The extension of man’s control over nature might metaphorically be described as a mental eating up of the universe. And as a result of this process, the organization of human life, its systems of communication and systems of control, are extended more and more and more in just the same way, for example, that by assimilating the minerals out of the soil and the rays out of the sunlight, a plant like a fern grows and grows and grows and extends its form. And in this way its organization prevails.
If you take this task of what we call the conquest of nature—the task of making order victorious over chaos or randomness—if you take this seriously, you will look upon it as warfare and you will firmly believe that the most urgent thing that there possibly can be is to make order prevail over randomness, to make good prevail over evil, to make life prevail over death.
When we experience the world around us, we identify with the subject, the knower. We don’t identify with what we see. But, as a matter of fact, if there is nothing seen, there is no experience of the seer. If there is no seer, there is no experience of anything seen. They both go together in the same way as the black and the white.
