing world-formation to the social or linguistic level alone. Language matters, but so do perception, embodiment, memory, mood, expectation, technology, and relational context.
Nonduality can also be examined in this way. It is not treated here as a privileged view from outside every configuration, but as a possible reorganisation of experience with its own language, practices, distinctions, promises, and forms of authority.
An analytic practice
We now live among densely overlapping worlds. Scientific rationality, political narratives, therapeutic vocabularies, spiritual frameworks, algorithmic environments, media realities, identity structures, and technological interfaces all participate in determining what appears real, urgent, desirable, and thinkable.
People move between these worlds, combine them, defend them, or become trapped within them. Often they are shaped by configurations they can feel but cannot yet see clearly. In such circumstances, simply choosing a side is not always enough. We also need ways of examining how sides are formed, how they acquire emotional and conceptual force, and how they organise perception from within.
The Dioramic Approach is intended as such an instrument: not a doctrine that must be believed, but an analytic practice. It is a disciplined way of looking that tries to make structures visible before they harden into inevitability.
Within Wide Open Windows, the subjects may vary widely. Books, essays, and investigations may approach daily life, philosophy, spirituality, language, science, politics, culture, art, or technology. The recurring gesture is not only to examine what is said, believed, or perceived, but also to ask what kind of world allows it to appear in that way.
No conversion is required, and no special belief is assumed. The approach asks for a particular kind of attention: a willingness to notice framing, to examine what supports what, and to recognise that even what feels most immediate may already be organised.
It also asks for a willingness to let one’s own certainties become, at least temporarily, objects of investigation rather than foundations beyond question. This is not meant to leave us with nothing. It is meant to reveal how much is already happening whenever a world appears.
What appears fixed may turn out to be structured. What appears absolute may turn out to be framed. What appears merely personal may reveal itself as a lived configuration, while what appears natural may turn out to be one way, among others, in which experience has learned to hold.
Publications
A formal presentation of the Dioramic Approach is available through Zenodo:
The Dioramic Approach: Toward an Experiential Ontology of Lived Reality
Haarmans, T. (2026). The Dioramic Approach: Toward an Experiential Ontology of Lived Reality. Zenodo.
More accessible versions are available for readers who want an introduction without the formal structure of the academic paper.
The Dioramic Approach — English
De Dioramische Benadering — Nederlands
A world is not only what is there, but how what is there becomes organised as experience.
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