Earth Spirit Dreaming: Shamanic Ecotherapy Practices - Elizabeth E. Meacham 2020

A Shifting Sense of Self: From Separation to Care and Connection
Everything Is Connected: A Brief Introduction to Visionary Environmental Thought
Introduction

Our actions emanate from who we think we are. Our sense of ourselves, our beliefs about our SELF, are so ingrained that we rarely stop to examine them. Even if we do take the time to explore our beliefs about ourselves, many of the most basic assumptions and values that underlie our experience are not visible to us; they are deeply embedded in the historical and cultural belief systems of our families, communities and nations. These matrices of beliefs intersect with, and offer avenues to express, instinctual needs, longings and desires. These belief systems change over time, albeit usually quite slowly.

It is argued by many Western environmental thinkers that our current psychological and ethical stance toward the biosphere and other species is evolving, shifting the ingrained Western sense of a separate, delineated self. Specifically, the idea that human needs should come before the needs of the natural world and other species is no longer assumed. The idea that Western people are superior to the Earth, human “others,” other creatures and natural cycles is changing. Increasingly, in public discourse, it is no longer presumed that the natural world is something to be used primarily to human advantage. The ethics of human rights are an important legacy of the 20th century. Environmental thinkers broaden this concern to consider the possibility of “rights” for natural beings, species, ecosystems and the planet.

Ecotheologian and historian Thomas Berry is a fulcrum point of the environmental ideas that I discuss in this chapter. He offered a now famous readjustment of Western thinking that captures the evolution of the idea of the Western “self,” as well as the dominant ethical stance toward nature. One of his most famous ideas, repeated throughout his work, captures with profound wisdom and simplicity the shift that is required to heal our relationship with the Earth community; he suggests that to transform into an ecological age, we must begin to see the world as a communion of subjects, rather than a collection of objects.

Here is an example of Berry’s use of this phrase from his book, The Great Work: “These spontaneities express the inner value of each being in such a manner that we must say of the universe that it is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.”¹⁵ Berry’s work quickens the heart and stirs the soul to rediscover the beauty of the Earth. Like Emerson and the American transcendentalists, Berry is committed to translating an Earth ethic through the sublime. Though Berry’s work isn’t the beginning or the end of visionary environmental thought, his work moves the field toward an ethic of care for the Earth by acknowledging the sacred awe required to care for all of life.¹⁶

In Western culture, we begin learning that the world is a “collection of objects”¹⁷ from a very young age. This is a result of the defining Cartesian/Newtonian mechanistic worldview that has dominated Western consciousness for more than 400 years. The Western SELF, in this framework, is a separate entity existing in a world of separate entities. I am reminded of an example from my son’s early years that illustrates the mechanistic worldview quite well. At the age of three, my son said to my husband, “What is the universe made of?” My husband answered, “Atoms, molecules, electrons, tiny units of energy.” I said, “That is what we learned in school, but is it really true?” Though it was likely annoying for my husband, I suggested that we could view the world instead as made up of interacting relationships of energy, another idea we learn in school. Why do we tend to focus on the separate entities that we believe to be the “building blocks” of the universe rather than the energetic relationships between them?

Another way to answer this kind of question is to focus on a relational model of reality: not to describe the individual parts, but to focus on the relationships and interactions that make up our world and the universe. What this story illustrates is our ingrained tendency, in Western cultures, to experience ourselves and understand reality as a “collection of objects,” or in other words, from an atomistic perspective. The reason we do this is a long and complex story that requires grappling with the history of Western thought (which is beyond the scope of this book). Suffice to say, for the moment, that our Western belief structures give us the impression that we are separate individual “selves” moving around and among separate individual “selves.” It comes as a surprise to many people indoctrinated into Western thinking that not all people on the Earth experience their “selves” this way. In fact, the notion of a separate self is only one way of experiencing life, which has pluses, and many minuses.

Delving into environmental thought and spirituality provides alternative perspectives for understanding our “selves” in relationship with others, the world and the cosmos. To face the challenges of our age, we need methods for developing new beliefs and patterns of living through the wisdom that is available by reconnecting with the Earth community. Environmental thinkers provide one path to these new ways of thinking and being by helping us understand our connections with all of life. As one of the early thinkers in Western environmental thought, Ralph Waldo Emerson championed the essential spiritual experience of nature as the core of an ethical relationship to the land. These famous words from his essay, “Nature,” capture this well:

Standing on the bare ground, my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God...

I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature. (Nature, 1836, 10)¹⁸