A walk in the shoes of a geo-caching newbie....

I am a Zen Materialist. First what is Zen Materialism?

     It is not a religion; it is a spiritual faith and philosophy that guides me to a higher state of personal and social behavior. It draws upon the wisdom of the Talmud, the New Testament, the Koran, and the writings of Kumarajiva. In essence, if the Buddhists believe you must learn to walk along the sands of time and leave no footprints, the Zen Materialist believes that you must learn to take steps with purpose to leave a path that can be used by others to find there waypoint(knowledge of where they are in life).

     As Buddhist believe you must let go of all material possessions a Zen Materialist believes you must learn how to be a consumer until you can learn to be a creator. The idea of Zen Materialism is to be a creator with no destructive waste, and to do so in ever increasing awareness of larger and larger systems from your cells to your family to your planet.

 
     It is not just eco-capitalism, it is an understanding of system theory that states that creators of great materialist advances are only doing good if they understand all the consequences of there creations in ever increasing depth and clarity. Cars, to potato peelers, even movie producers have purpose, and if a mass of products makes us more efficient and yet do go to waste in a harmful manner, then they provide a path to better living through intelligent design. Not intelligent design by a supreme creator, but rather the creator in our minds.

     A creator of great personal computers who does not take into account the waste of the product in land fills with in a few years is not following a path of Zen Materialism. A computer that can be reused and recycled is.

There are for noble markets of Zen Materialism:

The Human Capital: Or how much do I know?

The Biological Capital: Or how well can my body achieve a task

The Financial Capital: Or how much economic resources do I have to apply to a task

The Social Capital: Or how many persons do I know or know I exist

     What ties all of these markets together is the Moral Imperative Exchanges.

     What are we the person, the family, the society willing to trade to balance the capital in one market to get more capital in another? Outside these markets are the material world, the objects we use to create greater efficiencies (in physics and engineering, ratio of the amount of power produced by a machine to the amount of power put into it) in these markets. So in essence the exchange main purpose is to have each individual reach an equilibrium and become materialistically neutral, or put back into the material world what one takes out of it.

     Zen Materialist have no church, or persons of any symbolic cloth, but they do have symbolic positions, which can be comparable to priests, though they hold no closeness to a higher power, they simply symbolize waypoints on a journey towards enlightened balance. These include, the common repairmen, (plumbers, electricians, carpenters, etc) or the clergy of Zen Materialist. They devote their lives to keeping machines efficient. The tend to be philosophical by nature, and generally do good work by using and saving as much as can be salvaged from the natural forces of entropy. There are also the engineers, they are a class of creators that if they understand Zen Materialism can do the most good, though rarely without the help of others. The world of Zen Materialism has many characters and players, but this essay is not an attempt to fully explain the entire philosophy, but just a background to present a new and recent phenomenon.

     Inside the world of the internet which obeys the laws of networks is a small but growing phenomenon called Geo-Caching. It has rules and lessons which despite being completely ignorant of Zen Materialism actually obey all its beliefs. And if you understand Geo-caching, you will begin a journey that will enable you to understand Zen Materialism not as an ecological or political movement, but how technology and behavior can create social capital and biological capital without sacrificing the material material world but rather enhancing our awareness.

     The idea of Geo-Caching is simple. You go to site web or real location and receive latitude and longitude coordinates for a cache. You then journey using your Global Positioning Service tool, a phone or car or portable GPS receiver and go to that cache. Once at the cache, the cache creator may give you more hints for another cache, may ask you to sign a log book. The cache creator may give you what Geo-Cachers call a Travel Bug, a harmless object with a numeric code that allows the cache creator to track the travel bug’s longitude and latitude you anonymously fill out later. Or they may ask you to leave something else behind. They believe in “Cache in and Trash out”, so the entire 'game' is played in an eco-friendly way that allows you to log in to a map website and play the game all over the planet.

     This is an example of Zen Materialism, or the art of technology to help others discover journeys that bring people together. You do not have to create recyclable computers to be a great Zen Materialist master, you can help others along their journey to find things that are important to finding balance in their noble markets.

     The geo-caching helps build social capital by meeting others who leave caches, it increases biological capital due to the exercise to reach many caches. It strengthens human capital because it requires an understanding of coordinates, solving puzzles, and using our evolutionary instincts to discover ways to journey forward. It does so with a minimum of financial capital. Thus the use of one capital market that enriches three others and who’s moral imperative is to leave no waste and respect others treasures, is a very important living koan to understand fully.

Links: www.Geocaching.com