when your worldview changes

Black Bull and Stabs-by-Mistake at lower end of Cutbank Canyon (Blackfeet Tales of Glacier National Park, 1916)

Worldviews can be defined as the fundamental perspectives through which we perceive and interpret reality. They encompass our beliefs, values, and assumptions, influencing our thoughts, emotions, behaviors, and decision-making processes.

And worldviews can shift, morph, and change, either through our own efforts or through wyrd and highly strange experiences.

Recently, I have been reading about adverse experiences in meditation. There's a good bit of research and first-person reports, and I have my own experiences to draw upon. I came upon these because I have been curious about a change in my worldview and trying to find ways to understand that experience. I can trace the trajectory that led to it, but understanding the consequences is much more difficult. So, I wondered if a close parallel was an adverse experience in meditation, because that can definitely overturn a worldview.

Worldviews can be very comforting, can't they? When we are firm in our "beliefs, values, and assumptions," it feels good, stable, affirmed. Probably, we work hard to keep out anything that might challenge or overturn that worldview. (Note to self: remember terror management theory.) But what happens when something sneaks in, something outside our direct view or our peripheral vision and shatters that worldview?

I've had a few different worldviews, so it shouldn't be too surprising or disruptive when yet another one hits the skids. I bobble, wobble, look about, and then find some stability in a new worldview. I don't know if it's possible to live without a worldview, so perhaps the most we can ask is that we can actually see our own worldview and perhaps even overlook it, the way these Blackfeet men are overlooking their own world.