Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are? by Alan Watts
A classic from philosopher Alan Watts in his epic "The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are" described
our situation, our human condition, this 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 in which we feel and conceive ourselves as human beings, our sensation of being
alive, of individual existence and identity. We suffer from a 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 a 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 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."