Project Vision 21

Recently, an incident from a few years ago jumped out of the past into my memory after reading about one of the strange paradoxes of our time: our universe keeps expanding, but, at the same time, our reality keeps shrinking. In fact, many people today inhabit the smallest possible world: theirs.

So, years ago I contacted an electrician to make some repairs at my home. He arrived an hour later than the scheduled time, explaining that he was at a different house waiting for me to open the door. He said that I was at the wrong house and that I should check the deed of my property to be sure I was living in the right house. Not even once he admitted he made a mistake.

This approach to life wrongly thinking my world is the whole world reminded me of a familiar melody that generations have heard inside a theme park: “It’s a small world after all…”
The song promises a world of simplicity and harmony, a place where differences dissolve into bright colors and repetitive cheerfulness. The world feels cozy, predictable, contained.

But what if that song describes not the ride, but our current relationship with reality?

We live in a time when the world—at least in the objective, scientific sense—is expanding faster than ever. Telescopes show us galaxies that stretch imagination; artificial intelligence multiplies our ability to learn; neuroscientists reveal depths of the mind previously unknown. Reality is not just large—it is overflowing, layered, dynamic, and still unfolding.

Why, then, so many people dwell in the smallest possible world? Not because the world is small, but because our experience of it has shrunk. This is one of the strange contradictions of our time: we stand at the edge of the vastest universe ever imagined, while millions live inside pockets of reality no wider than the screen they stare at.

When astronauts look at Earth from space, something extraordinary happens. Many describe a sudden, life-changing opening of perspective known as the Overview Effect. At that moment, borders disappear, conflicts shrink, and the Earth appears as one fragile, luminous home. It is an expansion of consciousness that ancient Greeks  called anagōgē, “a leading up.”

In everyday life, anagōgē happens when we read a book that changes how we think, when we listen deeply to someone different from us, when we encounter beauty that redraws the map of our heart. It is the ascent toward a larger reality.

There is an opposite movement, one the Greeks called katagōgē, “a leading downward.” Today, katagōgē happens quietly, softly—even pleasantly—as we look into screens. Worst of all, we do not notice this shrinking, because inside a small world, everything looks normal.

Perhaps the task of our time is to awaken to a larger world—not just scientifically, but existentially. The universe is still unfolding. The question is whether we will unfold with it. Our world is only as small as our imagination allows. We need to grow.