Self-Realization: An Ecological Approach to Being in the World

Abstract

515 Humanity has struggled, for about twenty-five hundred years, with basic questions about who we are, where we are headed, and the nature of the reality in which we are included. This is a short period in the lifetime of a species, and an even shorter time in the history of the Earth, to which we belong as mobile beings. I am not capable of saying very new things in answer to these questions, but I can look at them from a somewhat different angle , using somewhat different conceptual tools and images. What I am going to say, more or less in my own way and in that of my friends, can be condensed roughly into six points: 1. We underestimate our self, and I emphasize self. We tend to confuse our self with the narrow ego. 2. Human nature is such that, with sufficient comprehensive (all-sided) maturity, we cannot help but "identify" our self with all living beings: beautiful or ugly, big or small, scientific or not. The adjective comprehensive ("all-sided") as in "comprehensive maturity" deserves a note: Descartes seemed to be rather immature in his relationship with animals; Schopenhauer was not very advanced in his relationship to his family (kicking his mother down a staircase?); Heidegger was amateurish-to say the least-in his po