Who knows that there is no ego? (audio)

Alan Watts: Who is it that knows there is no ego?

(Decoding Spirituality, 11/29/20) 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 [sankaras, "mental formations"].

And so it’s very important to understand that, in the real universe, there are no things at all. And this startles people, because we think of the universe as the sum total of things. But when you go into the question, “What do 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’ll say, “You’ve just substituted another word. That doesn’t tell me anything.” Or they could 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. Well, she was getting warm. A thing is a think. It’s almost the same word. It’s a unit of thought [citta, "thought moment," which form the stream of consciousness] 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 thing-ify.

And A. N. Whitehead used to talk about the fallacy of misplaced concretion -- thing-ifying 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 [be] a group, a society.