World of Self

This is my diatribe of the day. My hope is it gives you something new to think about.

A solipsistic universe. That from the good Dr. McCoy in one of the hundreds of fan fiction written by the many authors who were also 'Star Trek' fans. (Yes, I'm a trekie myself, I have around seventy of these novels collected in my youth) The concept stuck with me over the years, culminating the other night when I awoke with not only an expanse of the idea, but the idea for a novel, which before I owned only a title.

As the good doctor explained. Try as you may, you cannot see or imagine the world from any other point of view except your own. You can attempt to imagine what it might be, but you cannot experience others points of view because you are the center of your universe. Try it. You will find it impossible to see a world without you in it, and in fact, you at the middle of it. Your own omnipresent psyche will win out and if you examine what you thought, or felt, you will find it came from your mind.

So if the world's population is around 7 billion, as it is estimated to be. There are 7 billion separate universes out there. Seven billion worlds that none can have access to, unless of course you are God, and I hope he has a really big bottle of aspirin. Imagine from your perspective, which is the only one you can imagine from, the dreams, aspirations, pain, confusion and ideas of all of these people are different from yours, which they most certainly would be, and do the math. Wow! You can't wrap your head around it, can you?

Now, to quote another character from the famed series, Mr. Spock, you might say that is “a difference that makes no difference.” True, but the loneliness of it is astounding. I once wrote, or actually, I gave credit to my evil twin Drew, that when you think outside the box you find yet another box. I've just described 7 billion of them. Boxes we are trapped in and can only glimpse outside beyond through our imaginations.

That's were the writer comes in. We make a feeble attempt to bridge these boxes. Yes, it comes from our imaginations, but we are expressing feelings and thoughts of other people. Still, these characters come from us. An inescapable fact, yet we persevere anyway.