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In an attempt to insulate ourselves from danger and pain, our anthropocentric culture coaxes us into a psychological survival strategy which involves constructing, identifying with, and inhabiting the constricted and impermeable boundaries of a supposedly separate and detached self. The foreclosure of the boundaries of a constricted self isolates and alienates the self from others and from the world, shackling, restricting, and perverting the full and natural experience of our sense of care, compassion, and connection. Habitually experiencing ourselves as separate, we are denied the fullness of the experience of our whole selves, and we strive in vain to fill up the resulting vague sense of emptiness and discontent. Further, this sense of alienation from nature inevitably leads to the possibility of devastating effects for nature. A description of the experience of "self as part of nature" is presented and elaborated using results from phenomenological research on the structure of this experience: The grip of exclusive identification with one"s habitual, constricted sense of self is relaxed, allowing one"s self to reinhabit genuine but habitually vacated regions of self, to reemerge from its supposed separateness and extend its relatedness out into what was formerly lived as dissociated aspects of self. The core constituents involve the simultaneous unfolding of the transcendence of the habitual constricted sense of self, an increase in permeability of self boundaries and sense of intermingling connectedness, and a transcendent psychological identification with a profound sense of wholeness of self-in-relation with the rest of nature. The contentions of Deep Ecology are supported: The experience fosters a more ecocentric identity, profoundly inclining one toward care and compassion toward the natural world. This experience is found to be of the transpersonal type, a necessary, but often lacking, compliment to the personally based form of identification.

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4614-9619-9_8

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