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I would like to look at the Death of God theology in an entirely different way. I would like to say that what is dead is not God, but an idea of God. A particular conception of God has died in the sense of becoming implausible.
And I find this a very good thing because—well, it’s a principle of Jewish theology, and later of Christian theology, that it is always a mistake (even a sin, if you want to call it that)—and I want to interpolate something here as to the exact meaning of a sin. The Greek word in the New Testament for a sin is hamartánein (ἁμαρτάνειν), and that means to miss the point or, as in archery, to miss the mark. And therefore, from the mosaic Ten Commandments comes the idea that it is a sin—that is to say, a missing of the point—to substitute an idol for God.
Now, the picture I just showed you—as I said—is an idol. But those primitive Mexicans—even they don’t seriously confuse that particular image with God. The danger of it is, of course, they may think of God as something like that in their mind’s eye.
They may think of God in the form of man. But the images that have been made of God or of the gods—out of wood and stone, and in painting—have never really been taken seriously as actually what God is like, and nobody has confused the actual image, say, of a Buddha such as you saw at the beginning of this program. Buddha is, of course, never identified with a god because Buddha is a human being.
But these images are never seriously confused with what they represent any more than a Catholic confuses a crucifix with Jesus Christ. So the images that are pictures, statues, and so forth are not really very dangerous. The dangerous images of God are those that we make not out of wood and stone, but out of ideas and concepts.
You see, an idea is abstract. So St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, defined God as necessary being: he who is necessarily. Now that is a philosophical concept; God is being.
But that concept is an idol because it confuses God with an idea, and because an idea is abstract it seems something very much more spiritual than an image made of wood or stone. And that’s just precisely where it becomes deceptive. Likewise, many people think that the Bible is the authentic word of God, and therefore they worship the Bible and make it into an idol.
Disregarding the ironical remark of Jesus to his contemporary Jews “You search the scriptures daily, for in them you think you have life.” [?] said later, “The letter kills, but the spirit gives life.” And so whatever you put—as an image or an idea—in the place of God necessarily falsifies God. Now, a lot of people say, “I don’t think I could face, in life—I don’t think I could face life unless I could believe in a just and loving God.” It strikes me that that kind of belief in God is actually a lack of faith.
You see, the word ‘belief,’ in Anglo-Saxon, comes from this Anglo-Saxon root lēaf; I would as lēaf. And lēaf means ‘to wish.’ So belief really means ‘a strong wish.’ When you get up and say the Creed, you are really saying “I fervently wish that there exists a God the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth,” et cetera. Because if you really have faith you don’t need belief because faith is an entirely different attitude from belief.
Faith is a state of openness or trust. To have faith is, for example, like when you swim: you trust yourself to the water, you don’t grab hold of the water when you swim. And if you go stiff and tight in the water and try to catch hold of it, you’ll sink.
You have to relax. So in the same way, when a cat falls off a tree the cat doesn’t go stiff all over in a state of tension—that is to say, a state of holding on—the cat relaxes, it falls heavily, thumps the ground with its tail and isn’t hurt because it relaxed. So the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging, of holding on, so that you could say that a person who is a fanatic in religion—who simply has to believe in certain propositions about the nature of God and the nature of the universe—is a person who has no faith at all, because he’s holding on tight.
And so, when we sing hymns like “Rock of Ages, cleft for me, Let me hide myself in Thee,” these aren’t hymns of faith. Or even Luther made such a thing about faith, but he wrote a hymn in German—Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott—“A mighty fortress is our God.” That’s not a hymn of faith. A person of faith doesn’t need a fortress.
He’s not on the defensive. And so, in the same way, when churches are designed like the royal courts of kings. You know, in the royal court, the king sits with his back to the wall—which is the position (or used to be the position) of the altar.
And around him he would have his courtiers and guards, and their place, of course—in the church design called a Basilica, which means the court of a basileus; a king—the bishop sits at the back in his throne, and all his attendant clergy stand around him like his guards in the royal court. But why is this? A king stands with his back to the wall because he rules by force.
And when his subjects and his courtiers approach him, they prostrate themselves, they kneel down—why? Because that’s a difficult position from which to start a fight. And so, are we projecting the image of a frightened king upon the Ground of Being, the Godhead?
We are, you see. Or, in a Protestant church, the furniture all looks like a courthouse. The minister wears a black gown, and it’s the same black gown as is worn by a judge.
And there are pews and pulpits and all the familiar wooden boxes of court furniture. And the minister, like the judge, throws the book at you! He preaches the law laid down in that other idol of God, the Bible.
But does God need all that? I mean, is God somebody who takes this aggressive attitude, either of the king in the court where all the subjects must prostrate, or of the judge who bangs the gavel and says “Bah bah bah bah bah?” This is ridiculous. And a God so conceived is an idol and manifests the absence of faith of all those who worship him, because they have an attitude of trust.
They cling on to these rules, to these conceptions, and have no fundamental give to life. Now, in a certain way, you might say that a good scientist has more faith than a religious person. Because a good scientist says “I want to find out what is the case.
My mind is open to the truth, whatever that truth may turn out to be. I have no preconceptions, I may have some hypotheses, I may have some notions in my mind as to what the truth might be, but I’m going to test it. And the test is: I will open all my senses to reality and find out what that reality is.” But then again, the scientist runs into a problem because he knows that whatever comes to him as reality depends on the structure of his instruments and the structure of his senses, and behind the structure of his senses the structure of his brain.
And that’s himself. So he has to have—back of all that—an act of faith in his own brain, an act of faith in himself that his physical organism—or his mind, or whatever you want to call it—is indeed reliable and will show him reality, truth, what is. So unless there is a basic and primordial act of faith in yourself, and you can’t ultimately check on yourself, you have to believe your senses, you have to believe your reason, your logic, your intelligence.
So you have to have faith in that even though you can’t check it. I mean, it’s not like your mind’s a radio and you can go in and screw in a connection here and fix up another connection there, and so be quite sure—you always have to trust. And behind all that, you see—behind the brain, just as I’ve shown you before; behind your eyes—there’s the blank space, the unknown, the unseen.
And therefore one could say that the highest image of God—which is the unseen behind the eyes, the intangible and invisible which is space, out of which come all the stars—we can say, yes, that is God. But we have no image of that. We do not know what that is.
But we have to trust it. There’s no alternative; there’s no way out. You can’t help trusting it.
You’ve got to! But, you see, that trust in a God whom one cannot conceive in any way is a far higher form of faith than fervent clinging to a God of whom you have a definite conception. And that conception can easily be wrong—and even if it’s right, clinging to it would be the wrong attitude, because when you love someone very much you shouldn’t cling to them.
I don’t want to hug my wife so tightly that I strangle her. And mothers shouldn’t love their children so much that they strangle them by smother love. It comes out in the story in the New Testament when Mary Magdalene, who loved Jesus very much—she’s said to have seen him after his resurrection, and she immediately ran to cling to him and he said, “Do not cling to me.” It’s translated in the King James Bible “Do not touch me,” but the Greek word άπτομαι means ‘to cling to.’ “Don’t cling to me!” DOn’t cling to anything of the spirit.
It’s just like, “Don’t cling to water” because the more you grab it the faster it’ll slip through your fingers. Don’t cling to your breath. If I breathe in and hold it and say, “Aah, I’ve got this breath now.
But I’ve got to hang on to it because breath is life,” you know, you’re going to go purple in the face and strangle[d]. You have to let it go, you let your breath out. That’s the act of faith: to breathe out.
“Whew.” It’ll come back. Actually, the Buddhist word nirvāṇa means ‘breathe out.’ Because letting go is the fundamental attitude of faith. Now, it isn’t as if Christians hadn’t been aware of this.
One of the most fundamental source books of Christian spirituality was written—oh, somewhere in the 5th Century; maybe the 6th Century—by a Syrian monk who gave himself the name Dionysius. I’ve recently translated this book. It’s called Theologia Mystica, “Mystical Theology.” And you can get it from your paperback bookstore.
This book is a very strange document because it explains that the highest knowledge of God is through what he calls in Greek agnosia, which means ‘un-knowing.’ He says that one knows God most profoundly and most truly in not knowing God. That means: just in the same way as your sight comes out of an unseen, so when you know that you don’t know, you really know. And you really know because knowing that you don’t know is a state of mind in which you have let go of your efforts to grasp hold of life with your intellect.
Now, it sounds very odd in our civilization to say, therefore, “I am God”—or for that matter, “You are God.” But you will remember, of course, that this exactly is what Jesus Christ felt. And he was crucified for it because—in his culture—God was conceived as the royal monarch of the universe, and therefore anybody who gets up and says “Well, I am God” is blasphemous. He’s subversive.
He’s claiming to be, if not the boss himself, at least the boss’s son, and that’s a put-down for everybody else. But Jesus had to say it that way because—in his culture—they did not have, as the Hindus have, the idea that everybody—not only human beings but animals and plants; all sentient beings whatsoever—are God in disguise. Now let me try to explain this a little more clearly, because I cannot help thinking of myself as identical with, continuous with, one with the whole energy that expresses itself as this universe.
If the universe is made of stars—a star is a center from which energy flows; in other words, there’s the middle, and all the rays come out from it. And so I feel that—as the image of the whole thing—that all energy is a center from which rays come out. And therefore each one of us is an expression of what is—basically—the whole thing.
Now, therefore, whereas in the West—in the Jewish, Christian and Islamic religions—we have thought of God not only as a monarch but as the maker of the world. And as a result of that, we look upon the world as an artifact—a sort of machine—created by a great engineer. There’s a different conception in India where the world is not seen as an artifact but as a drama, and therefore God is not the maker and architect of the universe but the actor of it and therefore is playing all the parts at once.
And this connects up with the idea of each one of us as persons, because a person is a mask—from the Latin word persona, the mask worn by the actors in Greco-Roman drama. So this is an entirely different conception of the world and—as I think I shall be able to show you—it makes an amazing amount of sense. So we start from the premise that you—and you don’t know who you are, you can’t see yourself and, as I’ve pointed out, you don’t know how you grow your body, how you make your nervous system work, how you manage to emerge in this environment of nature.
And so this unknown you—the you that is not you, the you that is not the ego—this is God. That is to say, not the cosmic boss but the fundamental Ground of Being—the reality that always was, is, and will be—that lies at the basis of reality. That’s you.
Now, let’s go into a more mythological kind of imagery. Suppose you are God. Suppose you have all time, all eternity, and all power at your disposal.
What would you do? I believe you’d say to yourself after a while, “Man, get lost!” It’s like asking another question, which is: supposing you were given the power to dream any dream you wanted to dream every night. Naturally, you could dream any span of time—you could dream 75 years of time in one night, a hundred years of time in one night, a thousand years of time in one night—and it could be anything you wanted.
You’d make up your mind before you went to sleep. “Tonight I’m going to dream of so and so.” Well, naturally, you would start out by fulfilling all your wishes. You would have all the pleasures you could imagine, the most marvelous meals, the most entrancing love affairs, the most romantic journeys.
You could listen to music such as no mortal has heard and see landscapes beyond our wildest dreams. And for several nights—oh, maybe for a whole month of nights—you would go on that way, having a wonderful time. But then, after a while, you’d begin to think, “Well, I’ve seen quite a bit.
Let’s spice it up Let’s have a little adventure.” And therefore, you would dream of yourself being threatened by all sorts of dangers. You would rescue princesses from dragons, you would perhaps engage in notable battles, you would be a hero. And then, as time went on, you would dare yourself to do more and more outrageous things, and at some point in the game, you would say, “Tonight I am going to dream in such a way that I don’t know that I’m dreaming.” So that you would take the experience of the dream for complete reality.
And what a shock when you woke up! And you really scare yourself. And then, on successive nights, you might dare yourself to experience the most extraordinary things, just for the contrast when you woke up.
You could, for example, dream yourself in situations of extreme poverty, disease, agony. You could, as it were, work on the vibration of suffering to its most intense point, and then suddenly—WOOP—wake up and find it was, after all, nothing but a dream and everything’s perfectly okay. And you would say, “Wow, man!
That was a gas!” Well, how do you know that that’s not what you’re doing already? You, sitting there with all your problems, with all your whole complicated life situation, listening to me. It may just be the very dream you decided to get into.
If you like it, crazy. If you don’t like it, what fun it’ll be when you wake up. Do you see?
This is the essence of drama. In drama, all the people who come there know it’s only a play. The proscenium arch—the cinema screen—tells us this is an illusion; it is not for real.
But the actors are trying to give us the sensation that it is for real. In other words, they are going to act their part so convincingly that they’re going to have us sitting on the edge of our seats in anxiety, they’re going to make us laugh, they’re going to make us cry, they’re going to make us feel horror—even though we know in the back of our minds, even though we have what in German is called a Hintergedanke, which is a thought way, way, way in the back of your mind which you’re hardly aware of but you really know all the time. In the theater, we have a Hintergedanke that it’s only a play, but the mastery of the actor is that he is going to try (almost) to convince us that it’s real.
And so, therefore, imagine a situation where you have the best of all possible actors—namely God—and the best of all possible audiences ready to be taken in and convinced that it’s real—namely God—and that you are all many, many masks which the basic consciousness, the basic mind of the universe, is assuming. To use a verse from G. K. Chesterton: And, of course, here it is. This is the mask of Viṣṇu, the preserver of the universe.
And you see it is a multiple mask to illustrate the fact that the one who looks out of my eyes and out of all your eyes is the same center. So, if I look at another human being and I look straight into their eyes—isn’t that curious? We don’t like doing that.
There’s something embarrassing about looking into our eyes too closely. As if… “Don’t look at me that closely because I might give myself away. You might find out who I really am.” And what do you suppose that would be?
Do you suppose that another person who looks deeply into your eyes will read all the things you’re ashamed of, all your faults, all the things you’re guilty about? Or is there some deeper secret than that? The eyes are our most sensitive organ, and when you look, and look, and look into another person’s eyes you’re—first of all—looking at the most beautiful jewels in the universe.
And if you look down beyond that you see—of course—it’s the most beautiful jewel in the universe because that’s the universe looking at you! We are the eyes of the cosmos so that, in a way, when you look deeply into somebody’s eyes you’re looking deep into yourself and the other person is looking deeply into the same Self which—many-eyed as this mask is many-faced—is looking out everywhere. One energy playing myriads of different parts.
Why? Obviously—it’s perfectly obvious—because if you were God and you knew everything and were in control of everything, you would be bored to death. As I said: it would be like making love to a plastic woman.
Everything would be completely predictable, completely known, completely clear, no mystery, no surprise whatever. Look at it in still another way: the object of our technology is to control the world, to have—as it were—a super-electronic pushbutton universe where we can get anything we want, fulfill any desire simply by pushing a button. You know, you’re Aladdin with the lamp, you rub it, the jinn comes and says, “Salāmu ʿalaykum, I’m your humble servant.
What do you wish?” Anything you want. And after a while that—just as you would in those dreams I described—decide one day to forget that you were dreaming, you would say to the genie of the lamp, “I would like a surprise.” Or God, in the court of heaven, might turn to his vizier and say, “Oh, commander of the faithful, we are bored.” And the vizier of the court would reply, “O king, live forever! But surely, out of the infinitude of your wisdom, you can discover some way of not being bored!” And the king would reply, “Oh vizier, give us a surprise.” You know, that’s the whole basis of the story of the Arabian Nights.
Here was a very powerful sultan who was bored, and therefore he challenged Scheherazade to tell him a new story every night. So that the telling of tales—getting involved in adventures—would never, never end. And that’s—isn’t it; isn’t that the reason why we go to the theater, why we go to the movies?
Because we want to get out of ourselves. We want a surprise, and a surprise means that you have to other yourself. That is to say, there has to enter into your experience some element that is not under your control.
So if our technology were to succeed completely and everything were to be under our control, we should eventually say, “We need a new button.” In all these control buttons we always have to have a button labeled surprise. And just so that it doesn’t become too dangerous we’ll put a time limit on it. Surprise for 15 minutes, for an hour, for a day, for a month, a year… a lifetime.
And then—in the end, when the surprise circuit is finished—we’ll be back in control and we’ll all know where we are, and we’ll heave a sigh of relief. But after a while, we’ll press the button labeled surprise once more. So, then, there’s a curious rhythm to this—if you’ll notice what I’ve been explaining—and this rhythm corresponds to the Hindu idea of the course of time and the way evolution works, and their idea is backwards from ours.
First of all, Hindus think of time as circular, as going ’round. Look at your watch: after all, it goes ’round. But Westerners tend to think of time in a straight line, one-way street.
And we got that idea from the Hebrew religion and from—in particular—St. Augustine. The idea that there is a time of creation, then a course of history which leads up to a final eschatological catastrophe—the end of the world—and after that the judgment in which all things will be put to right, all questions answered, and justice dealt out to everyone according to his merit.
And that’ll be that. Thereafter, the universe will be—in a way—static; there will be the eternally saved and the eternally damned. Now, many of us may not believe that today, but that has been a dominating belief throughout the course of Western history and it has had a tremendously powerful influence on our culture.
But the Hindus think of the world as going ’round, and ’round, and ’round for always and always in a rhythm. And they calculate the rounds in periods that, in Sanskrit, are called kalpas, and each kalpa lasts for 4,320,000 years. [Curator’s note: Buddhist scholars have since determined that a kalpa’s duration is supposed to be magnitudes longer.
As is the case with mythology, they are intended to be illustrative, not literal.] And so a kalpa is the period, or manvantara, during which the world as we know it is manifested. And it is followed by a period also a kalpa long—4,320,000 years—which is called pralaya, and this means “when the world is not manifested anymore.” And these are the days and nights of Brahmā, the Godhead.
During the manvantara—when the world is manifested—Brahmā is asleep, dreaming that he is all us and everything that’s going on. And during the pralaya—which is his day—he’s awake and knows himself (or itself, because it’s beyond sex or anything like that) for who and what he/she/it is. And then, once again, pressed button surprise.
And as—in the course of our dreaming—we would very naturally dream the most pleasant and rapturous dreams first, then get more adventurous and experience and explore the hot dimensions of experience, so in the same way, the Hindus think of a kalpa—of the manifested universe, of the manvantara—as divided into four periods. And these four periods are of different length. The first is the longest and the last the shortest, and they are named in accordance with the throws in the Hindu game of dice.
There are four throws: the throw of four, the throw of three, the throw of two, the throw of one. The throw of four is always the best throw, like the six in our game, and the throw of one the worst throw. Now, therefore, the first throw is called kṛta, and the epoch—the long, long period—for which this throw lasts is called a yuga.
So we’ll translate yuga an “epoch,” and we’ll translate kalpa an “eon.” Now, the word kṛta means “done,” as when we say, “well done!” And that is a period of the world’s existence that we call the golden age, when everything is perfect, done to perfection. When it comes to an end we get treta yuga, that means the throw of three. And in this period of manifestation, something is a little off.
In other words, there’s an element of the uncertain, an element of insecurity, an element of adventure in things. It’s like, you know, a three-legged stool is not as secure as a four-legged one. You’re a little bit more liable to be thrown off balance.
That lasts for a very long time, too, but then we get next what is called dvapara yuga. Dva, that means “two.” And in this period the good and the bad, the pleasurable and the painful are equally balanced. But then—finally, in the end—there comes kali yuga—and this means: kali, the worst throw, the throw one—and this lasts for the shortest time.
And this is the period of manifestation in which the unpleasurable, painful, diabolical principle finally takes over. But notice that it has the shortest innings. In other words, if you add up the periods of years which they assign to all the different yugas you will see that the bad principle only has the stage for about one-third of the time.
And at the end of the kali yuga the myth goes on to say that the great destroyer of the worlds—god manifested as the destructive principle—Shiva does a dance called the Tāṇḍava, and he appears blue-bodied, with ten arms, with lightning and fire appearing from every pore in his skin, and does a dance in which the universe is finally destroyed. There is that moment of cosmic death which is, nevertheless, the waking up of Brahmā, the creator. For as Shiva turns ’round and walks off the stage—seen from behind, he is Brahmā, the creator, the beginning of it all again.
And Viṣṇu—whose mask I have been showing you—is the preserver, that is to say, the going on of it all, the whole state of the Godhead being manifested as many, many faces. So do you see that this is a philosophy of the role of evil in life which is, in a way, rational and merciful? You see, if we thought God is playing with the world—he’s created it for his pleasure—and he has created all these other beings than himself and they go through the most horrible torment… you know, terminal cancer, children being burned with napalm, concentration camps, the Inquisition, the horrors that human beings go through, how is that possibly justifiable under any system where we say, well, some god created it, and if a god didn’t create it and there’s nobody in charge and there’s no rationality to the whole thing, that it’s just a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing, then you’re liable to say the only out is suicide.
It’s a ridiculous system. But suppose it isn’t that. Suppose it’s the kind of thing I’ve described to you.
Supposing that it isn’t that God has all these victims and is pleasing himself, showing off his justice by either rewarding them or punishing them. Supposing it’s quite different from that. Supposing that God is the one playing all the parts, that God is the child being burned to death with napalm.
There is no victim except the victor. All the different roles which are being experienced, all the different feelings which are being felt are being felt by the one who originally desires, decides, wills to go into that very situation. Curiously enough, there’s something parallel to this in Christianity.
Very few people know about it. There’s a passage in St. Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians in which he says a very curious thing: You see, here you have exactly the same process: the idea of God becoming human, suffering all that human beings suffer, even death. And St. Paul is saying let this mind be in you, that is to say, let the same kind of consciousness be in you that was in Jesus Christ—okay, Jesus Christ knew he was God!
Wake up and find out, eventually, who you really are! In our culture, of course, they’ll say you’re crazy or you’re blasphemous, and they’ll either put you in jail or in the nut-house, which is the same thing. But if you wake up in India and you tell your friends and relations “My goodness, I’ve just discovered that I’m God!” they’ll laugh and say, “Oh!
Congratulations! At last, you found out!” Time is a very difficult thing to pin down. There’s a famous saying of St. Augustine of Hippo that when he was asked “What is time?” he said, “I know what it is, but when you ask me I don’t.” And yet it seems absolutely fundamental to our life.
“Time is money,” we say. “I don’t have enough time.” “Time flies.” “Time drags.” And I think we should go into the question of what this is, because in our ordinary common sense we think of time as a one-way motion from the past, through the present, and on into the future. And that carries along with it another impression, which is to say that life moves from the past to the future in such a way that what happens now and what will happen is always the result of what has happened in the past.
In other words, we seem to be driven along. You know, once upon a time it was fashionable in psychology for people to speak of man’s and animal’s instincts; that we had, for example, an instinct for survival, an instinct to make love, and so on. But nowadays that word has become unfashionable and psychologists tend, instead, to use the word drives, and to speak of the need for food as a drive, the need for survival or for sex as drives.
And that’s a very significant word because it’s brought out—isn’t it?—by people who feel driven. I must say, personally, if I feel hungry I don’t feel driven. Also, if I feel lusty I don’t feel driven because I don’t say, “Oh, excuse me, but I have to eat.” Or, “Excuse me, but I need to fulfill my sexual urges; my biological impulses.” I say, “Hooray!” I identify myself with my drives.
They’re me, and I don’t take a passive attitude towards them and apologize for them. So the whole idea of our being driven is connected with the idea of causality, of life moving under the power of the past. And that is so ingrained in our common sense that it’s very difficult to get rid of it.
Because I want to turn the thing ’round completely the other way and say that the past is the result of the present. Let us suppose, just for the sake of example, that this universe started with a big bang, as some cosmologists believe. Now, when that bang happened it was the present, wasn’t it?
And so the universe began in what we will call a now-moment. Then it goes on doing its stuff. And always, when any event that we now call past came into being, came into being in the present and out of the present.
That’s one way of seeing it. But before we get further involved in this, I want to draw your attention to a fallacy in the very common sense idea of causality that events are caused by previous events from which they flow—or result—necessarily. To understand the fallacy of that idea we have to begin by asking: what do you mean by an event?
Let’s take the event of a human being coming into the world. Now, when does that event begin? Does it occur at the moment of parturition, when the baby actually comes out of its mother?
Or does the baby begin at the moment of conception? Or does the baby begin when it was an evil gleam in its father’s eye? Or does a baby begin when the spermatozoa are generated in the father or the ovum in the mother?
Or could you say a baby begins when its father is born, or when its mother is born? All these things can be thought of as beginnings, but we decide for purposes of legal registration that a life begins at the moment of parturition, and that is a purely arbitrary decision. And it has validity only because we all agree about it.
Let me show you the same phenomenon in the dimension of space instead of the dimension of time. Let’s ask: how big is the sun? Are we going to define the sun as limited by the extent of its fire?
That’s one possible definition. But we could equally well define the sphere of the sun by the extent of its heat. We could also define the sphere of the sun by the extent of its light.
And each of these would be reasonable choices, except that it’s rather difficult to keep track of the extent of its light—because we’re inside it—and therefore we have arbitrarily agreed to define the sun by the limit of its visible fire. But you will see by all these analogies that how big a thing is, or how long an event is, is simply a matter of definition. Now, therefore, when—by simple definition for purposes of discussion—we have divided events into certain periods… we’ll say the First World War began in 1914 and it 1918.
Now, actually, all those things which led up to the First World War started long before 1914 and the repercussions of that war have continued long beyond 1918. How are we to distinguish an event from its repercussions? So you will see that because we have divided events from one another in this arbitrary way—we do that, and then we sort of forget we did it.
And then we have a puzzle: how do events lead to each other? Because, you see, in reality there are no separate events! Life moves along like water, and it’s all connected as the source of a river is connected to the mouth and to the ocean.
And all the events—or things—going on are like whirlpools in the stream. Because you go there today and you see a whirlpool. You go there tomorrow and you see a whirlpool.
But it isn’t the same whirlpool because all the water is changing every second. What is happening is not really what we should call a whirlpool but rather a whirlpooling. It is an activity, not a thing.
And indeed, every so-called thing can be called an event. We call, say, a house housing. We call a mat matting.
And we could equally call a cat a catting. So we could say “The catting sat on the matting,” and we would thereby have a world in which there were no things but only events. To give another illustration: a flame is something [where] we say, “There is a flame on the candle.” But it would be more correct to say “There is a flaming on the candle,” because the flame is a stream of hot gas.
Let’s take another amusing example: we say fist, and fist is a noun, and fist looks like a thing. But, suddenly, what happens to the fist when I open my hand? See, I was fisting.