[W]hat is ordinarily felt as the wayward, unpredictable, dangerous, and even hostile world - including one's capricious emotions and inner feelings -… - Alan Watts

In having a flawed sense of identity, we act in a way that is inappropriate to our natural environment.

"The British and the Western Europeans in general, as well as the North Americans, waste the space of their homes with these rooms for ludicrously vast sleeping-machines — some with four pillars and a roof, some with iron fences at each end, topped with brass balls, and some with mahogany headboards whose function I have never yet understood. I would rather follow the Turkish proverb that "he who sleeps on the floor will not fall out of bed." In sum, I despise all furniture as monstrous, heavy, space-greedy, expensive, and pretentious."

Thought and science are therefore raising problems which their terms of study can never answer, many of which are doubtless problems only for thought. The trisection of an angle is similarly an insoluble problem only for compass and straight-edge construction, and Achilles cannot overtake the tortoise so long as their progress is considered piecemeal, endlessly having the distance between them. However, as it is not Achilles but the method of measurement which fails to catch up with the tortoise, so it is not man but his method of thought which fails to find fulfillment in experience.