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.
“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.
I invent the word goeswith to indicate organic relationships. And we as human beings, obviously, we gowith an enormous cosmos of geological, botanical, and zoological events. And we are entirely dependent on them, and we cannot treat them as really and truly separate species.
There is really and truly no way of separating out independent things. And this is difficult for people to understand because of our method of motion. A plant is understandable as something growing out of the earth because it’s rooted. But human beings wander about on legs. And we don’t seem so stuck to things as plants do. And therefore we have delusions of separation.
True open-mindedness is what I’ve tried to explain as mental silence, of being able to be completely surprised by reality, and to observe that it is not at all what you thought it was or what you were brought up to believe. And not to be afraid when you suddenly discover the obvious, which is that the real you is not the ego, but the eternal center of the universe.