As students were sharing their final projects for "Religion and Ecology: Buddhist Perspectives," the wall of the courtyard out our classroom window, recovering from a night of rain, made its own offering.
Joanna Macy: The self is the metaphoric construct of identity and
agency, the hypothetical piece of turf on which we construct
our strategies for survival, the notion around which we focus
our instincts for self-preservation, our needs for self-approval,
and the boundaries of our self- interest. Something is shifting
here. The conventional notion of the self with which we have
been raised and to which we have been conditioned by mainstream culture is being undermined. What Alan Watts called
“the skin-encapsulated ego” and Gregory Bateson referred
to as “the epistemological error of Occidental civilization” is
being peeled off. It is being replaced by wider constructs of
identity and self-interest—by what philosopher Arne Naess
termed the ecological self, co-extensive with other beings
and the life of our planet. It is what I like to call “the greening of the self.”
