Chuang Chou dreamt he was a butterfly, fluttering about
happily, completely forgetting he was Chou. Soon he awoke, and was very much
Chou again. Was Chou dreaming he was a butterfly, or was a butterfly dreaming
he was Chou? –Chuang-tse
When I was a child, before video games were invented, I
spent hours and hours playing with my marble collection. I remember them
vividly from those long afternoons when I was deeply absorbed in the stories I
created around my marbles. Since they were all unique, the remnants of old
Christmas gifts and board games, or plucked one at a time, as a special treat,
from my father's 1940s marbles that he'd won in games with his playmates, I was
able to invest each one with its own personality and its own relationships to
the other marbles. They were my friends.
One day when I was perhaps seven or eight, I took out my box
of marbles and discovered a large, clear marble that I'd never seen before. To
this day I don't know how it got there: it wasn't from my father's collection,
nor can I remember having found it. Maybe it had been there all along and
somehow slipped my attention. But from that day that I first noticed it, it
held an increasing fascination for me. I integrated it into my games, joining
it into my marble society as a kind of respected outsider. It was the most
special marble of all, too special even to be their king, much less to occupy
any lesser role.
I spent increasing amounts of time just gazing into the
clear marble, fascinated with the way it contained a distorted image of my
entire bedroom and everything in it, even myself. One afternoon I looked into
it more deeply than ever before, immersing myself in its interior world. It was
as if my attention inhabited the marble. Its inner world became more real to me
than my own room, my own world. So deeply, in fact, did I enter this distorted
but complete inner world that I forgot myself. In the marble, I imagined or
perceived myself living out my life, playing with the other marbles, moving on
to a different toy. The distortions seemed less distorted as I forgot that
there was anything else. I even imagined myself leaving my room, going
downstairs for dinner. I had completely forgotten that I was lost in a world of
my imagination, that I was actually in my room gazing into a distorted image of
reality.
My trance did not end with that imaginary day. Days went by
in fact, weeks, months, years. My immersion in this world was so complete that
time outside it stood still. There was only one discrepancy, far below the
surface of my consciousness: something was missing. That something was the one
thing that the clear marble could not reflect: itself. That day, and indeed for
days and years after that, I remember searching for something. I didn't know
what it was. At first I had some inkling that it was to be found in my marble
box, but as the subjective years passed, I gave up such a childish notion, and
displaced my search onto other things, looking for something that would reveal
the truth of this world. With each discovery I made, a secret hope sprung up,
"Maybe this is it." But it never was.
I didn't really know what I was looking for, nor could I say
why I was looking for it; indeed, I was only half-aware that I was searching at
all. I had a vague sense that the world I was living in was unreal, an image or
a projection, and a distorted one at that. I had a sense of a wrongness in the
world, an incongruity. Little did I know that the one object that was the key,
the one object I was trying to find to reveal and unlock the matrix, was
unfindable. It didn't exist in the world I'd immersed myself in.
Thirty-five years passed. Finally, quite recently I was
cleaning out my basement when I came across an old box. It was my
long-forgotten marble collection. I opened it up, reminiscing about my happy
times absorbed in play, recalling the stories and personalities of each marble,
when I remembered! A marble was missing — and I remembered which one. It was
that clear marble. And in that instant I remembered the whole course of events,
remembered dropping into my trance, entering this world, getting so absorbed in
my play that I couldn't be bothered to leave, and eventually forgetting that
anything else existed.
Yet, even this realization didn't break my trance. By now,
decades of subjective time later, my trance was so deep that nothing could
shake it. Even the realization of trance was happening within the trance. To
exit my trance and return to the real world, I would have to somehow
communicate with that child gazing into a marble. And what a shock it would be
to him, to realize that he'd just imagined a whole life, that decades of
experiences weren't even real, but were just a figment of a few hours'
imagination.
No, I thought, I'd better let him discover the truth
gradually. I would not interrupt his game. I would let him play through his
trance till completion. I would be in this world, and of it.
I put my box of marbles back into the basement.
The world still seems distorted — more now then ever before.
The feeling of wrongness has lifted though. The missing thing is everywhere.
Image by camrich345, Courtesy of Creative Commons license.
