Introduction
The social and environmental global crises we face today are more threatening to human life than ever before in history. Many ecologists, such as John Seed, believe we have less than 10 years to make radical changes in our culture, before conditions reach the point where the habitat of humans and other large mammals is destroyed. If we survive these conditions at all, it would be in small numbers living very marginally for generations to come. We don't have time to wait any longer. We have to make major changes in the way we think and live, now.

My own attraction to this work began in childhood. It seems like I have heard a call from the planet all my life. I grew up in a small town, close to nature, and found my spirituality there far more than in church. When I was in fifth grade, a teacher told me she thought I might work for the United Nations when I grew up, so fascinated was I by global events. This vision inspired me for years to come, although the form changed.

The social and global implications of psychosynthesis attracted me as much as its psychological and spiritual dimensions. When my husband and I studied with Roberto Assagioli in 1973, there was a hunger crisis in Bangladesh, and I told Roberto that I didn't think I was doing enough to help. He said to me, "This is not your dharma. Others will take care of this problem. This is not your dharma." Although he didn't tell me what my dharma was, I was enormously relieved and touched by his words -- and continued to try to discover what my dharma might be.

My dharma, as I understand it now, is to help make the shift in consciousness we humans need in order to live in creative, sustainable interplay with the other natural systems and living beings of Earth. My involvement in psychosynthesis comes out of this commitment; everything I do is weighed in that scale. The question I have is: what role can we in the psychosynthesis community play in this transformation?

I'd like to share some of the perspectives I have learned from my work with Joanna Macy in deep ecology and systems thinking, and the relationship of all that to psychosynthesis.

Basic principles of deep ecology
Probably the most central principle of deep ecology is the interdependence of all living systems of Earth. Living systems encompass the non-living systems of their habitat, so that we live in interdependence with wind and sea, as well as fish and fowl. We are interdependent with all of nature, because we arise within nature; we are of nature; we cannot separate ourselves from the living web of life. Even our "spirituality" arises within nature. I understood this more deeply than ever before one evening when I wrote the following in my journal:

All evening I have been experiencing energy flow in my body-my legs and chest especially, and arms, too.... It is not an unpleasant sensation, and when I pay attention to it, I feel joyful, energetic, alive. So here I am ... brushing my teeth after reading Gregory Bateson and watching TV, and I have an epiphany. Oh, I get it! My "mind" -- my intelligence, my thinking capacities -- arise out of, no, arise within this "body," this body right here! The same intelligent processes that create my body create my "mind." There can be no distinction! The only intelligence I have is all of me. Period. And all of me doesn't stop with my skin. All of me includes, encompasses, embraces, arises within everything I touch, see, hear, taste, smell, and everything that has helped create all that.... All "I" am is some sort of rather arbitrarily localized node of Mind, of Life, of Being and Process.

So when I act, make a choice, respond, whatever, I do best to do so from All of Me-allowing this life force I feel coursing through my body to bring its certain wisdom into play. How utterly silly to "think" that we can decide anything by "thinking." God! Yes, God, indeed, for we have made a god of the conscious mind, and tried to cut it off from the totality of Mind, of Life. And that's idolatry.

So let me consult the sensation of coursing in my body as a way of expanding my identification and unchaining my consciousness. Let me know my creatureness, my physicality, my wondrous complex organism evolving even now into more intricate relationships with All That Is. What an awesome adventure life is. And how monstrously tragic our senseless limitations-literally senseless, for they come from cutting off our senses.

The human error of separation
The following morning, I found myself lying in bed with my body all twisted and tense, prepared to get up at any moment. This was after getting up to pee and returning to the warmth of the covers, thinking I should not stay very long. But why couldn't I be there until I did get up? Why hold myself so tense and uncomfortably?

I reflected on what my thoughts had been while lying this way and discovered that, although I had been thinking about a happy occasion-the last meeting of my psychosynthesis class-I had been regarding it with a kind of darkness, looking to see if I could detect any error on my part, anything I needed to correct.

Then I remembered the experience of the night before-knowing that I arise within Earth, that I am not separate and provisional. And I realized that no matter what I do, I stay here, whether in shit or beauty or a mixture of both; and because I am of the earth, I co-arise with everything else here and now.

I thought about the phrase: "put on earth" as opposed to "arising within Earth" and the implications of each. "Put on earth" implies separation, not belonging, having an assignment to fulfill and the danger of being snatched away at any moment. My tension seemed to come from a deeply held assumption that I must constantly "measure up" in order to earn the "right" to be here, as if I were on probation, and did not arise naturally from Earth-life. This notion has created a lot of pain for me all my life, and I suspect I am not alone in this.

How tragic is the error of Western civilization that we are separate from nature, and how costly its consequences-alienation, tension, and fear? But even this tragic error itself arises within the natural processes of life, which include and celebrate differentiation, diversity, individuality. And as a self-correcting, self-maintaining living system, we have the opportunity to correct this error and bring ourselves back into the whole, for healing, reunion and re-membering, before we disappear (which is how the larger system will self-correct). Let's see if we can do it another way!

With the realization that we are not, in fact, separate, I feel great relief and joy. There is no place else to go, no place to be snatched away to. Heaven and hell are right here, right now. Both arise along with us and everything else within the natural life force of Energy, Love and Intelligence, moment to moment. To quote Joanna Macy: "What is destroying our world is the persistent notion that we are independent of it, aloof from other species, and immune to what we do to them" (1991).

Evidence of our interdependence is the pain we feel for the world. Even our "personal" pain has elements of this collective pain. "Within us are deep responses to what is happening to our world, responses of fear and sorrow and anger. Given the flows of information circling our globe, they inhere in us already by virtue of our nature as open systems, interdependent with the rest of life" (Macy, 1991).

Our attempts to deny and suppress our pain for the world is deadening of our vital connections with all life, and perpetuates destructive behavior. The pain of the world is a message to be heeded, just as it is in our own body.

Principles of systems thinking
Some of the principles I have found most useful in thinking about our world and how to help it transform are:

1. The universe can be described much more accurately and usefully by looking at relationship and process than by focusing on components or parts.
2. Systems are made up of subsystems, and in turn are part of larger systems. This is called holonic nesting, and the same principles apply to all holonic levels, up and down.
3. Systems maintain and transform themselves constantly. They are both homeostatic (self-correcting or self-maintaining of their form and function with fluctuations) and autopoetic (adaptive and self-organizing in response to major changes in external conditions).
4. Information flow is vital to both processes. The system must have information about changing conditions, within and without, in order to self-correct and adapt.
5. There seem to be two intersecting dynamics in the universe: energy/matter and information. Information structures energy into pattern and form. Some people might call the information aspect Mind or Intelligence or Consciousness. Most of what we deal with in living systems, and in psychology, is information. Even when we speak of "energies," we are usually referring to patterns or information.

Problem areas for psychosynthesis
I see a couple of preconceptions underlying psychosynthesis thought which conflict with deep ecology and systems thinking. These preconceptions arise from the patriarchal underpinnings of most Western paradigms, and are therefore found throughout Western thought. Psychosynthesis did not originate these ideas, but it has perpetuated them to some extent.

The first is anthropocentrism, the assumption that human beings are the end-all and be-all of the universe. Elizabeth Sahtouris writes in her inspiring book, Gaia: The Human Journey From Chaos to Cosmos:

Our historic worldviews-our images of who and what we are in relation to all nature-have been limited, on the one hand, by narrow perspective and, on the other, unbounded in egotism. For thousands of years we considered ourselves God's favorite creatures; then, when we had no more use for God, we saw ourselves as the pinnacle of natural evolution. In both views nature was ours to command and exploit as we liked. Only when we ourselves began suffering from the damage we had done to our environment did we begin to gain a more realistic view of ourselves as one species among still uncounted others on whom we depend. (pp. 234-5)

Psychosynthesis, like all Western psychologies, has tended to act as if humans were the pinnacle of evolution. I don't think this belief is at all essential to psychosynthesis theory, and may actually detract from it. Just as we need sensitivity to subtle sexism and racism, we need to develop sensitivity to our unconscious anthropocentrism.

Another common Western fallacy which has influenced psychosynthesis is the assumption that Spirit and Earth, mind and body are somehow separate, independent phenomena, and that Spirit and mind are superior to Earth and body. We see this in our language, like "Higher" Self and "lower unconscious," and in the original wording of the Identification exercise: "I have a body and I am not my body." John Firman addressed this problem in "I" and Self: Revisioning Psychosynthesis. We tend to idealize what we think of as "spiritual" and devalue the "physical." We may climb up into the superconscious to get away from pain (from information!) Deep ecology and systems thinking has strengthened my perception of life as an interplay between polarities -- yang and yin -- and encouraged me to embrace it all, without prejudice.

Psychosynthesis contributions
I am excited about the contributions I think psychosynthesis can make to this whole deep ecology movement, to the shift in consciousness we need. First of all, I see our practices for developing self-observation and self-awareness as critical to the shift. As living systems, we maintain ourselves and learn and grow from information about ourselves and our relationships. Self-awareness provides us with that vital flow.

Psychosynthesis also focuses on the process of synthesis, creating larger integrated wholes from "parts," in our work with subpersonalities and body-feelings-mind integration, for example. We work to help people expand their identification, from habitual subpersonalities through the "I" or personal self to Self. I think what we might call "levels of identification" correspond to the holonic levels of systems theory, each system functioning as a part of a larger system, with its own special contribution, flavor, and choice. And these "levels" continue on beyond the individual, to Group Self and Universal Self-and, I propose, to what deep ecologist Arne Naess calls the "Ecological Self."

And of course the psychosynthesis understanding of the will supports our capacity to transform ourselves and our behavior in more sustainable directions. Practically, we have choices to make, about our paper use, recycling, what products we buy, how we simplify our lifestyles, what foods we eat, and how and when we spend time in nature. I think this understanding of the will can help us make these choices positively, rather than out of guilt, because guilt is a poor motivator. And because we live in an insane economic system, we have to forgive ourselves some non-sustainable behaviors, like driving gasoline-powered cars.

Last but not least, psychosynthesis offers the concept of Self-expression and its relationship to service. True Self-expression responds to the Will of the Whole-Universal Will or the Tao.

It is as if Nature has created a great experiment, and it's up to each of us as participants in that experiment to determine the outcome. The very capacities which have created the mess we are in can be used to find our way out. It takes alignment with Self to hear the Call, to know from moment to moment what our precise role in this might be. With each of us, Nature says: I think I'll try this!

Nature is not purposeful in the way we tend to think of it -- a human kind of strategizing, planning, giving various people assignments. I think Nature's kind of purpose is more an organic trial-and-error that is responsive to process moment to moment. Nature is more like an artist or a musician waiting to see what is emerging -- coaxing it out -- interacting with the materials and the patterns that emerge.

We almost can't conceive of this; it is so uncontrolled. So much of the time we are under the illusion we can control our lives by manipulation and master planning. But what emerges in art and nature arises from the interaction and mutual responses of all the players, be they animate or inanimate. Because the living players use feedback to change their responses, the outcome is unpredictable. One can never predict what will emerge, and therefore we cannot make precise plans, anymore than we can determine what a baby will look like.

No one can predict how we will respond to the increasing crises around us, and none of us can predetermine what our role may be in the unfolding of things. But we can circumscribe that role by closing down, living in denial and fear, running away from the pain (information), believing there is nothing we can do. We don't have to know what to do. The truth is we can't know what to do, in advance anyway. But that is different from believing there is nothing we can do. What we can do is stay open and make ourselves available. We can "show up." This is what we do with clients, after all. So we can do it with transformation on a larger scale. Show up, be present to what is-feelings and all, observe, participate, watch and see what the situation summons in us, what perhaps unknown wisdom, strength, skills, and eloquence emerges from us.

But we won't know what to do if we avoid the issue, hide our heads, throw in the towel, etc. And everyone's way of showing up is different. We can't judge one another. But let's not use that as an excuse for evading our responsibility. We are each responsible to Nature for the unique experiment Nature plays out in us; we are each responsible for our part of the whole radical experiment of humanity.

The challenge to the psychosynthesis community
In closing, I would like to offer a challenge to the psychosynthesis community to more fully participate in making the shift to living as if we are interconnected to all life. Each of us can begin by increasing our awareness and choice in our personal relationship to nature, making it a priority in our daily lives. We can develop humility regarding human knowledge, and open ourselves to learn from nature. And perhaps most importantly, we can face the gravity of our situation, embrace the pain, open to guidance, and take action. As Macy says, "With insight into our profound interrelatedness, you know that actions undertaken with pure intent have repercussions throughout the web of life, beyond what you can measure or discern" (1991).

References

• Firman, John, "I" and Self: Revisioning Psychosynthesis. Palo Alto CA: Firman, 1991.
• Macy, Joanna, Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age. Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1983.
• Macy, Joanna, World as Lover, World as Self. Berkeley: Parallax Press, 1991
• Sahtouris, Elizabeth, Gaia: The Human Journey From Chaos to Cosmos. New York: Pocket Books, 1989 (currently out of print).