We all live in this world.
And then of course, it becomes more specific as to where in the world. Down to each of our postal zones. In some parts of the world it’s easy to shift locations, and in other parts of the world it’s not so easy to shift locations, but one of the first questions people are asked when they meet new people, when they are introduced to new people, some one will say is “Where do you live?” And the answer will be something like “I live in such and such a country, in such and such a province and such and such a city.” That identifies you to a certain degree to the person you are talking to, but more importantly, it also identifies you to yourself. That’s interesting that we should be identified by a country, a state and a city. I’m sure as soon as those words come out of my mouth, we all immediately cognate that that is inappropriate, that that’s not how we should be identifying ourselves.
One of the interesting things is that wherever we go, whether it be from state to state in the U.S. or to other continents we still carry ourselves with us. So, when we land in Australia and they ask you where you live, and you give your address in the United States, it really has not a lot of meaning because what does that have to do with you while you are in Australia, other than you come with a certain understood set of cultural identities. What does it have to do with you if you are on pilgrimage. A more important and a more profound recognition of the fact that since you go on pilgrimage to give up everything, at least at the time of that pilgrimage, to go as a corpse, you begin to realize that place and location in this world are the least of what you are.
So, who are we? What are we? How do we see things? How have we laid out the scope of our understanding as to our relationship to our own existence? What do we understand as the core principles of our existence? How do we look at them? How do we see them? How do we react to them? What is it that we do? How do we do it? How are we driven? What drives us? How much time do we spend actually looking to understand how we are driven and what drives us?
