The Effects of Practicing-Altruistic Behavior and Awareness for Self-Transcendence through MORININARU Movement

(Practices of Transcendental Joy of Giving in "MORININARU" (Afforested Burial)",Mini Symposium,The 33rd Symposium on Life information Science)

Abstract

The purpose of this symposium is to describe how the MORININARU movement, which is an anonymous movement to facilitate planting trees to replace tombstones, contributes to one's self-transcending awareness. Kono starts by explaining the background and the overview of the MORINNARU movement, then Koda talks about the meaning of MORININARU from the inpersonal perspective. Next a social psychologist Onodera discusses the issues on gratitude and altruistic behavior. Finally I will describe the meaning of the MORININARU movement as an emergence of spirituality in the context of positive psychology. The MORNINARU movement gives not only useful meaning on environment and death, but also promotes one's positive emotions and life satisfactions, and contributes to one's ultimate happiness as a meaningful life or in other words "eudemonia". I will explain how the possibility of the payback behavior beyond individuals promotes universal altruism based on the broad-and-build-theory of positive psychology.