Ever seen one of those wooden puzzles made up of various geometric shapes that, when put together just so, form a perfect sphere? Imagine that each piece is held to its neighbors by a thick band of elastic cord, so that this particular sphere wants to stay together.
That’s a pretty good analogy for one’s world view, for one’s assemblage of ideas and opinions. As the puzzle pieces are put together to form a particular whole, so our ideas, beliefs and impressions are combined in a particular way to form a model of life, a world view. And those ideas are also held together with a certain tension, the force and nature of which will greatly determine how we get along in the world.
If the tension is too loose, like a rubber band that’s lost its oomph, one’s world view will lose its coherency, ultimately its contact with reality. If the tension is too tight, one’s world view will tend towards rigidity, with no room for new ideas or learning. Finding one’s sweet spot in between these two is not easy, that state of holding a coherent summary of one’s experience, while at the same time, holding it loosely enough to make room for new experience to enter in and perhaps even rearrange or displace set ideas.
Thinking about our world view as a puzzle that we construct helps remind us that our world view is just that, a construction, i.e., a representation of reality, as opposed to reality itself. Attachment to our views as right and true creates a greater sense of coherency, but at the price of rigidity and illusion. So while it is important to know our own mind, remembering that our assembly of ideas, however complex and deep, is but a model, a representation, a sliver of reality, a bar puzzle.