What Does It Mean To Be A Part Of The World And Other Questions
In its most simple sense, the word “world” means the entire totality of realities, to all aspects of reality or to all things in the universe. In other philosophies, the word “world” is used to refer to a single world-system or to the sum total of different worlds. Still, other conceptions view the world as being unique and others speak of a “plural of worlds.”
If you ask an expert what the world was created from, he may reply by giving a number of different answers. It could be some kind of animal, vegetable, or mineral world – the earth’s crust, atmosphere, and fluids. Another possibility is that the world was created through human intelligence and effort. Intelligent life could be like human beings, or it could be some form of animal. Then there are those who would say that the world was created in the “last moment,” with human beings as their only inhabitants.
Of course, it is not easy to know what the world was like before we lived on it. How can we tell if our existence and indeed the existence of all of the planet Earth is part of a great world plan, a cosmic plan? We do not. But we have theories about how the world works, and we can construct theories. One of these theories says that all the living things on the planet have originated from a common ancestor which was destroyed when the Earth was formed.
This is not so hard to believe, for the fossil record reveals many such fossils that were produced at the same time. There is also the theory that the Earth is round, and that the sun revolved around the center of the Earth. There are many places on the earth where the sedimentary rock layers reveal the existence of previously existing species. The history of life on earth is clearly a great history, one that we are all part of.
The second of these two scenarios is one that must be seriously considered by each of us. If the first is correct, then there is no way in which anyone, or anyone else, can claim any rights or ownership over the world. To say that something was created by someone when they did not even create themselves is to say that there is something which exists without any individual ownership. If this is true, then we are individuals.
Therefore, when someone asks us for something that they say was made by someone else, we should first ask them who that individual is. In other words, they cannot say that a particular individual created the world with us when they did not. We do exist as an entity, a part of something, and not an individual, and that is something that has been proved beyond doubt.