Man has to realize that he is an integral part of nature.
People in psychiatry complain about the hallucinatory states induced by LSD and so on and so forth, but they are nothing—they are nothing!—in their hallucinations compared with the hallucination of being a skin-encapsulated ego.
You have to treat the external world as if it were as much you as your own foot or your own head. It’s part of you. It is you. There’s no way of separating them.
The root of this kind of disturbance—of feeling that you are separate inside your skin and not simply all one process with everything that’s going on around you—the root of this is a failure of communication.
Alongside the physical universe of people and everything that’s going on there is another universe that we have invented—of words and signs and numbers—that represent the physical world. And we are very, very preoccupied with this symbolic world, and we very often confuse it with what it represents.
You’re functioning all the time—breathing, beating your heart, even driving a car while you’re absorbed in conversation with your friendly passenger—you’re doing an enormous number of things very well indeed without noticing what you’re doing. Your entire physical existence, as a matter of fact, goes on and maintains itself without your noticing anything about it.
This organism is related to the world outside it in exactly the same way that, say, a whirlpool in a river is related to the river. Everything outside you is sort of creating you by flowing through you and human-ing, body-ing; just as, when the river moves, it whirlpools and then goes on. So the entire physical universe is peopleing all around here, you see?
Every nerve end in your body is alive and aware, every organ is functioning without your thinking about it. And that’s you.
Our modern systems of communication are an extension into the external world of man’s nervous system. Telephones, telegraph, radio, television: all this network of electronic devices is extending our nervous system in the same way as a wheel extends our feet.