We like to think of ourselves and our loved ones as unchanging, if not eternal; that all the apparent changes that we undergo are mere circumstances, mere garments upon our essential selves, but if we are to be frank we must admit that circumstances are all we know of ourselves. None of us has ever met an essence.
Some postulate a soul, imagining an eternal individual essence, while others, similarly deluded, imagine the individual to persist for the better part of a century. Who among them has ever met a soul or a self?
We sometimes say, “when I was a child,” but what adult was ever a child? We do not so much mature as metamorphose, leaving our alleged “inner child” a smattering of images, some real and some contrived. Who can say which frame is among the former and which is among the latter? Each of us contrives our abandoned child as much as we remember it. What right have we to say, “When I was a child?”
The truth of the matter is that each adult has replaced a child, or rather that each adult has replaced a long precession of younger forebears of the same name, tied together by a broken stream of memories like spectators at a football game. Society regards this chain as a continuum and calls it a lifetime—but deep inside we know better. We know that we are each as much strangers to our memories as we are to each other. One doesn’t need to be a buddha to see that there is no self.
Parents know. Each child is replaced by another so frequently that their parents are daily torn between celebration and mourning. Each time a child breaks out of her chrysalis, she leaves a younger child missing. But this cannot be helped, so no outcry is heard.
One dark night, Siranush and Garegin Adroushan found that their two precious children had been taken away. The unsuspecting parents discovered this when they woke to find two alien children sleeping in the beds of their son and daughter. The kidnapper was skilled: the crime could easily have been overlooked. The new occupants were very much like the children whom they had replaced, but they were not the same. The mother and father could see that the new boy and girl were different, though they dared not speak of it.
A bow and a wheel turned up at the scene of the crime.