“What people do out of fear of irrational elements in themselves as well as in other people is to put tools and mechanics between themselves and the unconscious world.

This protects them from being grasped by the frightening and threatening aspects of irrational experience. I am saying nothing whatever, I am sure it will be understood, against technology or techniques or mechanics in themselves.

What I am saying is that the danger always exists that our technology will serve as a buffer between us and nature, a block between us and the deeper dimensions of our own experience.

Tools and techniques ought to be an extension of consciousness, but they can just as easily be a protection from consciousness. Then tools become defense mechanisms—specifically against the wider and more complex dimensions of consciousness that we call the unconscious.

Our mechanisms and technology then make us “uncertain in the impulses of the spirit,” as the physicist Heisenberg puts it.”