The Constructed World
Our active mind does not simply passively receive the world; it creates it by selecting some elements of experience and discarding others. It is precisely this process of forming our “objective” world that affects how our expectations begin to diverge from what exists independently of us. For example, according to one fragment, our sense of life and our well-being depend not so much on objective reality itself, but on the extent to which that reality conforms to our expectations. As it is stated:"Our sense of well-being, our evaluation of our life, depends not so much on the objective way in which we live, but on the extent to which reality matches our expectations. Let us try to imagine a picture that will never actually take place..." (source: link txt)Moreover, our mind actively selects information by capturing certain aspects of experience and ignoring others. This selective perception and organizing action create the “everyday world,” which turns out to be limited to what we are capable of noticing. As noted in another source:"And the everyday world, the world of daily life, is created by the active direction of our consciousness, by capturing one thing and discarding another; it cannot claim a greater reality than other worlds..." (source: link txt)Thus, it is the active construction of reality by our consciousness—through sensations, thoughts, and personal experience—that leads to our expectations being formed based on selected elements of experience. If the picture of the world we have chosen does not coincide with the objectively existing reality, a discrepancy arises between our expectations and what actually is. This explains why a person might feel dissatisfied or, on the contrary, happy, not so much based on the objective state of affairs, but rather on how they perceive and think about it.