IntraConnected

The good news about this identity lens is that we can adjust it—we don’t need to choose one level of identity and belonging over another because they are each real, and each have their importance.

This capacity to shift the focus of what criteria we choose is what we will call an “identity lens,” which we can adjust from a narrow focus on our body or brain alone to a wide-angle perspective, seeing who we are as fundamentally intraconnected within the whole energy system of the universe.

The criteria we choose to determine our identity directly define our belonging.

When we do not sense how we belong to larger systems, when we deny the reality of this unseen, intraconnected nature of the world, we come to live a partially true life, a life of separation.

If the hypothesis we are considering in this book is on the right track—that the contemporary construction of a solo-self, isolated from others in our human family and from the family of all living beings, is a significant source of our modern pandemics—then taking on an intraconnected energy flow approach to self, identity, and belonging might hel

Embodied flow literally means “how energy flow occurs within the skin-encased body and its brain in various manifestations,”

Relational flow indicates energy that is shared between people and between individuals and the natural environment with which they are fundamentally connected.

In my four books, The Developing Mind, Mindsight, Mind: A Journey to the Heart of Being Human, and Aware, I proposed that mind is an emergent property of embodied and relational energy flow; this flow arises—emerges—within our skin-encased body and brain (embodied flow) and within our relationships with people and the planet (relational flow).

this effort to find a common ground among the independent ways of knowing can be called “consilience.”