Box

"We live in a box. Everything we think, feel, see, and experience is in this box. It is a very big box. In fact, the sum total of everything you have ever been consciously aware of as existing in your life is in this box.

Your family, friends, school, work, church, culture, country, earth, and all the known universe all exist in this box. The box has flexible walls based on your new experiences, but it is still a box. There is still a limit to what we have previously conceived of as life on this planet. Imagine one day you have wandered over to the edge of this box and see this tiny hole in the wall of the box. You peer through the hole and see a much stranger sight than anything you see inside the box. At first, you don’t believe what you see because it is just too crazy and different from what you know to be true inside your well-worn, trusted box. Over time, though, you keep wandering over to that hole and peering through it. You start to become a little bit comfortable with what you are seeing in that strange new world. After awhile, the hole starts to get a little bit bigger.

You can see a little bit more from your vantage point. And then one day, you go over to that hole and notice that it is now big enough for you to crawl through it. Now, this is a big step. You don’t want to just step through that hole and into a totally different reality. So you think about it for a few weeks. Every day you wander over there and wonder what it would be like to take a step into that world. This is when the fear starts to rear its ugly head. What would it be like if I stepped out of my box into that new space?

What would my family think? What would my friends think? Would I still be able to keep my job and make money in my current box? Will it be safe in that new world? Will I be welcome there? What will happen to me and my life if I take that step? One day you decide you are going to do it. You take the step over the threshold. And BAM! You are in a whole new world. Your old box is still visible from across the threshold. But it looks totally different now from your new perspective. You turn away and start to look around in your new world. You don’t understand it yet. How could you? You are brand new to this world.

Some things look similar to your old box. Some things, though, in this new world seem to be defying the very things that you thought were immutable laws of your old box. Day after day you step out your old box and begin exploring this new one. As you learn about this new world and experience all of the wondrous things in it, you have this growing need and urgency to tell EVERYONE in your old box all about it. So you come back and start trying to explain all of the cool things you are experiencing to everyone who will listen.

Most of the people you talk to, however, are not that interested in life outside of the box they’re already in. Some are scared. Some are so busy and consumed with life inside their box that they don’t have time to consider what life could be like outside of it. Some are living a wonderful life inside the box and don’t care to experience anything different. Other people will listen to you. But they are convinced you are crazy. And sure enough, as soon as you start to explain to them some of the things in the new world that don’t agree with what they have experienced in the current box, they start to argue with you. They tell you that there is no way that what you are seeing is true. It doesn’t even obey the laws of physics for God’s sake.

So what do you do? Nobody gets it. Nobody wants to really listen to you. So you leave them be for a while and go off and decide to explore even more of the new world. As you are doing it, you meet some people who look just like you and are, in fact, explorers from the old box – just like you! You build great friendships with them and have a wonderful time exploring the box together. You also commiserate about how nobody else in your old box wants to listen to you and complain about how different you feel for knowing what exists in this new world.

One day, after years of sneaking out and exploring this new world, you think you have it figured out. You swear that you are now an expert in it and know everything there is to know about it. And as you are wandering around, you come across a familiar feeling… a familiar sense. You see this tiny hole at what you thought was the edge of this world. You decide to look through it, just as you looked through the last one. What do you see? An entirely different world! It turns out, the “new world” that you had been exploring was just another, larger box!..”

~ Scott Thompson, The Undoing of Reality