The choices we make – which we're making all the time – effectively behave as a filter ensuring that the world we perceive and partake in is the one we first conceive in the mind. This is how we create and live our own self-designed reality, and how 'self' is effectively the world we live in. Without this filter the mind would be literally blown apart and in all likelihood madness would ensue. But this is the nature of spiritual work – to slowly and gently bring down our barricades and start facing up to what's really there – a reality so belittling to self that it shrinks and shrivels, and yet so empowering to spirit that the once fledgling heart now burgeons. The world, previously a mere reflection of self, becomes all heart and soul.