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Loy 10 ( David R. Loy is a professor, writer, and Zen teacher in the Sanbo Kyodan tradition of Japanese Zen Buddhism, 2010, “Healing Ecology,” Journal of Buddhist Ethics, Volume 17, [...])One way to describe this problem is that, since the sense of self is a mental construct, it is by definition ungrounded and ungroundable, and therefore always insecure. It can never secure itself because there’s nothing substantial or real there that could be secured. The constructed self is better understood as a work in progress, because it is never completed—more precisely, always unhealed. Another way to say it is that the sense of self is always shadowed or haunted by a sense of lack. Processes are temporal, necessarily impermanent, but we don’t want to be something that’s changing all the time, vulnerable to illness, old age and death. So we keep trying to secure ourselves, often in ways that just make our situation worse. This is the core of the ignorance that Buddhism emphasizes. We often try to secure ourselves by identifying with things “outside” us that (we think) can provide the grounding we crave: money, material possessions, reputation, power, physical attractiveness, and so forth. That is because we misunderstand our sense of lack as due to lack of such things. Since none of them can actually ground or secure my sense-of-self, it means that no matter how much money, and so forth, I may accumulate, I never seem to have enough. The tragedy, from a Buddhist perspective, is that such attempts to solve the problem so often end up reinforcing the actual problem—the sense that there is a “me” that’s separate from others. The Buddhist solution to this predicament is not to get rid of the self. That cannot be done, and does not need to be done, because there is no separate self. There never was such a self. It is the sense of self that needs to be deconstructed (for example, in meditation) and reconstructed (for example, replacing the “three poisons” of greed, ill will and delusion with their more positive counterparts: generosity, lovingkindness, and wisdom). We need to “wake up” and see through the illusion of self: I am not inside, peering out at the objective world out there. Rather, “I” am one of the ways in which all the causes and conditions of the world come together—what the whole world is doing—right here and now. This realization does not automatically solve all my personal problems, but it reveals how my sense of self can be reconstructed, so that my way of experiencing the world is more “permeable” and I relate to others in a less dualistic fashion. brings us to the bodhisattva path. In Buddhism that path is often presented as a personal sacrifice: a bodhisattva is someone who is enlightened and could choose to leave this world of dukkha, yet he or she sticks around to help the rest of us. But there’s another way to understand it. If I’m not separate from everyone else, can my well-being really be distinguished from the well-being of “others”? How can I be fully enlightened, then, unless everyone else is as well? In that case, following the bodhisattva path is better understood as a more advanced stage of Buddhist practice: learning to live in ways that apply this insight to our daily lives. Taking care of “others,” then, becomes as natural as taking care of my own leg. To summarize: for Buddhism the sense of self is not something self-existing and real but a psychological construction, which involves a sense of separation from others. Our deepest dukkha is that we feel disconnected from the rest of the world, and this feeling is always uncomfortable, because insecure. We do many things that (we hope) will make us feel more real, yet they often have the opposite effect: they reinforce that sense of separation. No matter what we have or what we do, it’s never enough. While we cannot get rid of a self that does not exist, we can “wake up” and realize it is delusive. This also addresses the existential question about the meaning of one’s life: realizing my nonduality with the world frees me to live as I choose, but that will naturally be in a way that contributes to the well-being of the whole, because I don’t feel apart from that whole. This Buddhist account of our individual predicament corresponds precisely to our collective ecological predicament today.