Philisophical Exploration

Somewhere, a long time ago, someone wrote: "You reap what you sew." The following is a philosophical look at what that means, and why it has proven to be so important to the minds of men for 2000 years.

The actual sentence can be likened to a farmer tending his crops. You plant a seed, water it, and over time the plant grows until its harvested. The harvest is then sold, eaten, wasted, or used and the process is repeated over again.

It seems to be a simple truth, everyone knows that plants grow, people grow, life flourishes everywhere. Farmers are people who chose to make a living by exploiting that small fact of life. Agriculture itself has helped humankind just as much as did the discovery of fire, or the invention of the wheel. Without it, we would still be a nomadic society, moving from place to place fighting for survival.

But if this little phrase only applied to farming, then only farmers would have heard of it. So what is the verse really saying?

I suppose I could venture a guess as to say that it references karma, or it is karma, for those who acknowledge the validity of that theory. For those who don't it must mean something else. Perhaps it means that if you are a good person, then good things will happen to you. You just might wind up in heaven after all, right here on earth. For many more its a much more physical sentence. If I place my hands on a guitar and strum the strings with the strings depressed in a specific way, then I will hear a specific sound, say a C chord. Perhaps that is what this little phrase was attempting to say. Could it be something else? Absolutely, apart from action, let's look at mentality: If you believed that red roses were the best smelling flower ever to grow out of the earth, then for you those red roses are the best smelling. They may not be for someone else. In fact if they wanted to they could call you a moron for thinking that roses actually smelled good and that they had a purpose to grow at all. Perhaps those men and women prefer yellow tulips, and because of that their houses are filled with luxurious white vases brimming with yellow tulips.

I suppose when you put it all together it leads one to think: What am I sewing? How am I looking at life? And is it working the way I want it to? Trust me, its going to work how it works whether you're alive or not, born or unborn. You can get all defensive and try to disagree if you want, but there really isn't much denying that fact: Life goes on.

So it begs the question: "Do you know what you are weaving?"