Timewarp: No, past self, you can't eat televisions

This post was written on 5th February 2010, and involves me rambling about potatoes and televisions being the same in an attempt to explain the concept of emptiness.

Is everything empty?

I was thinking earlier about the idea that nobody, or nothing, is inherently good or bad. Instead, it is us who creates the positive and negative in everything through our thought processes – something good for someone is not so good for someone else, people enjoy different things, have different morals. Not only that, but the things in question change, for example, someone might look forward to the summer holidays, but the weather changes after a week, and suddenly spending a day at the beach isn’t so appealing anymore. Or, the person’s view on it changes – one day they want to go to the beach, the next they don’t really feel like it.

So if people, objects and places are always changing, how can they be inherently good or bad? And if one person thinks something is good and someone else thinks it is bad, how can it truly be either of these things? So, the state, names and labels of these things are not created by them just being, but because we label them – what they are is dependant on us. (A table is a table because we put things on it… if we sat on it, it would be a chair.) Does that mean that everything is empty? The concept of emptiness meaning that things do not have inherent qualities. And if everything is empty, does that mean that everything is the same? A potato is empty, the television is empty, my jacket is empty. So a potato is the same as a television? Perhaps not, I can’t eat the television. Then again, I can’t very well eat a raw potato either, or at least, I’d rather not. Some people don’t like potatoes at all, and so a potato doesn’t seem edible to them. So in that way, the television is the same as the potato – neither of them are very edible as far as that person is concerned. But then, they do acknowledge that some people eat potatoes. Maybe some people try to eat televisions, too, who knows. It’s tricky.

The theory certainly is easier to apply to humans. We are not inherently bad and good, some people like each other, some people don’t. There is also unrequited love. It is clear that people are different in terms of morality, and what some people consider acceptable is immoral to other people, so the idea of someone being “bad” and someone else definitely being “good” is pretty much out the window. But really, people have the same biological needs, everyone has feelings, and everyone wants to be happy. So everyone is the same, and everyone is empty. (Even though everyone is different in some ways and people are always changing, the basic needs are the same.) I’m not so sure this theory of same-ness can passed to inanimate objects to the same extent.