You walk down a street you know well. One day, everything feels familiar and pleasant. You hear birds, see light on a façade and greet someone. Another day, you are worried. The same street feels cold; a passer-by who does not return your greeting seems to be rejecting you. Each time, what appears is a whole world, with its own atmosphere and meaning.
Dioramics explores how such lifeworlds arise and change. It begins with something you do not have to look far to find: how life presents itself to you right now.
The flow of experience
As you read this, words, sounds, bodily sensations, thoughts and feelings appear. Perhaps something strikes a chord. Perhaps you think it is nonsense. Perhaps you are thinking about what you still need to do later. That, too, is part of the experience.
We can distinguish individual things within it, but we do not encounter them as separate packages. A sound evokes a memory, a thought brings tension, a feeling changes how a sentence comes across. Experiencing continues. When we speak of a separate ‘moment’, we mark something off within that flow.
Interpreting is part of it too. The thought ‘he is ignoring me’ appears along with what you see and feel. There is no interpreter standing outside experience, adding meaning afterwards.
How a world becomes meaningful
Suppose someone says to you abruptly: ‘We need to talk.’ Your stomach tightens. Have you done something wrong? Is there bad news? Then it turns out that the person wants your help with a surprise. You relax, and the whole situation takes on a different character.
More changes than an opinion about a single sentence. The other person appears differently, your body feels different, and your expectations change too. What seemed threatening a moment ago becomes something you might enjoy.
By lifeworld, I mean this interweaving of what appears and how it matters. People, things, memories, expectations and your sense of yourself belong together within it. Often, this coherence barely stands out. This is simply how the world is — until something shifts.
Why ‘dioramic’?
The name refers to a diorama: an arrangement in which light, the relations between things and a viewpoint come together to make a world appear. Think of a shoebox diorama. A few simple materials can, as soon as you look inside, become a landscape you briefly lose yourself in.
This image helps me attend to how a world appears as a whole. A change in mood, expectation or attention can profoundly alter a familiar situation. The comparison with a diorama serves as an aid; that comparison, too, appears within the experience we are trying to understand.
And nonduality?
Experience is sometimes described as though there were a separate ‘I’ facing an outside world. That sense can also recede into the background or fall away. Seeing, hearing, thinking and feeling continue, while it becomes less self-evident that there is a separate owner behind them.
This is where my affinity with nonduality lies. I am drawn to an approach that leaves room to keep exploring such descriptions. A profound change in experience need not mean that the ultimate truth about reality has thereby been discovered.
The conviction ‘now I see how everything really is’ is also part of the flow. Dioramics asks how such a conviction shapes a lifeworld, and what becomes self-evident or, conversely, invisible within it.
Noticing for yourself
You do not need to seek out a special experience for this. Perhaps today you will notice how a conversation, a walk or a message briefly changes the colour of your whole world.
What appears then? What feels certain? What do you expect? And what happens when that certainty shifts?
These are the questions with which Dioramics begins.
Dioramic analyses of four lifeworlds.
- An everyday, practical lifeworld
- A natural-scientific lifeworld
- A spiritual / New Age lifeworld
- A radically nondual lifeworld
For the philosophical foundations of Dioramics, read on at Dioramics: philosophical foundations.