Chapter 2.9

Chuang Chou and the butterfly

Once, Chuang Chou* dreamt he was a butterfly.
A vivid, vibrant butterfly
who didn’t know about Chou.

Suddenly he awoke, and was a startled, surprised Chou
who didn’t know:
Was the butterfly in Chou’s dream?
Is Chou in the butterfly’s dream?

Chou and the butterfly—there’s definitely a difference.
Let’s call this, things change.

*  *  *  *  *

Why does Chuang Tzu refer to himself in the third person? Because he doesn’t identify with Chuang Chou, he identifies with consciousness. He’s Of a Flock (Chapter 1.1), the ever-present field of awareness in which things—tables, chairs, butterflies, Chous—come and go.

~

The wisdom of not knowing.

Says my brain: Come on, we all know that the butterfly was in Chou’s dream. Butterfly brains cannot dream up a human.

Yes, Brain, we do all know that. The story itself tells us that in its opening line. This story isn’t inviting us to engage in an epistemological inquiry into whether the butterfly was in Chou’s dream or Chou was in the butterfly’s dream. This story is a metaphor.

In the moment of waking from a dream, have you ever felt that the dream was real, while also being unsure? ‘Did that thing happen, or was it just a dream?’ In that moment you genuinely didn’t know. Chuang Chou’s not knowing whether the butterfly was in Chou’s dream or Chou is in the butterfly’s dream is a dramatized—a metaphorical— representation of the moment when going-by-this-or-that-aspect-of-a-thing-and-saying-It’s-x ceases and you don’t know what’s so of the thing, and thus behold the path (section 4). It’s like the dawn or dusk moment when your brain falls silent and you awake to the wordless, dream-like wonder of the world (section 7).

~

Things change.

The difference between Chou and the butterfly represents the difference between any one moment and any other. In any one moment you find yourself immersed in a field of things, and from moment to moment (to say nothing of day to day, decade to decade) this field of things changes.

Now I am hungry. Now, full. Now I’m a hiker roaming the countryside. Now, an invalid bound to a bed. Now I have the body of a twenty-year-old. Now, of a fifty-year-old.

Who am I really? Which of these experiential worlds, which arrangement of things, is the real me?

None of them. Each is just a transient arrangement of things. The real me is the ever-present here-and-now field of awareness, the that in which things come and go.

Chuang Tzu, sitting down to write this story, has realised: When awareness was aware of flitting about as a butterfly, it was aware of flitting about as a butterfly. When it was aware of being a startled, surprised Chou, it was aware of being a startled, surprised Chou. And now? I—awareness—am in this moment aware of my eternal presence and of how things change. I do not identify with that butterfly, nor with that Chou, though I was present with each. Things come, things go, and I am always present.

~

Discussions that make things equal.

Chou and the butterfly. Three nuts in the morning, four in the evening, and four in the morning, three in the evening (section 4). These things are definitely different. And from the pivot of the path (section 4), or from the perspective of Of a Flock (awareness), we see that they are equal. Each is equally a full field of things, a full allotment of experience. Each has inherent so-ness and OK-ness (section 4).

~

Butterfly flight.

Butterfly flight is the perfect metaphor for Chuang Tzu’s philosophy of mounting the isness of heaven-and-earth and taking the reins of the disputing six energies, thereby wandering without constraint (Chapter 1.3). Butterfly rides on the wind and gives way to even the slightest breeze. She knows not where she is going, but trusts her inner urges and promptings. And she arrives at the flower. She doesn’t identify with some cocoon self or butterfly self. She is movement-sensation-impulse at one with the here-and-now isness of heaven and earth.

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