Changing the way we can experience our self is the most important thing we can do to navigate ecological crisis.
Something important is happening in our world that you are not going to read about in the newspapers. I consider it the most fascinating and hopeful development of our time, and it is one of the reasons I am so glad to be alive today. It has to do with what is occurring to the notion of the self.
The self is the metaphoric construct of identity and agency, the hypothetical piece of turf on which we construct our strategies for survival, the notion around which we focus our instincts for self-preservation, our needs for self-approval, and the boundaries of our self-interest. Something is shifting here.
Widening our self-interest
The conventional notion of the self with which we have been raised and to which we have been conditioned by mainstream culture is being undermined. What Alan Watts called “the skin-encapsulated ego” and Gregory Bateson referred to as “the epistemological error of Occidental civilization’ is being unhinged, peeled off. It is being replaced by wider constructs of identity and self-interest – by what you might call the ecological self or the eco-self, co-extensive with other beings and the life of our planet. It is what I will call “the greening of the self.”
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