Nizmo

There’s nothing absolute in this world. Nothing is absolutely _____(insert an adjective here, eg: dark) and nothing is absolutely _____(insert the antonym of the former adjective, eg: bright). Even our knowledge of brightness and darkness comes by comparing the two. It seems, correct me if I’m wrong, that everything that we come to understand in this world has this same quality of being relative-comparing one against another. So, friends, now you may go ahead and read the excerpt below-truly interesting I’d say:

The things of this world are merely conventions of our own
making. Having established them we get lost in them, and
refuse to let go, giving rise to clinging to our personal
views and opinions.

People, for instance. In reality people don’t have
any names, we are simply born naked into the world. If we
have names, they arise only through convention.
If we didn’t have names to differentiate
between them, and we wanted to call out to somebody
standing in a crowd, saying, “Hey, Person! Person!”,
that would be useless. You couldn’t say who would answer
you because they’re all “persons.” But if you called, “Hey,
John!”, then John would come, the others wouldn’t answer.
Names fulfill just this need. Through them we can
communicate, they provide the basis for social behavior.

Money, for example- In olden times there weren’t
any coins or notes, they had no value. People used to barter
goods, but those things were difficult to keep, so they
created money using coins and notes. Perhaps in the future
we’ll have a new king decree that we don’t have to use
paper money, we should use wax, melting it down and
pressing it into lumps. We say this is money and use it
throughout the country. Let alone wax, it may even happen
that they decide to make chicken dung the local currency
— all the other things can’t be money, just chicken
dung! Then people would fight and kill each other over
chicken dung! This is the way it is. You could use many examples
to illustrate convention. What we use for money is
simply a convention that we have set up, it has its use
within that convention. Having decreed it to be money, it
becomes money. But in reality, what is money? Nobody
can say. When there is a popular agreement about something,
then a convention comes about to fulfill the need.
The world is just this.

"Who is the third who walks always beside you? When I count, there are only you and I together But when I look ahead up the white road There is another one walking beside you Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded I do not know whether a man or a woman ~ But who is that on the other side of you?"

The Wasteland, T.S. Eliot