Self-Realization (Næss)

The capital S in Self-realization is deliberate. It distinguishes Næss's concept from the self-actualization of humanistic psychology — the journey toward becoming one's best self within the bounds of the ego. Næss meant something more radical: the recognition, achieved through expanding identification, that the self is not a bounded entity contained within the skin but a node in a web of relationships that extends, in principle, to include the entire community of life. Self-realization is not altruism, which sacrifices self-interest for another. It is the dissolution of the boundary between self and other — the discovery that the tree one climbs, the river one drinks from, the community one builds with are not outside the self but part of it, insofar as one's experience of being alive is constituted by one's relationship to them.