caught in our own net

And some more relevent passages from Alan Watts's The Book (the key points are in bold):

"Apart from such human artifacts as buildings and roads, our universe, including ourselves, is thoroughly wiggly. It's features are wiggly in both shape and conduct. Clouds, mountains, plants, rivers, animals, coastlines- all wiggle. They wiggle so much and in so many different ways that no one can really make out where one eiggle begins and another ends, whether in space or in time. Some French classicist of the eighteenth century complained that the creator had seriously fallen down on he job by failing to arrange the stars wit hany elegent symmetry, for they seem to be sprayed through space like the droplets from a breaking wave... Millinnia ago, some genius discovered that such wiggles as rabits and fishes could be caught in nets. Much later, some other genius thought of catching the world in a net. The net has cut the big world into little wiggles, all contained in squares of the same size. Order has been imposed on chaos. We can now say that the wiggle goes so many squares to the left, so many to the right, so many up, or so many down, and at last we have its number. Centuries later, the same image of the net was imposed upon the world as the lines of both celestial and terrestrial latitude and longitude, as graph paper for plotting mathematical wiggles, as pigeonholes for filing, and the ground plan for cities. The net has thus become one of the presiding images of human thought. But it is always an image, and just as no one can use the equator to tie up a package, the ral wiggly world slips like water throug hour imaginary nets. However much we divide, count, or classify this wiggling into particular things and events, this is no more than a way of thinking about the world: it is never actually divided."

"We have quite forgotten that both "matter" and "meter" are alike derived from the Sanskrit root matr-, "to measure," and that the "material" world means no more than the world as measured or measurable- by such abstract images as nets or matrices, inches, seconds, grams, and decibles."

"Today, scientists are more and more aware of what things are, and what they are doing, depends on where and when they are doing it. If, then, the definition of a thing or event must include definition of its environment, we realize that any given thing goes with a given environment so intimately and inseperably that it is more difficult to draw a clear boundary between the thing and its surroundings. This was the grain of truth in the primitave and unreliable scienceof astrology- as there were also grains of truth in alchemy, herbal medicine, and other primitive sciences. For when the astrologer draws a picture of a person's character or soul, he draws a hororscope- that is, a very rough and incomplete picture of the whole universe as it stood at the moment of that person's birth. But this is at the same time a vivid way of saying that your soul, or rather your essential Self, is the whole cosmos as it is centered around the particular time, place, and activity called John Doe. Thus the soul is not in the body, bu the body in the soul, and the soul is the entire network of relationships and proccesses which make up your environment, and apart from which you are nothing. A scientific astrology, if it could ever be worked out, would have to be a thorough description of the individual's total environment- social, biological, botanical, meteorological, and astronomical- throughout every moment of his life. But as things are, we define (and so come to feel) the individual in the light of our narrowed "spotlight" conscioussness which largely ignores the field or environment in which he is found. "Individual" is the Latin form of the Greek "atom" - that which cannot be cut or divided any further into seperate parts. We cannot chop off a person's head or remove his heart without killing him. But we can kill him just as effectively by seperating him from his proper environment. This implies that the only true atom is the universe- that total system of interdependent "thing-events" which can be seperated from each other only in name... Head, neck, heart, lungs, brain, veins, muscles, and glands are seperate names but not seperate events... In precisely the same way the individual is seperate from his universal environment only in name. When this is not recognized, you have been fooled by your name. Confusing names with nature, you come to believe that having a seperate name makes you a seperate being. This is -rather literally- to be spellbound."