Inside the Egg

"Every time you victimized someone,” I said, “you were victimizing yourself. Every act of kindness you’ve done, you’ve done to yourself. Every happy and sad moment ever experienced by any human was, or will be, experienced by you.”

This quote comes from a fascinating story I recently discovered on Stumbleupon (which is a wonderful invention, really).  It is called The Egg written by Andy Weir.  It tells the story from the point of view of a Creator speaking directly to a person addressed as “you”.  This person has just died, and the Creator is patiently explaining what is happening and what will happen next.  The person is not going to some spiritual destination outside this world.  As the Creator explains, the only way to go is back into the world, to live another life.  This is because there is only one identity, one person, with many incarnations.  Everyone in the world ever, has only been one person, and every time this person dies, he/she returns to live anew in the world.

This is a very heady thought.  The person in the story seems to think so, as well:

            “Wait. I’m everyone!?”

            “Now you’re getting it,” I said, with a congratulatory slap on the back.

            “I’m every human being who ever lived?”

            “Or who will ever live, yes.”

            “I’m Abraham Lincoln?”

            “And you’re John Wilkes Booth, too,” I added.

            “I’m Hitler?” You said, appalled.

            “And you’re the millions he killed.”

            “I’m Jesus?”

            “And you’re everyone who followed him.”

The point of all this is for the person, the child of the Creator, to grow and learn.  With each life, the person gains new knowledge and perspective about the world and about the self.  The universe, therefore, is an egg, and when the embryonic person has lived every life there has ever been or ever will be, he/she will be “born.”

It’s a lovely story, and there’s a great deal of truth in it.  One of the things I like very much is the way it is written.  It is dominated by dialogue between the Creator, “I” and the child/embryo, “you.”  This first- and second-person device neatly sidesteps the need to give these two characters an identity.  Not only can the reader step easily into the shoes of the child, but the Creator can be any god-figure that the reader chooses—Allah, or Zeus, or Buddha, or Mother Earth, for the use of first person also eliminates the requirement for a gender.  In addition, with the dialogue, there’s no need of time or place, which are, after all, human ideas that would be of little use outside the world we live in.  So simply by making good choices in his methods of writing, Weir creates the perfect “space” in which to present his idea.

I’m not saying that I literally believe that every person in the world was, is or will be myself.  But metaphorically, the idea that every human being is every other human being has merit.  If we consider the child/embryo identity to be, not a single entity, but the ideal of mankind, then the story takes on a new truth.  Every cruelty we inflict on others undermines the whole of humanity, while every kindness we offer strengthens that ideal and makes it more real.  The only way, then, to really make ourselves into what we could be is to experience and understand the lives of others.

Now, unless the universe really is an egg—and who knows?  Maybe Weir is onto something here—managing this kind of empathy and understanding will be next to impossible.  But I believe that everyone is capable of it.  I believe that the mankind is maturing, that gradually we are learning to look beyond ourselves and discover what it means to be better people.  Maybe, in a hundred years or a thousand, we will have grown enough to be “born.”  And when that happens…well, who can imagine what kind of wondrous things will be possible for us then?