the burden of being asleep (3)
A Prison Without Guards (allegory)
Dawn broke over a landscape devoid of warmth or welcome. The sculptor and companion emerged from those last fringes of foreboding forest and stood on the edge of a barren plain that stretched endlessly under a saddened, sullen sky. They moved like ghosts, gray against the grayer-gray of the vast expanse of pale ground that was surely the graveyard of a long-dead spring. Even the few drops of refined sun filtering through jagged clouds appeared dull, having been sterilized of their usual brilliance. The blank horizon revealed a gate held in place by one faltering hinge. The gate stood without meaning, sentried by absence, somehow promising less than total emptiness. The open air felt suffocating as if the soil itself had given up hope of growth. Each step cracked the ground underfoot. Each step kicked up dust that clung to their sandals. From time to time, she glanced at him, her features betraying little but a quiet, calculated alertness.
His warm breath mingled with the arid air, indistinguishable and lost against the cool of morning. He wondered at her, at the emptiness engulfing them, at the ridges and seams of his mind. He had no memory of agreeing to this path, nor any memory of resisting it either. It was like a sketch, abandoned in its earliest strokes, with details still yet to be detailed.
"Was there something before this?" he speculated aloud, "Before this—"
"This...?"
"This… emptiness." He gestured vaguely, a sculptor’s hands unsure of their material. "It feels like we've stepped into the eggshell of the world. It’s so empty."
Her expression shifted to reveal something of a smirk. "Maybe. Or maybe it’s not just the world that is empty."
The sculptor let the words settle, heavy with their own weight. And the air now felt more demanding. It demanded more than merely easy understanding. Most things that came out of her mouth were like that. They stepped through the yawning entrance into a vast courtyard paved with fractured stone slabs with weeds sprouting in the fissures, forming ragged patterns. The sculptor expected the watchful eye of guards or the rattle of chains but there was nothing. A prison without guards.
The companion’s voice intruded once again, yet it felt as though it had never really left. "Do you know what you seek?"
"Who even are you?" He snapped. "What do you want from me?"
She placed her hand lightly on his arm before letting it drop, resuming walking. "It is not about what I want," she said. "It is about what you are willing to find out."
He hesitated. "Answers," he said at last. "Answers to questions I’m not even sure how to ask."
"And yet you walk with such certainty."
"Not certainty," he corrected. "Not certainty. Something not as good."
The companion acknowledged him, turning her head a fraction of a second. "Not as good how?"
"It’s not certainty so much as it is inevitability. As if I’ve already made my choices." His eyes traced the ruins of the prison. "Or maybe as if the choices are making me."
"And that troubles you?"
He nodded definitely. As they got closer, no guards appeared still. Instead, skeletal figures wandered aimlessly: some muttered to themselves in frantic intensity, others stared vacantly at the sky, waiting for it to pick them up. Time itself seemed unsure of whether to move forward or back. Stained columns, once grand, lined the perimeter of the courtyard while faded murals flaked from the walls, depicting bygone myths of heroes and triumphant victories—some long lost ideals of freedom haunting the bastion built to deny it. Standing near one such cant mural was a gaunt man bent over a labyrinth of chalk scribbles. Clumps of chalk dust and shattered bits of stone lay scattered around him like the debris of obsessive thought. He crouched in a wilderness of his own making, a maze of numbers and calculations sprawling out in all directions. The sculptor thought he looked more spider-like than human, small and frail at the center of a tenacious web of chalk dust. The man’s hands darted across the concrete in quick spasms, cramming digits into equations. The world, distilled to just calculations and numbers and graphs and theory. To white lines and curved symbols and axioms that spoke of themselves like a tail eating its own snake.
"What is he doing?" the sculptor whispered, partly to the companion, partly to the chalk web itself, as if, possibly, the wise numbers themselves might speak up and answer.
"Calculating," she replied, with an ease in her voice that suggested she had seen it all before, that it was nothing really out of the ordinary.
As they approached him, the man jerked upright. His frenzied eyes locked in on them. His long hair, stiff and brittle with neglect, fell across a permanently furrowed brow. Before they could speak, he quickly swept his arms across the chalk lines on the ground, smearing some intricate geometric patterns into dust, for they were instantaneously made obsolete now by the appearance of newcomers.
"Who are you?" he demanded, voice tight with suspicion. "I’m close. I’m this close to understanding everything!"
The companion lifted both of his hands, palms out, in a gesture of peace. "Nobody sent us. We mean no harm."
He snorted, gaze flicking over their worn clothes. "Harm." he chuckled, more amused than disparaging. "Harm… Nothing can harm me so long as I’m within these walls. The real harm," he gesticulated, "The real harm is stepping outside these walls without a flawless plan. Every possibility must be weighed. Every angle considered. Every contingency accounted for. Do you not see?" His eyes looked just about ready to escape from their own sockets, fueled by a terrible urgency. "To leave without certainty is to condemn yourself to certain doom." He continued, more to himself and the numbers than to them, more refined and mannerly. "I seek the perfect answer. And it must exist somewhere. It’s a matter of refining and seeking what’s beyond seeing. What do you know of refinement?" His voice descended again as he turned to his visitors.
"I carve stone," the sculptor said, hearing the insufficiency of his own words.
"And in that carving," the companion nudged, "do you not also refine? Do you not also seek perfection?"
The sculptor considered. "It’s not the same," he stumbled, yet the distinction felt false, as if he were clinging to a lie. "I’m looking for—meaning. A shape. Something real. This…" He gestured to the chaos. "This is different."
The prisoner’s laugh was a cracked and rusted thing. "There is no difference," he spat. "Numbers. Stone. All illusions."
"No! You are a prisoner to your own illusions! We just came through the gates, my friend. They’re wide open and yet you remain trapped." the sculptor retorted, surprised by his own boldness and the certainty in his voice.
"And you," the old man questioned, "are you free?"
And with his words, the world fell silent again. No applause, no murmur. Only the rhythmic drip of water against stone in this place where there was no moisture. There was no malice in that question, yet it cut swiftly and cleanly. The sculptor recoiled, unable to find any rebuttal. He rose from his crouch, retreating to where the companion stood as silent witness to their exchange. He looked at her, hoping for an answer, but her expression told him that she was not the one to give it. He only saw his own desperation in her eyes. The prisoner retreated into the darkness and began to work again at his equations and jottings. And they watched him with a sorrowful glance from the outskirts of his universe—the map of everything. And then they walked away.
They retraced their steps, back into the now bleaker light of the courtyard. As they crossed the cracked stone, the companion touched his arm, motioning to the gates. There, a lone prisoner, a hesitance made flesh, stood just before the threshold. His bare feet gripped the stone as if he couldn’t decide whether to hold on tighter or step beyond the frontier. The sculptor saw her turn to watch the prisoner teeter on the edge of the threshold. Her hood shifted just enough for him to catch the glint of one, deeply brown eye—clear, unafraid, and utterly familiar.
"What if I’m wrong? What if everything goes wrong?" He repeated it like prayer, eyes distant and haunted. The gate remained wide open, yet it may well have been sealed shut by nothing more than indecision. The sculptor knelt and picked up a jagged piece of stone that looked as if it had broken off from the crumbling wall. With a hesitant glance, he crouched, pressed the stone shard into the courtyard’s dusty ground, and carved a rough arrow pointing away from the prison. The prisoner’s gaze flicked down, curiosity somehow still alive deep within his dead features. He stared at the arrow, breathing deeply as if it were some cryptic sign or heavenly mandate. The sculptor rose, stepping back alongside the robed woman. For a heartbeat, no one dared move. And then, the prisoner lifted one foot and placed it cautiously beyond the gate. And then he brought it back in.
An unspoken acknowledgement seemed to settle over the courtyard as though the dilapidated walls themselves recognized the significance of this small earthquake. The sculptor exhaled a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. He glanced at the shard of stone in his hand, pocketing it as if it were a relic. He and the companion turned away, walking past the open gates and out onto the plain once more. Not one soul followed. Few even looked up. But freedom is not forgotten. At the far edge of the plain, a thin ribbon of coastline shimmered like a whisper of salvation, the sky now brightening up just enough to catch the reflection of the sea. The companion—only her eyes visible through the hood—cast a final glance at the sprawling prison behind them. Her eyes shone with compassion. And then they pressed on, leaving behind that living graveyard of unspoken fear and unrealized possibility. Freedom is not forgotten.
essay
I. The Illusion of the Final Answer
“You are under no obligation to be the same person you were five minutes ago.”
There will be a moment in time when you stop moving just long enough for your mind to notice the quiet between your thoughts. It’s a restless quiet, though. It’s not the kind of quiet you’re used to—it’s not just the absence of noise. It’s deliberate. And sharp. It takes conscious effort to deny your thoughts as if to make your mind hold its breath. You could hear a needle drop. It would echo if it did. Even your thoughts, normally rowdy and uninvited, hesitate to break the silent silence. For one minuscule moment, they don’t clamor for your attention. They don’t fill the vacuum. You can try to observe this silence—but the moment you do, it vanishes. To even think about it is to disturb it. To feel the calm of a still pond means that it’s no longer still. And yet, for that little instant before the silence runs away, you’re closer to your mind than thought itself.
It’s human nature to struggle with the concept of the indefinite. Every step you take shifts your horizon further. To search means to look for something with the intention of finding it. You’ll never find that final version of you, though. You’ll die with questions unanswered and ideas unfinished. At first, self-reflection convincingly seems to offer the clarity of a still pond. We notice surface-level patterns in our behavior, draw connections to past experiences, and then we begin connecting the dots to build these nominal narratives of who we are and where we lie in the world. We find our place in the sun only for the shadows to shift over us once again. Later, we realize that for every explanation, there is a counterpoint; for every valid identity we claim, there exists more valid evidence against it. And then the final realization rears its paradoxical head: there is no final realization. There are no final answers in introspection. Instead of arriving at a final, tangible truth, we discover something unexpected. Like a hall of mirrors, self-reflection does not reveal one reflection of you but an endless cascade of selves. Which one is the real you? All of them. We are divisible individuals; we are each a harmony of contradictions: strength and vulnerability, logic and emotion, certainty and doubt. We are not robots. We don’t exist in binaries but in fluid spectrums. As fluid as blood. We change according to what’s inside us as well as what’s outside us. The deeper we dive, the more we realize that there’s no single "real" version of ourselves. We begin to understand that we’re soft, dynamic processes that redefine ourselves perpetually with every new experience or interaction or emotion. Every "you" shifts restlessly with time, mood, and circumstance. And so we arrive at the first paradox of self-knowledge: the more we understand ourselves, the more we understand how little we understand ourselves.
II. When Introspection Becomes a Trap
“The mind is its own place and in itself, can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”
Some thoughts just don’t knock before entering. They slip in unnoticed, settle into the corners of your mind, and begin to make themselves comfortable. They don’t demand attention—not at first. They’re mindful guests. They wait. And then they resurface between tasks, before you sleep, while you shower, and in the blank spaces of conversation. Always patient. Always willing to return.
The human mind is wired for pattern-seeking. Our universe is chaotic, and we must make order of it. We construct meaning from the smallest details. In many ways, it was and still is an awesome advantage—it allows us to predict outcomes, learn from our mistakes, and navigate the complexities of social life. But it is also a liability. The line between organizing and distorting reality isn’t very distinct when "reality" is ultimately up to our own interpretation. The mind begins to fill in blanks where none exist—building bridges where there’s no river. It projects intention onto coincidence. It assigns weight to moments that were never meant to carry any. Simple conversations are no longer conversations—they become evidence. A clue to something deeper that must be explored and understood. Memory itself is not an archive of objective, immutable truth, but actually a reconstruction influenced as much by present emotions as by the actual events of the past. Like a lonely game of telephone. The more a moment is revisited, the more it begins to deviate from what actually happened. Each recollection alters the next, reinforcing anxieties, sharpening little mistakes, exaggerating social mishaps. No, nobody even noticed you had a stain on your shirt. Overthinking is not just excessive analysis—it's the erosion of certainty and truth. A slow, stochastic regression from total clarity to total doubt. Your thinking room—the one that’s supposed to give you those answers just beyond your fingertips—becomes an industry of delusion. It manufactures an unending supply of new questions rather than producing any answers. The process, meant to clarify, begins to question itself. Reflection begins obsession. Thus: the second paradox of self-knowledge: the mind, in its crusade to impose order, invites disorder. The pursuit of certainty, in its rashness, becomes the very thing that obscures it.
The side effects creep in quietly. Your mindful guests aren’t that mindful after all. They’re thieves. Overthinking silently steals time first—minutes, then hours, then evenings. Lost to circling thoughts that lead nowhere. It distorts your sense of reality. It convinces you that your worries are urgent or that you’ve missed something critical here or there. It turns small uncertainties or lapses into personal failures. Some moments are unworthy of scrutiny. Those are the ones you begin to scrutinize. And next, it steals your peace, inviting paranoia and hesitation. You begin pausing before you speak, second-guessing even the most trivial remarks. You overcorrect, filtering your words, dulling your opinions, delaying your replies because you just can’t yet figure out the exact perfect way to respond. The more you overthink, the more you feel detached from yourself. And to stop feels impossible. Not when you’re this far—you almost have it figured out! Go a little further and you’ll be at ease, the thieves whisper.
III. The Wisdom of Uncertainty
“Behold! Here is Plato’s man.”
Western ontological philosophy often assumes a divide between mind and body, while modern science leans toward the brain as the origin of consciousness. Consequently, some argue that there is no such thing as free will—that human behavior is as deterministic as the firing of our synapses, according to the laws of physical reality. Some counter that the self is an emergent property, greater than the sum of its neural parts. Some posit that there can be no pure universal determinism due to operational principles of quantum randomness. Regardless, this debate demonstrates how difficult it is to easily define where soul ends and reality begins. The metaphysical “mind-body” problem extends beyond just the boundary dividing mind and body, however, also encompassing the dance between thought and consciousness. Even as we look inward for clarity, we can’t ignore the fact that the quest for self-knowledge only complicates when the ‘self’ itself rests on an unsolved mystery.
Certainty is a comforting illusion. The mind craves the warmth of stability. We are all pioneers of our chaotic worlds. It’s a main attribute of humanity to believe that things are to be understood and that with enough thought and analysis, they can be understood. Ambiguity is the enemy, and it must be fought and extinguished. We’re able to see a world of color, but we choose to restrict ourselves to black and white. We lose key information and nuance when we try to categorize things into binary boxes they were never meant to be sorted into. We become colorblind. But our indifferent reality does not conform to our desires. Life is not a set of fixed truths waiting to be uncovered. We search for truths that are not there and then we mistake their absence for personal failure. Our smart minds interpolate information that isn’t there, to compensate. Uncertainty is framed as something to be conquered, like a big wall between ignorance and understanding. But certainty isn’t the sign of wisdom. Doubt isn’t the marker of weakness. In many ways, the ability to sit comfortably with uncertainty and to let questions remain unanswered without rushing to resolve them is a far greater strength.
And here we approach the third paradox of self-knowledge: true wisdom isn’t about discovering a final answer but actually learning to live and function in the absence of one. The mind instinctively grasps for closure. In drawing lines between what is true and what is false, we narrow our own perception of the world rather than expanding it. We maim and alter pieces so they fit into our puzzles. The search for definitive answers compels us to cling to convenient explanations rather than confront the uncomfortable complexity of our reality. Resist the urge to categorize every experience and thought and minute shift in identity as either progress or failure. The insightful mind is the one that remains open while understanding that knowledge is not something to be possessed. It is something to engage with. To embrace the uncertain is to cultivate a kind of intellectual and emotional agility. It lets you be adaptive. It lets you grow unshackled by rigid expectations. It keeps your mind flexible enough to hold contradictions but still tough enough to not let them overwhelm, tough enough to recognize when an old belief no longer serves. The world is not a puzzle to be solved in the sense that you aren’t a riddle to be answered. Welcome to the empty room between knowing and not knowing. Make yourself at home. Trust that clarity will come when it’s needed, and understand that some things perhaps may never be clear at all. This is the foundation of real wisdom.
IV. From Pondering to Living
“Flip a coin. When it’s in the air, you’ll know which side you’re hoping for.”
If self-knowledge is a journey without a destination, which way is forward?
You choose. Self-reflection is only meaningful if it informs the way we live. Insight without action is to read a map and never step outside. Don’t let introspection become a closed loop; let it serve as a guide for growth. But also don’t go journeying without having studied the map first. Traveling is equal parts navigation, walking, and critical thinking. Find your balance. Thought can illuminate and clarify and refine but it cannot replace tangible experience. The theoretical does not precede the practical, it follows it. You cannot "think" your way into understanding what can only be learned by doing. We know already that thinking does not always offer more clarity. The powerful computers in our heads can simulate, anticipate, predict—but they can’t substitute reality. We will never truly know how a decision feels until it has been made. Excessive fixation risks detachment. It replaces lived moments with imagined ones. It creates an internal world where every action is rehearsed before it’s taken and where life becomes something to prepare for rather than the improvised play that it really is. Wisdom does not come from pure reflection. Nor does it come from impulsive action. It’s found in the dialogue between the two—the cyclical process of thought informing action and action refining thought. Reflection must illuminate, not immobilize! A life spent only in thought is an unfinished one. Trust that clarity comes after the fact, not before it.
The search for understanding pulls in two directions at once. It daydreams for a future where things make sense. A perfect future without uncertainty. It looks to no place but utopia. But it also fixates on the past, dissecting it, replaying it and scouring it for something you may have missed. But there is one thing it doesn’t do—it doesn’t stay in the present, where the search is still ongoing. Presence is where self-knowledge actually happens, though. Introspection isn’t about figuring out who you’ll be or who you were, it’s about understanding who you are. It’s about engaging with what is. But we untether ourselves anyway. We fly out to look upon ourselves as observers at a distance. We stop being participants. It’s possible to think so much about yourself that you stop experiencing. The novelty and freshness of a ripe world is dulled by grey analysis, examination, investigation, and inspection. An intellectual sieve distills the spontaneity of your emotions before you’re even allowed to feel them. So orderly. So synthetic. But you shouldn’t mistake this for progress. Introspection isn’t about retreating inward; it’s an act of courage—the courage to engage fully with the world as it unfolds. To explore the depths of identity without needing to reach the bottom.
Yet, that willingness to explore without needing to arrive at a final conclusion can be undone by a quieter presence in your mind—dressing up as a voice of realism, quietly insisting that nothing you do will matter. On the surface, pessimism feels strangely comforting. After all, if you believe every outcome is already doomed, you’ve left no room for disappointment or that nagging voice pulling you toward a better self. Pessimism doesn’t just preserve you from an imagined embarrassment; it stalls you from living. It, too, is another form of inertia. It is illegitimate. It’s self-cynicism. It’s a shield that blocks not only from setbacks but also from breakthroughs. Yes, optimism can be naïve, but pessimism is a different kind of illusion—it’s the illusion that you already know how the story ends. Progress demands at least one foot off the ledge. If you cling to the idea that nothing will ever change, you become your own obstacle. Why bother exploring an unwritten path if you’ve concluded prematurely that it's a dead end? That it’s unwinnable? To step forward is to selflessly afford reality the chance to prove you wrong or right. And no amount of deliberation will produce a more accurate or correct answer. And no abstract epiphany, however bright, can outshine real experience. And no theoretical answer can rival the one you discover by daring to move forward.
V. The Guards Are Gone
If you meet the Buddha, kill him.
We’ve arrived at the final paradox of self-knowledge: clarity comes to only those who do not seek it. In Zen Buddhism, a kōan is a paradoxical riddle (e.g., “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”) meant to spark an awakening (Kenshō) deeper than logical thought. Sometimes, not seeing a rational solution in favor of experiencing the question itself opens space for genuine insight.
Accepting that uncertainty is not failure, that it is not a flaw in the process, but that it is the process, is not surrender. Nobody is asking us to embrace confusion. We’re embracing the clarity and grace of the realization that life itself doesn’t provide answers. It only provides better questions. Don’t resist. Participate. The journey won’t end, but that’s fine. For your journey to end, it would mean you stopped changing. It would mean your search was complete and all your questions had been answered—you solidified into something fixed and final. You would become more statue than human. To be human, to begin with, means to be in motion and to live in tension between understanding and uncertainty and between thought and experience and between who we are and who we become. It’s alright to not know. The search is not about arriving at a destination. It’s about learning to walk forward without there needing to be a destination. It’s about staying present and grounded. It’s about understanding that introspection is not something we work toward but something we live.
And maybe that is the closest we will ever come to a final answer.
