Banana Nature – an allegory

I came up with this analogy a few years back, and since then it has grown into a story that I find useful. I've told it to people but not written it - so I hope this account is able to convey the light-hearted nature in which it's intended:

Imagine that a large group of people were hypnotized into believing that they were bananas. As a result of this, they would spend much of their time sitting in groups of reclining chairs (their bowls) arranged so their heads were near each other, reaching their hands over their heads and clasping them together with each other. They would mostly occupy themselves by talking about the condition of their skin – their coloring, how their brown spots were coming along – and their insides – how soft they were, how much they were bruised.

Imagine then that after a while, a few of them started speculating that there must be more to them than this, their banana nature. Someone might suggest that, after all, if they were really bananas, they wouldn’t be able to talk. But most of them would not want to talk about that. They would say that talking was one of those things that couldn't be explained, and that its existence could be questionable – it could also be attributed to a chemical phenomenon in the skin. And the conversation would quickly go back to such things as the effects of bowl location on health, and the effect of bunch size and position on personality.

But there would be some of them who would keep thinking there had to be more to life, and maybe one or two of them would get up and walk around. They would say, see – bananas can’t do that, and we can. Some might reply, that’s not healthy – it’s bad for bananas to be alone. You need to stay with the group or you’ll get terribly bruised. Others might say, wow, that’s something to aspire to. And they might try getting up. But they might say, I try to escape it, but I just can’t get around my banana nature. It keeps pulling me back with the deep need I have to sit in the bunch and be connected at the top.

Eventually, some of them might wake all the way up, and it would be clear to them that they had never been bananas at all. Some of them might just walk away from the whole group and go have adventures and live normal lives. Others might come back and try to wake up the rest of the group. They might say: look, you’re not a banana. You’ve never been a banana. It doesn’t matter if you think you were badly bruised during transit or that you’ve gone too brown and soft and need to be thrown away. This truth about you, that you’re not a banana, can free you from all those difficulties. You can get up!

If it’s anything like current life in our society, there would be some in the group who would be angry at that assertion. They would say, how can you say it doesn’t matter whether I was bruised? How can you assert that the inevitable process of becoming brown and mushy doesn’t govern us all?

Meanwhile, there might be some kind of a religion formed around this new teaching – it would be a gathering of the bananas who believed there was more to aspire to, and that it was reachable. There would be some among these who would sit in their place asserting the words, but not actually getting up. They might talk about how they were trying to have faith but they hadn’t gotten a clear sign yet. They might get in contests with each other about which of them was a deeper believer – which was best able to recite the words and carry on convincingly about how their nature was more than bananas.

The more these believing bananas would sit there and talk about it without doing anything, the less credence the words would have among the whole group. But occasionally, there would be a banana who would take the words to heart and actually get up and walk around. That banana would try to tell the others: you don’t have to be a banana – you can get up.

And in fact, any of the group who did choose to entertain the possibility that this was true, that they weren’t bananas, could get up and slowly prove it for themselves. Maybe at first they’d be drawn back to their banana natures, but after a while their actual selfhood would become clearer to them. They would find a huge world to live and move in, far beyond what they could have imagined. They would be free.

To be tiringly obvious in driving this point home: I believe that the gap between the hypnotized “bananas” and their true selfhood is not larger than the gap between what our societal norms tell us we are and our actual being. I believe we each not only have the power, but are already being much more than our societal constructs give us credit for. After all, we do have love as our engine. We do take soaring leaps of compassion and understanding. We have beautiful dreams. I believe that a close look at what we already are can help us see that we deserve to aspire to much more than we do.