The Smuck Was Starkers

Are you aware that Buddha has a birthday, and that his birthday was yesterday. Nothing significant in this except that over here we all had a long weekend ... again.

I know Hong Kong is crazy busy and people work hard, I’m just not exactly sure of when they work, because between all the secular and religious holidays, of which we celebrate both Christian and Chinese, my girls seem to spend more time at home than at school.

Which of course gets me to asking, whether we send our children to school to learn, or just to get them out our hair - how’s that for projecting.

Ok, that gets me asking whether I send my girls to school to get them educated or out my hair? Bit of both I guess.

And that really opens up the whole question of why we even send them to school in the first place, since I totally don’t get the system of education, which is based on a logic that is quite frankly, absurd.

But then, the system of education is no more or less absurd than the systems of politics, law, trade (business), military and finance, which are all extensions of the same logic.

I’m not for a moment saying they are not required, because they are. I am not for a moment saying they are wrong, because they aren’t. What I am saying is that they are based on assumptions and a logic which are, from the perspective I’m seeing then ... irrational.

And yet, I must live, work, make love, eat, drink and be merry ... participate, in a world that is dominated by fundamental assumptions of reality, that although are real and valid, are only relatively real and valid.

They are relatively real and valid, not absolutely real and valid.

This of course leads us nicely into the observation that, ‘the king really has no clothes on, he’s stark bollocks naked’.

And contrary to the idea, that everyone else saw him as naked, this in the story was not really so. Everyone, except those who knew, saw him as clothed. They saw a ‘reality’, which from another place, supported by other assumptions and a contradictory logic, looked different.

But then the whispers started and the spread of ‘self-evident’ information.

And a new reality was born. The schmuck was starkers ...

So happy Buddha’s day and at least he wore clobber, al-be-they drab, so for that we can all be grateful, and I’ll get back to making ‘not so much’ non-sense, next week.