Part of the difficulty seems to be that we educate a style of consciousness which ignores whatever is a constant sensation. Consciousness is ever upo… - Alan Watts

For the individual is almost universally unaware that he has learned to confuse himself with a political and legal fiction, a theory of the individual without physical or biological foundation. His identity is thus a construct built up through years of self-dramatization between himself and his associates, that is, a purely artificial status or role. It is this role which he mistakes for his essential self and that he fears to lose in death, And because the role defines him as a separate individual and an independent agent, his identification with it blinds him to his union with the external world.

Man can never understand his freedom while he regards himself as the mere instrument of fate or while he limits his freedom to whatever he his ego can do to snatch from life the prizes which it desires. To be free man must see himself and life as a whole, not as active power and passive instrument but as two aspects of a single activity.

Here, then, is the genesis of two of the most important historical premises of Western science. The first is that there is a law of nature, an order of things and events awaiting our discovery, and that this order can be formulated in thought, that is, in words or in some type of notation. The second is that the law of nature is universal, a premise deriving from monotheism, from the idea of one God ruling the whole world.