Who is it that knows there is no ego?
 And you must realize, you see, that this is a problem created linguistically.
 I explained that language based on the sentence composed of subject, verb and predicate contains
 the hidden belief system that events are started by nouns, by things.
 And so it's very important to understand that in the real universe there are no things at
 all.
 This startles people because we think of the universe as the sum total of things.
 But when you go into the question what you mean by a thing, you ask children this question,
 what do you mean by a thing?
 And they'll say, well, an object.
 Well, I said, you've just substituted another word that doesn't tell me anything.
 Well, they can come back if they're very smart and say, what do you mean by anything?
 I got once in a class of high school kids an Italian girl who said a thing is a noun
 while she was getting warm.
 A thing is a think.
 It's almost the same word.
 It's a unit of thought in the same way that an inch is a unit of linear measure or a pound
 a unit of weight.
 And so in various languages this comes out.
 In German you've got ding, thing, denken, to think.
 In Latin, res, thing, reor, to think.
 So when we reify, that means to thingify.
 And A.N. Whitehead used to talk about the fallacy of misplaced concretion, thingifying
 what isn't there.
 But it's easy to understand this, although it's a little bit of a shock to our common
 sense.
 For purposes of description, we must break the world down into some sort of units.
 This is the basis of calculus.
 How do you measure a curve?
 Well you treat it as a set of points.
 And in this way measure it.
 Although it isn't a set of points.
 There is no such thing as a point.
 Euclid defined a point as that which has position but no magnitude.
 I think it's right, isn't it, that in modern mathematics one doesn't define a point at
 all.
 You just assume it's an axiom.
 So when you ask how many things is a person, an individual organism, well it depends on
 what point of view you're going to take in describing it.
 In the normal way we describe one body as a body and that is a thing.
 Physiology describes it as many organs.
 Physics describes it as many molecules or atoms or electrons, mesons, protons, what
 have you.
 And sociology will look upon you as only a part thing because the sociologist likes to
 have his unit, a group, a society.
 And so it goes.
 It depends.
 Let's take rabbits.
 The way you describe a rabbit will depend on whether you are a hunter or a furrier.
 It's the way you look at it and the way you describe it so that the way of describing
 always varies according to the use you want to make.
 So that the world is not unlike a Rorschach plot.
 And in psychological testing we get people to describe Rorschach plots and say what they
 see in them.
 Now you can perfectly well imagine that we in this room could have an enormous Rorschach
 plot on the wall and we would all discuss it and arrive at a consensus about what it
 was.
 And we would manage.


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