Toy boxes are magical, aren't they? Just think about one right now. Yes, right now? What do you picture in your mind? A chest full of wondrous, colorful toys? And what does the adult in you note of such an image? Could a toy box not be a metaphor instead? Perhaps for our beliefs; our beliefs as toys, and the system which organizes them as a box.

After all, isn't that what children's toy boxes do, organize toys and other playthings? And what are beliefs but toys of the mind, intellectual playthings that we manipulate for our amusement? 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. And isn't this belief nothing but a toy?

Indeed it is, for the overwhelming vast majority of people who subscribe - yes, "subscribe!" - to them. It is nothing more than a kind of toy, a kind of tranquilizer, even; something to help them (that is, us) relax, to deal with our hectic lives and this crazy world of forces beyond our ken and certainly beyond our control.

So people choose to believe 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.

Some merely accept what's been passed along 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.

What are these, one and all, but toys in their elaborately constructed toy boxes? 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!