All around is stone
All is soft inside

All that I know lies within emotion
Words remain unspoken, lead me through the dark

Aurora, All Is Soft Inside

Let’s take your brain’s perspective for a moment.

Like those ancient, mummified Egyptian pharaohs, the brain spends eternity entombed in a dark, silent box.

It cannot get out and enjoy the world’s marvels directly; it learns what is going on in the world only indirectly via scraps of information from the light, vibrations, and chemicals that become sights, sounds, smells, and so on.

Your brain must figure out the meaning of those flashes and vibrations, and its main clues are your past experiences, which it constructs as simulations within its vast network of neural connections.

Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made

Consider the nerve signals reaching our brains from our sense organs.

Far from providing direct or untainted access to reality, even they themselves are never experienced for what they really are—namely crackles of electrical activity.

Nor, for the most part, do we experience them as being where they really are—inside our brains.

Instead we place them in the reality beyond.

So we perceive nothing as what it really is.

It is all theoretical interpretation: conjecture.

David Deutsch, Beginning Of Infinity

We see the homunculi at war with one another in a brain interior resembling a factory. There are, of course, the two windows, which represent the eyes, overlooking the outside world.

Who is this being through whose eyes we now see? It is at this point still a mystery.

But within this battle we recognize all the emotions at play (or at war!).

Charlie Kaufman, Antkind

All things fuse that can fuse, and nothing separates except what must.

Although they separate easier if they come in through distinct nerves, yet distinct nerves are not an unconditional ground of their discrimination.

The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion; and to the very end of life, our location of all things in one space is due to the fact that the original extents or bignesses of all the sensations which came to our notice at once, coalesced together into one and the same space.

There is no other reason than this why “the hand I touch and see coincides spatially with the hand I immediately feel”.

William James, Principles Of Psychology

From childhood onwards, we have a sense of identity, a kaleidoscope of memories.

Through a blend of senses, emotions, hidden impulses and intimate narrative, we dream and we anticipate.

Melanie Challenger, How To Be Animal

Too many years spent staring into the sun, I suppose, trying to dissolve the old subject-object dichotomy that Descartes (they say) imposed on us. It’s a “personal universe”; every window really a mirror. (They say.)

We are a bunch of windowless monads—nomads?—groping for return to the womb of total nullity.

But let’s be open-minded about this.

Ed Abbey, Fool’s Progress

Try to realise it’s all within yourself
No one else can make you change
And to see you’re really only very small
And life flows on within you and without you

George Harrison, Within You Without You