FRONTIERS OF CONSCIOUSNESS: THE PIVOTIAL PSYCHOLOGICAL REALITY OF OUR TIME

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Ready or not, the soul has become a force of nature. Its whims, fantasies, and passions shape life on Earth as inexorably as storms, fires, and ocean currents. The health of the human soul and the vitality of Earth’s living systems are now inextricably intertwined.

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Only a culture that divorces mind and matter, soul and soil, humans and hummus needs semantic glue to connect ecology and psychology. Radical divisions exist in our opinions and fantasies, not in reality. Whilst it seeks to re-establish emotional and physical ties with the natural world because, at its foundation, our mental and physical health rests upon this belonging. In fact, the root word of ecology, oikos, means "home." We eat, breathe, and are made of this earth. We are, each of us, the very stuff of the cosmos. A psychological break in our sense of organic belonging delays and distorts the natural development of wisdom, shatters inner peace, and leaves us vulnerable to mindless consumerism, poor self-esteem, workaholism, and many other social maladies.

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Urban living, where money comes out of machines, apples magically appear in bins, and clean water comes from a pipe, exacerbates this ruptured belonging. In the standard IQ test there is a story about planting a tree, finding worms, and going fishing with a tin of wrigglers. Urban children often fail to piece this story together, because many of them have never planted a tree or dug up a worm, let alone gone on a fun fishing expedition. They have no idea that their lives depend upon healthy worms. This loss in ecological intelligence is, in the long run, fatal.

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Unfortunately, a healthy relationship with nature does not guarantee peace. Hitler was a vegetarian. George Bush loves his ranch in Texas. Martin Luther King most likely never went on a wilderness trip. Genocides occur in stunningly beautiful places. Pre-modern hunters and gatherers had vicious fights. Countless pristine meadows grow over heaped bodies of warriors. “What makes grass grow green?” bark Marine Sergeants to new American military recruits. “Blood! Blood! Blood!” they shout in response.

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Harmony with nature and harmony with each other are not mutual guarantees, but a degraded environment clearly instigates social disharmony, and even total disintegration. We witness this in current food riots around the world, the tragic failed state of Haiti, and the collapse of the Mayan, Anasazi, and Easter Island civilizations. A healthy relationship with the environment will always remain the foundation for lasting peace and the flowering of culture.

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Social and ecological degradation share a key common cause. A lack of genuine empathy underlies all violence in relationships, be they personal, political, or ecological. Wanton violence against each other or the environment indicates a flawed relationship with the “other.” Missing are the bridges that connect each other to a shared reality and destiny. How do we build, or more accurately, how do we become these bridges?

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Tapping the wellspring of traditional shamanism, ecopsychology tends the fertile edges where the ordered conscious world meets what is wild, uncontrollable, and mysterious. Modern ecopsychologists may not use rattles, feathers, and smoke (some do), but they still mediate the relationship between humans and nature in ways that are healing, personal, and transformative.

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Imagine an entomologist delicately holding a tarantula in her palm before an audience of gawking children. Slowly, with a mischievous grin, she places the hairy creature upon the head of a young volunteer who holds perfectly still while his classmates squeal with laughter, delight, and horror. This naturalist does not consider herself a traditional shaman or modern ecopsychologist, yet she fits the mold because she cultivates emotional connection with the utterly “other.” Peacemakers must also bridge worlds and mend broken connections, even when the “other” is perceived as being worse that a hairy spider!

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Those dedicated to building bridges between species or human enemies must have an unquenchable dedication to what is possible, because they tend treacherous and unstable territories between what we are and what we can be. They themselves must have made the journey from limitation to possibility. They must, in their unique ways, become bridges and catalysts.

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This process of embodying connection and interrelatedness is often hard won. Usually one’s own little world must come crashing down before one can make a connection to a larger, more inclusive reality. Sometimes a brush with death, emotional breakdown, or irretrievable loss can become doorways to grace. Tasting the unbearable sweetness of life and experiencing its fragility can awaken humans to new levels of expansive maturity and grounded concern. Only tempered souls and tempered steel can become the stuff of bridges. Enduring and dynamic peace demands that we each, in our own way, do the hard work and undergo the suffering necessary to become bridges between “self” and “other.”

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Building and becoming bridges entails a shift in identity. The aim is to develop an “ecological-self” that is not rigidly bounded by human identity but expands to include air, water, and our larger Earth family of creatures and plants. This soulful and difficult-to-describe expansion may seem mystical, but it is the natural bedrock of mental health in ecopsychology. Over time, an inclusive ecological identity fosters a vibrant capacity to think and feel ecologically, to connect the dots, and to affirm interrelatedness by daily behavior that is respectful of all life. A comparable expansion of identity that is inclusive of all humanity is also necessary to build bridges between peoples in conflict. Inclusive identity softens and dispels instilled prejudices that contaminate, distort, and destroy social relations.

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Expanding one’s identity must be balanced by consistent movement towards intimacy with one’s unique individuality. Identity expansion without attentiveness to the individual self can be psychologically damaging. Self-esteem still matters. An outwardly expanded sense of self demands a counterbalancing journey inward to discover one’s personal calling and deepest, and very personal, affections. Each of us has something unique and vital to contribute to life. Individuality is part of the social and ecological diversity that is vital to the health of all natural systems. Lost personal and cultural eccentricity represents a loss of diversity as harmful and tragic as any extinction.

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Embracing a larger identity while valuing personal uniqueness is also essential to sustaining peace because ecologically expanded and personally grounded individuals are not easily hijacked by or harnessed to the whims of those who seek power only for themselves. They use their noses and read between the lines. They trust their instincts rather than the dictates of others. And they are full of energy. Awakened and quirky individuals make lousy pawns.

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Perhaps most important is that ecologically expansive and internally sovereign people have the capacity to be both strong and vulnerable. They can be trusted with the vulnerability of others. Years ago, I read an essay suggesting that Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and the other leaders participating in Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT II) come to the negotiation table stark naked. Toes curling into plush carpet, bellies tickled by the tablecloth’s tassels, chests breathing rhythmically, bared for all to see. Imagine that negotiators’ grandchildren were allowed to run in during breaks and jump into the welcoming laps of their grandparents. How would negotiations proceed then? Negotiators need to be reminded that they, like all of us, are great grandparents of the unborn.

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After the Holocaust of WWII, Germans were asked, “Didn’t you see the smokestacks or smell the smoke?” Participating in, or passively allowing, mass extermination of fellow human beings seemed, to outsiders, unthinkable, wicked, and crazy. But don’t we find ourselves in a similar situation? Aren’t we willing participants in mass extinction of other species? Don’t we “see the smokestacks” and “smell the smoke?” We may answer as many Germans did. Hey, lay off. We’re just doing our jobs, like everyone else. Like them, we suffer from culturally inculcated bigotry, in our case a virulent human-centered strand of “racism” called anthropocentricism that favors human satisfaction above all else. This human-centered narcissism is blinding and permeates every action we take.

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Ultimately, the belief that we have the right to destroy the lives of other beings because of our innate superiority is the main impetus of modern ecological degradation. This belief, coupled with a sense of separation from nature, forms the invisible and deadly ideology of modern civilization.

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Like racism, anthropocentricism is socially sanctioned and indiscernibly imparted to our children. It needs to be recognized and then cared for psychologically, ideally in a therapeutic community. This work is very important because policing and “policy-ing” people and corporations are not sufficient in and of themselves. Until we heal the deep-seated disease of anthropocentricism, bridges between humans and nature will be flimsy and false, and their integrity will be flaunted. Without rooted and authentic care for other life forms, rules will be broken, spills will continue to happen, and, oops, wink-wink, fines will be paid in dollars from bloated profits. “De-objectifying” animals, forests, mountains, and oceans is the ecological equivalent to “humanizing” the “other.” Together, they form the bedrock for lasting social, political, and ecological harmony.

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In the face of global threats, most people frantically maintain life-as-usual. Wrenching emotions like fear, despair, shame, and rage, natural responses the dangers we collectively face, are assiduously avoided or suppressed. Psychic numbing is perhaps the greatest danger to life on Earth, greater even than the threat of nuclear war and environmental catastrophe, because it deadens our capacity to creatively respond to danger. If we cannot feel, we won’t pull our hands out of the fire!

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Many peace activists believe that information is the cure for ignorance. If people just knew what was happening, they would change. Massive amounts of information constantly flow before us these days, but it rarely cures ignorance. Without capacities to work with our fear, shame, despair and rage, endlessly dreary facts and figures become bludgeons. We cower, cover our heads, or run away because our emotional responses are overwhelming.

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Guilt and shame are especially challenging because they elicit an instinctive response to hide, run, or blame others. But healthy “organic” shame, if we can bear its discomfort, may signal to us a deep yearning to make things right and repair broken relationships. Shame is a call to belonging. If we don’t face shame, we won’t feel accountable. Exxon Mobile executives were smoothly explaining in a U.S. Senate hearing why, when reaping grotesquely massive profits, they donated only a pittance to green energy research and continued to gouge consumers at the pump. A congressman, throwing up his hands, interrupted, “This may be a rhetorical question, but where’s the shame?” Shame, an emotion unique in social creatures like us, is a natural response to broken and abused relationships. Shame is essential to social harmony and belonging, yet shame is never suffered lightly.

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Nor are despair, anger, confusion, and disappointment. We are faced with the awkward and difficult task of being healers who advocate experiencing these and other challenging emotions because authentic emotional responsiveness is a sign of health! However, inviting emotional responses to what is happening in our world is not an invitation to wallow in emotional swamps. We are keenly aware of this danger because they may themselves have been stuck in slippery depths of despair longer than necessary.

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There are two main ways to avoid emotional quagmires. First of all, being awake, sensitive, and accountable must be balanced with capacities to transmute negative feelings into their positive expressions or “capacities.” Fear transmutes into courage, shame into belonging, despair into compassion, anger into fierceness, and so forth. Perhaps even evil can be transmuted into eros, agape, and filial love. This kind of work cannot be undertaken lightly on a single weekend retreat. Transmuting negative affects requires significant and sustained psychological work, ideally in community and with skilled assistance.

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Secondly, denying or suppressing uncomfortable feelings deadens effective responsiveness and cripples our capacity for joy, ecstasy, and creativity. Psychic numbing aborts deeper exploration of the drives that underlie and inspire our feelings, namely our values, possibilities, and needs. We must let ourselves be affected! All feelings, however uncomfortable, are connected to deep yearnings and needs. Despair or anger may connect us to needs for accountability, renewed purpose, and community. Follow the feelings. Explore and touch the yearnings that stimulate emotional wretchedness. This is the work of ecopsychologists who refuse to pathologize negative emotions. Staying in touch with needs and aspirations—even if they are not yet realized—is often uncomfortable but can, over time, inspire life-changing behavior and novel approaches to age-old problems. Indeed, what else will?

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Sustaining peace and restoring our battered earth require a shift from the thrill of conquest to the enduring, unreasonably committed, and patient thrill of mothering, fathering, grandparenting, and great-great-great grandparenting. Being nourished steadily by an enduring connectedness to life rather than by the personal satisfaction of immediate conquest demonstrates a psychological shift in what gives us pleasure and excitement.

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Humans will always need fun outlets for conquest and aggression, but, even more, we need to cultivate the slow and mature joy of planting and watering trees rather than felling them, much like how humans need to thrive. We need to change our definitions of happiness.

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Through the eyes of the soul, catastrophe is an adventure. Soul seeks out and perhaps inadvertently creates crisis. One way to reframe crises is to see them as trials on a long evolutionary journey. Perhaps humanity is undergoing an initiatory rite of passage rather reaching a dead-end. Indeed, old ways of surviving that have brought our species tremendous success and wealth are now killing us. Environmental activists habitually wag their fingers and rub noses into the collective soiled carpet, “Bad. Very bad. See what we have done?” It may be more effective to shift away from the “bad dog” approach of activism and reframe crisis as invitation or opportunity. Emphatic enticement rather than haranguing might be a more effective way of eliciting changes in behavior. Look! Meeting requirements for peace and sustainability will make us happier!

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We are being invited, in no uncertain terms, to shed old skins and grow. Not all initiations are undertaken willingly. Often we are dragged kicking and hollering to the threshold of a new life. Yet it is through the ordeals of initiation that the soul is tempered and made strong, flexible, and able to serve life in creative ways. Maturity and wisdom are not inherited, but wrought and wrung from life by each individual in their own way.

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Reframing our situation from crisis to initiation changes the role of peace activists from gadfly to guide. With this shift, our work becomes therapeutic and transformative. We are calling for actions that require inner clarity and emotional wholeness which, when embodied, become a leap in evolution for humanity. This kind of activism takes patience, compassion, and a capacity to inspire the imagination. Remember that reacting to the smell of smoke or the cry of a child is very different than responding to global warming.

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Abstract dangers and “inconvenient truths” do not explicitly signify a red-blinking “DANGER! DANGER!” Concrete dangers cause us to leap into action without thought. But connecting the steady pressing of our foot upon the gas pedal to drowning polar bears in the Artic is a huge stretch in imagination. Connecting melting icecaps to broken levies in New Orleans is another stretch. Both link human actions to the fate of others and disparate disasters to common causes.

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Here we arrive at the key fertile juncture of peace — the human imagination. Imagination can be harnessed to the engines of war and remain shackled to the structured rape of nature. Or it can shake free. It can stretch and leap! Imagination is the key and the doorway to a different future than the one we are headed toward.

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It is the territory of soul whence come songs, stories, art, and creative action. Always the human imagination has been the unquenchable mother of invention and revolution. Now, ready or not, it has become the potential grandmother of evolution. We will either re-imagine a future where we live in harmony with each other and with nature, and find ways to get there, or we won’t. Indeed, the same inborn capacity to imagine what is not physically palpable in the moment, that tortures our species with the fear of death, and allows us to live in denial of reality, can also inspire us to envision the impossible and make dreams come true. This is our choice.

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That being said, the imagination, the mysterious core of the human soul, is part of nature and therefore not always in our conscious control. We heed our imagination, we don’t direct it. But we can inspire our imagination, give it space, and entice it to participate in the journey towards peace and ecological balance. When a freed imagination is engaged, anything is possible. And it's fun.

- Katie Kamara

ॐ ❤#somafusion⁠ #interdisciplinary #transdisciplinary #metapsychoanalysis