Thanks for the observations and queries. I don’t know Ryff’s work very well, though I understand many have reservations about it. In general ‘mastery of the environment’ is used to mean ‘living environment’ ie the capacity to get things done in the context you are in. I don’t think it’s directly about our relationship to the natural world as such. That said, my comment about grounding the models in the natural world relates to the need to connect with open systems biology as a theory of life and consciousness as such — fuller details of that are in my earlier post on the unrecognised genius of Jean Piaget.