For a while on my blog we’ve been talking about delusions of separateness and the pathologies it creates. What I’ve been thinking about lately is: what caused this initial delusion of separation from the rest of the world? What was that switch? A few have identified some of the trends, ideologies, and philosophies that push our minds deeper into human isolation, such as Cartesian dualism, elements of the Enlightment, Judeo-Christianity and the biblical myth, patriarchy, industrialization, Western individualism and objectivism, and others. What we see over the last few thousand years is a trend in fragmentation and inequality in societies, and therefore, in their people.

One aspect of this that I like to explore is how the Westerner’s notion of self may contribute to this. I think by identifying the “self” as a central entity that is separated from the rest of the world, we lose something. This separation of ‘self’ and ‘other’ creates an implied barrier. What is the barrier between self and other? Is it the skin, as the behaviorists propose? Is it our auras, 3 feet around our bodies? Or our thoughts and dreams? It’s impossible to determine where we end and the rest of the world begins, and this drives the discipline of psychology nuts. It’s because this imaginary barrier doesn’t really exist, but is arbitrarily determined given the practice or ideology one is working with. As humans, we’ve cemented the delusion of a barrier between self and other, and now roam the perimeter of these walls like an animal circling a pen. It created the difference between what Neil Evernden calls nature, the rest of the world, reality, and Nature, human’s abstraction of it. As Rilke said, “Men only began to understand Nature when they no longer understood it.”

With these abstractions and resulting civilization, we’ve built this unreality, or as Derrick Jensen would put it, a “Culture of Make Believe.” As the abstractions increase in depth and breadth, we are losing more touch with reality and are now facing major ecological consequences as a result. I think it’s because we’ve mistaken abstract conceptions for real things. We’ve created a human landscape, and the issue is that we forgot that it’s not the whole story.

Am I going too far by suggesting that modern humans inhabit a world of abstractions? Probably not. This really dawned on me early in my college career. I used to be a biochemistry major at a school in Connecticut until I started to have major beef with the premise of the entire discipline. What I noticed when we would learn laws and their associated equations is that the equations did not apply in all situations. There were always exceptions to the rules and equations we were learning. But then we would use these equations and principles to find solutions in the lab, disregarding that they are really rough approximations. It’s and example of the layers that we create between our “selves” and “the rest of the world”. So there was this created and delusionsal separation between Modern chemistry and the world it created and the real world, nature with a lowercase ‘n’, which has no straight lines, finite boundaries, or even predictability.

A couple of days ago, during a visit to my parents, I visited my friend Deb and we talked about growth, progress, and the fallacy that it’s healthy to have that be the primary focus of our lives—both individually and as a culture. I mean, look at economic growth. So many injustices are seemingly justifiable based on if they contribute to economic expansion. This is not to say I’m against “growth”, but I do think societies should be critically questioning what and how we are choosing to grow. This goes for technological growth as well.

When visit my parents, I fly across this continent and I watch how the landscape changes going eastward—specifically, how how suburban sprawl is remarkably cancer-like. Deb and I were talking about cancer, a subject she has studied for a while as a healer, and she explained to me her perspective that cancer is essentially the immune system body not recognizing itself and trying to heal. This struck me as very interesting. So I thought: Does our civilization have cancer? We don’t recognize ourselves anymore because we have such a narrowly defined view of “self”, and we’re starting to destroy ourselves.

As modern humans, for the most part we inhabit an artificial, abstract, and man-made landscape, disconnected from the larger reality. This fragmented human reality, by definition, is founded on the silencing of so many voices. It’s designed by privileged speakers with the assumed power to decide who is a person and who has a voice. For a long period of American colonial history, only white male landowners were “people” and had a voice. We’ve come a long way since then, but even today, personhood is only extended to humans (and for that matter, not even all humans).

Going back to species-level diagnosis, let’s look at sensory deprivation on a large scale and the resulting constrained human psyche. I think humans are deprived of their natural instincts and perceptions, and that this is a big factor in psychopathologies. If you don’t agree with me, think about all the ways the man-made environment differs from the real world: artificial lighting, straight lines and perfect shapes, images and television, unnatural textures, chemicals, homogenous diets (processed sugar, soy, corn, rice, etc.). What is troubling is that this such a rapid and drastic change that has occured pretty recently and suddenly in human history, creating a “psychological shock”. We inhabit bodies that have evolved in very different circumstances than what we experience today. It’s almost like a square peg trying to fit a round hole.

Everything we see, touch, taste, smell, and hear is nearly always a human artifact. There are so many layers between what we interact with and its origins, its story. There are many cultural theorists that claim that, in fact, we are overstimulated. And I agree with that to the extent that humans are overstimulated with human artifacts. On the whole, we have lost touch with the larger reality because we don’t use our senses as much as we once did. One of the common effects of sensory deprivation is hallucinations. Can we see any evidence of hallucinations in our culture? How about corporate personhood? Or celebrity obsessions and other expressions of drama and public theatre (Republican or Democrat? Pepsi or Coke? Odwalla or Minute Maid?) Or how about the worship of green printed paper? And the thing is, we still trust our senses and perceive these things as real. Thus, delusions and pathologies emerge from a state of collective isolation from what Depth psychologists term the “World Unconscious”.

So what, then, do we do? My proposal is that direct experience and authentic engagement with our communities will reconnect us with the ebbs, flows, rhythms, and turnings of our home planet. And the awareness of our infinite connections—who grows our food, where our water comes from, what plant grows on my sidewalk—expands our sense of self to include the rich tapestry of the totality of life on this planet. Anchoring our selves as beneficial members of both our human and ecological communities plugs us back into this circuit, and gets us flowing again. I mean, who are we, really? How do we construct our identities? Are we defined by our respective subcultures or ideologies? Or defining who we are based on what we are not? Why do we try to construct an identity based on how we are different from others? Our identities are our relationships and our connections. By redirection our focus to our connections, we take a bold step in establishing beneficial and respectful relationships with our neighbors and our place.

I’ll wrap up with something Matthew Fox said: “We’re part of something larger than ourselves. If we don’t learn that, we’re set up for greed.” Paul Hawken calls the current environmental and social justice movements the largest movement in history, because at the core they all address one common issue—that of mistreatment of our neighbors and habitat. It’s a cycle of abuse, of inappropriate relationships. And that dynamic has its roots within every one of us. I believe the answers lie in looking at the big picture and understanding the interconnectedness of all of these issues.

We have the ability and therefore the ethical responsibility to change this. Let’s honor our connections, and dive deeper into this ecology.