Non-dual Ecopsychology

[Guest guest]

Through thousands of years of anthropocentric conditioning, absorbed by

osmosis since the day we were born, we have inherited shallow, fictitious

selves, and have created an incredibly pervasive illusion of separation from

nature.

 

A century ago Freud discovered that many of the symptoms of his patients

could be traced to repressed sexual material. However, our sexuality is only

the tip of the mighty repression of our very organic nature.

 

The reason why psychology is sterile and most therapy doesn't work is that

the "self" that mainstream psychologies describe and purport to heal doesn't

exist. It is a social fiction. In reality the human personality exists at

the intersection of the ancient cycles of air and water and soil. Without

these there is no self and any attempt to heal the personality that doesn't

acknowledge this fundamental fact is doomed to failure. There is no "self"

without air and water and soil. Incredible amounts of energy go into futile

attempts to heal what is really a fictitious self while our actual,

ecological self suffocates.

 

Some of the best thinking on Ecopsychology comes from the neo-Jungian James

Hillman. In his "100 Years of Psychotherapy and the World's Getting Worse",

Hillman blames a lot of the social and environmental problems that we face

on the fact that the people who should be out there changing the world are

in therapy instead. They treat their pain as a symptom of a personal

pathology rather than as a goad to political action to bring about social

change. Therapists create patients instead of citizens.

 

People are willing to die by the millions in defense of one social fiction

after another - a religion or political system or ideology. Yet attacks on

the Earth which gave rise to all of these and without which none could

exist, leave us numb.

 

Because we haven't learned to identify with the living Earth, She fails to

ignite in us anything near the passion and commitment that some of her

lesser works manage to do. Though we are born, live and die in her, we have

made ourselves unconscious of this. As Woody Allen said: "The Earth and I

are two."

 

 

"As long as the environment is "out there", we may leave it to some

special interest group like environmentalists to protect while we look after

our "selves". The matter changes when we deeply realise that the nature

"out there" and the nature "in here" are one and the same, that the sense of

separation no matter how pervasive, is nonetheless totally illusory. I would

call the need for such realisation the central psychological or spiritual

challenge of our age. "

 

 

John Seed, On Ecopsychology

(http://www.gn.apc.org/schumachercollege/articles/jseed.htm)