Fun with clouds

Do you ever play with clouds?  My kids and I do this from time to time.  We look up at the clouds and talk about what we see.  There are all kinds of things up there.  We see dogs, elephants, horses, carriages, cars, buildings, you name it; we see it.

The part that is most fun is trying to see what someone else sees.  "Can't you see it, Dad?" they will ask.  "See his trunk?"  Then I see it.

I was thinking about this today.  If we played this game like we play most other games in life the conversation would be much different.  It would go something like this.

 

Me:  "See that elephant?"

You:  "That's not an elephant.  It's a truck."

Me:  "No it's not.  It has a trunk."

You:  "Trucks have trunks."

Me:  "Not that kind of trunk."

You:  "Well it obviously has wheels.  Elephants don't have wheels."

Me:  "You are clueless."

You:  "You're delusional."

The problem isn't that one person is wrong and the other is right.  Both are right and neither is right.  One problem is the unwillingness to look at something from another's perspective.  Why are we unwilling?  I don't really know.  I think the issue is more fundamental.  We don't realize that perspective is all there is.  There is no elephant.  There is no truck.  Yet we see it, so it does exist.  Or does it?

The simple recognition of the nature of what we experience takes a lot of the fight out of you.  It seems silly to argue over mentally constructed images formed by transitory clouds.  So, why do we argue?  I think those eastern mystics were on to something.