Academic literature on the topic 'Transpersonal ecology'

Dr. Goswámí, a Theoretical Quantum Physicist, shows how science and spirituality can be integrated by connecting between quantum physics and transpersonal psychology. Dr. Goswámí touches three concepts from quantum physics: unity consciousness, quantum self and purposiveness. 1. There are two domains of reality: that of possibility which is represented by waves of unity consciousness and that of actuality which is represented by particles. 2. The self has also two versions: the quantum self, the original self which holds direct connection to the unity consciousness, and the ego self, based on memories which generate conditioned behaviours thus it is disconnected from reality. 3. Consciousness as a representation of vitality is purpose driven. In its evolution it goes thorough three types of purposive movements: the movement of feelings (expressed through physical organs and the chakras), the movement of meaning (thinking) and the movement of archetypes (intuition). Now, it is true that unity consciousness is only potentiality, but by working on ourselves, developing our creativity and intuition, expending our consciousness, we can reestablish the freedom of choice the original self had and create satisfying kind of life which is full of joy and in flow with reality. The text of this contribution is taken from the International Transpersonal Conference 2017 - Prague. KEY WORDS Quantum physics, science, spirituality, consciousness

The paper opens with a brief overview of 'limerence' or obsessive love disorder (OLD) from the perspectives of psychology, neurology, anthropology, and sociology, but concludes that certain unique characteristics of the condition suggest that it is better understood as a form of 'divine madness', resulting from the failure of the Platonic ascent of love to follow its natural trajectory. The paper focuses on Plotinus's model of the erotic ascent from the one to the ONE, drawing parallels with the Indian bhakti tradition and other models derived from transpersonal psychology. The final section explores the distinction between pagan and Christian Platonism and the entailments of the latter for secular perspectives on love.

The term “Anthropocene” is frequently used to refer to the present planetary epoch, characterized by a geological signature of human activities, which have led to global ecological crises. This paper probes at what it means to be human on earth now, using healing as a concept to orient humanity in relation to other species, and particularly medicinal plants. Donna Haraway’s concept of the “Chthulucene” is used as an alternate lens to the Anthropocene, which highlights the inextricable linkages between humans and other-than-human species. Healing can be viewed as a type of embodied orientation or engagement with the world, which has the potential to reach across boundaries of the skin, blur distinctions between self and other, and allow for both transpersonal and trans-species reconciliation. I focus my attention on Indigenous Shipibo healing rituals, and Shipibo concepts of healing that integrate humans within the ecosystem, and traverse species boundaries through communication with and embodiment of plant spirits. These healing rituals offer ways of coming into being within an ecology of selves—both internal and external, human and non-human—through listening and lending voice. I explore the potential for healing and ritual to work as a form of porous resistance through the internal blurring of binaries and hierarchical structures.

Among the most significant, controversial and difficult concepts for environmental educators and students alike to come to terms with are those of the anthropocentric (or totally human centred) view of the environment compared with the biocentric (or totally non-human centred) attitude to the environment. The concepts are significant because they represent profoundly different philosophical positions and also because they may have far reaching implications and, therefore, consequences in practice. Eckersley (1992, p.26) says:… the most fundamental division from an ecophilosophical point of view is between those who adopt an anthropocentric ecological perspective and those who adopt a nonanthropocentric ecological (or ecocentric) perspective.They are controversial because both views have been said, by different authors, to be either totally disastrous or absolutely redeeming for the planet. For instance, in his recent authoritative and well received book Towards A Transpersonal Ecology, philosopher Warwick Fox writes (1990, p. 13)… anthropocentrism represents not only a deluded but a dangerous orientation toward the world.and adds (1990, pp. 18-19) that it is… empirically bankrupt and theoretically disastrous, practically disastrous, logically inconsistent, morally objectionable and incongruent with a genuinely open approach to experience.Yet Jeff Bennett, expressing the anthropocentric view in a volume entitled Reconciling Economics and the Environment, says that… a complete property rights system over ecosystems, and even individual species making up an ecosystem, can ensure their conservation.(Bennett & Block 1991, p.272)

Old media can be scary – much scarier, ceteris paribus, than other objects of comparable antiquity. Film and television directors, as well as writers of fiction, who traffic in chills know that few things can insert a palpable sense of dread into a mise-en-scène more economically than a strategically placed daguerreotype (its dour or baleful inhabitants staring out from their world of sepia), a tinny voice issuing from an ancient radio, or the needle of a Victrola bobbing cracklingly in grooves of black vinyl. On the other hand, it is at least as much of a truism to say that new media, too, come freighted with anxieties as well as exhilarations: otherwise we would be less susceptible to narratives about being enslaved by a transpersonal Matrix, zombified by our cell phones, and so on. It should not surprise, then, that in our own media-saturated age a host of tropes and topoi derived from information technologies have tended to recur again and again in works of horror film and fiction. Many of these involve interactions between and among media: old technologies acting like new ones, and vice versa; categorial blurrings and hybridizations involving different media within a particular ecology, or the sense of an uncanny partnership or cooperation between them; and so on. Also common are tableaux of trans- or extra-medial transgression: e.g., the figure of dread escaping the representational field and entering the “real world” of the story. Then, too, there is the figure of prodigious or preternatural (and usually unasked-for) perceptual extension or augmentation, the trope of the technology that enables, or compels, one to see and/or hear more than is good for one.

The author connects the demand for social and philosophical research of the responsibility phenomenon with the need to strengthen the processes of self-identification, due to the decrease in the influence of the value and cultural space of modern society on the individual. The article substantiates the position on the irreducibility of the content of the responsibility category only to its ethical content due to the wider range of its social functions and socio-project potential. It is emphasized that in the space of social relations and their structures, the necessary condition for maintaining the influence of the moral and value world on organizational and technological processes is the development of relations between a person and society based on the relationship of responsibility. For this reason, the importance of a fundamental sociophilosophical study of the content of the responsibility category is associated in the article with overcoming the one-sidedness and incompleteness of its study in certain areas of social relations – medicine, business ethics, law, pedagogy, ecology – and identifying its integrative and project meanings as a factor of sustainable functioning and development of society. Revealing a number of historical and philosophical approaches to the analysis of responsibility, the author shows the connection of this category with the category of "freedom" both in its personal (existentialism of J.-P. Sartre) and transpersonal (representative of the philosophy of the Russian Diaspora S.A. Levitsky) dimensions. However, historical and philosophical experience testifies to the similarity of different methodological positions, which are determined by the fact that the content of the responsibility category reveals the forms of finding the personal meaning of life. The directions of philosophical searches of the XX century also point to the need to take into account, through the perspective of responsibility, the diversity of possibilities in different social circumstances and the understanding that only one of them will be realized. The disclosure of the meaning of responsibility as a norm of intersubjective interaction, in which the interests and needs of society are manifested, indicates its multidimensional nature and differences in the manifestation of the activities of individual and collective subjects of responsibility. Proceeding from this, it is shown that responsibility can be represented as a complex hierarchical system in which the levels that characterize it at the level of general and specific, as well as systemic and specialized knowledge are organically linked. Specifying the working model of connections that reveal the socio-philosophical content of responsibility, the author identifies a number of categories: general theory (society, person, state, social institution, nation, family, etc.); philosophy of Economics (property, labor, production, money, etc.); ethics (justice, conscience, duty, etc.); philosophy of religion and religious studies (God, fate, faith, sin, etc.); axiology (values). Based on the research, it is concluded that the socio-philosophical study of the category "responsibility" is promising, linking its philosophical, ethical and specifically scientific aspects, which is important for the theoretical and practical development of the human dimension and the morally-oriented development of modern society.

AbstractThis article provides a structural analysis of the position of the human being (anthropos) in the integrale Tiefenökologie of the philosopher Jochen Kirchhoff (born 1944). This term denotes not only the indissoluble unity of human and cosmos, but also the entire spectrum of consciousness, from the physical level of matter/energy to the transpersonal level of Spirit/the Absolute, in an epistemological as well as ontological sense. The contours of the ecological problem, according to Kirchhoff, as well as the outlines of his remedial project are drawn, in the context of the tradition in which he stands and the contemporary discourse (modern science) from which he disengages himself.

The distinguished Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess coined a distinction in 1972 between "shallow" and "deep" approaches to ecology and environmentalism. In the 1980s, this distinction - and particularly the ideas associated with "deep ecology," which constitutes the challenging or radical aspect of Naess's distinction - has come to exert a powerful influence upon academic ecophilosophical discussion. Moreover, the ideas associated with deep ecology have spread well beyond the confines of academic ecophilosophical discussion and have become a source of inspiration to - and, often, heated debate among - not only environmental activists but also ecologically oriented thinkers across a range of areas that includes ecological science, broad cultural analyses, sociology, and politics. This dissertation is devoted to the articulation, clarification, and development of the deep ecology approach to ecophilosophy. The dissertation is divided into four parts, which examine the context, influence, meanings, and distinctiveness of the deep ecology approach to ecophilosophy respectively. In Part I, I outline the context of the emergence of ecophilosophy and show the central role that the issue of anthropocentrism has played in the development of ecophilosophical thinking. In particular, I show that Naess's shallow/deep ecology distinction represents just one of a number of apparently similar distinctions that have been made between anthropocentric and nonanthropocentric approaches to ecology and environmentalism. In Part II, I show how influential deep ecology has become, both within academic ecophilosophical discussion and beyond, and consider the question other apparently comparable distinctions have exerted little or no influence upon ecophilosophical discussion. I argue that Naess's conception of deep ecology actually subsumes three related but analytically distinct meanings or fundamental ideas and that it is the distinctive nature (as an approach to ecophilosophy) of one of these meanings that has led to Naess's distinction drawing the advocacy that it has in ecophilosophical circles. In Part III, I outline the three senses of deep ecology that are to be found in Naess's work. These senses refer to (i) the general idea of a nonanthropocentric (or ecocentric) approach to ecology/living-in-the-world; (ii) the idea of deriving one's ecologically relevant views from fundamental assumptions, by which Naess means assumptions that are arrived at by a process of asking progressively deeper questions; and (hi) the idea of the this-worldly realization of as expansive a sense of self as possible in a world in which selves and thingsin- the-world are conceived as processes. I refer to these senses as Naess's "popular," "formal," and "philosophical" senses of deep ecology respectively. On the basis of this analysis, I show, on the one hand, that there is nothing distinctive about Naess's popular sense of deep ecology and, on the other hand, that Naess's formal sense of deep ecology is untenable. In Part IV, I proceed to show that it is Naess's philosophical sense of deep ecology that lies at the heart of what is tenable and distinctive about the deep ecology approach to ecophilosophy. I draw on recent developments in psychology in this context to suggest that it is more accurate and informative to refer to this distinctive, philosophical sense of deep ecology as "transpersonal ecology" rather than "deep ecology." (Naess makes it clear that the term "deep ecology" refers to what I have characterized as his formal sense of deep ecology.) In the Epilogue, I further elaborate the distinctive nature of the transpersonal ecology approach to ecophilosophy by discussing the specific kinds of identification that are implied by a transpersonal approach to ecology. The dissertation also contains two appendices. The first addresses recent controversies concerning deep ecology and is entitled "The Deep Ecology- Ecofeminism Debate and its Parallels: A Defence of Deep Ecology's Concern with Anthropocentrism." I point the reader to this appendix primarily in the context of my discussion of the influence of deep ecology in Chapter 2. The second appendix provides background information that is relevant to the argument that is developed in Part IV and is entitled "The Emergence of Transpersonal Psychology." I point the reader to this appendix in the context of my discussion of transpersonal ecology in Chapter 7.

The core premise of the thesis is that our global environmental and social crises are of our own making and can only be transformed by us. Therefore it is imperative that humanity finds ways of protecting and sustaining the natural environment for our collective survival. This necessarily depends on human beings� ability to co-exist in harmony with other humans and species and to feel connected to and protect nature. This thesis examines three spiritual or wisdom traditions � Aboriginal spiritualities, the Goddess movement and Tibetan Buddhism, as they relate to Arne Naess�s concept of the �ecological self.� The ecological self is a psychological construct that suggests that human beings can evolve from a narrow egocentric way of being and relating to others, to one that is more open, inclusive of the �other� and where one sees all lives as important. One is ultimately able to embrace the whole earth community, so that nothing is excluded as �other�. This process of increasingly �wide identification� Naess defined to be the process of the development of the ecological self. There is much written about spirituality and the environment but little relevant research that specifically examines spiritual traditions as they relate to the ecological self. The insights of transpersonal psychology elucidate the maturation from ego consciousness to eco-consciousness � a process of progressively inclusive identification with �others�, including the environment. However, transpersonal psychology does not directly �converse� with Naess�s construct of an ecological self. This thesis examines the nexus between Arne Naess�s ecological self, transpersonal psychology and the three spiritual traditions. �Aboriginal spiritualities� refers to Australian Aboriginal spiritualities, unless other wise stated. The literature review covers relevant background to the ecological self in relation to Western science and thought; this includes constructions of self and �other� and story. Literature reviews of the three traditions informed in-depth interviews with five research participants who practise or identify with their particular spiritual tradition. I believe this research will enable the reader to gain an overview of the ecological wisdom of these three spiritual traditions, grounded in the lived experience of practitioners who embody these traditions. Each wisdom tradition has a long history of imparting psychological, social and ecological insights and understandings that are profoundly helpful and relevant to the current period of ecological crisis. The interviews are analysed under the broad conceptual themes of ecology, compassion and story. These traditions will be shown to encourage compassion, connectedness, interdependency and impart ecological wisdom - all vital to the realisation of the �ecological self�. Story, lifelong learning and the ecoeducational model are used as frameworks for examining the educational potential of the spiritual traditions involved. A choice must be made: will we continue to base our knowledges on Western science or will we examine alternate constructions of reality, such as those of the three spiritual traditions examined in this thesis? The three spiritual traditions provide a compassionate and non-violent view of human consciousness with the potential to transform into an ecologically sensitive creative force. This thesis argues that great wisdom is held by these three wisdom traditions in the context of education for sustainability. This thesis examines this context.

A significant and growing number of authors and commentators have proposed that ecologically enlightened (‘greened’) religion is the solution or at least a major part of the solution to the global ecological crisis. These include Birch, 1965 p90; Brindle, 2000; Callicott, 1994; Gardner, 2002, 2003, 2006; Gore Jr., 1992; Gottlieb, 2006, 2007; Hallman, 2000; Hamilton, 2006b, a, 2007b; Hessel & Ruether, 2000b; Hitchcock, 1999; King, 2002; Lerner, 2006a; McDonagh, 1987; McFague, 2001; McKenzie, 2005; Nasr, 1996; Oelschlaeger, 1994; Palmer, 1992; Randers, 1972; Tucker & Grim, 2000; and White Jr., 1967. Proponents offer a variety of reasons for this view, including that the majority of the world’s and many nations’ people identify themselves as religious, and that there is a large amount of land and infrastructure controlled by religious organisations worldwide. However, the most important reason is that ‘religion’ is said to have one or more exceptional qualities that can drive and sustain dramatic personal and societal change. The underlying or sometimes overt suggestion is that as the ecological crisis is ultimately a moral crisis, religion is best placed to address the problem at its root. ¶ Proponents of the above views are often religious, though there are many who are not. Many proponents are from the USA and write in the context of the powerful role of religion in that country. Others write in a global context. Very few write from or about the Australian context where the role of religion in society is variously argued to be virtually non-existent, soon to be non-existent, or conversely, profound but covert. ¶ This thesis tests the proposition that religion is the solution to the ecological crisis. It does this using a case study of mainstream religion in Australia, represented by the Catholic, Anglican, and Uniting Churches. The Churches’ ecological policies and practices are analysed to determine the extent to which these denominations are fulfilling, or might be able to fulfil, the proposition. The primary research method is an Internet-based search for policy and praxis material. The methodology is Critical Human Ecology. ¶ The research finds that: the ‘greening’ of these denominations is evident; it is a recent phenomenon in the older Churches; there is a growing wealth of environmentalist sentiment and ecological policy being produced; but little institutional praxis has occurred. Despite the often-strong rhetoric, there is no evidence to suggest that ecological concerns, even linked to broader social concerns (termed ‘ecojustice’) are ‘core business’ for the Churches as institutions. Conventional institutional and anthropocentric welfare concerns remain dominant. ¶ Overall, the three Churches struggle with organisational, demographic, and cultural problems that impede their ability to convert their official ecological concerns into institutional praxis. Despite these problems, there are some outstanding examples of ecological policy and praxis in institutional and non-institutional forms that at least match those seen in mainstream secular society. ¶ I conclude that in Australia, mainstream religion is a limited part of the solution to the ecological crisis. It is not the solution to the crisis, at least not in its present institutional form. Institutional Christianity is in decline in Australia and is being replaced by non-institutional Christianity, other religions and non-religious spiritualities (Tacey, 2000, 2003; Bouma, 2006; Tacey, 2007). The ecological crisis is a moral crisis, but in Australia, morality is increasingly outside the domain of institutional religion. The growth of the non-institutional religious and the ‘spiritual but not religious’ demographic may, if ecologically informed, offer more of a contribution to addressing the ecological crisis in future. This may occur in combination with some of the more progressive movements seen at the periphery of institutional Christianity such as the ‘eco-ministry’ of Rev. Dr. Jason John in Adelaide, and the ‘Creation Spirituality’ taught, advocated and practiced by the Mercy Sisters’ Earth Link project in Queensland.

A significant and growing number of authors and commentators have proposed that ecologically enlightened (‘greened’) religion is the solution or at least a major part of the solution to the global ecological crisis. These include Birch, 1965 p90; ... . Proponents offer a variety of reasons for this view, including that the majority of the world’s and many nations’ people identify themselves as religious, and that there is a large amount of land and infrastructure controlled by religious organisations worldwide. However, the most important reason is that ‘religion’ is said to have one or more exceptional qualities that can drive and sustain dramatic personal and societal change. The underlying or sometimes overt suggestion is that as the ecological crisis is ultimately a moral crisis, religion is best placed to address the problem at its root. ¶ ... ¶ This thesis tests the proposition that religion is the solution to the ecological crisis. It does this using a case study of mainstream religion in Australia, represented by the Catholic, Anglican, and Uniting Churches. The Churches’ ecological policies and practices are analysed to determine the extent to which these denominations are fulfilling, or might be able to fulfil, the proposition. The primary research method is an Internet-based search for policy and praxis material. The methodology is Critical Human Ecology. ¶ ...