What connections (if any) do you see between respecting the environment and respecting yourself?

Question

are the two exclusive, or is there some relationship between self respect and earth care? can only those who respect themselves first truly make the effort to respect the earth? why or why not?

Answer 1

Perhaps your question is about self realization and respect? The correlation would then be much easier to see. If a man is starving, would he 'disrespect' or exploit his natural environment to eat?  If the man had no protection from the elements (shelter) would he 'disrespect' his natural environment? In those terms (self realization) would mean that each stage of needs would have to be fulfilled before the man could achieve self realization/respect for the environment and himself. I do not consider this is correct. We are part of, not separate from, the natural environment.

I believe we can respect the environment without respecting ourselves, but we can not really respect ourselves without first respecting the natural world.

There seems to be a contradiction there, but not every human action has a notable impact on the environment. For an extreme example, people can show their disrespect for themselves by their actions such as anorexia but this would have a positive effect on the environment (less resources).

Yet to come to any form of real self respect, in my opinion, you must appreciate your own place within the natural world. That you are insignificant in the scale of things and in real time scales. That you are of equal value, not superior to other living things and non living systems. That you can make your actions positive or negative but your impact can only ever be on those living things sharing your immediate 'world'.

That all things in our own lifetime are fleeting, transient, vulnerable. That nature has enormous strength and power and regardless of how 'secure' we feel in our own 'world' it is the Natural World, natural forces that determine whether or not we  live or die. Whilst this concept brings to mind massive events like floods or droughts, it applies to many living things and non living systems from falling in a stream to viruses that kill people.

Answer 2

you respect the environment, u respect yourself by giving clean air, water, and things like that.

Answer 3

i only respect energy which can be in any form.

i don't know where and why energy was came ?

who made them .

i do not believe in  God.

in environment of earth or any other planet, can be harmful when the people will disturb environment.

people and other can live when they stop period of time of conversion of one energy to another energy form.

i am one part of environment.

Answer 4

We are nature. Therefore in order to take care of ourselves we must take care of nature.  You can learn to respect yourself by respecting the Earth or vice versa.  Once you learn to respect it is only a matter of application after that.

Answer 5

If  you have  no respect  for  yourself chances  are  you will  care  less  about the  environment.

Answer 6

It's the respect one gives to their own Mother. It's a family affair.

Answer 7

the guy with the tree hugger comment is not a good example of respect for anything whatsoever.. and a good example of lower consciousness at work.

Respecting yourself ultimately means respecting everything else because you essentialy are everything.  The true self, sometimes called Atman is one with all there is.  Knowledge of that true self is  the goal of all true spiritual paths.  That's why people with higher consciousness are ALWAYS environmentalists.  They understand the interconnectedness that underlies all reality.

We have free will. We can choose not to harm the environment.

We are making a mistake by assuming that we are just animals and nothing more. Man creates his own reality with his thoughts. If that seems like an outrageous statement, I'm here to tell you, that

that is what all enlightened people in the world know. The state of things in the world are the result of the collective thoughts of all the people in the world. Outragious? Maybe, but it is true.

Too much us and them thinking, too much thinking that the world is just stuff and therefore what does it matter what we do to our environment. It is all based on an incorrect world view. Reality is

quite different than commonly assumed.

You might want to read some books by Fred Alan Wolf Phd who writes books about quantum

physics and the nature of reality. The universe is far more strange than we think it is.

And man is far more than commonly thought.

Wolf's books include The Spiritual Universe,

The Dreaming Universe , Taking the Quantum Leap. Also a book called The Tao of Physics is an earlier book with a similar theme. But Wolf makes the ideas accessable to a layman and fun to read.

And if you are open to expanding your perceptions even more, I recommend the three books called "Conversations with God" by Neale Donald Walsch. The ideas presented there are consistant with what all enlightened people worldwide understand.  This is true no matter what spiritual disipline or path they have followed.   Fundamentalists will have a hard time with this and probably call it the work of the devil, trust me, it is the truth. Approach with open mind. It's hard to receive new information when your mind is already full of preconceived notions.

The mechanistic universe of cause and effect is based on Newtonian physics several hundred years old. This is still the outlook of most scientists and constitutes most of our world view, but that is changing.

That is by no means the universe that quantum physics describes.

Also, evolution is much more than just survival of the fittest. this aspect of evolution has been

stressed at the expense of perhaps a more important concept, that of symbiosis. Evolution happens as much by cooperation among species as it does by competition. The first idea has so dominated our thinking, especially in the west, that we have arrived at a dog eat dog kind of perception of reality that has colored our cultural values, economic theories and more. It is a very limited view.

That is what is wrong with the world.

And religions have limited views as much as reductionists scientist do.

I saw a bumper sticker recently that speaks to what I am saying here.

"God is too big to fit inside one religion"

That's because God, or the absolute or whatever you want to call it, is INFINITE. Beyond any

religion's description and beyond any of our scientific descriptions. No concept can describe infinity.  You don't have to be religious per say to get something from what I'm saying.

This is what no one is talking about;   that what the world needs, to solve it's problems is higher

consciousness. If you think that's a pipe dream, you are dead wrong. The world is full of people

who have achieved this higher consciousness. I personally have met hundreds of them.

As Bob Dylan said in a song, "there's something going on here, but you don't know what it is, do you Mr Jones?"

And as William Blake said "a fool and a wise man don't see the same tree"

Reality is a perception. Not a fixed rigid thing.

Shakespeare, another wise man, said the same thing . to paraphrase since I don't have it here in

front of me, " the world is far more than you philosophers could possibly dream of"

Life is a dream! some people wake up from the dream. Blake and Shakespeare were among those who wake up.

How's that for food for thought?

If you truly understood what I am saying, you're views about the environment would be quite

different.

Answer 8

I agree with the firist answer.