r e l a t i o n a l
s e l f

"One's role thus becomes that of participant in a social process that eclipses one's personal being."
--Ken Gergen, The Saturated Self, p.156



YOU & I become ----> US



He cannot jog without headphones, as he needs to hear voices singing the lyrics, forecasting the weather, broadcasting the news. Without them coming into his ears, he'd have to listen to the other voices in his head. And those are intolerable.

She cannot sit in her apartment alone without turning on the television. Or listening to her stereo, or talking on the phone, or playing on her computer.

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I am daughter, granddaughter, great-granddaughter, sister, niece, lover, friend, student, teacher, employee, client, devotional follower, mistress, listener, and volunteer. Alone, who am I? I sit on my bed and listen to the silence. I am a heartbeat. I am breathing. I am energy waves. I am a body. I am brain babble. Yet nothing separates me from you. Are we part of a process of surrender into the oneness of our original creation, or are we passively relinquishing the uniqueness of our individual selves?


"Spiritual growth, or unfolding, begins when we cease to understand or see ourselves as isolated and narrow competing egos and begin to identify with other humans from our family and friends to, eventually, our species. But the deep ecology sense of self requires a further maturity and growth, an identification which goes beyond humanity to include the nonhuman world. We must see beyond our narrow contemporary cultural assumptions and values, and the conventional wisdom of our time and place, and this is best achieved by the meditative deep questioning process."
--Deep Ecology

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