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

schemes of the mind. Meanwhile, however, the illusion is as real as the
hallucinations of hypnosis, and the organism of man is indeed
frustrating itself by patterns of behavior which move in the most
complex vicious circles. The culmination is a culture which ever more
serves the ends of mechanical order as distinct from those of organic
enjoyment, and which is bent on self-destruction against the instinct
of every one of its members.

We believe, then, that the mind controls the body, not that the body
controls itself through the mind. Hence the ingrained prejudice that
the mind should be independent of all physical aids to its
working---despite microscopes, telescopes, cameras, scales, computers,
books, works of art, alphabets, and all those physical tools apart from
which it is doubtful whether there would be any mental life at all. At
the same time there has always been at least an obscure awareness that
in feeling oneself to be a separate mind, soul, or ego there is
something wrong. Naturally, for a person who finds his identity in
something other than his full organism is less than half a man. He is
cut off from complete participation in nature. Instead of being a body
he "has" a body. Instead of living and loving he "has" instincts for
survival and copulation. Disowned, they drive him as if they were blind
furies or demons that possessed him.

The feeling that there is something wrong in all this revolves around a
contradiction characteristic of all civilizations. This is the
simultaneous compulsion to preserve oneself and to forget oneself. Here
is the vicious circle: if you feel separate from your organic life, you
feel driven to survive; survival---going on living---thus becomes a
duty and also a drag because you are not fully with it; because it does
not quite come up to expectations, you continue to hope that it will,
to crave for more time, to feel driven all the more to go on. What we
call self-consciousness is thus the sensation of the organism
obstructing itself, of not being with itself, of driving, so to say,
with accelerator and brake on at once. Naturally, this is a highly
unpleasant sensation, which most people want to forget.

The lowbrow way of forgetting oneself is to get drunk, to be diverted
with entertainments, or to exploit such natural means of
self-transcendence as sexual intercourse. The highbrow way is to throw
oneself into the pursuit of the arts, of social service, or of
religious mysticism. These measures are rarely successful because they
do not disclose the basic error of the split self. The highbrow ways
even aggravate the error to the extent that those who follow them take
pride in forgetting themselves by purely mental means---even though the
artist uses paints or sounds, the social idealist distributes material
wealth, and the religionist uses sacraments and rituals, or such other
physical means as fasting, yoga breathing, or dervish dancing. And
there is a sound instinct in the use of these physical aids, as in the
repeated insistence of mystics that to know about God is not enough:
transformation of the self is only through realizing or feeling God.