Western science has made nature intelligible in terms of its symmetries and regularities, analyzing its most wayward forms into components of a regular and measurable shape. As a result, we tend to see nature and to deal with it as an “order” from which the element of spontaneity has been “screened out.” But this order is maya, and the “true suchness” of things has nothing in common with the purely conceptual aridities of perfect squares, circles, or triangles—except by spontaneous accident. Yet this is why the Western mind is dismayed when ordered conceptions of the universe break down, and when the basic behavior of the physical world is found to be a “principle of uncertainty.” We find such a world meaningless and inhuman, but familiarity with Chinese and Japanese art forms might lead us to an altogether new appreciation of this world in its living, and finally unavoidable, reality.
— The Way of Zen by Alan Watts (Part 2, Chapter 4)
