Convergance - the act of converging and especially moving toward union.

Participation Mystique - a kind of psychological connection with objects, whereby the subject cannot clearly distinguish himself from the object but is bound to it by a direct relationship which amounts to partial identity.

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There is an ecological revolution underway. We are beginning to re-cognise Nature as extended self, realise that everything is sentient and that eventually everything connects. We are part of one whole, indivisible consciousness, and the path to remembering this is through the heart. The following are some of my favourite quotes on this subject.

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  “It seems both outrageous and irresponsible that so few mental health clinicians connect the epidemics of mental distress in industrial societies with the devastating impact of our suicidal destruction of our own habitat and ecocidal elimination of whole species. — Linda Buzzel and Craig Chalquist”

― Joanna Macy, Coming Back to Life 

"It is my experience that the world itself has a role to play in our liberation. Its very pressures, pains, and risks can wake us up -- release us from the bonds of ego and guide us home to our vast, true nature. For some of us, our love of the world is so passionate that we cannot ask it to wait until we are enlightened.”

 “In the first movement, our infancy as a species, we felt no separation from the natural world around us. Trees, rocks, and plants surrounded us with a living presence as intimate and pulsing as our own bodies. In that primal intimacy, which anthropologists call "participation mystique," we were as one with our world as a child in the mother's womb.

Then self-consciousness arose and gave us distance on our world. We needed that distance in order to make decisions and strategies, in order to measure, judge and to monitor our judgments. With the emergence of free-will, the fall out of the Garden of Eden, the second movement began -- the lonely and heroic journey of the ego. Nowadays, yearning to reclaim a sense of wholeness, some of us tend to disparage that movement of separation from nature, but it brought us great gains for which we can be grateful. The distanced and observing eye brought us tools of science, and a priceless view of the vast, orderly intricacy of our world. The recognition of our individuality brought us trial by jury and the Bill of Rights.

Now, harvesting these gains, we are ready to return. The third movement begins. Having gained distance and sophistication of perception, we can turn and recognize who we have been all along. Now it can dawn on us: we are our world knowing itself. We can relinquish our separateness. We can come home again -- and participate in our world in a richer, more responsible and poignantly beautiful way than before, in our infancy.”

“Grace happens when we act with others on behalf of our world.”

― Joanna Macy, World as Lover, World as Self

"What has come over our age is an alienation from Nature unexampled in human history. It has cost us our sense of reality and all but cost us our humanity." - Henry Beston

Somewhere along the way, we lost the experience of unity. We live our lives propping up the lie that we are different from everything else. This is a lie because the same awareness shines in the heart of all things.”
― Eliot Cowan, Plant Spirit Medicine

“It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.

Through the process of self-actualisation, one transcends the notions of the individuated "egoic" self and arrives at a position of an ecological self. - Arne Næss