In a lecture given in 1970, Gregory Bateson said:
If you set God outside and set him vis-a-vis his creation and if you have the idea that you are created in his image, you will logically and naturally see yourself as outside and against the things around you.And as you arrogate all mind to yourself, you will see the world around you as mindless and therefore not enltitled to moral or ethical consideration. The environment will seem to be yours to exploit. Your survival unit will be you and your folks or conspecifics against the environment of other social units, other races and the brutes and vegetables. If this is your estimate of your relation to nature and you have an advanced technology your likelihood of survival will be that of a snowball in hell. You will die either of the toxic by-products of your own hate or,simply,of overpopulation and overgrazing. The raw materials of the world are finite.
Interestingly, atheists simply swap the idea of "God" for the idea of "human reason", the difference between "us" and "animals" that makes all the difference. And the end result is the same. Dominion. Add into the mix capitalism, consumerism, and extractivism and you have a perfect storm. All these are IDEAS which though essentially invented products of the imagination upheld by societal norms risk the destruction of the Earth as we know it.
A psychological gear-change required, then, and Craig Chalquist suggests that Terrapsychology could be a useful tool. In his book Terrapsychological Inquiry he writes:
Most psychologies are psychologies of departure, of the lone ego moving through the world without attachment to tribe or place. To fully embody our lives here on Earth, we need psychologies of how to come home to our home world. P15
Terrapsychology asks: What emerges when we listen, imagine, and feel into rich intersections of psyche, story, symbol, body, mood, and place? When we put the presence of world at the centre of psychology? P31
We begin emplaced and connected-to nature, place, region, planet- and the quality of our knowing always reflects these connections, just as a branch implies the tree on which it grows. P41
Working consciously with deep connections between self and world begins to heal the split driving environmental crisis and collective self-alienation and invite knew delight in the complexity of our ties to nature, place, creatures, and things. P42
Terrapsychological inquiry (TI) seeks to lend voice to that which has been ignored or silenced in how we relate to the world and how it relates to us. The work is a project of recovery in the spirit of the alchemical opus, the great work of sustained labour and love that led in the operation of coagulatio, the bringing together of what was previously mixed up or sundered. P122
It's certainly interesting. It's also very different from a sociological inquiry, for example, in that Chalquist advises students or practitioners to pay attention to their dreams, to synchronicities, and to the symbolic. The methodology is influenced by Jungian depth psychology as much as by phenomenology, indigenous traditions, history, ecology and sociology. Truly multi-dimensional with the added extra of the unconscious.
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