How your words build worlds

Like Minecraft… but with your mind. Mindcraft! Ugh.

Credit to a dear friend of mind for constantly telling me that my world is constructed through my language. “Words make worlds!” she said. They do, it’s as simple as that.

That being said, I want to contribute to the existing breadth of knowledge on how your internal state of being reflects what you see on the outside, because what ‘words make worlds’ really means is that what you think—what you believe—determines what you see. It sounds fairly obvious on the surface, I’m pretty sure some of you reading this would scoff at the revelation, but that’s just supporting the point from two different perspectives. Firstly, the fact that I think this post will be scoffed at means I’ll find someone who does, and secondly, the person who does scoff is supporting an internal worldview of their own.

Firstly I’m going to sidetrack because history can tell a better story than I can.

If you’ve read any Ancient Greek literature you will understand the concept of the self fulfilling prophecy, because their grasp on fate and destiny at the time (as it seems for many of the ancient civilisations) led them to believe that knowing your fate essentially meant you were doomed to meet it. The story of Oedipus Tyrannus (originally by Sophocles) is based around two prophecies: the king and queen of Thebes ask the Oracle of Delphi if they will ever have children and they are told that if they have a son, he will kill them. Knowing this, they cripple the child Oedipus and give him up for adoption in order to protect themselves.

You can see where this is going even if you don’t know the story, right?

Oedipus eventually realises that the family who raised him isn’t his own, and he too consults the same Oracle of Delphi to learn about himself. True to the original prophecy he is told that he’ll kill his father and marry his mother, but the trick is in the ambiguity: as the reader you know the Oracle is talking about the king and queen, the original parents, but in Oedipus’ mind he thinks it’s the parents who raised him. So he runs away from home and heads to…Thebes. The home of his birth mother and father.

The end of the story is not a twist: Oedipus does marry his mother and he killed the man who was his father on the way there, because the story never puts that up for debate. The Oracle was determining a future based on what they believed. As Oedipus’ awareness sets in many years later, after he has children of his own, he understands the truth and punishes himself through blinding and exile. There was no twist because in the most basic sense the entire story was told as soon as you heard the first prophecy, and because the reaction to the prophecy was avoidance at its core, it did nothing to prevent that particular fate.

(If you find this particular story interesting, check out Antigone and the other works by Euripides…)

If you’re asking ‘how does this relate?’ then consider how many times you’ve felt an anxiety or a worry and noticed that whatever you did to try and stop it not only increased that feeling, but gave you even more shit to deal with.

If you can’t think of a particular example in your own life, why not look at 90% of TV shows and movies that exist? You know, where the entire movie would be pointless if one character communicated their intentions and feelings instead of playing games? “I really enjoy your company, fancy a coffee?” would stop most modern stories in the first five minutes. Instead, you get the opposite.

Let’s lay out a few examples, from the perspective of the self-fulfilling prophecy…

I’m really afraid of losing you

I know that I’m not a positive element in your life and I’m going to be even less positive so I can hold on to you

I’m a bad friend

I know my behaviour is not healthy or supportive and I want you to be responsible for absolving me of that guilt

I’m a total fuck up

I assume failure in everything I do

I’m never gonna find someone who loves me

I’m never gonna find someone who makes me happy

I’m never gonna find someone who makes me happy

I’m not responsible for my own happiness

I don’t know about you but I’ve had a bunch of those beliefs over the previous years and the only result is that those beliefs came true and I became even more unhappy.

The thing is, people can take positivity and turn it into negativity. You can be envious or jealous of other people’s success and you can twist that into so many destructive narratives that feed your self-loathing, and it’s so much easier to chop the tall poppy than it is to grow yourself, let alone the rest of the fucking field.

And that is what your thoughts do: the more they focus on what you don’t have, what you can’t do, what you should and shouldn’t do, what you are and what you aren’t (notice how we say ‘you are/are not’ and not ‘you are/you aren’t’, as if to emphasise that not?), the more your world revolves around those deficiencies and the needs that come from them, and over time they can grow to unbearable proportions. You might survive and live life to a healthy age, but were you happy or were you all bitter and twisted about all of the things everyone else had that you didn’t?

And if you are a parent, are you aware of how your words create their world? And for those you love, how your worlds influence it?

The solution is not to take every negative sounding phrase out of your vocabulary, nor is it to take a forced positive focus and be ignorant of your true deep-down feelings. Those words make an inauthentic world.

But…look at how you affect yourself and others depending on how you talk about things, how you share. Don’t you notice that the more authentic love you have, the more you see it in others and the world around you? And the more hateful you are, the shittier the world seems?

I’ll leave this with two quotes:

I have noticed that the Universe loves Gratitude. The more Grateful you are, the more goodies you get
- Louise Hay

And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.
- Paolo Coelho

Be negative and the universe will help you be negative. Be something else and the universe will help you be that.