Uncle suddenly scooped down with his hand and brought up a closed hand. He then brought it to a glass box that stood on a pedestal I hadn’t noticed. He slid one of the box’s glass planes open and placed an insect inside. It looked like a grasshopper. “This creature lives its entire life in these fields without limitation. I just ended that.”
I watched as the grasshopper jumped inside the glass box hitting against the top and some of the sides. The grasshopper stopped as if he was stunned by the new circumstance of his environment.
“To the grasshopper,” Uncle said, “all is well. He is alive after all. He sees his normal environment all around him. He can’t see the glass. If I keep him in here for a few days he will stop his jumping and become acclimated to the dimensions of his new home. All he needs is food and water, and he can survive.”
“So you’re saying these people are acclimated to simply survive?”
Uncle slide one of the side panels of the glass box open. “If you were a grasshopper, what would you do?”
“I would jump through the open panel.”
“But how would you know it was open? It’s perfectly clear glass.”
I thought about it for a moment. “I’d jump in every direction… I’d experiment.”
Uncle took a stick and pointed it at the grasshopper through the open side panel, and the grasshopper jumped into the opposite wall, hitting his head and falling to his side. “Do you see that I offered him an exit and he fled? He could’ve climbed on the stick, and I would have freed him.”
“Yes, but he doesn’t know that.”
“True.”
Uncle opened another side panel. “What you said is right. You experiment. You try different ways to climb the mountain of consciousness. You don’t settle on one way… one method… one teacher. If you devote your entire life to the worship of one thing, what if you find out when you take your last breath that the one thing was not real.
“You find that you lived inside a cage all your life. You never tried to jump out by experimenting, by testing the walls. The people who never bother to climb this mountain are inside a cage, and they don’t know it. Fear is the glass wall. Wakan Tanka comes and opens one of the glass panels, perhaps offers a stick for them to climb out, but they jump away, going further inside their soul-draining boundaries.”
Uncle brought the stick out again and lightly jabbed it in the direction of the grasshopper, who hopped through the open side panel, and was instantly lost in the thick underbrush that surrounded us.
Uncle turned his eyes to me. “Are you ready to do the same?”
James Mahu, Quantusum, 2018
“Imagine you are in the driver’s seat of a car. You have been sitting there so long that you have forgotten that it is the seat of a car, forgotten how to get out of the seat, forgotten the existence of your own legs, indeed forgotten that you are a being at all separate from the car. You control the car with skill and precision, driving it wherever you wish to go, manipulating the headlights and the windshield wipers and the stereo and the air conditioning, and you pronounce yourself a great master. But there are paths you cannot travel, because there are no roads to them, and you long to run through the forest, or swim in the river, or climb the high mountains.
A line of prophets who have come before you tell you that the secret to these forbidden mysteries is an ancient and terrible skill called GETTING OUT OF THE CAR, and you resolve to learn this skill. You try every button on the dashboard, but none of them is the button for GETTING OUT OF THE CAR. You drive all of the highways and byways of the earth, but you cannot reach GETTING OUT OF THE CAR, for it is not a place on a highway. The prophets tell you GETTING OUT OF THE CAR is something fundamentally different than anything you have done thus far, but to you this means ever sillier extremities: driving backwards, driving with the headlights on in the glare of noon, driving into ditches on purpose, but none of these reveal the secret of GETTING OUT OF THE CAR. The prophets tell you it is easy; indeed, it is the easiest thing you have ever done. You have traveled the Pan-American Highway from the boreal pole to the Darien Gap, you have crossed Route 66 in the dead heat of summer, you have outrun cop cars at 160 mph and survived, and GETTING OUT OF THE CAR is easier than any of them, the easiest thing you can imagine, closer to you than the veins in your head, but still the secret is obscure to you.
And finally you drive to the top of the highest peak and you find a sage, and you ask him what series of buttons on the dashboard you have to press to get out of the car. And he tells you that it’s not about pressing buttons on the dashboard and you just need to GET OUT OF THE CAR. And you say okay, fine, but what series of buttons will lead to you getting out of the car, and he says no, really, you need to stop thinking about dashboard buttons and GET OUT OF THE CAR. And you tell him maybe if the sage helps you change your oil or rotates your tires or something then it will improve your driving to the point where getting out of the car will be a cinch after that, and he tells you it has nothing to do with how rotated your tires are and you just need to GET OUT OF THE CAR, and so you call him a moron and drive away.”
“So that metaphor is totally unfair,” I said, “and a better metaphor would be if every time someone got out of the car, five minutes later they found themselves back in the car, and I ask the sage for driving directions to a laboratory where they are studying that problem, and…”
“You only believe that because it’s written on the windshield,” said the big green bat. “And you think the windshield is identical to reality because you won’t GET OUT OF THE CAR.”
“If you must have it in inside-the-car terms, here’s how to get out of the car. There is an image in your windshield, but you’re always disregarding it. To see it better, drive to a dark place, stop to a halt so you can’t crash into anything, turn off your headlights, and turn on the lights inside the car. This is called meditation, there’s a good book by Sam Harris on the matter. Once you see the image, you can study it, although it will be confusing because you’re so used to interpreting everything in beyond-the-windshield terms. If you turn your ignition key just a bit – so you get lights but the motor isn’t running – you can try to accelerate and brake, which won’t do anything dangerous in that ignition key setting, and discover the actuators you’re using to accelerate and brake. These are your legs, and you can learn to use them independently of the intent to accelerate or brake. These are important because you’ll need to use them very differently once you’re out of the car – otherwise you “fall down” (this term will make sense when you’re outside) into an affective death spiral and your instinctual system 1 will scramble to get you back into the car to protect you.
There are similar but more complex actuators, which you’re using for everything else you’re doing, and a single actuator which is the most difficult to study because when you play with it you lose sight of the image in the windshield. But using this last one in a deeply unfamiliar way you can discover a way to unseal the self, um, car, which is called samadhi, um, the door handle. Learn to use it, this might take a while, and you’ll discover how to get out of the car. Finally, a warning: outside the car you’ll be much slower and more vulnerable than you used to, so if you get out of the car in a bad place, or in the middle of lots of other cars, you could get too confused to ever find your way back into your car, which you’ll still need to do to go places.”
Scott Alexander, 2015, Universal Love, Said the Cactus Person
Imagine you’re in a world where people have literally forgotten how to look up from their cell phones. They use maps and camera functions to navigate, and they use chat programs to communicate with one another. They’re so focused on their phones that they don’t notice most stimuli coming in by other means.
Somehow, by a miracle we’ll just inject mysteriously into this thought experiment, you look up, and suddenly you remember that you can actually just see the world directly. You realize you had forgotten you were holding a cell phone.
In your excitement, you try texting your friend Alex:
YOU: Hey! Look up!
ALEX: Hi! Look up what?
YOU: No, I mean, you’re holding a cell phone. Look up from it!
ALEX: Yeah, I know I have a cell phone.
ALEX: <alex_cell_phone.jpg>
ALEX: If I look up from my phone, I just see our conversation.
YOU: No, that’s a picture of your cell phone. You’re still looking at the phone.
YOU: Seriously, try looking up!
ALEX: Okay…
ALEX: looks up
YOU: No, you just typed the characters “looks up”. Use your eyes!
ALEX: Um… I AM using my eyes. How else could I read this?
YOU: Exactly! Look above the text!
ALEX: Above the text is just the menu for the chat program.
YOU: Look above that!
ALEX: There isn’t anything above that. That’s the top.
ALEX: Are you okay?
You now realize you have a perplexing challenge made of two apparent facts.
First, Alex doesn’t have a place in their mind where the idea of “look up” can land in the way you intend. They are going to keep misunderstanding you.
Second, your only familiar way of interacting with Alex is through text, which seems to require somehow explaining what you mean.
But it’s so obvious! How can it be this hard to convey? And clearly some part of Alex already knows it and they just forgot like you had; otherwise they wouldn’t be able to walk around and use their phone. Maybe you can find some way of describing it to Alex that will help them notice that they already know…?
Or… maybe if you rendezvous with them, you can somehow figure out how to reach forward and just pull their head up?
Ra, Open the Door, 2022