Connected.

This will relate to you and psychology/therapy/counseling, I promise... just hang in there with me...

Some friends of mine have been really struggling with the BP oil... spill? (Wiki here)... it's so big, I scarcely know what to call it.  Have seen and heard some things I'll not reiterate- not because it wouldn't serve, but simply because we've been so inundated with the details of most of this news I'd be afraid that anything I'd have to say to describe such would be heartbreakingly insufficient.  The effects of this are catastrophic, to say the least.

Earlier too today, I was talking with a client about consciousness.  What is "I", how we know such things and etc, a lot of things rooted in Eastern thought, the ideas of Daniel Dennett (Dennett's Wiki), Stephen Pinker (Pinker's Wiki), and the like.  My client began to talk about having the awareness that we're all "one" (maybe that should be capitalized), and what that means in terms of how we experience our world.

This made me bring up another great thinker, a gentleman named Chuck Chamberlain who wrote a book called "A New Pair of Glasses".  In it, he asserted what I think is a fundamental truth (paraphrasing), that our real problem as humans is seeing ourselves as separate from "God" (the "universe", physics, whatever one prefers).  Ignoring this is far from inconsequential.  Our view, true or not, that we are somehow separate from others is part of what enables us to lie, cheat, steal, things much worse.  Even make oil spills.

As I'm alluding to above, whether we are all "one" or not, it's arguably true that we indeed operate (behave) this way.  We certainly see the consequences, but as with many things, we don't really see the etiology of them.  The Horizon spill is only the most immediate example.

Had we been behaving since the industrial age as if we are all connected, including the flora and fauna we are surrounded by (or more tragically accurate, that we are surrounding...), our world would look much different.  As promised, bringing this full-circle to the soul of this little corner of the web, the application of the idea that we are all connected has deep-reaching utility in psychology/therapy/counseling.  My world, and I hope the world of my clients have likely been improved greatly by finding ways to operate on this premise.

As noted earlier, it's pretty easy to see the negative consequences of operating as if all humans, animals, plants, etc are different, whether this is true or not.  There's pretty amazing benefits to operating as if we are indeed one in the same.  Behaving this way allows me to be as gentle a person as I intend.  It's a great method for being more considerate/thoughtful.  This may be true, because it's an idea that lends itself to increasing empathy.  It's a great way to diminish selfishness/self-ful-ness.  So many people are speaking in the "human potential movement" (*ahem* I struggle with these kinds of euphemisms and etc, but for the sake of simplicity...), behaving as if we are all one is fantastic mindfulness training.  We could certainly use a softer, warmer world (among some of the other ideas above), and this is a great way to help turn some of those problems around.

Again, I find that there's too many positive things to gain from such an idea to write here.  What prompts this though, is my own deep sense of sadness for the creatures upon whose lives we've so encroached because of not just our desire for a certain way of life, but because we avoid the emotional consequences of such a life in part, maybe because of the misperception that we are separate from these creatures, making it much easier for us to operate the same way every day, regardless of the consequences they have to endure.  Much as it's important for us to clean up the spill, have clean means of energy and etc- all of these things are rooted in a philosophy of separateness, that if we sit with a minute, we might realize how much less of our own hurts, sadness, fears, shame and etc might have been avoided had we or the person who stepped on our toes behaved as if this encroachment was really upon themselves.