The existent is a bundle of five parallel processes. What binds them is an instinctive repulsion against pain. Taking pain seriously was the chief pathology identified by the Buddha. His remedy was to point out that the victim of the pain is in concept both a unity and static, but in empirical presentation “it” is a plurality, unified only by name, and changing all the way down, so that prospective substances dissolves as well. The mystical unity demanded by the grammatical subject is both (1) a condition for taking pain seriously and (2) empirically absent. Merely combining these two facts was the Buddha’s contribution to the august tradition of analytic or axiomatically economical theory-making. The less the theorist presumes, and the more empirical data he accounts for, the better the theory. This is also exactly our attitude today towards theories we recognize as properly scientific. It is encapsulated by Ernst Mach’s Principle of Economy, his formulation of Occam’s razor —

• Principle of Economy: Scientists must use the simplest means of arriving at their results and exclude everything not perceived by the senses.

The elements are empirical are the most real, for they have the reality which belongs only to the overwhelm of sensation, a magnitude of intensity that cannot be imagined away. And the relations that link them in various ways, such as contiguity and causality? These bits are actually spurts of subjective activity. These are empirical absent as given, but present when we perform the act (for all act is empirical, indeed the most empirical—cf. Galen Strawson). When elements are real but relations are not, the result is dissolution.