Alan Watts curated one of the most succinct thought experiments at the intersection of desire and self. I encourage everyone to do this simple journey, before you go to bed, or just after you wake up as the rosy fingers of the sun begin to grasp you.
Imagine you can live any dream you cook up, the wildest fantasy.
You are lucid and able to direct the phenomenon that unfold. At first you invent a lover and you live with them for a hundred years in a paradisaical environ. You soon get bored, and invent a new lover, and you begin to build a world, you get bored.
After this dream you decide to stay for a hundred more years, you concoct the most elaborate feasts, delicacies of untold pleasure, you populate these places with Adrienne Rich, perhaps Socrates or Simone De Beuvior - just to have intense philosophical conversations, and after a while, you get bored again.
You then construct a new dream, one of more intense conundrums... you fight magical beasts, perhaps sit in meditation for years on end, invent psycho-medicinal beverages sans hangover to explore your inner world and still, you get bored.
In time you begin to invent new labyrinths of experience and you think, “shall I forget who I am in this dream, only to find myself at its resolve?” So you do.
This is the essence of our existence, to get lost and find yourself again. You realize that it is only in loosing yourself that you can experience the quintessence of experience — and elaborate “hide and go seek” which never ends.
And through this you begin to suspect that this is indeed what is happening with your waking life.
That the fulfillment of our desires are constructed for us and have little to do with what it means to be alive, it is the liminal, the confusing, the weird sense of constant search that leads us to remember who we are, the universe experiencing itself by hiding from itself.
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