___ Now let’s play some pretending games. Shut your eyes and pretend you’re looking at that poor old mynah bird with one leg that comes to school every day to be fed. Can you see him?”(…)
“Four one-legged mynah birds at the four corners of a square, and a fifth one in the middle. And let’s make them change their color. They’re white now. Five white mynah birds with yellow heads and one orange leg. And now the heads are blue. Bright blue—-and the rest of the bird is pink. Five pink birds with blue heads. And they keep changing. They’re purple now. Five purple birds with white heads and each of them has one pale green leg. Goodness, what’s happening? There aren’t five of them; there are ten. No, twenty, fifty, a hundred. Hundreds and hundreds. Can you see them?” Some of them could—-without the slightest difficulty; and for those who couldn’t go the whole hog, Susila proposed more modest goals. (…)
“What’s the point of it all?” Will asked when the children had run off to play and Mrs. Narayan had returned to her office.
“The point,” Susila answered, “is to get people to understand that we’re not completely at the mercy of our memory and our phantasies. If we’re disturbed by what’s going on inside our heads, we can do something about it. (…)” Island, Aldous Huxley