The World

"Come consider the world, a painted chariot for kings, a trap for fools, but he who sees goes free..." - Dhammapada

"The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work... when you go to church... when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth." - Morpheous


Now I'm not saying that we're all really plugged into some pod somewhere acting like human batteries for our mechanical overlords. What I am saying is that the we experience the "world" with our senses and our thoughts and our feelings and all of these things are dynamic and created by us and so the truth is that we create our own world.  For example, the chair I am sitting on is not inherently a chair. It is a collection of hundreds of pieces of plastic and metal and fabric in positioned in such a way as to comfortably  adequately support my body when in a seated position. If I took my chair apart into its component pieces, you would no longer call it a chair. It no longer has the quality of a chair.


I think that it is very easy to lose sight of the fact that so much of how we experience the world around us is made up by how we are disposed to see things, how things are presented through the media, how our friends and family share their experience of the world and so-on. We react to opinions as fact and can see separation where there is none and cause ourselves and others much suffering. 


If you have read this far, hopefully your brain doesn't hurt too much. Mine did at first until I realized, there is no such thing.