My virtual wanderings and a comment by Peter on my previous post started me thinking. It’s amazing how much of our daily world doesn’t actually exist.
Take a bank account, imagine that I put £200 into an account. OK, all good so far. So I can walk into any branch, or up to a cashpoint and take out that £200. But what does that say about the actual existence of that £200? The £200 I get back isn’t the physical notes I put in, if I walked in a month later and ask to see “my £200″, I imagine I’d get a very odd look.
However, even those notes were only the promise of £200, when you read them it says “I promise to pay the bearer on demand”, etc, etc. So all it is is promises, not reality.
Another example is a church. Now, a church isn’t a church till it’s consecrated, if it’s deconsecrated the church isn’t there anymore. Even though the building is there, it’s just a place that a Church can be said to exist. But in my view, the Church only really exists in our heads. If you separate out the components, you’ll get lots of pews, glass windows, rafters, doors, etc. But where’s the Church? It doesn’t exist outside our heads.
My final example is our employers. Many people work for a company, a company has assets (buildings, furniture,etc) and it’s staff and contracts and legal existence. But if you do the separation thing on your company, and yes you can use dynamite if you really want, but it’s nothing to do with me 3;-), again lots of assets, some staff, some buildings, but where’s the company? Again, it’s in our heads. It amazes me how much of our daily world doesn’t exist, it’s just fairy tales that we’ve all agreed to buy into.
From a Buddhist perspective, I think I shouldn’t be surprised, we are told that all things are impermanent, and warned against attachment. I’m realising now how bad it is that we get ourselves so worked up and stressed over clinging to things that don’t have any real existence. Blimey, how much of a mess are we in?
September 21st, 2007 at 5:58 am
Aloha Rich, nice to hear from you, and a thoughtful post…it is amazing how much of what we think is really what creates our world. Even more so now even, as I recently started a new online business, this is really just a cyber-dream of a sort; so very not real and yet real at the same time! All in my head. And our spiritual beliefs even more so - like you said, buildings and books notwithstanding, it’s what and how we think that creates that illusion. Amazing, right? Hope all is well with you…
September 21st, 2007 at 6:49 pm
Hi Angela, I’m fine, good to hear from you too. I’ve just been a bit preoccupied with things of late, I seemed to hit a wall everything dried up all at once.
I know what you mean about the cyberdream, I’m mainly in SL for the networking and for a laugh, but I’m hoping to make a little side income from this virtual economy. I agree with IBM in considering it the next logical step for the Internet.
It’s amazing how we seem to be creating new illusions for ourselves all the time, though I suppose the real thing is to SEE the illusion, be honest about the fact we’re conceptualising, that it’s just a dream we all agree to share.
Good luck with the business!
September 21st, 2007 at 10:08 pm
I saw the same thing when I took a course in economics a few years ago. The instructor pointed out that banking and wealth were in reality only numbers on an account record somewhere. There was not enough printed currency available to even begin to cover all those numbers, let alone anything substantive behind the currency. If those numbers or the account disappeared, wealth was gone. All that banking wealth was only a number on a computer somewhere, that moved around from account to account. To carry it further, think about how abstract numbers are; they are only mathematical symbols that allow us to communicate.
It’s bizarre when one realizes how much blood has been shed over those numbers.
That dazed everyone in the class for a bit. It was a very Zen-like moment.
October 2nd, 2007 at 8:58 pm
A big mess, I think! To your “all in the head”, I’d add “all in the heart.” A much better place to hold things, because it recognizes impermanence and unreality.