In her book Quantum Self, Donar Zohar states that in this century we have been plagued by an alienation between consciousness and matter,  a sense that we are strangers in this world.  She traces these roots back to Plato’s distinction between the realm of ideas and experience, Christianity’s favouring of the soul over the body (or at the cost of the body as somehow a vessel for sin), and the 17th Century philosophical and scientific revolution which brought in Cartesian doubt and Newtonian physics.  The living cosmos of the Greek and mediaeval times in which the universe is filled with mystery, intelligence and purpose, was replaced by the sense of the universe as a clockwork machine.