On 28 July, 18:02, frantheman <[email protected]> wrote:
> In the course of the recent discussion here concerning the reposting
> of Minds Eye contributions in other internet fora, the question of
> copyright arose. It got me to thinking about the idea of intellectual
> ownership and the idea of possession in general.
>
> We have all seen the Westerns in which the Native Americans sold away
> title to land for nothing, or pittances because the white man's
> concept of "owning" land was incomprehensible to them. Throughout
> history, many of those whom we regard as great thinkers have been very
> critical of the benefits of possessions and owning things. Indeed, a
> controversy centred on the absolute poverty of Christ raged throughout
> the medieval Christian Church and completely split the Franciscan
> movement (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
> Franciscans#Renewed_controversy_on_the_question_of_poverty). In this
> context, it is perhaps interesting to note that one of the all-time
> heroes here on Minds Eye, William of Occam, was a proponent of the
> principle of absolute poverty and lost his job as English Franciscan
> provincial and was excommunicated as a result.
>
> Personally I spent almost a decade as a Dominican friar, during which
> time I took a "vow of poverty." I don't want to go into a discussion
> on the extent to which Catholic monks actually live according to this
> vow here, personally, I always found it to be the expression of an
> attitude of freedom from a dictatorship of "things." It may also have
> left an indelible mark on me in that in almost a quarter of a century
> since leaving the order I have been pretty bad at earning,
> accumulating and retaining material wealth and possessions. During my
> life I have gone through a number of pretty radical changes, which
> have often involved leaving nearly everything behind and starting
> again. Such processes have been, inevitably, traumatic, although not
> necessarily negative. One of the things that has helped is the fact
> that I have never felt particularly attached to "things". But maybe my
> sense of "ownership" is just underdeveloped, or damaged!
>
> There's a German saying which states that "he who has possessions has
> worries." Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, one of the founders (!) of modern
> anarchism went farther with his statement that "property is theft."
> What does it mean to "own" something anyway?
>
> To use Molly's words: What do you think?
>
> Francis
Ownership is an illusion derived from the close spatio-temporal
relationship formed by a human (although I feel that other species
also have a similar concept {thus the problem encountered when trying
to take a bone or toy from a dog who's enjoying it}) towards an
object. That is, we tend to think of those things that spend a lot of
their existence near us as 'ours'. Of course, nothing could be
farther from the truth. Things exist. Things exist nearer or farther
from us. We tend to bond more closely, due to familiarity, to those
things that are nearer us. Those things that you can take with you
into the 'next world' are those things which are truly yours.
Everything else is just stuff that happens to be near you during your
period of physical existence. Theft, is just moving a thing from one
place to another. If there was no bond between humans and 'things',
theft could not occur. All things, including humans, simply exist and
are a part (perhaps even better, an expression) of the One. There is
only that One and any division we make is, in truth, illusory and, in
the case of ourselves, simple vanity.
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