Why does this seem to me like a Zen thought experiment? The color of the shirt is irrelevent, because there is no shirt. The colors do not change, because there is no time. There is only emptiness.
Seriously though...
Quote:
|
So if the shirt is what it is from one moment to the next regardless of past then any change to the shirt happens from a force outside the shirt itself, the human or new owner. The new owner wanted it green and made it so. It became green because he made it green.
|
But did the shirt make the human want to make it green? Think about it, how often do people react to inanimate objects? If the object never existed, the human never would have made it green.
Quote:
|
The shirt itself seems to have no real existence if we define existence by exerting some will to change a system. I define it this way because existence must by definition be different than nothingness.
|
Does this mean that the absense of will is nothingness? Existence is only different from nothingness because of a will? That doesn't really make sense, much like the notion of nothingness to begin with.
Quote:
|
Getting back to the shirt, the shirt doesn't seem to exist outside of our influence. We make it green or white, the laws of the universe only exist (matter) because we have an ability to create, to change, without this there is nothingness.
|
Do we make it green? Or do the laws of the universe make us make it green? Just as shirts exist to be worn, perhaps we exist to make things.
Quote:
|
So what color is the shirt?
|
It is important to see things as they are. When looking at the shirt, see it as it is in this moment, for it is by living in each and every moment that we can glimpse immortality, and eternity. The shirt is what color it is at any given moment, and for you to see clearly, with all things shining, exactly what color it is in any given moment is to understand clearings of finite eternities in a spectrum of infinitude.