The self-conscious feedback mechanism of the cortex allows us the
hallucination that we are two souls in one body—a rational soul and an animal
soul, a rider and a horse, a good guy with better instincts and finer feelings
and a rascal with rapacious lusts and unruly passions. Hence the marvelously
involved hypocrisies of guilt and penitence, and the frightful cruelties of
punishment, warfare, and even self-torment in the name of taking the side of
the good soul against the evil. The more it sides with itself, the more the good soul reveals its
inseparable shadow, and the more it disowns its shadow, the more it becomes it.
Yet the very society from which the individual is inseparable is using its whole irresistible force to persuade the individual that he is indeed separate! Society as we now know it is therefore playing a game with self-contradictory rules. Just because we do not exist apart from the community, the community is able to convince us that we do—that each one of us is an independent source of action with a mind of its own. The more successfully the community implants this feeling, the more trouble
it has in getting the individual to cooperate, with the result that children raised in such an environment are almost permanently confused.
Yet the very society from which the individual is inseparable is using its whole irresistible force to persuade the individual that he is indeed separate! Society as we now know it is therefore playing a game with self-contradictory rules. Just because we do not exist apart from the community, the community is able to convince us that we do—that each one of us is an independent source of action with a mind of its own. The more successfully the community implants this feeling, the more trouble
it has in getting the individual to cooperate, with the result that children raised in such an environment are almost permanently confused.
To be sure, Watts doesn’t dismiss the mind as a worthless or fundamentally perilous human faculty. Rather, he insists that it if we let its unconscious wisdom unfold unhampered — like, for instance, what takes place during the “incubation” stage of unconscious processing in the creative process — it is our ally rather than our despot. It is only when we try to control it and turn it against itself that problems arise:
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