“The idea of eternity lives in all of us. We thirst to live in a belief which raises our small personality to a higher coherence – a coherence which is human and yet superhuman, absolute and yet steadily growing and developing, ideal and yet real.” Christian Lous Lange

“In fact, at this point in history, the most radical, pervasive, and earth-shaking transformation would occur simply if everybody truly evolved to a mature, rational, and responsible ego, capable of freely participating in the open exchange of mutual self-esteem. There is the ‘edge of history.’ There would be a real New Age.” Ken Wilber

“Free will is the measure of a man’s capacity to be and act as an individual. fate[sic] is the measure of his dependence upon collective and generic standards as determining structures.”
Dane Rudhyar

Many spiritualities look for the “ocean state”, where the individual dissolves and there is nothing left but a seamless unity with the All, an idea I courted in my journey through “ecomysticism” and nature-based spirituality. But it was a nature-based path I was walking, and seeking to “dissolve” myself into the All seemed a bit “unnatural”. My evolutionary roots just didn’t arrive here for me to simply lose my form and disappear into the great, undifferentiated… Thingy. I am a human, not a blancmange! There’s too many biological conditions to ignore, and in my “reverence for nature” it doesn’t make sense to deny this.

An organism cannot function well if it is not physiologically well-defined. In biological terms the “ocean state” is death, when the body’s self-regulation fails or simply stops functioning and the matter and energy disperse and are recycled back into the ecosystems. An organism doesn’t survive by releasing the “inner tension” of its cells, but by maintaining a physiological integrity that distinguishes it from the world around it. Without this physiological definition, which has been called physiological or biological individuation, there would be no life. This principle holds in human psychology too. Without psychological and/or physiological definition (or centre and circumference) an entity cannot function in the world, and would just be a blancmange.

The self-definition of the psyche is crucial in order for the individual to function well in the world. Without a well-defined integrity and autonomous volition the individual will not have the psychological definition to act as it needs and wants and will be nothing but a passive vessel following its cultural conditioning. If there is not this definition between individuals, there can be no communication, and without communication a relationship cannot be built, and the “individuals” remain stuck in pre-verbal assumptions and unexamined motivations, relying on “givens” to determine the relationship and simply neglect their psychological individuality.

Humans, having a psychological dimension, not just physiological, constitute a curious expression of the Earth’s biosphere.