What is an Avatar?
There is a huge confusion about avatars on the Internet. The recent blockbuster is partially to blame, Avatar.
I watched the movie. I enjoyed it. A certain point I had to go and do something for like 20 minutes: the conflict in the movie was impossible for me to bear.
In that movie, an avatar is an artificially grown body that is animated, remotely, by a human being. The purpose of that avatar is to infiltrate a different culture for the purpose of exploitation.
Nice… grrr…
Another common use of the word, Avatar, is a symbol, picture, that represents you. It is your public representation, but you, the human, animates it, and it has no choice of its own.
According to Hinduism, an Avatar is the physical manifestation of a Deity… like Vishnu, etc. I don’t know much about Hinduism: I don’t believe in Deities, in my world view all deities are 4th Plane creations: the creations of human imagination.
I do have quite a clear picture of my own, but let us see, if we can get to it through the cultural mambo jumbo, religious, science fiction stuff, and computer animation.
So let us see if there are any elements of that definition we can work with, if any element of that definition will stand further examination from close.
Let’s first examine what is the purpose of having an Avatar in the first place?
What is the job of the Avatar?