"Joyous Cosmology by Alan Watts" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watts Alan)

the very unsatisfactory joining of two concepts which have both been
impoverished by long separation and opposition. But we are at least
within sight of being able to discard altogether ideas of a stuff which
is mental and a stuff which is material. "Stuff" is a word which
describes the formless mush that we perceive when sense is not keen
enough to make out its pattern. The notion of material or mental stuff
is based on the false analogy that trees are made of wood, mountains of
stone, and minds of spirit in the same way that pots are made of clay.
"Inert" matter seems to require an external and intelligent energy to
give it form. But now we know that matter is not inert. Whether it is
organic or inorganic, we are learning to see matter as patterns of
energy---not of energy as if energy were a stuff, but as energetic
pattern, moving order, active intelligence.

The realization that mind and body, form and matter, are one is
blocked, however, by ages of semantic confusion and psychological
prejudice. For it is common sense that every pattern, shape, or
structure is a form of something as pots are forms of clay. It is hard
to see that this "something" is as dispensable as the ether in which
light was once supposed to travel, or as the fabulous tortoise upon
which the earth was once thought to be supported. Anyone who can really
grasp this point will experience a curiously exhilarating liberation,
for the burden of stuff will drop from him and he will walk less
heavily.

The dualism of mind and body arose, perhaps, as a clumsy way of
describing the power of an intelligent organism to control itself. It
seemed reasonable to think of the part controlled as one thing and the
part controlling as another. In this way the conscious will was opposed
to the involuntary appetites and reason to instinct. In due course we
learned to center our identity, our selfhood, in the controlling
part---the mind--- and increasingly to disown as a mere vehicle the
part controlled. It thus escaped our attention that the organism as a
whole, largely unconscious, was using consciousness and reason to
inform and control itself. We thought of our conscious intelligence as
descending from a higher realm to take possession of a physical
vehicle. We therefore failed to see it as an operation of the same
formative process as the structure of nerves, muscles, veins, and
bones---a structure so subtly ordered (that is, intelligent) that
conscious thought is as yet far from being able to describe it.

This radical separation of the part controlling from the part
controlled changed man from a self-controlling to a self- frustrating
organism, to the embodied conflict and self-contradiction that he has
been throughout his known history. Once the split occurred conscious
intelligence began to serve its own ends instead of those of the
organism that produced it. More exactly, it became the intention of the
conscious intelligence to work for its own, dissociated, purposes. But,
as we shall see, just as the separation of mind from body is an
illusion, so also is the subjection of the body to the independent