I firmly used to believe that I am a person, an individual who doesn't go well with the institutions. I wanted to be a rebel. I wanted to feel like I'm more important than any organization. Any group wielding it's power frustrated me, making me feel like the world was unfair, that the individual had no hope against an organization.
And then I met him...
"What are colours, what are shapes?"
When he asked me this question once, I laughed at him. For it was so silly. Colours and shapes are...
He continued,
"Well, they're nothing, really. Scientifically speaking, they're a bunch of electrical impulses that our brain perceives and understands. Philosophically speaking, they are defined in more ways than I know of. But what are they?"
He took a pause and started, "When I walked into the room on the left, I just saw the bed, the red covers on it, the velvet pillows and the red draperies. But I kept staring on, and the rigidness of everything disappeared. The velvet was no more velvetty, the draperies were no longer held by the poles, the red flowed down into the floor and the bed was now just a pool of red. All I had to do was keep staring at the room. The room so familiar in colour and shape, but all the shape in it had vanished."
"What a loon!"I thought and wanted to walk away.
"Well, you can do this too, just keep staring at this room, just use your eyes and pull the field off focus. Your brain doesn't see the shapes anymore, but of course, we see the colours. The colours are now free, they've been let go, not bound by the institutions of rigidity and shape."
The rigidity that the colours were having in their existence is now removed. I've freed them. But they are still thereabout. I asked, "The red never goes, does it?"
He replied, "I closed my eyes and imagined the room on the left, and now I imagined the room on the right. In my mind's eye, the red room was no longer my environment. If you meditate for long enough, you can escape the room too. You can turn it blue, or like me, you can render it colourless."
So, now I choose to see nothing but colours, all around me... Colours that I can control.
I don't see shapes. I don't see confinement, I don't see rigidity.
So, I don't cry against institutions, because I freed myself from them.
The institutions and I can now exist peacefully, mutually excluded in philosophy, but as always, sharing the same space, being the same entity, just like the colours and the shapes. But I can be sure that just like everything else, I'm temporary too, I'm imaginary too.
But who was HE? Well, should it matter? I can only tell you his colour and shape, but WHO he is, is a question far beyond the scope of descriptions.