"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?
