MAN

“This is not what you might call a fatalistic or deterministic idea. You see, you might be a fatalist if you think that you are a sort of puppet which life pushes around. You are separate from life, but life dominates you. That’s fatalism. But in the point of view I am expressing, the real you is not a puppet which life pushes around. The real deep down you is the whole universe, and it is doing your living organism and all of its behavior, it’s expressing it as a singer sings a song. We have been hoodwinked into the feeling that we exist only inside our skins, and that is a hallucination. It is just as nutty as anybody could be, like a fruitcake, you know, who thinks he is Napoleon or something another, thinks he is a poached egg and goes around finding a piece of toast to sit on. It is just like that, a hallucination. And I was showing how we need to experience ourselves in such a way that we could say that our real body is not just what is inside the skin but our whole total external environment. Because, if we do not experience ourselves that way, we mistreat our environment. We treat it as an enemy. We try to beat it into submission, and if we do that, comes disaster. We exploit the world we live in, we do not treat it with love and gentleness and respect. We cut down millions of acres of forests to turn it into newspaper, of all things. Lovely trees turned into information about nothing, and we do not replace them properly. We kick the world around in revenge for feeling that really we are puppets which the world kicks around.”
– alan watts