7 - Container and Content
Reality contains everything, whether real or not.
* When reading this book for the first time, it is best to read from the beginning without skipping forward. Otherwise, the intended meaning of some words might not be obvious.
Container and Content
CONTAINER: “Container” refers to something that is used to gather or select other things. Here are several examples of containers: a basket, a fence, a room, the sky, a list, an idea, this paragraph, rules, choices, moments, and so forth. It does not necessarily refer to a physical object, such as a basket or a written list, nor to an abstract object, such as a category, a possibility, or a context. Container simply refers to criteria or methods for selecting things.
CONTENT: “Content” refers to things that are gathered or selected into some kind of container: apples in a basket, cows inside the fence, clouds in the sky, attributes of some object, objects sharing some attribute, numbers that are even, sensations, other containers, the letters [a, b, c], important things, and so forth.
Container and content refer to things and to how things are related to one another. “Thing” refers to whatever you can imagine it to refer to, except that it cannot truly refer to or represent reality, being, awareness, and such.
These simple and abstract meanings for container and content are extraordinarily useful in almost every aspect of experience. Even though the idea of containers may appear simple and straightforward, and even though nearly every person uses the idea of containers easily, most do not fully understand the concept of containers and content. Neither do they understand its limitations.
Container and content are ways of referring to different things depending on whether or not these things meet certain criteria. In this sense, a container refers to ways of selecting things according to their characteristics. Consider each of the following criteria that might be used to select things from a box; do these make sense to you?
Invisible things.
Colors.
Spaces.
Things with names.
Things that do not belong there.
Things without shape.
Useless things.
Nothing.
Things on top of other things.
Only one thing (just choose it).
A guide for exploration:
Reality contains everything, real or unreal.
Being contains everything that can in any way be said to exist, even hypothetically.
Awareness contains all that can be experienced in any way at any time.
Where Is Here (revisited 2)
When considering this puzzle, be careful how you judge the meanings of the words. We typically take “here” to refer to some physical, spatial, or temporal location: on the table, in the middle, or now. But if you expand your thinking a little by interpreting the puzzle more as a question of container and content, other possibilities arise.
What does the word, “here,” mean to you right now as you read this question?
What contains that meaning? Is it public or is it private?
What does the phrase, “Where …,” mean to you right now as you read this question?
What does the phrase, “Here is where …,” mean to you right now?
Reflect for a moment on how you reacted to those questions: your thoughts, feelings, ideas, various attempts to answer in words, and so forth.
The next six topics expand upon the idea of container and content. Before you turn to these topics, consider carefully how you react to each of these words as you read them:
Universe
Allow
Choose
Represent
Anticipate
Know