In the Buddha’s system there are no such things as worlds in themselves. A world is nothing but the summation of the single processes of which it is made up, just as a banquet is nothing but the summation of the guests and the ingredients of the feast. As birds flock together because there is something present that attracts them in large numbers; as crows gather round a mango-stone; as a saline solution from the centre of shock outwards proceeds to crystallize; so does this unitary experience, whether it manifest itself in organic or non-organic shape, conglobate into cosmic groups, burst into systems of worlds. Here one must hold to it firm and fast that “non-organic” is not the converse of “organic,” but is simply the not organic, and an indication that energies are here concerned upon which we ourselves even by analogy can say nothing.[34] For the rest, however, all is the same--all is the self-interweaving of energy and material--all is Sankhāra. Whether the processes are of such a nature as in the course of their development to permit of flowering forth into consciousness or whether they are not--this makes no essential difference. When the Buddha says: “The arising of the world will I teach you,” and then proceeds with his sequence of thought: “Where the eye and forms are, there arises visual consciousness; the conjunction of the three results is contact; contact yields feeling,” and so on; or when he says: “The world is where the six senses are”--this is not meant in the philosophical idealistic sense. There is no arising of the world other than that experienced at every moment as a self-interweaving of energy and material in me, in every being, in every process in the world. _The summation of this individual experience--that is the world._ Other world there is not. This moment that now says “_I_”--this is the arising of the world, and never and nowhere in all the universe does it take place otherwise. As eater, as self-nourisher, I am _world-maker_ in the strictest sense of the word. In this actual world nothing new arises. Centres of tension, tendencies, shift about hither and thither, heave up and down like mist-wreaths over the dark depths of unfathomable abysses--a beginningless coming together, a beginningless falling asunder, in which nothing persists save the never-sated thirst, the ever-sleepless lust for food. It is the terrible game “law” that here is played. Worlds, the arena; fates, the players; and the prize--nothing!