There is no natural reason ... - Dhamma by Ajahn Jayasāro
There is no natural reason why red should mean stop and green mean go. And yet, when we reach a traffic light we all stop at the red and go at the green. We do so because we have all agreed on the meanings of red and green in this context. There are so many things in our daily life that depend upon a shared agreement. Money is another obvious example. There is no natural reason why we should be able to exchange a bank note for goods or services. We are able to do so because we have all agreed that it is possible to do so. A thing that exists because of a shared agreement is called a convention. In the ability to create conventions we see the genius of human intelligence
The difficulty with conventions is that we tend to confuse them with natural truths. We give them too much importance, get attached to them, and so we suffer. The most fundamental of our conventions, and the one we attach to the most, is the idea of self. In Buddhism we do not reject conventions. We simply learn to see conventions as conventions, without taking them to be ultimately real. By doing so, we are able to use conventions wisely, we live in a world of conventions without being deluded by them
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