Alan watts

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 If we do not even know how we manage to be conscious and intelligent, it is most rash to assume that we know what the role of conscious intelligence will be, and still more that it is competent to order the world. 

It is this very ignorance of and, indeed, estrangement from ourselves which explains our feeling of isolation from nature. 

We are, as it were, cut asunder into a confined centre of attentiveness, which is ‘ I ’, and a vast organic complexity which we know only in terms of indescribable and disquieting feelings, or abstract biological technicalities : and this is ‘ myself’

the scientist, despite his theoretical naturalism, tends to regard nature, human and otherwise, as a world to be conquered and reordered, to be made subject to the technology of the rational intellect, which has somehow disowned and shaken off its roots in the very organism it now presumes to improve. 

In practice, the technical, rational consciousness is as alien to the natural man as was the supernatural soul. For both alike, nature and the natural man is an object, studied always by a technique which makes it external and therefore different from the subjective observer.

 For when no knowledge is held to be respectable which is not objective knowledge, what we know will always seem to be not ourselves, not the subject. 

Thus we have the feeling of knowing things only from the outside, never from within, of being confronted eternally with a world of impenetrable surfaces within surfaces within surfaces.

For the scientist, despite his theoretical naturalism, tends to regard nature, human and otherwise, as a world to be conquered and reordered, to be made subject to the technology of the rational intellect, which has somehow disowned and shaken off its roots in the very organism it now presumes to improve. 

In practice, the technical, rational consciousness is as alien to the natural man as was the supernatural soul. For both alike, nature and the natural man is an object, studied always by a technique which makes it external and therefore different from the subjective observer. 

For when no knowledge is held to be respectable which is not objective knowledge, what we know will always seem to be not ourselves, not the subject. 

Thus we have the feeling of knowing things only from the outside, never from within, of being confronted eternally with a world of impenetrable surfaces within surfaces within surfaces.

it becomes clearer and clearer that we do not live in a divided world. 

The harsh divisions of spirit and nature, mind and body, subject and object, controller and controlled, are seen more and more to be awkward conventions of language. misleading and clumsy terms for describing a world in which 

all events seem to be mutually interdependent — an immense complexity of subtly balanced relationships .