The Tangerine Limo & The Human Corridor

Today it all seems to be about possessions. What can we buy when we have saved our salaries for another year ? - maybe a new car, a holiday in Australia or a conservatory for the garden. Everybody thinks that they want the tangerine limo, but they only think they do because they have been told by everyone else in society that that is what it is all about - possessions; possessions like the tangerine limo which will give you status, peer approval, a position of respect in a vitiated society. If only they knew that it is things and idle possessions which cripple the human spirit and enslave. Buddhists have recognised this for centuries. It is the giving away of all possessions which bestows on us a great sense of freedom and peace. To give things away is very liberating. All the worry of possession has gone - no one can steal from us, no one can damage our new possessions; we have an immunity from care and worry because we do not have anything.

Life is not about materialism, but people have been told that it is by capitalist entrepreneurs for decades. To make society tick the moguls of business enterprise have had to sell. Society has been based on selling things, and consequently we have been brain-washed into thinking we need things that nobody really needs. Knowledge is a very good thing, but books can be a dead weight. So what we really need is libraries. We need to read books but then give them back for someone else to read. Many things do not need to be possessed by the individual. Ornaments and trinkets are most obviously vain superfluities. Give them away, become reductionist, minimalist, give away your home if necessary if it has become a millstone around your neck. The 'human corridor' of the title of this distraction is a corridor in a people's hotel. The hotel is full of various characters but they all possess very little, just the clothes they need to wear and maybe a change to avoid dullness. The people in the hotel are engaged in enjoying each other. They have a freedom from worry about thieves; they possess nothing that the thief wants, but what they have all learnt is the importance of human interaction in life's human corridor. People need people, not things, not material possessions. In the human corridor people are relearning the skills of having nothing but each other and that is entertainment enough, free from the prison of possessions.

If society has become a prison full of locks and bolts it is because of possessions. There is no freedom, no liberty in possessions, But to live in a hotel where no one possesses anything but the human heart and eternal soul one can discover the meaning of being human again. One can get back to basics. That tangerine limo has been made to look very attractive by its makers, but how much more satisfying is a corridor full of doors to rooms where living human beings can get to know you and give your spirit everything it needs. Obviously some spirits will be more in tune with you than others, but what all of the spirits understand is the freedom all of us can possess if we centre our goals on people, not things or material goods. The tangerine limo belongs in the knacker's yard, the human corridor opens its doors continually to nourish and feed a soul hungry for satisfaction. What do you want, the prison of materialism or the freedom of the hotel with human corridors, where all are liberated, all are free from care, all are happy once again ?