Decentering the ego-self and releasing of the care-consciousness

This paper explores ways of cultivating an extraordinarily expansive caring consciousness for an extraordinarily challenging time such as ours. This is not the first time humans have faced the challenge of caring. But now the scope and urgency of the challenge have changed. Morality bas always been centrally about extending care-consciousness beyond the narrow confines of the individual self to the other, be it the family, clan, village, or nation. We are now challenged to extend care-consciousness to the whole of the biosphere and to the whole of humanity as a constituent part of it. Also, unlike before, we do not have the luxury of evading this challenge for the same reason that we could not afford to let a critically wounded person lose more blood. In both cases, intensive care is a must. My argument proceeds in two stages: first, I analyze the conditions that afford caring, and then I examine one "experiment" in caring consciousness, that of the Buddhist theory and practice of caring. I select this example because it illustrates clearly the conditions of care-consciousness that I analyze in the first part of the paper.