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 … We do not “come into” this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree … The first result of this illusion is that our attitude to the world “outside” us is largely hostile … 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.
-Alan Watts
