The Story of the Illusion of the Ego
- Cosmic Dimension
- Jul 18, 2024
- 6 min read
There was a great philosopher, as there are many. But I really wanted to share with you a story from his book, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, in which he answers children's fundamental questions: "Where did the world come from?", "Where was I before I was born?", "Why did God create the world?
As Alan Watts further writes in his book, it is an old and easily understandable story, which, as he himself says, does not originate from him, but from ancient India, and is a mystical explanation of the Vedanta philosophy.
And even though I am no longer a child myself, I liked this wonderful story so much that I want to share it to remind everyone. Maybe we should be like children again, as Jesus said, in order to understand the simple things that we are often incapable of in our everyday adult life. Maybe not because we don't want to, but because we have forgotten, because we have been taught differently. But we can all do it, if we want to, if we have the courage, if we have people by our side who reach out to us, who support us, who guide us to find our way back into the light.
And now on to the story itself
"There has never been a point in time when the world began, because it always goes around like a circle. But there is no point on a circle where it begins. Look at my wristwatch, which tells the time: The hands always go around in a circle, and so the world keeps repeating itself. But just as the hour hand of the watch is sometimes at twelve and sometimes at six, so there is day and night, waking and sleeping, living and dying, summer and winter. One would not be possible without the other, because you cannot know what is black until you have seen it side by side with white, and vice versa.
In the same way, there are times when the world is and times when it is not, because if it were to go on forever and ever without rest and quiet, it would become completely tired of itself. It comes and goes. One moment you see it, the next you don't. But because it doesn't get tired of itself, it always comes back after it's gone. It's like your breath: you breathe in and out, in and out, and if you try to hold your breath all the time, you feel very bad. It's also like playing hide-and-seek: it's always fun to hide somewhere else and look for someone who's not always hiding in the same place. God also likes to play hide and seek, but since there is no one but Him, He has no one to play with. But he gets around this problem by pretending not to be himself. That's how you can hide from yourself. He pretends to be you, me, all the people in the world, all the animals, the plants, the stones, and the stars. In this way he has strange and wonderful adventures, some of which are terrible and frightening. But they are like bad dreams, because when he wakes up, they are gone.
When God plays hide-and-seek and pretends to be you and me, He plays it so well that it takes Him a long time to remember where and how He hid. But that's what He likes to do, that's what He wanted to do. He doesn't want to find himself too quickly, because that would spoil the game. That's why it's so hard for you and me to find out that we are God in disguise, pretending not to be ourselves. But when the game has gone on long enough, each of us wakes up, stops pretending, and remembers that we are all one Self - the God who is all there is and who lives always and forever. Of course, you must remember that God does not look like a human being. Humans have a skin, and there is always something outside our skin. If He didn't exist, we wouldn't even know the difference between what's inside our body and what's outside our body. But God has no skin and no form because there is nothing outside of Him. (For a child who is intelligent enough, I illustrate this with a Moebius strip-a strip of paper rolled into a ring and twisted so that it has only one side and one edge).
Inside and outside of God are the same. And although I spoke of God as "He" and not "She," God is neither a man nor a woman. I didn't say "it" because we usually say "it" for things that are not alive. God is the Self of the world, but you cannot see God for the same reason you cannot see your own eyes without a mirror, and just as you cannot bite your own teeth or look inside your own head. Your self is so skillfully hidden because it is God who is hiding. You may ask why God sometimes hides in the form of horrible people or pretends to be people suffering from serious diseases or severe pain.
First of all, remember that he is not really doing this to anyone but himself. Also remember that in almost every story you like, there have to be good people and bad people, because the exciting thing about a story is watching the good people triumph over the bad people. It's like when we play cards. At the beginning of a game, we get all the cards in a mess, which can be compared to the bad things in this world, but the joke of the game is to fix this mess, and the one who does the best is the winner. Then we shuffle the cards again and make a new game, and that's how the world works.
From the book "The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are" by Alan Watts (pages 26-30)
Don't we all sometimes feel lost in some way, unable to find ourselves because we have forgotten, just like God in this story?
Maybe we have, and maybe we haven't. For just as God knows that it is only a game and that he cannot lose himself, so do we all. It's just that in our daily experience of the world of duality, we have a harder time remembering that we do the same thing to ourselves. In the end, we are all one, but we are only divided in order to experience ourselves. Just as the eye cannot see itself and needs an aid to do so, other people are our mirrors in which we can find ourselves. But it seems so hard to remember, and sometimes it seems that everything is against us to rediscover ourselves. But it is our mind that prevents us from doing so, because it cannot grasp and understand what can be felt and experienced with the heart and with love. This complex tool does not seem to be made for such simple tasks and thus prevents us from going beyond many things and achieving this reunion effortlessly.
And whether it will be a lot of time for some and not for others, we will all return to the source. Everything and everyone has its time and the Great Spirit is always there and will always help you up when you fall. Until the time when you make it on your own. This is the law of nature and the cycle of life. But of course we can do our part at any time to free ourselves from the suffering that Buddha speaks of and thus influence time to reach the goal of the path more quickly.
What is a Möbius strip?
Also known as the Moebius strip, it refers to a surface that has only one edge and one side. If you were to describe it with an elongated strip of paper, glued together at the ends and rotated 180 degrees, you would realize that you cannot distinguish between top and bottom or outside and inside. There is virtually no orientation, and it merges into itself, so that if you start coloring one side, you end up coloring everything.
I can warmly recommend the book to anyone who is not yet familiar with it and would like to learn more about the illusion of ego and the duality of our world. Below the story is a link to download the book. If you want to know more about the author Alan Watts, you can find more information here on Wikipedia. Since he has also done a lot of work on Far Eastern wisdom, there are many other great books, especially in the field of Taoism, which are also very good to read, even if they are not always easy to understand at first glance.
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