Once Chuang Chou dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn’t know he was Chuang Chou. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Chuang Chou. But he didn’t know if he was Chuang Chou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Chou.
Chuang Chou did not know whether he was Chuang Chou or the butterfly.
But the butterfly had no doubts, which means he had certainty.
Therefore, it was the butterfly who dreamt Chuang Chou.
This is the logic of ideological butterflies, who cannot conceive how anyone might disagree with them.
Between Chuang Chou and a butterfly there must be some distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things.
What is meant by the Transformation of Things?
Most of us spend our lives flitting and fluttering through existence, conforming to norms, nonconforming and dissenting within the acceptable norm-supporting range. As long as we cooperate, we remain who we’ve become within a world that is simply what it is. Today’s world, though, is universally acknowledged to be socially constructed, distorted by cognitive biases and shot through with blind spots.
But very, very few people think to question the rock-solid critical metaworld behind the constructed world, and to wonder if that critical metaworld is not just as constructed, blind and corrupt.
And this is the sublime joke: the critical metaworld, not the “constructed world”, is the world where everyone actually lives today. That alleged constructed world, the object of critique, is just a decoy. (Same with self. Most folks who “do the work” of self-scrutiny, scrutinize a decoy self. The critical metaself evades notice and operates behind the scenes with one hundred times the bias, blindness and self-serving logic as the decoy identities it so theatrically renounces.)
Today, when everyone seems to have learned to “question everything” fewer people than ever before actually question anything real. They don’t even notice the critical metaworld from which “the world” is questioned, critiqued and challenged — which cloaks and protects it from all question, critique or challenge.
If you do manage to find the critical metaworld, though, and if you do choose to interrogate it, you will find that this metaworld dissolves under scrutiny.
When it dissolves, deeply weird things happen to you. But those weird things manifest as changes to the given world — so weird they make magic seem mundane and paltry in comparison. Everything and every thing transforms in the most inconceivably uncanny way.
Now we have a before and an after. Before we had only lack of doubt. Now we have profound doubts.
Between after and before there must be some distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things.