I think that was the point in “The Book: On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are” . Alan Watts 1966
I read it in the late 70’s; it did my head in.
A few Quotes:
“Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
“Irrevocable commitment to any religion is not only intellectual suicide; it is positive unfaith because it closes the mind to any new vision of the world. Faith is, above all, openness - an act of trust in the unknown.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
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 thatexcrement 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 Wilson Watts, The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are