Welcome to the fourth of my posts on The Tao of Storytelling
For this chapter I am using the translation by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English.
Throughout my explorations of the chapters, I will use various translations. Each time I will include links to the previous chapters, although you can read them in any order. These are included at the bottom of the post.
As well as a discussion of the chapter of the Tao Te Ching, each post includes a reading of a short story and sometimes these will be available to read online, other times they’ll be from a short story collection or anthology so will only be available to buy and read. I will include links each time for both kinds.
I hope you enjoy these posts and I would love to hear your thoughts and ideas about my interpretations, and to hear your own and read any work you create from the prompts. All of the posts are free for everyone to read, but if you appreciate them, please consider making a donation.
Some of this month’s post first appeared in a writing course I wrote in 2020.
With love,
Chapter Four
The Tao is an empty vessel; it is used, but never filled.
Oh, unfathomable source of ten thousand things!
Blunt the sharpness,
Untangle the knot,
Soften the glare,
Merge with dust.
Oh, hidden deep but ever present!
I do not know from whence it comes.
It is the forefather of the gods.
I recently watched this video with Rupert Spira which I think ties in with this chapter. It’s funny, insightful and thought provoking. It reinforces for me that despite the many minds that apply themselves to the questions about our existence, the universe’s and everything else that our human minds perceive, it essentially remains unfathomable where it’s all coming from/came from. I do believe as Rupert says that there is one underlying consciousness that creates it all, but then that poses the question of where that consciousness is, and where it came from. Like I said, unfathomable! But like my exploration of Chapter One said, reading the Tao Te Ching has taught me to embrace the mystery and let go of my desire to have answers to these kinds of questions.
Then there are the suggestions that we’re living in a virtual reality. Many scientists believe so and say that this is what ancient spiritual traditions also imply. In which case, our life here is temporary and an essence/soul/spirit, whatever you want to call it, is somewhere else guiding us through this simulated experience in which we're here to learn something.
All of the ancient spiritual traditions are built on the idea that this life on Earth is temporary and we will be going on to something else afterwards. That it's how we behave and what we learn in our time here that influences what comes next.
Christianity says we just get the one chance and if we mess it up we're off to hell for eternity but if we do well, heaven awaits. Buddhism is built on the belief of cycles of rebirth and what we return as in the next life is linked to our actions in the previous cycle; with liberation and transcendence of this recycling achievable through enlightenment and letting go of desire. The beliefs about reincarnation in Hinduism, Jainism and Sikhism are very similar to Buddhism in that our rebirth is linked to karma — cause and effect.
Taoist ideas about what comes after death are harder to pin down. There doesn’t seem to be one universal belief. Depending on what source you read, they believe in reincarnation, in heaven and hell, in immortality. With your next destination dependent on how well you lived ‘the way’ in the life you are departing.
All of them are built on the idea that we are not our bodies and that we continue somewhere, in some form after our bodies die. Which could mean this is all a simulated reality.
Back in 2003, Swedish philosopher, Nick Bostrom, a Professor at Oxford University who founded and leads the Future of Humanity Institute, published a paper 'Are You Living in a Computer Simulation' in which he states that he's pretty certain that we are.
You can read the full thing here if you want to dive deep into his method and theories:
But this article in Scientific American sums it up neatly for us:
Bostrom imagined a technologically adept civilization that possesses immense computing power and needs a fraction of that power to simulate new realities with conscious beings in them. Given this scenario, his simulation argument showed that at least one proposition in the following trilemma must be true: First, humans almost always go extinct before reaching the simulation-savvy stage. Second, even if humans make it to that stage, they are unlikely to be interested in simulating their own ancestral past. And third, the probability that we are living in a simulation is close to one.
We've already reached the simulation-savvy stage and virtual realities have been around in one form or another since the 1800s, according to The History of Virtual Reality (The Franklin Institute). But the advances in the field really started happening in the 1980s and today you can put on VR goggles and move around in virtual spaces and feel like you are really there and it really is a live world.
We've got the computing power for lifelike holograms to appear among us, like this one of Michael Jackson performing at the Billboard Music Awards in 2014, five years after he died.
And the results of a scientific study, From Planck Data to Planck Era: Observational Tests of Holographic Cosmology, published in 2017, reveals what the researchers believe is the first observational evidence that our universe could be a vast and complex hologram.
In this article about the paper, the lead researcher, Professor Kostas Skenderis, says:
“Imagine that everything you see, feel and hear in three dimensions (and your perception of time) in fact emanates from a flat two-dimensional field. The idea is similar to that of ordinary holograms where a three-dimensional image is encoded in a two-dimensional surface, such as in the hologram on a credit card. However, this time, the entire universe is encoded!”
The evidence they believe they have found to support this idea is that advances in telescopes and sensing equipment have allowed them to detect a vast amount of data hidden in the ‘white noise’ left over from the moment the universe was created with the Big Bang.
So what does all this mean for how we can tell stories? I've got a couple of ideas...
Holographic Stories
First is an idea based on how holograms work, which is that if you break a hologram into tiny pieces, you can still see the entire object in any of the pieces. So if you smashed the hologram of a cup into bits, you would still be able to see the entire cup in all of the bits.
I thought this could be used in stories through repetition of actions, behaviours, relationships, thoughts, etc. to show that characters are the same even if you remove them and place them somewhere else; or remove part(s) of them and keep them in the same place to show the character in the same situation but choosing to do things in a different way.
Read this story, which won a contest at Retreat West.
Girls of Summer by Sara Hills
1.
We go to the river, stand on the bank like true girls of summer, our bare legs exposed in bikinis as red as our mother’s lips, our long hair flowing like gypsies. We’re thirteen-fourteen, brave enough to call to the boys on the other side, “Hey, lover!” like we’ve seen in the movies; stupid enough to dare each other to jump in.
We say we’ll gasp when the cold water courses through us. We’ll splash about, flail our arms, pretend to drown, white flecks of water catching the light while we wait for the boys to rescue us.
We’ll float downstream to the low bridge where we can grab onto the pillar, hoist ourselves breathless onto the bank. You’ll shake out your long hair and laugh, your scarlet bikini flashing against pale skin like a warning beacon.
2.
From the water’s edge, it’s only a quarter-mile to the low bridge. We’ve had years of swim lessons; our strong arms have been holding each other steady since we could stand. We check our bikini ties—a ruby red our mothers would kill us for wearing if they knew—and we dare to jump. The cold water cuts our breath, slows our legs, your hand slips out of mine, and we’re begging the boys across the other side to save us.
The river rushes toward the bridge, tumbling our bodies, whipping us against the pillar like rag dolls. I claw my way to the bank. I cough until the blood beats back into my limbs. I scream your name, scream for help, stare into the water and swear I see your gypsy hair wound, weighted down. The day they find you, dusk washes the sky with cloud flecks the same pink as your cheeks.
3.
When we sneak down to the riverbank, it’s early summer, and the water’s coursing cold with late mountain snow melt. We’re brave enough to jump, but we don’t. We don’t. Instead, we lay out in bikinis, kept secret from our mothers, showing off large swaths of sun-blushed skin to the boys on the opposite bank. We’re stupid enough to think we have years left, to dream of futures in the bright white houses across the river, naming our children, two each girls of summer, like us.
We swear we’ll let them grow their hair long as gypsies and wear whatever they want; we’ll never tell them they’re too young. We’ll cry at their weddings and when we’re old, we’ll sit out on the veranda in the evenings like movie stars, sipping on martinis and laughing, making plans for tomorrow, our lipsticked mouths matched to the crimson colors that bridge across the setting sky.
I think this story is doing what we're exploring here. It has played with repetition in that the same characters are in the same situation but there's a different outcome each time. So for the purposes of the ideas in this workshop, they could be holographic characters broken into three with each part having a different approach to life. What do you think?
We often see examples of repetition in folktales and fables too. You can see it at play in The Three Little Pigs — the first two of whom build the same straw house only to have it blown down by the wolf, then the third pig breaks the cycle and builds a brick house. But the first time you encounter the story, you expect the wolf to destroy the third pig's house too.
We could also view these pigs as the same hologram broken into three. Having a character keep doing the same thing then in a final twist do something different, which would also be in keeping with the idea of a simulation that we are here to learn something. More on that below.
Writing Exercise
Take your pick from these two ways of telling a story inspired by the holographic nature of the universe (or you can do both if you want!)
Write a story that plays with repetition in the same way that Sara's does. So that a character(s) is in a situation that turns out one way, then have them in the same situation again but with a different outcome.
Write a story in The Three Little Pigs style where the repetition is twisted in the final section.
Simulated Reality
My second idea of how we can use this concept of reality in our stories is connected to how simulations work, what they are used for, and the philosophy behind ancient spiritual traditions — we are here because we need to learn something and we have a higher power we can call on for support.
In spiritual traditions that higher power is a god, or gods, or enlightened beings. A simulated reality in modern terms could mean that higher power is some other form of us. But there's also a view that if we're living in a simulation, it's somebody else's video game. This is an interesting article in The Conversation, 'If our reality is a video game does that solve the problem of evil?' that says:
But suppose the person who was directly responsible for creating the world wasn’t God but some far lesser, far more fallible being. Someone more akin to an ordinary human engineer or scientist – or even a movie director or video-game designer. Let us further suppose that the diseases and disasters that can be found in the world are all the result of design choices, freely made by this non-divine designer of worlds.
This may seem fantastically far fetched. But in the realm of physics just these kinds of scenarios are being played out as scientists work on the complex mathematics behind lab-created “pocket universes” and tech leaders, such as Elon Musk, explore the potential of brain-machine interfaces.
I'm not going to dig into the bigger ideas of good and evil that the article covers here, but instead use these three different ideas of simulation for writing stories.
I'm thinking about what we could be here to learn, which is loosely connected to the article's ideas about good and evil. According to spiritual traditions, we're here to learn how to be more compassionate and loving, to recognise the things that are really important, to live in harmony with each other and the planet we call home.
This theme seems like it could be used to write stories that are tapping into very current issues that humanity faces around environmental breakdown and the sixth mass extinction. About the rise in extremism and the divisions being (re)created in society based on ethnicity, religion, nationality, gender, and sexuality.
How can our characters engage with these issues and bring in this idea of a simulated reality? My ideas are:
They know they're in a simulation and use an interface to communicate with themselves outside the simulation to get help.
They don't know but call on a god that they believe in for help (either one we've heard of or one specific to them) and they then see that help manifest (miracles do happen!).
We see the video game start over as the controller doesn't like where it's going or the tech failed (switch it off and on again!).
Maybe when we reach the end of our life here on Earth that is actually the video game player losing all their lives, so we start at the beginning again.
So many different ways to bring this in! What ideas have you got about ways to play with simulated reality theory? Do let me know in the comments.
Writing Prompt
Choose one (or more) of the following story ideas, or go with an idea of your own about how this simulated reality idea could work in a story, and write a story.
A character discovers a glitch in the simulation that leads them to a different reality than the one they've been living in. Did they already know they were in a simulation or do they also have this mind-bending discovery to cope with at the same time? Is it a better reality or a worse one?
A character is confronted by a stark truth that forces them to learn one of the lessons we are here to understand.
A character starts directly engaging with the person playing the game of their life.
I hope you enjoyed this month’s post about how unfathomable it all is. I would love to hear what you think so please do let me know in the comments.
With love,
This was a fascinating and mind-blowing read, Amanda! I'm not a story-writer, but you have provided so much on which to ponder.
It's one of my favorite chapters