The question of ownership. Look at the assets, the qualities, the treasures you cannot do without. Do you own them? You consume air. Your body inhales and exhales the oxygen in that air. Do you own that air? You drink water wherever you are, from a bottle you buy in a store, from the tap, or from a roadside fountain. Now, these waters that come into your body, water your body, and go out of your body, do you own them? The sun, its beams that are so essential for your health, do you own it? The light of the sun, so essential for your functioning, do you own it? You see?
So then, now evaluate the things that you do own or consider owning: your money, your objects, your, say, company, shares, passports, whatever it is. And ask yourself, what is the nature of that ownership? Is it just a feeling, “I own,” backed by the world’s expressions, like a certificate of ownership and so on? And that so-called ownership, whether real or not, what does that feeling of ownership make you be and do? Does it make you more free? Does it make you more generous? Does it make you more coexistent with the environment in which you live?
Take five people, throw them on an isolated island, and take another five people and throw them on another isolated island. On one island, let’s say they take the question of ownership seriously, seriously in their sense, and they try to maximize ownership. They are alone on the island; everything there is available to them. But they take, for whatever reason, the challenge of ownership as a drive for their life and prosperity on that island. Soon enough, they agree on an ownership mechanism. Let’s say the first one to plant a stupid flag on a stupid hill claims to own that hill on the island, and they start to move toward the maximization of what they can own and then protect that ownership, while the other five have not even been introduced to the possibility of ownership, and they coexist without it.
Evaluate that example as if you are one of the five in Group A and one of the five in Group B, and ask yourself what the actuality of ownership, or the feeling of actual ownership, does to you as a contributor to the survivability and flourishing of that island. Does it make you a more fruitful contributor to the survivability and flourishing of the island, or the opposite? Only you can ask it for yourself. For different people, the answer will be different.
But if you do ask yourself, throw away all this story, throw away this article or talk you are reading or listening to now, and look at your own life, because you live on this island with X amount of people and animals and trees and sea and desert and forests, and you give very, very serious weight to what you own. And you never question what that feeling of ownership does to you as a contributor to the survivability and flourishing of planet Earth. And I don’t mean planet Earth in a disconnected way. I mean your spot on this planet Earth. Be sure not to spit into the well of what this planet offers you in your short transience living on it by feeling that you own what’s given to you, call it by the circumstances of your life.
