A few years ago a Thai law student and fellow community member, Krung, established a personal website and asked if I would like one. I felt some apprehension that it might result in annoying and possibly abusive e-mails. After weighing the potential consequences of such a step into the global exposures and anonymities of cyber space, I agreed. It would be a useful way of listing my science publications for enquirers and colleagues. In addition to my science contributions, I listed some biographical facts, added some images of marine animals I have named and some images of Antarctica, and included essays that have been published in Reflective Writings. Web search engines, such as , do direct people to the website. I have received some engaging contacts, and not a single objectionable one. A man in his twenties e-mailed to say how affirmed he felt when he read the essay on Young Men and Spiritual Experiences. A schoolgirl from Florida e-mailed to ask how she might care for a seastar she found on a beach. Recently I received an e-mail from an excited sociologist who is researching links between “marine science” and “spirituality”. She entered these words into the Google search engine, and my website was one of very few found. I agreed to be interviewed, and I found it valuable to be asked to put language around what has been my lifelong journey of spiritual searching. So where has this journey brought me? What do I share with others? What language is available to describe my experience?

The last century witnessed dramatic changes in philosophical, theological and scientific thinking. I experienced many of those changes as I lived immersed in philosophising and theologising about church and our brotherhood and religious life, as I faced the challenge of teaching religion to senior students, as I journeyed with post-school youth, and as I researched the marine world. I remember deciding in the early 1950’s that I had to shift from a scholastic philosophy and theology to an existential one. I was encouraged that Karl Rahner S.J. took the same step a year earlier. This change was remarkably freeing. I could now search for meaning through an experiential approach, rather than within formulaic constraints.

In the early 1970’s the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess coined the phrase deep ecology, and distinguished it from the anthropocentric environmentalism which he saw as shallow ecology. For Naess, deep ecology had three different meanings. It referred to an approach which asked deeper questions about the ecological relationships of which we are a part. It carried a popular sense of “ecocentric egalitarianism”, that everything has a right to exist. Most significantly, it expressed a philosophical view that self-realization is achieved fully within being a part of all things. Naess believed that a person achieves fullness of being through an expansiveness that relates beyond (trans) the person and connects with the cosmos. Amongst others, Fritjof Capra and Charlene Spretnak have embraced the language and philosophy of deep ecology, and the thinking of Naess underpins the spiritual and ecological bases of Green Politics.

While Naess philosophised about deep ecology, the psychologists Abraham Maslow and Anthony Sutich were reacting in the 1960’s against Freudian deterministic psychology with its focus on dysfunction and illness. They argued initially for a humanistic psychology, with the focus on the whole person, the interior life, and the health of the person. By the 1970’s they were dissatisfied with this humanistic psychology, considering it to be too ego-centric, potentially narcissistic, and lacking a cultural and cosmic dimension. Under the influence of the Taoist ideal of living in harmony with the nature of all things, the Spinoza ideal of living under the aspect of eternity, and the recognition by the Eastern Traditions of trans-egoic consciousness and super-consciousness and transpersonal states of being, they began to write about transpersonal psychology. They observed persons whom they described as transcenders. In their experience transcenders moved beyond self-actualization and had a more expansive experience of Self, and transcenders experienced more ecstasy and were more prone to a kind of cosmic sadness.

Warwick Fox has written a comprehensive review of the work of Naess, Maslow and Sutich (Fox, Warwick, 1990. Towards a Transpersonal Ecology. Developing New Foundations for Environmentalism. Sahambhala: Boston and London). He argued that transpersonal psychology remained widely anthropocentric, and proposed the new phrase transpersonal ecology to capture the ideals of these thinkers. Transpersonal ecology would describe the philosophical view of Naess, and the psychological observations of Maslow and Sutich, that we are all entities in a single unfolding reality, and that there is an expansive self, a Self which derives being and self-realization from beyond-self relationships with all else. We are leaves on the evolving branching tree of all things, and we have a steadfast friendliness with the whole tree.

For transpersonal ecologists the attainment of the expansive Self is thorough what Naess called identification. In his review, Fox recognized three types of identification. Personal identification describes an individual’s capacity to become immersed in what is being experienced. Ontological identification refers to a personal conviction that all that exists is as much a manifestation of being as the self. Cosmological identification describes the deep personal sense that the self, and all, are aspects of a single unfolding reality. Do I experience these identifications? Some of my personal experiences are that “I feel deeply at home with the ocean”; “I become transfixed by the cloudscapes of Turner”; and “I am transported by the adagietto of Mahler’s 5th”. I frequently experience personal identifications such as these. I have written about my experience of recognizing “the being of Lake Mungo”. I sometimes experience such ontological identifications. In Tanzania I was given a profound experience of “being a part of all things”, a rare cosmological identification. The language is dense, but I am grateful for it. It enables me to know that I am not alone. I understand what Naess, Maslow, Sutich and Fox have said. I experience what they claim is the experience of others. I can describe myself as a transpersonal ecologist, and I recognize others whom I would describe with this language also.

But what of spirituality? I find a comment by Fritjof Capra affirming: Ecology and spirituality are fundamentally connected, because deep ecological awareness, ultimately, is spiritual awareness. David Ranson unlocked a connecting door for me. During a Sacred Earth Series presentation at Treacy Centre in February 2004, David stated that the nature of God is communion. The statement resonated with me. If I am a leaf on the evolving branching tree of all things, and I have a steadfast friendliness with the whole tree, then I am in deep communion. I dare to recognize that I am immersed in the sacred. In an older language, I am in God. I find myself at a stage in my journey where there are moments for me when transpersonal ecology and cosmic spirituality are one. May the moments lengthen.

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