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Practical natural system distance learning that addresses mid-life and other crises. |
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Thinking and Learning
With all Nine Legs
"If you
count a dog's tail as one of its legs, how many legs does a dog
have?"
Problem
solving with natural systems: overcome Natural System Dysfunction (NSD):
Creatively
use logical Earth and whole-life relationships.
Learn how
to address the deep, unrecognized prejudice and cultural bias
in our nature-disconnected thinking.
Strengthen
the effectiveness of
.
If we are not using
critical and creative thinking that offsets our destructive cultural
biases, unknowingly we are part of a major life, midlife
and earth crisis and we feel the erosion of hope.
We cannot solve our most challenging
personal and environmental problems by thinking and relating
with the same prejudice and limiting process that causes them.
The How
and Why of "Nine-Leg" Thinking:
How to identify
and address the underlying conflict in the destructive way we
habitually learn to think, act and relate to the world.
Why we produce
our discontents and life crisis even though we don't want to
and it doesn't make sense.
A CORE PROBLEM
As I returned home from my
hike, the school bus stopped at the corner and dropped off two
young girls from first and third grade. We walked down the country
road together and as we talked about how they liked school. I
made the mistake of asking them if they learned mathematics there
and they said they did. Although I soon wished I hadn't, I asked
them if they could answer a simple math question that I had seen
on a critical thinking math aptitude/intelligence test. This
logical reasoning question is used to help determine our mathematical
ability or our competency to qualify for the rewards of better
job, higher salary or greater prestige and self-worth. Here's
the question:
'If you count a dog's tail
as one of its legs, how many legs does a normal dog have?'
With smiles, both girls proudly
responded "five" and looked at me as if I had asked
a dumb question.
'Yes,' I replied, "And
have you ever seen a real dog? How many legs does it have?"
'Four'
'Is its tail one of its legs?'
'No, silly,'
'Well then, isn't your mathematics answer incorrect, doesn't
a real dog only have four legs?"
As they thought about my question,
sadness filled the girl's faces. They thought they got the question
wrong or that I said they were wrong. The younger girl was about
to cry, and a tension built in each of us.
I was mortified about what
I had done and about to apologize for confusing them when, as
if by magic, a dog with a cropped tail walked down the road toward
us. Both girls excitedly smiled and shouted 'Four and a half
is the right answer, its four and a half.' As they quickly walked
away from me to pat the dog, I was so thankful that it had come
to the rescue. It should have received a hero's medal.
The next day, when the school
bus arrived, I noticed that the girls were met by their mother
who drove them home....probably to protect them from me, some
crazy guy who was harassing them with stupid mathematics questions.
The
incident helped me recognize that the stress situation that I put the
girls in is the same stress that faces each of us in industrial society
from the day we are born. We learn to habitually think, act and relate
to each other and the world as if a dog has five legs. We are
socialized to "as if" thinking that is malligned. We, in turn mallign
each other and the environment.
It is no surprise that most
people answer 'five' when I ask the "5-legged dog"
question. We are indoctrinated or addicted to this answer by our
education, training and conditioning.
However,
there is another reality at work. It's the nature of our planet, Earth,
and the solar system. Its natural grace, self-correcting intelligence
and restorative attraction powers normally produces dogs with four legs, dogs with
tails that are not legs.
Nature's
reality also produces the way the world works as an optimum of life in
diversity and balance, as a web of life with a perfection of its own
that does not produce the pollution and disorders that result from our
"tail is a leg" thinking.
We are born into and are part of nature's reality. It
gives us the common sense to recognize that a warped, but habitual,
"tail is a leg" way of thinking is wrong with respect to life in balance. That wrong
underlies the "unsolveable" personal and global troubles
that we suffer in Industrial Society. In this regard, we are
no better than a goat directing air traffic at O'Hare International
Airport.
The "five
legged dog" critical thinking question presents a logical
reasoning challenge. Of course, "five," is the correct
answer on a math examination if you want to score high and get
ahead with a higher salary and prestige. Intelligent people say "five" because it is
valid in mathematical systems and contemporary thought.
Mathematics
is a helpful and creative way of thinking, a problem
solving method that is stringently trained and rewarded by industrial
society. It even affects our self-esteem. We are like the two
elementary school girls. For example,
how comfortable
would we be if people discovered that we think 1 + 1 = 5?
We feel, look
and are treated badly if we are not mathematically adept because
we are out of step with our scientific technological world. In
it, 1 + 1 = 2
Most of us don't solely
use mathematically logical creative thinking to live our lives.
For problem solving, our natural sense of reason can consider
what we know from our genuine contact with a real, normal dog,
too. That's when our multitude of 53 natural senses and their sensibility come
into play: for example, our inherent natural senses of sight,
touch, motion, color, texture, language, sound, smell, reason,
consciousness, community, trust, contrast and love, to name just
a few.
Using his or her natural attraction senses, even a very young child who does not know
math can determine that a tail is not a leg. A child's sense of
consciousness and reason can accurately register that a tail is
located, moves, feels, looks, smells, acts and has a different
name than a leg.
Each of our 53 natural
senses applied to a normal dog provides us with additional
information. Each helps our critical and logical thinking
sense of reason make more sense and more informed, sensible,
problem solving decisions.
In concert,
our multitude of natural senses enable our inherent creative thinking
to identify and register a different truth than that of 5-leg
thinking. Natural thinking recognizes from experience the fact
that a tail is different than a leg, that a dog has
four legs, not five, no
matter what is correct in mathematical logic, no matter what is
accurate in our society's "as if," story on an aptitude test. Four legs
is nature's reality, no matter how Industrial Society socializes us to
think.
Five
leg "as if" thinking and knowing has been absent from
Earth's 4.5 billion year existence.....until humanity very recently
entered the scene with the nature-disconnected five leg story that we
must conquer nature to survive in a good way.
Our excessively
nature-disconnected society too often builds itself on 5-leg thinking and
stories. It rewards us, including paying us, to habitually think with these stories. This overwhelms and suppresses
our natural 4-leg ways of sensory thinking and feeling into our subconscious.
It produces the crisis of Natural System Dysfunction
that frustrates and injures our 53 natural senses and underlies most of
our
stress, disorders and troubles. It disables us from consciously
registering and thinking with sensory signals from natural systems
within and around us. The play of these natural attraction sensitivities is the way nature works to
produce its perfection. We inherit, and we are, their grace. However,
an unreasonable prejudice against nature in Industrial Society, for
profit, socializes us to conquer and exploit nature by convincing us to
think like a dog's tail is a leg.
Conflicting
Realities and our Discontents
Research in
Neuropsychology has established that our natural, four-leg dog,
sensory way of knowing and problem solving is our old brain
(Cohen 1995). It is the way that non-literate nature and its systems throughout
the eons, along with our inherent inner nature today, know, without words, how to sensitively sustain
the world in its natural grace balance and beauty.
In nature,
our old brain's intelligence
nurtures us to fulfill our 53 natural attraction senses and their
intelligence, to seek and enjoy natural good feelings of greater
wellness and balance. This is nature's way. It naturally produces
dopamine. We enjoy this phenomenon even on just a quiet walk in
the park.
Out of Balance
The "four-leg
dog" old brain makes up 90% of how our mind and psyche
work. However, our cultural bias prejudicially disconnects us
from nature's ways. It socializes us to habitually think with our old brain for less than .01 percent of our lives.
We are trained,
for problem solving in Industrial Society, to use, think and feel "adequately"
with the bias of our "A dog has five-legs," our "as-if"
way of knowing. As the two school girls demonstrated, we develop
emotional bonds to it by our seventh birthday. This 5-leg ability centers around our recently evolved "new brain,"
the Neocortex. It only makes up about 10 percent of
our mentality.
It is our cultural story, a
"we must exploit nature for survival" prejudice that
extensively trains our new brain so that it dominates over 99.9 percent
of how we would naturally think and be conscious throughout our
lives. Our exploitation of natural systems and their flow, within and about us,
often becomes a source of midlife crisis and most other problems.
This results because our prejudice to exploit nature for economic
rewards has become a "normal" addiction. It has addictively pushed us far past what we
and natural systems need for survival in balance. Our demands for "more of
everything" trespass our ability to survive in peace.
"From
the masses to the masses'
The most Revolutionary consciousness is to be found,
Among the most ruthlessly exploited classes:
Animals, trees, water, air, grasses."
- Gary Snyder
"We must stop denying that
we have created and live in a 5-leg lie. We base our lives on
a grossly inaccurate fact. It's misinformation is the heart of
global warming as well as most personal and social troubles.
Fortunately, we can easily correct
this dilemma once we come out of our denial that it exists.
Here's what's wrong. There is an underlying
short circuit in our thinking: we learn to "five-leg" believe that we live
on the surface of Planet Earth. We don't. We live in our
planet, ten miles deep in its biosphere, in the web of life that includes Earth's natural systems, atmosphere and sunlight.
We "four-leg" sense and feel this as senses of distance, motion and
color help us 4-leg know we are below them and since they are part of
the Planet, we must be in it.
We survive as part of the life and flow of nature's plant, animal
and mineral community. It is us, we are it. Every seven years
the flow replaces every atom in our body. Radioactive isotope
studies show that 98 percent of our 'personal' atoms are replaced
by the biosphere every two years.
"Our thinking is our destiny.
We suffer our troubles because we disconnect our thinking from
nature's ways and lose the grace, balance and restorative powers
of nature. We can't afford to do that."
- Anonymous Course
Participant
|
SUMMARY:
"If you count a normal dog's tail as one
of its legs, how many legs does a dog have?"
The old
brain inherently senses and knows four, as does the
dog and the rest of nature and the eons.
Our society's
cultural bias trains, rewards and conditions our new brain
to mathematically think five. This problem solving prejudice
produces conflict, stress and life crisis in our sensory old
brain and nature's balanced, non-polluting ways. Although often
overwhelmed, they know the answer to be four.
Old Brain =
4-leg dog = nature's sensory ways of harmoniously knowing and relating
New Brain =
5-leg dog = socialized, biased ways of habitually knowing and
relating that often conquer or exploit nature.
From womb to
tomb our cultural bias applauds, rewards and conditions us to
habitually know the world through the prejudice of 5-leg logic
rather than 4-leg facts of life.
The truth
of the matter:
a tail is not a leg. However, the prejudice of our new brain
thinking has also convinced itself that only it
contains intelligence and that it is superior, that its 5-leg way of
thinking and problem solving can best produce survival and manage the
world. When we consider the destructive effects of this thought, we
recognize that something is missing or very inaccurate in how we think and feel.
|
.
"Many
go fishing all their lives without knowing that it is not (5-leg)
fish they are after. As far as the laws of mathematics refer
to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain,
they do not refer to reality." (see paragraphs 1-5 for details)
- Albert
Einstein
.
"Men have become the tools of their tools."
- Henry
David Thoreau
|
Four-legged
awareness
No matter how
conceptually clever we are with our biased five-leg dog thinking,
it is our four-leg sensory awareness that grounds our lives in
the reality of natural systems and how they work within and around
us. Again, that reality knows any normal dog has no more than
four legs and no matter how you look at it, a tail is not one
of them.
What is true
for our thinking to accurately determine the realness of a four
legged dog, is also true for the determining the realness
of our life on Earth, of our relationships with plants, minerals
and animals, with other people and  our natural self.
Our disorders,
discontents and midlife crisis arise because when it comes to
supportively relating in balance to nature and its systems around
and within us, we rarely think in 9-leg (4-leg plus
5-leg) ways of critical or empirical thinking.
Nine-leg thinking
offsets our Industrial prejudice and bias against nature. It is
readily available.
A major problem we face
is that we live extremely nature-separated lives. On average,
we live over 95% of our lives indoors, disconnected from how
nature works. Less than 12 hours of our entire lifetime is spent
thinking in tune with the grace, balance and self-correcting powers
of nature. This conditions us to become prejudicially biased
against nature's intelligence and wisdom.
"Upon
arrival the play of fresh wind waves and color on the rocky shoreline
filled our senses. A loving feeling of awe and belonging suddenly
unified us when only minutes before we were angrily competing
for status and to be 'winners' "
- Project
NatureConnect
participant
Prejudicially
limited critical or creative thinking is detrimental. For example,
it might be logical to kill or hurtfully stress a dog if we make
it run too fast or far because we think that it has five legs.
But,
isn't that what our bias is doing to us and to the environment?
How often do we fund our 5-legged ways and thereby overwhelm 9-leg
common sense. How often do we, in metaphor, applaud our ability to dream up
things like a 5-legged dog and then suffer the consequences of
disrupting the health of the gene pool and ecosystem by genetically engineering a dog
to have five legs?
The destructive
results of our problem solving prejudice speak for themselves with respect to our
5-leg relationships to emotional, psychological and biological
natural systems, to life and midlife crisis within and around
us. We suffer from its distortions.
"We have
repressed far more than our sexuality: our very organic nature
is now unconscious to most of us, most of the time, and we have
become shrunken into two dimensional social or cultural beings,
aware of only five of the hundreds of senses that link us to
the rich biological nature that underlies and nourishes these
more symbolic and recent aspects of ourselves.".
...- Norman
0. Brown
...Author of Love's
Body (1966)
Act now:
books, courses, degrees, grants, recovery, self-help
Start with an Orientation
Course online.
Help yourself and others overcome
Natural System Dysfunction
The differing
values and attributes of
- natural-sensory thinking,
- abstract thinking and
- whole thinking
It is a grave
mistake for us not to take seriously the difference between natural sensory
(4-leg) and abstract "as if" story (5-leg) ways of critical and creative thinking,
along with our learned prejudice for the latter. The schism between their different
means of registering the world often produces our discontents
and life crisis, the destructive relationships, stress and conflict
within and around us.
Natural
sensory (Four-leg
) knowing
is a magnificent psychological and physiological attraction phenomenon with
deep natural system sensitivity roots into the eons, the heart
of Earth and the universe. It registers in the older lymbic brain that
makes up 90 percent of our psyche. It brings our widely diverse
multiplicity of ancient natural attraction senses and sensory ways of registering
the world into our immediate awareness so that we can think and
relate with them.
We are biologically,
psychologically and spiritually built to know and relate to the
world through our natural senses, as does the rest of nature and its natural attraction
sensitivities.
Abstract
story thinking (Five-leg) knowing produces important awareness
through our cultural bias to creatively think with abstract theories, imagination,
labels and stories. However, like a movie playing in our mind,
they are each a shortcut to reality, not reality itself.
Our
mind movies are never reality, they are pictures of it or stories
about it. They abstract reality into three of our 53 natural
senses: language, reason and consciousness. These three senses
connect with each other to produce the movie in the newer frontal
neocortex of our brain.
In our abstract
story thinking movie, a sentence that makes us conscious of something
that is reasonable is considered a story that is "true"
or "a fact." However, when we do not also seek information
and think with our 4-leg natural sensory ability, our abstract,
5-leg, "truth" results not only in personal desensitization
but in the biased separation of our thinking from the balancing
reality of Earth's natural systems and their self-correcting
powers within and around us. This profound loss in our thinking
produces the destructive side effects and life crisis of our
artificial world. These are troubles that we can not readily
solve with nature-disconnected thinking alone.
"An actually
existing fly is more important than a possibly existing angel."
.....- Ralph Waldo Emerson
.
"We
can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used
when we created them."
.....- Albert Einstein
Whole
thinking (Nine-leg)
knowing
combines 4-leg and 5-leg thinking to our benefit. It produces a
whole-life, integrated, intelligent and balanced re-connection between
interconnected natural senses and systems and our abstract thinking
abilities. It also brings to our consciousness our inherent attraction
to the grace, beauty and restorative ways of natural systems. This
love, to our benefit, offsets our cultural bias and its detrimental
effects. It helps nature help us relate and co-create more harmoniously
and sustainably with natural systems in ourselves, each other and the
environment. For example, when building a road, the shortest and
least expensive distance between two points may be identified, but if
it goes through a beautiful natural area that should be protected, or
through a cathedral, what we sense and feel tries to guide us to
go around them.
Whole Thinking
is Normal and Natural: Brain research by Dr. Wilder Penfield and others
demonstrate that when an area of the brain is stimulated, the
subjects report that they become conscious of specific past places
or situations as well as of the senses and feelings that
are part of that experience. Our mentality, by design, stores
and thinks with both experiences or stories and the sensations that accompany
them. To separate one from another reduces our thoughtfulness
and produces dysfunctional thinking and relationships. Scientists
and Philosophers tend to do this by dismissing our senses and
feelings as being "subjective" "fuzzy thinking" or "granola."
""Scientific research is based
on the idea that everything that takes place is determined by
laws of nature, and therefore this holds for the action of people."
"Our task
must be to free ourselves from (our) prison by widening our circles
of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of
nature in its beauty."
.....- Albert Einstein
The
heart of our many problems and discontents is that we know and treat
natural systems within and around us inappropriately because our
prejudice incorrectly registers them in our thinking as a "5-legged
dog." This finally catches up with us when we recognize that this
conflict leaves us dissatisfied and troubled. It motivaes us to find
our natural roots and feel better.
"As a
mother and counselor I have been feeling stressed and pressed
for time. I have been juggling time ever since my kids were born.
So much of my daily interactions are around taking care of others,
especially their pain. Or as a parent dealing
with mundane tasks or having to be a disciplinarian.
I walked to
sit by a small pond and was especially attracted to the wind,
watching it dance across the shimmering water. It was playful,
joyful, and suddenly I wanted to make something beautiful. I
arranged a broken piece of birch tree limb, some bark with little
lichens, a few acorns and a pine cone, and created a "thank-you
to nature" gift on a rock beside the pond.
The important
message for me that I took from this experience was how much
I need to thank and revive the playful, joyful, creative parts
of myself. I began making different choices about how to prioritize
my time and where to put my energy. In doing this, some things
have fallen by the wayside at times; a balanced checkbook, an
over clean house, more garden weeds. But am starting to feel
better. I have a lot more energy. I'm more interested in my work
and I have a deeper connection with my husband and kids."
.
- Project
NatureConnect
participant
"A lake is the landscape's
most beautiful and expressive feature. It is Earth's eye; looking
into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature."
-Henry David Thoreau
"Truth
is what stands the test of experience."
- Albert
Einstein
|
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Start with an Orientation
Course online.
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Natural System Dysfunction
Solving
a Core Problem
A described
above, the five-leg bias and prejudicial limits of critical and
creative contemporary problem solving and thinking produce our
greatest disorders. One of these disorders is that, being logical,
our five-leg thinking can not tolerate its awareness of the unreasonable
suffering that its nature-disconnected ways cause. It escapes
this pain by going into denial of the problem. It
refutes that its sensory disconnection from natural systems within
and around us is prejudiced, biased, addictive or limiting and
that it produces disorders. It's bias defensively claims instead,
that our mentality and intelligence is far superior to that that
of other species and the global ecosystem, even though the results of how we are trained to think
don't feel right. That is a way to describe hallucination.
Dealing with
this problem consists of using a distinct nature-reconnecting,
9-leg art and science. Engaging in this whole
thinking tool
enables us to first let nature revive our numbed natural senses.
This heightens our multisensory awareness of natural systems
around and within us and others so that our every relationship
may connect with and benefit from registering their regenerative
balance, beauty and grace.
The greater
sensibility of the 9-leg thinking process enables us to let
nature's powers help us free ourselves from our bonded prejudice
and bias for our destructive ways and against natural systems.
Our reward is that we enjoy sustainable relationships that support all of
life and benefit from them.
"Hey,
I may be dumb but, you know, I'm also rich. That is because I'm
so dumb that I gamble all the time and I only make one bet.
I bet that
a person who is not using nine-leg thinking to solve a problem
is actually helping to cause that problem and they don't even
know it.
The reason
I'm rich is because I win that bet every time."
- Alfred E. Newman <grin>
Some Basics
of Love
(Before reading
further please recognize that it is the bias of our five-leg
thinking that is doing the reading, not our inherent sensory
connections with natural systems, for the latter are non-literate. Our prejudice against nature may feel ill-at-ease
with this page's critique of how our 5-leg thinking is in denial
and how it omits the way nature's global perfection works so
successfully.)
Most scientists
recognize that just as our arm is naturally attracted, or "loves,"
to be attached to our body, all people are biologically, psychologically
and spiritually born of, part of, and naturally attached to nature,
our planet, Earth. This includes being emotionally attached or
bonded to Mother Nature and Mother Earth through our natural
attraction senses, just as a child is also bonded to its human
parents.
We are born
with an innate sensory love of nature's plant, animal and mineral
kingdom, of sunshine, food, water, soil, air, community, cooperation,
spirit and beauty--that we hold in common with each other and
all of nature. This is why most children love to play in nature.
The name we give to this deep potent and rewarding love is survival, our love of life.
"A four-leg
experience put the shock of my unexpected job loss in perspective.
The job loss left me extremely drained of energy but in a nearby
park, I experienced both the physical and the mental healing
effect of nature. As I drew near a strand of shade trees, it
quite literally reminded me of being held in my mother's arms
as a very young boy. It was as if the area was saying to me;
come to me, let me hold you so that you can rest. I lay down
and fell asleep under those trees. When I awoke I sensed how
each thing around me was connected to the others for its survival,
how we're all part of Nature, relying on one another. I knew
I would be OK even though my job had ended.
Change is constant
and I'm not going through it alone. The natural world has been
surviving much longer than I have, so why not learn from it."
- Project
NatureConnect
participant
Act now:
books, courses, degrees, grants, recovery, self-help
Start with an Orientation
Course online.
Help yourself and others overcome
Natural System Dysfunction
Five-Leg
Effects
Our stringently
learned "five-leg dog" new brain's extreme disconnection
from thinking with our inherent old-brain "4-leg dog"
way of knowing, causes serious limitations in the way we relate
to ourselves, each other and the global ecosystem. It is as foolish
as hiring a lobster to direct the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
"Technological
progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal."
- Albert
Einstein
.
"What
is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to
put it on?"
- Henry
David Thoreau
"The loss
of nature's wisdom and purifying powers in our mentality makes
us continually want so there is never enough. We presently 'want' the world's resources at
a pace that outstrips the planet's capacity to sustain life in balance, as
we know it."
- Michael J. Cohen
|
Because our
critical and creative indoor thinking and psyche have very little
genuine, sensory 4-leg contact with authentic nature, we desperately
need a process that helps us increase our conscious sensory
contact with natural systems.
The world and
its people are seriously at-risk. It makes the greatest sense
for our super-trained "5-leg" thinking and problem
solving to learn to see the value and logic of connecting with
"4-leg" sensory old brain ways of knowing in order
to make better sense of our lives and reduce our troubles.
Project
NatureConnect is a tool that teaches us how
to recognize 4-leg and 5-leg thinking, and how to bring them
together. We benefit ourselves and the planet by learning to
use a 9-leg thinking process to appreciate it. Knowing the world
this way helps us keep in mind that a dog's tail is not a leg.
"People
who have had a beneficial experience in nature but whose bias
does not let them practice the nine-leg art and science of strengthening
that experience, and think with it, have been socialized into denying their
own truth. They and the world suffer accordingly."
Organic Psychology instructor
Act now: books, courses, degrees, grants,
recovery, self-help
Start with an Orientation
Course online.
Help yourself and others overcome
Natural System Dysfunction
Four-leg connections
combined with our five-leg thinking enable us to enjoy restorative
9-leg experiences and relationships that help us co-create more
harmoniously with nature's
healing and renewing powers within and around us.
An online 9-leg
learning
technique helps
us make better sense of our life, and life on Earth, and reduce
our most challenging troubles --personal and global. This is essential,
for prejudicial short circuited thinking usually short-circuits
its ability to figure out what short-circuited it.
"I am
going through a breakup with my partner and am thinking about
things that are most important to me. I am finding a great difference
between my intuitions and my instincts. My instincts, which include
my senses tell me to stay with my partner. I am still so attracted
to Renny in many ways. But the rationale of my inner intuition
tells me that I need to move on. In the natural area I visited,
I was attracted to a group
of trees, and I remembered roaming in the woods before I was
with Renny, and that lost sense of freedom and autonomy.
Focusing on
my senses in the wild allowed me to temporarily be away from
my attraction to Renny. Being connected to the Earth brought
many senses to mind that helped me evaluate my connection to
my partner and how it was serving me.
I think I am
getting too "attached" to Renny. Meaning- my time of
learning and growing with my partner is over, but I cling to
the relationship out of a need for connection. Out of a lack
of deep connection with the Earth and people, I find someone
that I can cling to and hold on to. What I discovered I really
need to do is let go and work on building deeper relationships
with people who I am not in love with and be with the Earth.
I find that
being connected with all possible aspects of nature dissolves
my addictions and allows me to be free and think clearly. It
teaches the part of me that attaches to things that have become
less sensible to let go and be free, and to let myself change
and grow."
Project
NatureConnect
Ecology Student
.
"We
need the tonic of wildness."
"In wildness is the preservation of the
world."
- Henry David Thoreau
"A
human being is a part of a whole, called by us -universe-, a
part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts
and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of
optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind
of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and
to affection for a few persons nearest to us. "
- Albert
Einstein
"No
matter the original source of
natural attraction energy, here's my challenge to you:
'Get real. Show me a
thing,
place or relationship that, since the beginning of our Universe, has not,
or does not consist of natural attraction binding things
together in ways that support nature's purity, balance and beauty.'
I don't think you can show me the above because it's a 5-leg
distortion. It doesn't actually happen in nature.
The
beginning of our universe consisted of binding natural attraction
energy that flowed in, through and around atoms. This process continues
today in the Sun and in us.
The integrity of natural things is intact because natural attractions maintain them this way.
If
all things consist of natural attraction in action, surely our 53
natural attraction senses are a continuum today of the attractive
workings of natural attraction through the eons until this moment. For example, the natural attraction sense of thirst turns on and off to bring water into, through and out of us in a balanced and nurturing way for all things.
Our
disorders arise simply because our 5-leg stories excessively disconnect our
society and mentality from conscious sensory contact with natural
attraction self-correcting power that flow through and around us and natural areas, backyard or
backcountry.
The 5-leg
story of our central culture
denies natural attraction is an essence of nature and life.
Our denial gets us into the troubles we suffer. It applauds us
for our
thinking's omission of natural attractions and their wisdom from
our thoughts, feelings and relationships.
Nine-leg thinking and feeling
helps us address this detrimental flaw in our lives.
Within
and around us, our use of a tool
that helps us genuinely reconnect our mind to nature's balance, beauty
and healing powers enables our thinking to reduce our troubles and
increases our love of nature. This is significant because we protect
and save what we love."
- Michael J. Cohen,
.
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NINE LEG COMMUNICATION
"This
course was attractive to me because in it I could find like-minded
people to share my passion and reverence for nature. The course
provided a framework for me to try to verbally express what I would
experience in nature with others. We went from a group of relative
strangers to people who were as honest and open in the sharing of our
weekly experiences as we could be. It didn’t matter where we all
started from; our common goal was growth through nature’s experiences.
There was a commitment and trust from the beginning that I have never
experienced in a course before. I am deeply appreciative of the
opportunity to learn with all of the members of my group. Their
presence was invaluable, deepening, anchoring and so wise."
- Orientation Course Participant
Act now:
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Start with an Orientation
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Help yourself and others overcome
Natural System Dysfunction
REFERENCES
Cohen, M.J. 1995, Counseling
and Nature: A Greening of Psychotherapy THE INTERPSYCH
NEWSLETTER volume 2, issue 4 March, 1995. Contains additional
reviewed journal references. [Also re-published in
U.S. Department of Education ERIC, Green Education, Reconnecting
With Nature (Ecopress), and Web of Life Imperative
(Trafford).]
Cohen, M. J. (1993) Integrated
Ecology: The Process of Counseling With Nature. The Humanistic
Psychologist, Vol. 21 No. 3 Washington, DC: American Psychological
Association.
Cohen, M. J. (2003) The
Web of Life Imperative: Regenerative ecopsychology techniques that help
people think in balance with natural systems. Victoria, British Columbia, Trafford
Cohen, M. J. (2007) Educating, Counseling and Healing With Nature Natural Attraction Ecology in Action.
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