in other words, to coagulate our different points of view.
 And if there were a very dominant person present,
 he or she would tend to force the particular view upon everybody else,
 and say, "No, obviously it isn't what you say it is. Look, it's perfectly clear that it's that."
 So we are living in a Rorschach block.
 Only urban people have difficulty in realizing this.
 Because urban people live in a straightened out world,
 and we call them straights or squares,
 because they think in very simplistic terms.
 See, Euclid had a very simple mind,
 and therefore he discussed a geometry which wasn't a measure of the Earth at all.
 The word "geometry" is from the Greek "geos", the world, the Earth, "geis",
 and "metra", which means to measure.
 Now the Greek word for measure, from which we get metric, meter,
 comes from the Sanskrit root "m-a-t-r", which also means to measure,
 and derived from that is the Sanskrit word "maya", which means illusion,
 as well as imagination.
 So figuring it out is the measuring of the world, the metering.
 And "metre" also is the Greek word for mother,
 and is of course the root of the word "matter", material.
 And so when we ask, "Does it matter?"
 we are asking, "Does it measure up to anything?"
 Well, we come to the conclusion that there is no matter.
 There's form. It's the form that matters,
 or you could say the universe is a matter of form.
 And in Sanskrit, there is no word for matter.
 The word "rupa", which is used for the material or physical world, means form.
 And so you get "nama-rupa" as the full name for what we call physical reality.
 "Nama" means name, "rupa" form, so it is named form.
 And so Lao Tzu, writing the Tao Te Ching, says,
 "The nameless, or the no-name, is the basis of heaven and earth,
 but the named is the mother of ten thousand things."
 So, in the sense then of this, you can understand the saying,
 "In the beginning was the Word."
 All things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made.
 Because you don't get things until you start naming.
 Because then you point out, on the universal Rorschach plot, this wiggle.
 What do you mean, "this wiggle"? Where does one wiggle begin in the other end?
 Well, this is a matter of arbitrary definition.
 Where does your head end and your neck begin?
 Here? Here? Here? Here? Here? Well, where is it?
 We know vaguely.
 But you can't be precise about it,
 because you can look at the head and the neck as continuous.
 You start here and say, "Well, it's all one thing up from here to here," see?
 Or you can start here and say, "No, it's all one thing from here to here," etc.
 Because it's all arbitrary.
 And the value of it is that by description
 and by conventional decisions as to where to draw the line,
 we can communicate in language.
 And this is socially valuable.
 But we must not be deluded by what we're doing.
 Because if we do truly believe that the world is a lot of separate things,
 we believe that we can take them apart
 and have this without that.


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