Introduction

Most of the things that we experience, we regard as things that happen to us, which we ourselves do not originate. If there's a thunderstorm or an earthquake, well it happens to you're not responsible for it. And this way of looking at the world in this sort of passive mood goes right down to our general feeling about life. As Westerners we have been accustomed to look at human existence as a precarious event in a cosmos that on the whole is depicted as being completely unsympathetic and alien to our existence.