CONQUERING THE NATURE OR COOPERATING WITH IT?
COMING INTO THIS WORLD, OR OUT OF IT?
THE ILLUSION OF BEING ISOLATED EGO IN THE BAG OF SKIN.
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“But the problem of man and technics is almost always stated in the
wrong way. It is said that humanity has evolved one-sidedly, growing
in technical power without any comparable growth in moral integrity,
or, as some would prefer to say, without comparable progress in
education and rational thinking. Yet the problem is more basic. The
root of the matter is the way which we feel and conceive ourselves as
human beings, our sensation of being alive, of individual existence
and identity. We suffer from hallucination, from a false and
distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms. Most of
us have the sensation that “I myself” is a separate center of
feeling and action, living inside and bounded by the physical body –
a center which 'confronts' an 'external' world of people and things,
making contact through the senses with a universe both alien and
strange. Everyday figures of speech reflect this illusion. 'I came
into this world.' 'You must face reality.' 'The conquest of
nature.'
This feeling of being lonely and very temporary visitors in the
universe is in flat contradiction to everything known about man (and
all other living organisms) in the sciences. We do not 'come into'
this world; we come out of it, as leaves from the tree. As the
ocean 'waves', the universe 'peoples'. Every individual is an
expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total
universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most
individuals. Even those who know it to be true in the theory do not
sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated
'egos' inside bags of skin.
The first result of this illusion is that our attitude to the world
'outside' us is largely hostile. We are forever 'conquering' nature,
space, mountains, deserts, bacteria, and insects instead of learning
to cooperate with them in a harmonious order. In America the great
symbols of this conquest are the bulldozer and the rocket- the
instrument that batters the hills into flat tracts for little boxes
made of ticky-tacky and the great phallic projectile that blasts the
sky. (Nonetheless, we have fine architects who know how to fit houses
into hills without ruining the landscape, and astronomers who know
that the earth is already way out in space, and that our first need
for exploring other worlds is sensitive electronic instruments which,
like our eyes, will bring the most distant objects into our own
brains.) (…) The hostile attitude of conquering nature ignores the
basic interdependence of all things and events-that the world beyond
the skin is actually an extension of our own bodies-and will end in
destroying the very environment from which we emerge and upon which
our whole life depends.
The second result of feeling that we are separate minds in an alien,
an mostly stupid, universe is that we have no common sense, no
way of making sense of the world upon which we are agreed in common.
It's just my opinion against yours, and therefore the most aggressive
and violent (and thus insensitive) propagandist makes the decisions.
A muddle of conflicting opinions united by force of propaganda is the
worst possible source of control for a powerful technology.”
SOURCE: Alan
Watts, The
book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, ABACUS,
1966
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