And other astronomers either say there was a primordial explosion, an enormous bang millions
 of years ago, billions of years ago, which flung all the galaxies into space. Well, let's
 take that just for the sake of argument and say that was the way it happened. It's like
 you took a bottle of ink and you threw it at a wall. Smash! And all that ink spreads.
 And in the middle, it's dense, isn't it? And as it gets out on the edge, the little droplets
 are finer and finer and make more complicated patterns. See? So in the same way, there was
 a big bang in the beginning of things and it spread. And you and I, sitting here in
 this room as complicated human beings, are way, way out on the fringe of that bang. We
 are the complicated little patterns on the end of it. Very interesting. But so we define
 ourselves as being only that. If you think that you are only inside your skin, you define
 yourself as one very complicated little curlicue, way out on the edge of that explosion, way
 out in space and way out in time. Billions of years ago, you were a big bang. But now
 you're a complicated human being. And then we cut ourselves off, like this, and don't
 feel that we're still the big bang. But you are. Depends how you define yourself. You
 are actually, if this is the way things started, if there was a big bang in the beginning,
 you're not something that is a result of the big bang. On the end of the process, you are
 still the process. You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on
 as whoever you are. See, when I meet you, I see not just what you define yourself as,
 Mr. So-and-so, Miss So-and-so, Mrs. So-and-so. I see every one of you as the primordial energy
 of the universe coming on at me in this particular way. I know I'm that too. But we've learned
 to define ourselves as separate from it. And so, what I would call a kind of a basic problem
 we've got to go through first, is to understand that there are no such things as things. That
 is to say, separate things, or separate events. That that is only a way of talking. And if
 you can understand this, you're going to have no further problems. I once asked a group
 of high school children, "What do you mean by a thing?" And first of all, they gave me
 all sorts of synonyms. They said, "It's an object," which is simply another word for
 a thing. It doesn't tell you anything about what you mean by a thing. And finally, a very
 smart girl from Italy, who was in the group, said, "A thing is a noun." And she was quite
 right. A noun isn't a part of nature, it's part of speech. There are no nouns in the
 physical world. There are no separate things in the physical world either. See, the physical
 world is wiggly. The clouds, mountains, trees, people, are all wiggly. And only when human
 beings get working at things, they build buildings in straight lines and try and make out that
 the world isn't really wiggly. But here we are, we sitting in this room, all built on
 straight lines, but each one of us is as wiggly as all get out.
 Now then, when you want to get control of something that wiggles, it's pretty difficult,
 isn't it? You try and pick up a fish in your hands and the fish is wiggly and it slips
 out. What do you do to get hold of a fish? You use a net. And so the net is the basic
 thing we have for getting hold of the wiggly world. And so if you want to get hold of this
 wiggle, you've got to put a net over it. And I can number the holes in a net. So many so
 holes up, so many holes across. And if I can number these holes, I can count exactly where
 each wiggle is in terms of a hole in that net. And that's the beginning of calculus,
 the art of measuring the world. But in order to do that, I've got to break up the wiggle
 into bits. I've got to call this a specific bit and this the next bit of the wiggle and
 this the next bit and this the next bit of the wiggle. And so these bits are things or
 events. Bits of wiggles, which I mark out in order to talk about the wiggle, in order
 to measure it and therefore in order to control it. But in nature, in fact, in the physical
 world, the wiggle isn't bitted. Like you don't get a cut-up fryer out of an egg. But you
 have to cut the chicken up in order to eat it. You bite it. But it doesn't come bitten.
 So the world doesn't come thinged. It doesn't come invented. You and I are all as much continuous
 with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean. The ocean waves and the universe
 peoples. And as the wave, I wave at you and say, "You!" The world is waving at me with
 you and saying, "Hi, I'm here." But we, our consciousness, the way we feel and sense our
 existence, being based on a myth that we are made, that we are parts, that we are things,
 our consciousness has been influenced so that each one of us does not feel that. We feel,
 we have been hypnotized, literally hypnotized by social convention into feeling and sensing
 that we exist only inside our skins. That we are not the original bang, but just something
 out on the end of it. And therefore we are scared stiff. "My wave is going to disappear!
 And I'm going to die! And that would be awful! We've got a mythology going now, which is
 Father Maskell put it, we are nothing but something that happens between the maternity
 ward and the crematorium. And that's it. And therefore everybody feels unhappy and miserable.
 Now, this is what people really believe today. You may go to church, you may say you believe
 in this, that, and the other. But you don't. Even Jehovah's Witnesses, who are the most
 fundamentalist fundamentalists, they are polite when they come round and knock at the door.
 But if you really believed in Christianity, you'd be screaming in the streets. But nobody
 does. You'd be taking full-page ads in the paper every day. You'd have the most terrifying
 television programs. The churches would be going out of their minds if they really believe
 what they teach. But they don't. They think they ought to believe what they teach. They
 believe they should believe, but they don't believe it, because what we really believe
 is the fully automatic model. And that is our basic, plausible common sense.


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