You are in a box

Imagine you are in a box, and when you look outside of this box, there are fires and demons and goblins and the gnashing of teeth.

Whether you’re looking up, down, left or right, front or back—in all six of these directions, there’s clear danger.

You are very grateful for your box because it keeps you safe from all of these things.

However, you also don’t have any friends, and you have no way to impact the box. You don’t even realize it’s a box because it’s all you’ve ever known.

To you, it’s just six directions.

One day, while looking at one of the sides of this box, you move in an accidental and non-ordinary way.

You press up against the box, and suddenly you can feel that there is a shape to it—it’s not just reality, but it’s got a form to it. Additionally, when you press up against it, the box shape is warped slightly.

When this happens, you notice that what you are looking at is actually a projection screen, and everything you can see—all the meanings that you have made about it—is actually coming from the inside of this box. So, having become curious, you poke and kick a hole in the box, and you look through this hole. All of the fire and other threatening things are not outside.

They are actually only being projected onto the box from the inside.

You sit with this for a few days, and you have to wrap your mind around this: what you thought was the world is actually a box with a projection that nobody else but you can see.

It seems that you have some kind of responsibility to yourself now to investigate further—because what are you going to do?

Just patch up the hole and pretend like it never happened?

Now you have a few options.

You could crawl through the hole, or you could go on a rampage and just start making other holes. No one is there to tell you if one option is better than the other. So the best you have is just a guess.

One day, you start kicking and punching sporadically to see what happens, and you learn that you can actually change the shape of the box. The patterns and content of the projections can be influenced and controlled as well. Through digging at various parts of the box, you discover some are more secured and some are more flimsy.

The flimsy areas are easier to manipulate, but the more solid areas make a larger impact on the projections.

Through experimentation, you’ve learned that your whole relationship to reality depends on how much this box obscures your vision, your access to air, and your access to the outside world in general. Now your legs are poking through the bottom of the box, and you can walk around.

You see other boxes with other people inside of them, and you start yelling at them that there’s a box they’re inside of and they can just manipulate it.

From their side, what they see is a goblin or a demon yelling at them. Every time you yell “Break free!” they see flames streaming from your head—the projections on the inside of their box are causing them to perceive you as a demon, and so they are thankful that their box is there to protect them.

You tell them, “You don’t know what you’re missing!” On the inside of their box, they say, “Wow, this demon is really getting close to my box and is really convinced of my wrongness.”

From the outside of the box, you explain, “I’m not saying you’re wrong. I’m saying that you are more free than you realize. You are incorrect about your level of freedom, but you are not fundamentally wrong.”

But on the inside of the box, the other person seems to hear only the words “fundamentally wrong.” And so they say, “I’m so grateful for my box.”

You try a different person in a different box, and you try hundreds or thousands, and you have the same response over and over again. So you eventually give up, and you realize the boxes are extremely tricky. No one wants to actually be out of their box because they cannot hear what you’re saying, and you cannot break the box for them because it must be torn apart from the inside.

So you sit down and you wait, and eventually somebody else walks over.

They also have a broken box that they have destroyed, and they sit down next to you.

You say, “Hi.”

And then they say “Hi.”

Then you both just start laughing.