The Practice of the Wild - Gary Snyder

Our bodies are wild. The involuntary quick turn of the head at a
shout, the vertigo at looking off a precipice, the heart-in-the-throat
in a moment of danger, the catch of the breath, the quiet moments
relaxing, staring, reflecting—all universal responses of this mammal body. They can be seen throughout the class. The body does
not require the intercession of some conscious intellect to make
it breathe, to keep the heart beating. It is to a great extent selfregulating, it is a life of its own. Sensation and perception do not exactly come from outside, and the unremitting thought and imageflow are not exactly outside. The world is our consciousness, and it
surrounds us. There are more things in mind, in the imagination,
than "you" can keep track of—thoughts, memories, images, angers, delights, rise unbidden. The depths of mind, the unconscious,
are our inner wilderness areas, and that is where a bobcat is right now.
I do not mean personal bobcats in personal psyches, but the bobcat
that roams from dream to dream. The conscious agenda-planning
ego occupies a very tiny territory, a little cubicle somewhere near the
gate, keeping track of some of what goes in and out (and sometimes
making expansionistic plots), and the rest takes care of itself. The
body is, so to speak, in the mind. They are both wild.
Some will say, so far so good. "We are mammal primates. But we
have language, and the animals don't." By some definitions perhaps
they don't. But they do communicate extensively, and by call systems we are just beginning to grasp.
It would be a mistake to think that human beings got "smarter"
at some point and invented first language and then society. Language and culture emerge from our biological-social natural existence, animals that we were/are. Language is a mind-body system
that coevolved with our needs and nerves.