Toy boxes are captivating, aren’t they?  Put one in mind right now.  That’s right, now!  What does it look like?  A chest bursting with toys?  And what about the adult side of you?  Does it not find a metaphor instead?  Such as for our beliefs, where beliefs are toys and the box is the system which organizes them.

After all, that’s what children’s toy boxes do, right?  Honestly, don’t we simply play with our beliefs in the very manner of a toy?  Take the belief in God - is it not a toy?  Perhaps there is a God, or gods, or some supernatural beings - but the belief (as opposed to the reality) is what concerns our discussion here.  So aren’t such beliefs just toys that give us pleasure?

Indeed it is, at least to those great many folks that subscribe - yes, “subscribe!” - to them.  That’s just what it is, a toy, a tranquilizer, moreover: something to help us all relax, the better to deal with life in this world where everyone is subjected to powerful forces.

Thus the belief in God, because it’s a relief mentally to imagine that even if we mere mortals can’t fathom what the hell is going on, someone does!  Never mind that God said to do this and not that; belief alone is all we care about - our relief, through the belief.

There are those who just take what’s given to them.  Others have made a half-hearted attempt to verify the veracity of such beliefs and were satisfied.  Still others managed to discover a little bit of the truth for themselves by themselves before crystallizing their discoveries in a formal system of beliefs, at last able to permanently rest from having to ever do any more discovery again.

So what are beliefs but toys, and belief systems richly manufactured boxes for their storage?  And what are such people but grown-up children?

Most people will not like hearing such a challenge to their egotism, which they have misidentified with themselves.  But with a calm and quiet mind it is possible to see that much of our lives is similarly illusory, made up of nothing but our own thoughts - like a toy car which we have deliberately chosen to mistake for the real thing!