Liberals have often been accused of relying on an overly individualistic idea of who we are.  Liberals answer they are well aware we have social sides, but they (and their ritics) rarely question the nature of the individual self.  I think the Christian concept of a unitary self influenced by its environment but fundamentally distinct from it has colored and confused most all liberal thought.
         

I think our selves are like a
photon in one interesting respect.  They appear to be a
particle when asked some questions, and a wave spread out over space when other
questions are asked.  This fits a
Pagan view much better than the self as little atom view does.      

Here is a
thought experiment.  Think of
yourself.  Now remove one of your
identifying external traits and replace it with a different one.  Your family life is very different,
with different siblings and perhaps parents who divorced if they didn’t, or
didn’t if they did.  Your
profession is different. 
Whatever.    

You still can easily think of yourself as being the ‘same’ person, but
with a difference.  Yet the longer
you live the greater difference that divergence will have on who you are. In
some sense you would still be you, 
but in another sense you’d be different.      

Now, what would be the case if every one of
those external dimensions of who you are changed? You were adopted by a
different family into a different culture, speaking a different language and
practicing a different religion, and so on.  When every external detail changes, ‘you’ no longer
exist.  Yet what is ‘you’ is most
importantly yur inner sense of self and inner character.  Internal and external are not really
separate.           

You are what you are because you are a central node in an extraordinarily
complex array of relationships.          

Every
relationship manifests a quality of existence.  As the African proverb states, “I am because we are” but the
“we” goes beyond even the human community.  It includes our ancestors, our evolutionary history, in a
sense, it includes the world.  I
think it’s relationships, “all the way down.”          

To me,
this perspective does not make the individual disappear or decline in moral
value.  I think it ennobles the
individual and increases his or her intrinsic worth as a truly unique
expression of the ways in which complex value manifests in the world.  Months ago during National Poetry Week
I offered a fragment from a poem by Yevgeny Yevtushenko as the poem that most
influenced how I view the world.  Yevtushenko
probably describes this image I am trying to communicate better than any thing
I can write.  Each of us is a
creator and manifestation of a world of experience, of a quality of life.        

In an alive universe of Sacred Immanence such as I have experienced –
and I think is most in harmony with a Pagan outlook –  anything conceivable has some degree of existece, some
degree of awareness.  When many
come together they form a greater gestalt that is a ‘self,’ from the
down-and-out guy asking for donations, to the richest CEO and wisest Elder.          

The
more connected we are to any given quality the more we are linked with other
manifestations of it.  I suspect
this is why those who obsess the most abut the failings of others so often seem
to show the same failings themselves. I suspect this is also why an injustice
to any sends its own vibrations throughout existence. I sometimes think that
the universal spiritual emphasis, at least among genuine religious traditions,
of centering, quieting the heart, love, forgiveness, peace – the terms are
manifold – enable us to act as dampeners on the damage these acts do.  (It is also why I find writing a blog
where I need to post almost every day, and know more about politics than most
other things so I write on it, spiritually a very challenging task.)            

Equally, it is why growing peace in our own heart send out its own
impact elsewhere.           
So by virtue of the links with others that taken collectively make us

who we are, we are linked with everything else.  We are beads in Indra’s net, 
but often without the self-awareness to notice the net, or the reflections in
who we are.  And some beads are
closer than others, even if everything is reflected in them all.          

So I
think a Pagan perspective can enrich liberalism, and free it decisively from
its Christian rooted disconnect with the world and with other people.             

The next part of this mini-essay will explore how a Pagan perspective
heals the separation of people from the world.  I’ll discuss Baruch’s point he made in Part I as well.