Now isn't it obvious that a word is not what it represents?
 A word is a sound, a noise in the air, and if we take the sound water,
 the sound water cannot be used for washing or drinking.
 It stands for it, and in just the same way, it is not nutritive to eat dollar bills,
 or checks, or credit cards.
 They are not wealth. They represent it.
 In the same way, you as a living organism are not the same as your idea of yourself.
 That is to say, your organism is not your personality, is not your ego.
 That is simply a concept of yourself in the same way as a dollar is a concept or measure of wealth.
 Or in the same way as a menu represents what is going to be served for dinner.
 But it is not for dinner.
 It is very useful and very marvelous to be able to represent the real world with symbols,
 provided you know what you are doing, provided you do not confuse the two,
 and go for symbols instead of wealth, instead of reality.
 Now you may ask me on the other hand, because I am talking,
 because I am a speaker, because I am a philosopher, what do you mean by reality?
 And I am not going to tell you, because it can't be said.
 Reality is, some people would say, that was a clap.
 The clap is not the same sound as...
 Some people will say reality is material and physical.
 Other people will say reality is mental or spiritual.
 But you will see that in either case, reality is being defined in terms of philosophical concepts.
 The notion that the world is material is simply a philosophical school of thought.
 It is an idea.
 Equally so is the notion that the world is spiritual.
 Even if we take it down to God,
 to the root and ground of being,
 all we can talk about it is ideas.
 And those are strings of words,
 or they may be strings of numbers, or strings of algebraic equations,
 but they never get there.
 Because words and numbers are always strung out in a line,
 and you have to scan them with a process of attention called consciousness,
 and however fast you speed that up, even using computers,
 the world is always beyond it.
 Why? Because the world itself is not linear.
 The world is a multidimensional complex of everything happening altogether everywhere at once.
 Look at it this simply.
 How do you know how to breathe?
 Do you think how to breathe?
 Did you teach yourself how to breathe?
 Did you have to go to school to learn how to breathe out of a textbook?
 No.
 You breathe as soon as the doctor who delivered you spanked you on the bottom.
 Nobody had to teach you.
 But breathing from the point of view of physiology is a very complex process.
 How did you learn?
 How did you learn how to grow your hair?
 How to color your eyes?
 How to shape your bones?
 How to make your glands give out their proper secretions?
 You never did learn.
 In the sense where we mean learning is reading instructions.
 You may therefore very well disclaim all this skill and say, "Well, I didn't do it.
 All this breathing, all this hair, all these eyes, bones, and everything else were given to me by God."
 To whom then were they given?
 Is your heart not you?
 Is it just something you have?
 Is your brain, which we know less about than any other organ in the body, is that not you?
 Is it just something you have?
 If so, I ask again, who is you?
 Do you know how to open and close your hands?
 Well, you say, "Surely I do, because I do it."
 Yes, but how?
 You can't describe it in terms of words, although a physiologist may describe it in terms of words,
 but that doesn't help him to open and close his hands any better than you.
 So you see, you are a great deal more than you suppose.
 Because we have all been brought up to confuse our living reality with an idea, with a personality, which is given a name.
 And as a result of that, we all feel isolated.
 We all feel as if we were a little man inside our heads, about halfway between the ears and a little way behind the eyes.
 That's what most people seem to mean when they use the word "I," "I myself."
 So we are detached from our bodies.
 We have them, and in turn our bodies are detached conceptually, not really, but conceptually, from the rest of the world.
 And we think, "Well, everything outside my skin is definitely not me."
 Now look into some other historical aspects of this strange situation in which we find ourselves.
 Through the Jewish and Christian religions, we inherit a tradition of thought about the nature of the world, which uses certain metaphors.
 I should say, first of all, that these metaphors are not essential to these religions.
 But these religions include them as part of their pedagogy, their way of teaching.
 So I don't want to, as it were, give offense to anyone here who is a Jew or a Christian, as if I were trying to tear your religion apart.
 But it is so that both the Jewish and the Christian religions have used an image of the creation of the universe,
 which represents the universe as an artifact, as something made in the same way as a potter would make a vessel, a sculptor, a figurine, or a carpenter a table.
 And we get that, of course, right from the book of Genesis, where it is said that God created Adam out of clay and then breathed the breath of life into his nostrils.
 So it is fundamental to the common sense of all Western peoples to think of themselves as made.
 And if you are made, you are essentially a mechanism.
 Now look what happened. Towards the end of the 18th century, advanced Western thinkers found it impossible to believe in God.
 As a super boss, king and lawgiver, governing the universe.
 The reason they found this impossible, they never could prove that such a God did not exist.
 But that sort of an idea, the old gentleman with the white whiskers on the golden throne of heaven, simply became implausible in relation to the vision of the universe that late 18th century astronomy and other sciences were unfolding.
 No one would dream of attributing a composition by Beethoven to Palestrina.
 The style.
 So when we saw this new vision of the style of the universe, what sort of a thing it is, it was awfully difficult to attribute the nebula in Andromeda to the Lord God Jehovah.
 Because the Lord God Jehovah just didn't seem to have the imagination to produce that sort of a phenomenon.
 And you know when people thought, were thinking then, Christians in Europe and America were thinking then of the world as having been created in 4000 BC.
 And then they started to think about light years.
 And the Hindus came along and said well of course we've known this all along.
 We always calculated the history of the universe in terms of Kauppas as our mere basic unit of reckoning.
 And a Kauppa is 4,320,000 years.
 That's what we begin with.
 And we think of those added up into crores of Kauppas, cotes of Kauppas, centuries you see of Kauppas.
 We've always thought that way.
 Though this upstaged the Christians pretty badly.
 And so they rushed to reinterpret everything.
 And they've always been having to do this.
 And saying well of course when it says in the book of Genesis that God created the world in 6 days, of course a day, well it says in the Psalms, a thousand years are but a day in thy sight.
 That stretches the day at least to a thousand years.
 But then they thought well perhaps a day is merely a metaphorical expression.
 Well what if God is just a metaphorical expression?
 See, there we get to.
 But the problem was essentially this.
 That if you think of the world as an artifact, as something made,
 and then you find you can no longer believe in the maker,
 what are you left with?
 You're left with a machine.
 And you don't like it.
 The scientific naturalism of the 19th century,
 which rejected all supernaturalism,
 came therefore to regard the world as nothing but a fortuitous congress of atoms,
 operating in accordance with the principles of Newtonian mechanics.
 And you would have thought that someone who declared himself to be a naturalist would have been sort of in favor of nature.
 But on the contrary, the naturalists began the most savage war against nature ever waged.
 Because they hated it.
 It's like Americans, who are credited with being materialists, absolutely loathe material.
 They do everything to destroy it, to convert it into poison gas and garbage.
 They don't know how to cook, how to dress,
 and mistreat the world in the most terrible way.
 Cities that look like rubbish heaps,
 scattered all over the most beautiful mountain country in the plains.
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