But the other people say there was a primordial explosion, an enormous bang billions of years ago which flung all the galaxies into space.
Well lets take that just for the sake of argument and say that was the way it happened.
Its like you took a bottle of ink and you threw it at a wall.
Smash!
And all that ink spread.
And in the middle, its dense, isnt it?
And as it gets out on the edge, the little droplets get finer and finer and make more complicated patterns, see?
So in the same way, there was a big bang at 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 youre a complicated human being.
And then we cut ourselves off, and dont feel that were 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– youre not something thats a result of the big bang.
Youre not something that is a sort of puppet 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.
When I meet you, I see not just what you define yourself as–Mr so-and- so, Ms 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 Im that, too.
But weve learned to define ourselves as separate from it.
And so what I would call a basic problem weve 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.
If you can understand this, youre going to have no further problems.
I once asked a group of high school children
What do you mean by a thing? First of all, they gave me all sorts of synonyms.
They said
Its an object, which is simply another word for a thing it doesnt tell you anything about what you mean by a thing.
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 isnt a part of nature, its a part of speech.
There are no nouns in the physical world.
There are no separate things in the physical world, either.
The physical world is wiggly.
Clouds, mountains, trees, people, are all wiggly.
And only when human beings get to working on things–they build buildings in straight lines, and try to make out that the world isnt really wiggly.
But here we are, sitting in this room all built out of 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, its pretty difficult, isnt 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 the fish?
You use a net.
And so the net is the basic thing we have for getting hold of the wiggly world.
So if you want to get hold of this wiggle, youve got to put a net over it.
A net is something regular.
And I can number the holes in a net.
So many 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 thats the beginning of calculus, the art of measuring the world.
But in order to do that, Ive got to break up the wiggle into bits.
Ive 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.
Bit of wiggles.
Which I mark out in order to talk about the wiggle.
In order to measure and therefore in order to control it.
But in nature, in fact, in the physical world, the wiggle isnt bitted.
Like you dont 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 doesnt come bitten.
So the world doesnt come thinged it doesnt come evented.
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 I wave and say to you
Yoo-hoo! the world is waving with me at you and saying
Hi!
Im here! But we are consciousness of 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 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, just something out on the end of it.
And therefore we are scared stiff.
My wave is going to disappear, and Im going to die!
And that would be awful.
Weve got a mythology going now which is, as Father Maskell?, put it, we are something that happens between the maternity ward and the crematorium.
And thats it.
And therefore everybody feels unhappy and miserable.
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 dont.
Even Jehovahs Witnesses, who are the most fundamental of fundamentalists, they are polite when they come around and knock on the door.
But if you REALLY believed in Christianity, you would be screaming in the streets.
But nobody does.
You would be taking full- page ads in the paper every day.
You would be the most terrifying television programs.
The churches would be going out of their minds if they really believed what they teach.
But they dont.
They think they ought to believe what they teach.
They believe they should believe, but they dont really believe it, because what we REALLY believe is the fully automatic model.
And that is our basic, plausible common sense.