Tastes of magic
we were all once tripping all the time
I couldn’t contain my excitement when my dad and I were on our way to watch the yugioh movie as a kid. It must’ve been 2004. I really wanted to get those “duel disks”, the gizmo you’d strap on your arm and put your playing cards onto. I imagined that they must work exactly as they do in the show: put in the card (a white dragon, say), and a big hologram of the dragon appears in the physical world.
This is one of the things I remember about childhood: things seemed magical. I have some memory, that certainly must be made up, of putting my tooth under my pillow, and just sitting there next to the pillow, not moving an inch, and some number of minutes later there was a toy in its place. I remember the first time we got a color printer, I printed out a fullpage image of goku from dragonball z, and it was an ink printer so the page was soaking wet, but I still couldn’t stop staring at it, couldn’t hold back my awe that this figure from another world is now in my hands. You get similar feelings like this in adulthood, but not as easily or as often.
There’s a flipside to the wonder of childhood, though: things can be as terrifying as they are mesmerizing. In fact, when I think about childhood the feeling that usually comes up is not wonder, but terror. I was afraid of everything as a kid: of my parents dying, of burglars breaking into our apartment, of the dark and dirty hallways of my elementary school. Even the shows I loved would scare me: there was a character in dragonball z, his name was broly, and even to this day thinking about the image of his face sends the faintest shiver down my spine.1 This is why I always say I’m happy to have grown up: life is less scary now that I’m older, now that the world is more predictable.
These two things seem to come as a package deal: life as a child is both mesmerizing and terrifying. I think there is something fundamental here. It’s the same reason why when people take LSD, they will either describe it as the most blissful experience of their life, or the most harrowing—and often both. Someone asked recently whether babies are tripping all the time. I’m sure they are.
There’s a neat Bayesian brain explanation of this: when we are born, we experience reality with very few “priors” – preexisting beliefs, expectations, conceptual schemas through which to filter what we see. And so a child’s experience is an endless explosion of vividness. Slowly we start to make sense of the world, we start to notice repeating patterns, we start to establish boundaries between “me” and “you” and “this” and “that”, and we get better at predicting what will happen next. Life becomes a little more manageable, but a little more dull. Our ideas about experience harden into rigid stories we can’t shake.
There are two ways to make the world more mesmerizing: to seek out new and increasingly intense experiences, or to loosen the filters that make ordinary experience “ordinary”. You can go skydiving, or you can meditate for long enough that walking feels like skydiving. Either way, I think what we’re seeking is an escape back into what we used to be, into a moment in which there is nothing else but the moment itself. We are seeking eternity.
"...You can go skydiving, or you can meditate for long enough that walking feels like skydiving...."
Beautiful.
Great piece!