Wide Identification and Open Individualism

(A subset of stances on self and identity)

Short Fiction:

Poetry and music:

Books:

Articles:

Quotes:

We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.

—Carl Sagan

“My life … runs back through time and space to the very beginnings of the world and to its utmost limits. In my being I sum up the earthly inheritance and the state of the world at this moment.”
– Simone de Beauvoir

What do you have in your own circle of life that is so precious that you cannot put a price on it? What would it be? And if someone tried to come and take it from you, what would you do – how far would you go to stand for it? For me it was my land. For me, it was my mountain.

—Larry Gibson, Keeper of the Mountains

The requisite care flows naturally if the self is widened and deepened so that protection of free nature is felt and conceived of as protection of our very selves.

—Seed et al. (1988), Thinking Like a Mountain: Towards a Council of All Beings

Once we have experienced the fierce joy of life that attends extending our identity into nature, once we realize that the nature within and the nature without are continuous,
then we too may share in the exquisite beauty and effortless grace associated with the natural world.

—Seed et al. (1988), Thinking Like a Mountain: Towards a Council of All Beings

 “Experiences which are transformative by nature and allow us to change the cognitive framing of who we are and where we are going, are experiences which recontextualize the self as a marvelous conduit in a timeless whole. A self from which molecules and meaning flow from neurons to nebula and back again.”
– Tim Doody

Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.

—Alan Watts

It’s like you took a bottle of ink and you threw it at a wall. Smash! And all that ink spread. And in the middle, it’s dense, isn’t it? And as it gets out on the edge, the little droplets get finer and finer and make more complicated patterns, see?

[…] If you think that you are only inside your skin, you define yourself as one very complicated little curlique, way out on the edge of that explosion. Way out in space, and way out in time.

—Alan Watts

Billions of years ago, you were a big bang, but now you’re a complicated human being.
And then we cut ourselves off, and don’t feel that we’re still the big bang. But you are. […] You are still the process.

You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are.

—Alan Watts

We do not “come into” this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean “waves,” the universe “peoples.” Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated “egos” inside bags of skin.

—Alan Watts

When I can no more identify myself with that little man inside, there is nothing left to identify with—except everything!  There is no longer the slightest contradiction between feeling like a leaf on a stream and throwing one’s whole energy into responsible action, for the push is the pull.

And thus in using intelligence to change what has hitherto been the course of nature, one has the realization that this is a new bend in the course and that the whole flood of the stream is behind it.

 —Alan Watts