NO! An Ontological Perspective

Philosophers and psychologists have considered humans to be unique in that we live in time, establish history, give meaning to life, live with the reality of death, and experience compassion and love. This uniqueness becomes useless when we are always rushing or running out of time, resigned about our purpose for being here, petrified about death, and experiencing profound isolation and social fragmentation in our personal and international relations. Early psychological theories of human consciousness have been cast aside by contemporary theories that the entire universe is conscious. The latest interpretation of our human uniqueness is that we live in a world of linguistic commitment, making requests and promises. While animals may communicate, they do not live in language and commitment. But the results of our unique human ability with respect to acting in commitment don’t look so great if we consider our economic, social, environmental, political, and diplomatic realities. But let’s not stop here.

The topic has not been changed. This has everything to do with what NO is all about! A mule or elephant knows when there is respect, generated in a space of US. There are millions of humans who connect with and love animals, and experience this knowing profoundly. And while animals may not be linguistic, they don’t go against the grain of who they are, forcing each other into being this or that way. Neither do they rape, torture, mass murder, or indiscriminately harm each other.

But where is the ontological perspective in this? Have we missed something? Let’s approach what we have been saying in a different way.

We are not suggesting that we can rid our human being of the concept of the SELF. This is deeply engrained and at the moment, culturally untouchable. We human beings have historically constituted a person’s uniqueness or essential being by referring to the self. In this psychological perspective the self is the unity of human being. The self is an individual person as the object of his or her own reflective consciousness. This psychology of self includes all of the studies and theories of the cognitive and affective representations of one’s identity or the subject of experience. This has also permeated many religious and spiritual views about who we are, the nature of our own importance, and today’s popular teachings about consciousness. However, no matter how earnestly one promotes this, there is no absolute reality or universal truth to it. And it doesn’t matter if it is the dominant and predominant perspective. After all, for a long time the majority of humanity also held that the earth was flat.

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