Heroes Not Zombies

We humans see objects everywhere. I look at this sky and I don’t see simply an entirely grey sky, I see patterns. The sky is laden with water which, on a clear day, I can’t see, but on a day like this I see the water molecules collected together. We call these collectons clouds.

On this particular day I see a vast dark grey funnel of cloud stretching from above my head to as far as I can see. It looks like a vast highway or path in the sky. I see it as a distinct object…..a particular cloud, separate from the other clouds.

But where are it’s edges? Where does it begin and end? The closer I look, the harder it is to see an edge. “It”, this cloud, doesn’t seem so separate from the rest of the sky as it appears at first. It’s edges blur and fray and blend into the neighbouring clouds.

Yet it still seems an enormous heavy presence stirring a certain anxiety in me, carrying the threat of a storm, or at least, some heavy rain.

I don’t have to stand looking at it for long to see it change. Over the course of a few minutes it slides to the side, thinning and dissipating as it goes. Not much later, I can see no trace of it.

This is what we do. We abstract certain elements of reality, focusing on just a few of them, to the exclusion of others, and, so we see patterns which we’ve seen before, and we give them names. We turn them into objects.

Objects like clouds remind us that there are no fixed, separate objects at all. They show us that all so called objects are patterns within the Flow.

Clouds emerge in the sky, the way a wave appears on the surface of sea. They are perceptible for a short period of time, constantly changing, through every second of their existence, then they’re gone.

Some objects have much shorter lives than clouds, others much, much longer. It depends on the speed of the flow. Mountains take millions of years to form, and millions more to disappear.

I’m not saying objects are not real. I’m just saying they are never fixed, separate or permanent. They are a useful concept but it helps, I think, to try to see them as emerging patterns within the Flow, vastly interconnected within Indra’s Net of reality.