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Project NatureConnect
Institute of Global Education
Online, grant-funded,
alternative courses, career training and holistic jobs; degree
programs for sustainable personal and environmental health
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Director: Michael
J. Cohen, Ed.D. ©2003
Akamai University
West Coast University
Portland State University Adjunct Faculty
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Thinking
and Learning With all Nine Legs
Strengthen
the effectiveness of
-Counseling, 
-Teaching,
-Parenting,
-Therapy,
-Healing,
-Recovery,
-Self-Help,
-Complimentary Medicine
through "nine-leg" environmentally
based self-education.
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If we are not using
critical and creative thinking that ofsets 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
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 way we habitually
learn to think, act and relate to the world,
Why we produce
our discontents and life crisis when we don't want to and it
doesn't make sense.
Please consider
this critical thinking aptitude or intelligence test question,
a logical thinking type of competency question that ordinarily
helps society determine our mathematical ability to qualify for
a better job or higher salary:
"If you count a dog's tail as one of its legs, how many
legs does a dog have?"
"Five," of course, is the correct answer on a math
examination if you want to score high and get ahead. Intelligent
people say "five" because it is valid in mathematical
systems and contemporary thought.
Mathematics
is a logical critical and creative way of thinking, a problem
solving method that is stringently trained and rewarded by our
society. It even effects our self-esteem. For example, how
comfortable would we be if people discovered that we think 1
+ 1 = 5? What would our grade and class standing say about us?
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
However, we
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 come into play: our
inherent senses of sight, touch, motion, color, texture, language,
sound, smell, reason, consciousness, community, trust, contrast
and love, to name just a few.
Each of these
senses applied to a normal dog provides us with further 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 senses enable our natural creative thinking
to recognize 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 the mathematical logic,
"as if," story on an aptitude test.
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 how nature throughout the eons, and our
inherent inner nature today, knows how to sustain the world in
its natural grace balance and beauty.
In nature,
our old brain nurtures us to enjoy natural good feelings
of greater wellness and balance. We enjoy this happening even
on just a short walk in the park.
Out of Balance
The "four-leg
dog" old brain makes up 90% of how our brain and mentality
work. However, our cultural bias prejudicially socializes us
to habitually think with the old brain for less than .01% of
our lives.
We are trained,
instead, for problem solving, to use think and feel "adequately"
with the bias of our "A dog has five-legs" way of knowing.
This 5-leg ability is located in our recently evolved "new
brain," It only makes up about 10 percent of our mentality.
It is our cultural
"exploit nature" prejudice that extensively trains
our new brain so that it takes over 99.9 percent of how we think
throughout our lives. This often becomes a source of midlife
crisis,
"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
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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 knowing and relating
New Brain =
5-leg dog = socialized, biased ways of habitually knowing and
relating.
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 bias of our new brain
thinking has also convinced itself that it is intelligence and
superior, and that it's 5-leg way of thinking and problem solving
can best produce survival and manage the world.
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"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."
- Albert
Einstein
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"Men have become the tools of their tools."
- Henry
David Thoreau
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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. 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 accurately determining 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 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, empirical thinking. Nine-leg thinking offsets
our cultural prejudice and bias.
A major problem
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 restorative 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 ourselves and to the
environment? 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 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
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 story (5-leg) ways of critical and creative thinking,
along with our learned prejudice for the latter. When these ways
do not overcome our bias, 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 phenomenon with
deep natural system sensitivity roots into the eons, the heart
of Earth. It registers in the older lymbic brain that
makes up 90 percent of our psyche. It brings our widely diverse
multiplicity of ancient natural senses and sensory ways of registering
the world into our immediate awareness so that we can think with
them. We are biologically, psychologically and spiritually built
to know and relate to the world through them, as does the rest
of nature's sensitivities.
Abstract
story thinking (Five-leg) knowing produces important awareness
through our cultural bias to 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. 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 that makes up only 10 percent of our psyche.
In our abstract
story thinking, 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 powers within and
around us. This profound loss in our thinking produces the destructive
side effects and life crisis of our artificial world, 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
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"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. 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
"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 their prejudice
incorrectly registers in our thinking as a "5-legged dog."
This finally catches up with us as midlife crisis.
"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."
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- 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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Act now:
books, courses, degrees, grants, recovery, self-help
Solving
a Core Problem
The five-leg
bias and prejudicial limits of critical and creative contemporary
problem solving and thinking produces our greatest disorders.
One of these limits 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 our and 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. That
is a definition of midlife crisis.
Dealing with
this problem consists of using a distinct nature-reconnecting,
9-leg art and science. The process 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 and beauty.
The greater
sensibility of the 9-leg thinking process enables us to let
nature's powers help us free ourselves from our prejudice and
bias for, and bonds to, our destructive ways. Our reward is that
we enjoy 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. Our bias 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,
in the form of our planet, Earth. This includes being emotionally
attached or bonded to Mother Nature and Mother Earth through
our natural senses,
just as a child is bonded to its human parents.
We are born
with an innate sensory love of nature's plant, animal and mineral
kingdom "resources," 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.
"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
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. Its as foolish
as putting a lobster in charge of O'Hare International Airport.
"Technological
progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal."
- Albert
Einstein
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"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 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 as we know it."
- Michael J. Cohen
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Because our
critical and creative indoor thinking and psyche have very little
genuine, sensory 4-leg contact with authentic nature, we desperately
need a tool to  help
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 and benefit ourselves and the planet with a balance
9-leg process and appreciation of it. Knowing the world in 9-leg
ways never removes from our consciousness 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
Four-leg connections
combined with our five-leg thinking enable us to have 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
tool 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
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"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
"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. We protect and save what we love."
- Michael J. Cohen
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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
ADDITIONAL NINE-LEG INFORMATION: courses, degrees, grants,
recovery, coaching, self-help
Professional
and Personal Training Books,
Courses, Degree Programs, Grants Articles and Nine-Leg Process Validation
The on line Exceptional Secrets of Natural
Attractions Trail
The Great Einstien-Thoreau Equation
for Balanced Relationships. Benefit
from a blend of 4-leg and 5-leg genius
Outcomes; empirically knowing ourselves and the world
in a nine-leg way.
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