In my early youth there are a few things that had a massive impact in the way I view this world. They are things most of us don't contemplate often, but for me are the foundation of everything around us. A baseline upon everything else is built.
1: The planet called Earth
When I was very young, my mother once bought me a globe. I was in total awe when I saw it. So all of us anywhere are living on this ball floating in space, amazing. You could see the oceans and the landmasses clearly. Then my mother, proud of her gift, put the plug in the wall and flipped the switch. "Look", she said, "it has a light inside which shows all the countries". In an instant, the landmasses turned into a colored checkerboard delining the borders of all the countries. Young as I was I was confused by the concept of different countries. Why are they divided while we are all living on the same globe?
Although by now of course I understand countries and how they differ, that early notion of one ball for all of us still prevails in my worldview. We have on planet, and we are all it's children. Countries don't matter and are merely constructs of the human mind, not real divisions of any kind. To my mind, as long as we are not one people in one big land that encompasses the entire earth, we are not there yet.
2: Once I reached high school, I was introduced to the sciences, and in particular the periodical table. So here was a very finite table of just 118 things that make up our world. The entire world mind you! So here we are, with millions of different things around us and all these millions of things consist of only 118 different things. Not only that, these 118 elements themselves consist of merely 3 things: protons, neutrons and electrons. So literally everything around us, al those millions of things, consist of only 3 things! Three things that aren't even visible in a microscope make up the vast universe we live in.
I'm convinced that if we dig deeper, we eventually will come down to a single element or energy that makes up these protons, neutrons and electrons and thus everything around us. This leads to the belief the essence of my being isn't any different than the essence of, say, a grain of sand nor a giant star in a distant galaxy. This may touch on religion, but I really do not believe in any (single) entity or deity with a conscience.
3: In my early twenties I once picked up the comic 'Kate' of the series 'Jonathan'. It is a comicbook series about mystical journeys through India of an American man. The opening text of this comic had a profound philosophical influence on me. It goes like this (translated from Dutch):
"Pentagon, hexagon, octagon, nonagon, decagon, dodecagon, etc... What is the polygon with the greatest number of sides, the geometrical figure that precedes the circle?"
I pondered on the question and even took it to school to ask my math teacher who gave me the most unsatisfying answer I could think of. "Don't you know?" he asked, "It's simple: it's infinity minus one". Infinity minus one... As a circle has an infinite amount of sides, the answer was mathematically correct, but I still couldn't grasp this. As you can't put a number to infinity, how could you put a number on infinity minus one?
This notion evolved in a metaphysical view of our selves. We are born a triangle, learn to utter sound and turn into a square. Then we learn to walk and turn into a pentagon, learn to talk and evolve into a hexagon and so on and on and on. Every time we learn a new thing, every development, adds a side to our personality, to our self. As such we can evolve to polygons with a huge number of sides. We can in fact go as far as infinite minus one in our development.
To this day,much of my worldview is hung up on these three underlying notions.