Visions of beings big and small, old and young, all different shapes, I used to see them stuck in these squares, and it used to kill me why they had done it to themselves. Nothing in our universe was square, yet they all accepted their roles as squares trapped in square houses on square blocks and flattened squares of cropland surrounded by square walls which encircled the oblong earth which encircled the spherical sun, and somewhere there was a supermassive black hole which was probably spherical and encircling something else which wasn’t square.
Allegory of the Square
If we sat here perfectly still for a lifetime, just the three of us sitting in front of this cabin staring forward, all we would see is a square. If we never moved, the cabin would always be a square to us.
To the left of me you, the dogmatic rationalist, would tell me about the scientific proof of squares. “There are only squares. That’s all there is,” you’d say, “It’s been proven.”
To the right of me you, the religious zealot, would quote the ancient scripture of the square which says there’s more than squares out there. “You just have to have faith. There’s more than just squares, because my square book says so.”
Suppose one day I stood up for the first time and took a step to the left, I’d see two walls and a roof, a new dimension, a cubical cabin.
If I sat back down with you two idiots, how could I possibly tell you about my experience? Both of you would compare and contrast my experience to your own experiences sitting, unable to accept that there are experiences which don’t fit into squares, experiences which you haven’t yet experienced.
The religious zealot would say, “I told you so,” then you’d quote some scripture like, “Seek thy cube in thine heart, and receive thy cube in the afterlife.” And I’d say, “You don’t need a book. Those books have been unrecognizably manipulated. The root of all the world’s religions are words of beings who stood up and then chose to come back to us, sitting back down to try to inspire us all to stand up ourselves.”
You continue reciting that crap in your monotonous square, and then you project it upon the rest of us with judgement, shame, guilt and fear. My experience threatens everything you ever believed in, so you become more empowered than ever to propagate the words of the square book in the square world, and I must be an occultist, satanist witch for blaspheming the patriarchy of thy cube.
The dogmatic rationalist is much simpler. “Prove it,” you’d say. And I’d respond, “Prove what? You want me to prove my experience to you? No, I just came back to try to inspire you to stand up for yourself, to experience it for yourself. Experience a new dimension for yourself.”
The scholarly dogmatic rationalist becomes excited by the opportunity to put his hard-earned pedantic memory to the task of arguing the impossibility of an experience he hasn’t yet had, for nothing could be real which he hasn’t yet experienced, and he’s certain of this because it’s been proven by other dogmatic rationalists whom haven’t experienced it either, for those who’ve experienced it cannot fit it into words or graphs or concepts, for the words and graphs and concepts only exist within the squares, and all that fits into squares are simply regurgitated memories.
“Consciousness permeates all things,” I’d say, “and your concept of an empirical, corporeal universe is just another assumption from an unexamined place in timespace. It’s all performance art passing in front of a screen. Every moment you spend yielding facts, observing and analyzing the screen of perception is a moment wasted in denial of the observer, the One observing, for the observer and the observation are One.”
“There’s no proof. You’re delusional. Don’t become one of THEM, believing in woo-woo nonsense.” you’d say.
But it’s not a belief. I am sworn never to believe in anything. I do not believe in anything, for I cannot believe in anything. I experience, and experience is all I can truly deduce corporeally, scientifically or otherwise. My experience of life cannot be peer reviewed or emulated or tested against a control group. I am obligated to use scientific method on myself, my observation of the self through skepticism, the incessant test tube, deducing what cannot be put into words, that which will never fit into squares.
P.S. “The Grace of Suffering”
Here’s what they call “The Grace of Suffering.” One day a car backs into both of my little square friends, the scholarly one and the religious one, and in their suffering they begin doubting all their dumb beliefs. The religious one finally embracing the internal rage, the absurdity of being, asks, “Why God? I thought we had a deal. I followed your book, and you’re supposed to never let anything bad happen to me. That was our deal. Why have you allowed this to happen to me?”
And the dogmatic rationalist realizes none of his facts are here to help him. All the things he memorized, they’re all useless as he’s left alone with nothing but himself. And what did any of it matter anyhow? Matter. Facts. Knowledge. All of the important things in life had happened in between the certainties, in between the facts, outside of the squares. He had known that oxygen and hydrogen made water, and water and carbon had formed life, but what was it? What was oxygen? What was water? What was life? What was any of it, really?
And all their rigid certainties dissipate in their desire to be, and being becomes greater, deeper, stronger. The human becomes Being. In desperation, they’re forced to move. Slowly, day by day, the will to live and the desire to overcome the godawful suffering forces them out of their dumb little squares, and they’re forced to reckon with the fact that the squares were a self-induced hallucination encircling an unfathomable eternity. The good news is, it seems this life is much more beautiful and bizarre than any of our wildest dreams, and everything in our wildest imaginations exist within a much greater, much wilder imagination, an infinite imagination which imagined us imagining imagination, and here we are… imagining ourselves stuck in squares.