Here at the end of the twentieth century, we are faced with an awesome threat and an awesome challenge. We in the industrialized growth economies are destroying our habitat, our life support system, along with that of the myriad species which share our ecosystem. We threaten ourselves with species suicide. Our challenge is to transform our attitudes and practices so we can live harmoniously and sustainably within the planetary biosphere for generations to come. Everything we do takes on enormous significance within this context.

Most of the time we act as if human life will go on indefinitely, without any radical change on our part. At the recent World Conference in San Diego, I heard speeches about the evolution of psychosynthesis over the next hundred years, as if there was no question that human life and society would survive that long. Even now, as I sit here in the sun with my laptop computer resting comfortably on my knees, beautiful music pouring from the stereo, it's easy for me to feel complacent about the future. But I know differently. I know about environmental destruction going on around the globe, and the long-term effects of this destruction on the global climate, on air and water, on crops, on the human immune system, and so on. Hey, gang, we can't go on like this! We need to wake up and actively participate in transforming the way we live.

So I am willing to write regularly in the AAP's Psychosynthesis Community News to keep this challenge at the center of our conversation about psychosynthesis. We in the psychosynthesis community have such powerful tools and perspectives to offer the world! Let's put them to work on the problem, rather than denying that the problem exists. I invite you to contribute your thoughts, perspectives, and practices regarding "ecosynthesis" to me, and to this column, in future editions.

Here's my two bits' worth for this time. I want to share about "Ecological Self," a concept from Deep Ecology which I believe resonates with the concept of Self in psychosynthesis. Ecological Self refers to a larger identification beyond the "skin-encapsulated ego." When I open myself to identifying with Ecological Self, I experience my own organism and personhood as continuous with life around me, with the whole of the planetary biosphere, and even with the cosmos from which Earth, and life on Earth, arose. I participate more consciously and actively in the wondrous web of life of which I am a part. It's like the experience of disidentifying from a subpersonality and identifying with the self/Self -- only better!

I have learned through psychosynthesis to align with Self by paying attention to the full range of inner impressions and imagery. Through Deep Ecology, I have learned to pay attention to the full range of sensory and energetic impressions from the land, air, water, plants, and animals around me. Open to both and see what happens. Aligned in this way with Ecological Self, I begin to sense where change wants to happen and where there is readiness to awaken. And I learn, more and more precisely, how I can participate in this transformation.

As I do that even very briefly now, I realize how I must do this as a practice: quiet, pay attention in and out, ask for what is trying to emerge, ask for guidance. I make it so hard on myself when I blunder through my days without this practice. The promptings still get through, because I have practiced enough in the past that the habits of listening still go on at some level. But I suffer a lot unnecessarily, and waste my energies in less useful actions.