Carl Jung’s theory of the Collective Unconscious states that “all humans have a common psychological predisposition” (Wikipedia), that all humans are linked through a collective psyche, is one way of explaining how we are all interconnected. Watts goes further; he says that there are no parts to the world, only the whole itself.

It is clear the natural world is interconnected; though “man aspires to govern nature, but the more one studies ecology, the more absurd it seems to speak of any one feature of an organisms or of an organism/environment field, as governing or ruling others,” (Watts, 914). We have recently talked about gardens, how they are a representation of this human desire to control nature. However, it is important that man knows his limits in the realm of the natural world—he is not all-powerful, simply part of the whole, the “harmony of contained conflicts,” (Watts, 917).

Though I do believe in this interconnection, I’m skeptical that minute occurrences in your life, like dropping a penny on the street, will play a great part in your future or affect the world around you in some crazy domino effect. However, I do believe there are decisions we make that can shape the rest of our lives—where we choose to go to college, how we choose to act once we’re there—that will play a direct effect in our futures. Just as Watt says, “every organism is a process…it is what it does;” (915) we are, in a sense, the sum of our actions. Thus it is important to remain conscious of our “whole” selves: who we were, who we are, and who we are going to (want) to be.

Using our passions as the base of our “selves,” our aim in this class is to discover who we are, what we want from our lives. Once we (yet again) “hammer our thoughts into unity” (Yeats, 905)—our passions, our actions, the framework in which we live—we will begin to find ourselves. Hopefully with this discovery we can find our place in the world; our part in the great, interconnected, living force we call earth.