I've been reading Alan Watts' "the way of Zen" recently and this point forms a strong central pillar of his explanation. What we think of as our mind or our sel

I've been reading Alan Watts' "the way of Zen" recently and this point forms a strong central pillar of his explanation. What we think of as our mind or our self, the conscious mind, seems to be basically a paper thin director on top of all the real functionality which is much more powerful and evolutionarily much older. Relatedly, our use of language to describe and identify things and phenomena falls prey to the map-territory relation in a way that can warp our thinking. But I can't do his explanations justice, I can only recommend picking up the book if you're interested in these kinds of cognitive paradoxes.