We are a product of every soul that has touched us

An excerpt from a book by Alan Watts has a message in it which resembles a thought that has been meandering in my mind for a while. It explicates the idea that the thoughts and emotions we carry are not our own. This is a truth I have worn on my sleeve ever since I've been in touch with my thoughts and memories. I often marvel at how I have been moulded by each soul I have ever contacted; quirks relating to my slang and tone of voice, to how I fashion my hair; it all was influenced by the environment I traversed through. But we're often blind to it, or cogitate the emotions with a lag. I just wanted to point out that we are a product of our environment, both mentally and physically, as if we're all just a network of veins and arteries in a huge body called Earth. And once we're all able to digest this philosophy, humanity can start progressing through a tiny step called empathy.

“We seldom realize, for example, that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society. We copy emotional reactions from our parents, learning from them that excrement is supposed to have a disgusting smell and that vomiting is supposed to be an unpleasant sensation. The dread of death is also learned from their anxieties about sickness and from their attitudes to funerals and corpses. Our social environment has this power just because we do not exist apart from a society. Society is our extended mind and body. 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.” ~ Alan Watts (The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are)

#Philosophy #AlanWatts #Society #Politics