Continued from Grant
Release: New Nature-Connected Grants and Scholarships
are Offered to Strengthen Self-Help, Counseling, and Education
that Improves Personal and Environmental Sanity.
GRANT
APPLICATION INFORMATION:
If you
are interested in a grant or scholarship, you may first want
to review the grant
application
What they don't teach at
Harvard or Yale:
THE ORGANICS
OF PSYCHOLOGY
How to trust our experiences
with natural systems within and around us and come to our senses.
Practical information for personal,
environmental and global well being; we learn to ignore it because
our society denies that it is addicted to its artifical ways
and conquest of nature.
Michael
J. Cohen, et al
Excerpts from the book The
Web of Life Imperative,
Chapter One, used with permission in support of a Project NatureConnect
grant application
Source: Material that appears on this web page
and its links is drawn from articles that have been professionally
reviewed and published in The Journal of Humanistic Psychology,
Journal of Environmental Education, Interpsych Journal of Mental
Health, Greenwich University Journal of Science and Technology,
Councelling Psychology Quarterly, Proceedings of the North American
Association for Environmental Education, Journal of the Oregon
Counseling Association, The Trumpeter, U.S. Department of Education
Educational Resources Information Center, Outdoor Communicator,
Clearing Magazine, Nature Study, Between the Species, Cooperative
Learning, International Journal of Humanities and Peace and
others. (see MJCohen
personal page)
|
Abstract:
We are born as part of nature,
its grace, well being and perfection. We have been educated,
socialized and adulterated to become and suffer our troubles
and discontents.
This article helps us strengthen and additionally benefit from
good experiences we have had or will have in nature, backyard
or backcountry, or with our pet, or with the wind, sea or stars.
Using numerous quotations it demonstrates that great thinkers
throughout history have long recognized the value and restorative
powers of good experiences in nature.
Although we are each part of
nature and its perfection, authentic nature is non-literate.
Our great troubles arise because our society's cultural rewards
addict us to register our personal life, and all of life, through
abstract language-reason ways of knowing and being that are foreign
to non-literate nature. This addiction disconnects our consciousness
from the beneficial, non-verbal callings and balancing ways of
natural systems around and within us. It disconnects our consciousness
from being sensitive to our 53-sense inner nature (our natural
born "inner child").
Because the rest of nature
does not use our vital survival ability to think in abstractions,
our literate intelligence prejudicially demeans and conquers
nature, thinking it to be "dirty, illiterate, non-intelligent,
bloody tooth and claw savagery." This fear prevents our
thinking from consciously connecting with natural systems within
and around us. Our mind, heart and spirit don't benefit from
nature's peaceful eons of sensitivity, wisdom and regnerative
relationships.
We feel stressed and lackluster.
We are unfulfilled and deficient due to our estrangement from
nature's vitality. It produces depression and low self-worth;
it causes us to excessively crave rewarding sensations and goads
us to use artificial substitutes for nature, be they responsible
or not. With nature's wisdom, beauty and renewing powers missing
from our lives, we want, and when we want there is never enough;
greed, vulnerability, frustrations and discontents result.
A sensory nature-connecting
tool helps us reverse the destructive disconnection of our thinking
from nature and adverse personal and environmental effects that
result. The tool's process genuinely reconnects our senses and
thinking to their balancing and nurturing origins in natural
systems. This lastingly provides our consciousness with the wisdom
of nature's safe and responsible fulfillments. When we add nature's
restorative powers to counseling education and healing techniques,
we reconnect our mind to nature's perfection. This helps us thoughtfully
overcome our nature-disconnection problems and reduce our personal
and environmental dysfunctions.
|
SUGGESTION: read this article
once through for content and then return to explore the links
that attract you.
|
Test yourself:
If your scientific or thinking
ability can select the most accurate multiple choice answer
to this question you will benefit from the article and grant
program that appear on this page:
A CENTRAL QUESTION:
From sub-atomic particles to
weather systems and seasons, what holds our attractive living
planet and its plants animals and minerals together in balance?
1. velcro, 2. Elmer's glue,
3. zippers,
4. buttons, 5. natural attractions
If you selected number five
(5), please continue.
|
Introduction
"Ishi, (the last hunter-gather
Native American) was sure he knew the cause of our discontent.
It stemmed from an excessive amount of indoor time. 'It is not
a man's nature to be too much indoors."
.....- Theodora Kroeber
"It is quite clear to
me after several years in the environmental movement that all
physical problems of man's impact on the environment - pollution
of the air and waters, the desecration of the land, the contamination
of the food chain - all start within the environment of man's
mind."
.....- Maurice Strong,
.....Founder or the United Nations Environment
....Program,
.....Co-chair of the Commission on Global
....Governance,
"If you slice off part
of a ball, you make both the ball and the slice dysfunctional;
neither will roll with the same perfection as when the ball was
whole. The same holds true for our extremely indoor lives. They
separate our heart and mind from the attractive, life-supportive
Nature of our globe, our living planet Earth."
.....- Michael J. Cohen
We are born as part of nature. From the beginning
of humanity's time on Earth we have embodied nature's ability
to produce and enjoy the perfection of its organic balance and
beauty.
However, our society is extremely
separated from nature. As our socialization
disconnects our thinking from nature and re-attaches it to our
artificial ways, we produce many troubles that neither nature
nor nature-centered people display or create. Globally this has
placed people and ecosystems at risk.
"You didn't come into
this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean."
.....- Alan Watts
To our loss, by rewarding us
with its money, power and support, our society's prejudice against
nature conditions or addicts us to disconnect our thinking from
nature's balancing and restorative ways. And if you don't believe
the thinking that produces our troubles is a prejudicial addiction,
just try to change it.
To more fully understand how
and why we remain disconnected, consider the following intelligence
test question, a type of question that ordinarily helps society
determine our mathematical aptitude 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 pass and get ahead. Intelligent people
say "five" because it is valid in mathematical systems
and contemporary thinking. Math is highly regarded and rewarded
by our society. It is a core of scientific method.
However, we don't solely live
our lives or think in mathematical
systems. Our natural sense of reason
can consider what we know from our actual contact with a real,
normal dog, too. That's when our multitude of 53
other natural senses come into play: senses of sight, touch,
motion, color, texture, language, sound, smell, consciousness,
community, trust, contrast, and love.
Each of these senses provide
us with further information. Each helps our sense of reason make
more sense and more informed decisions. They enable our thinking
to register that a tail is different than a leg, that a dog
has four legs, not five, no matter what is correct in mathematical
logic.
Does the fact that we have
53 natural senses, instead of just five, surprise you? Aristotle
reasoned in 340 B.C. that we have five senses and we are today
born into 5-leg knowing that story today. But consider this:
"Aristotle thought there
were eight legs on a fly and wrote it down. For centuries scholars
were content to quote his authority. Apparently, not one of them
was curious enough to impale a fly and count its six legs."
.....- Stuart Chase
It is a grave mistake for us
not to take seriously the nature vs. nurture difference between
natural sensory (4-leg) and disconnected
abstract story (5-leg) ways of knowing and our learned prejudice
for the latter. As our book, The Web of
Life Imperative, shows, when these ways are not in balance,
the schism between their different means of registering the world
often produces destructive relationships, stress and conflict
within and around us.
Human nature and mentality
consists of:
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 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.
The Old Brain and the whole
of nature work through natural attractions
Abstract story thinking
(Five-leg) knowing produces important awareness
through theories, imagination, labels and stories. However, like
a movie playing in our mind, it is a shortcut to reality. It,
like a movie, is not real, rather it abstracts reality through
three of our 53 natural senses: language, reason and consciousness.
They connect with each other in the newer frontal neocortex brain
that makes up 10 percent of our psyche.
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 and think with 4-leg natural sensory ability, our abstract
"truth" is disconnected from the whole of nature. This
results not only in personal desensitization but in the separation
of our thinking from the balanced grace and restorative powers
of Earth's natural systems within and around us. This profound
loss produces the many destructive side effects of our artificial
world, dysfunctions that we can not readily solve with nature-disconnected
abstract thinking alone.
The New Brain consists of stories
that are isolated abstractions.
"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 produces a whole-life, integrated,
globally intelligent and balanced re-connection between our connected
natural senses and our abstract thinking abilities. It also brings
to our consciousness our inherent connections with and our inherent
attraction love of our Mother Nature and Mother Earth, the
beauty grace and restorative ways of natural systems. This, to
our benefit, helps us relate and co-create more harmoniously
and sustainably with natural systems in ourselves, each other
and the environment.
The Whole Brain consists of
natural attractions socialized by abstract stories (socialized
attractions) that can be measured as intelligently reasonable
or unreasonable by determining their long term effects in support
of the global life community (personal and global quality
of life).
Our most challenging personal,
social and environmental problems result from us being paid,
or otherwise rewarded, to embrace 5-leg thinking and suffer its
destructive disconnection from the truths and ways of 4-leg knowledge.
Personally and globally, this habitual disconnection underlies
our troubles and discontents. It limits our ability to more fully
enjoy, respect and make sense of our lives and creation.
Our limited thinking is detrimental.
We might kill or hurtfully stress a dog if we make it run too
fast or far because we think that it has five legs. However,
that is exactly what our socialization
is doing to us and the environment. The
destructive results speak for themselves in the deterioration
of emotional, psychological and biological systems within and
around us.
Nine-leg thinking enables us
to bring nature's balancing and restorative powers to our mind
and heart. Therein lies our salvation.
"Upon arrival, the play
of fresh wind, waves and colors on the rocky shoreline filled
our senses. A loving feeling of awe and belonging soon unified
us when only minutes before we were angrily competing for status
and to be winners"
- Project
NatureConnect participant
HISTORY
In 1959, Dr. Michael J. Cohen founded
a camp and school program based on nine leg thinking and relating.
The National Audubon Society and many others called it the most
revolutionary school in America. They said it was "utopian"
and "on the side of the angels" because it produced
cooperation at every level and it did not display or produce
the troubles that normally plague contemporary society.
The 9-leg secret to each participant's
success, as well as the success of the school, was to learn how
to thoughtfully learn while incorporating 4-leg natural sensations
and feelings that arose from their newly regrown sensory roots
in natural area ecosystems. These sensations acted as nature's
guiding voice. They replaced the voice of our "normal,"
often destructive ways that ordinarily played in their mind even
when they visited natural areas.
The value and rewards of 4-leg
connections freed the participants' senses from their bonds to
questionable 5-leg stories. It helped them re-bond their senses
to their 4-leg sense of reason in congress with 52 other rejuvenated
natural senses while these senses were connected to their nurturing
origins and home in nature. This resulted in bonding to consensus-based
9-leg thinking, literacy and relating that included information
from, and the regenerative healing powers of, natural systems.
Each participant learned to thoughtfully hold nature in awe and
reverence.
.
The path to full sanity
To many 5-leg thinkers, this
whole way of thinking sounds ideal
or impossible, but year after year the beneficial results
of nine-leg knowing speak for themselves. They improve relationships
and reduce stress, conflict, dysfunction and a wide range of
associated disorders. It is the addictive 5-leg prejudice against
nature that we each carry that prevents us from enjoying this
process and its rewarding outcomes.
CHALLENGE YOUR MIND
GRANT
INSTRUCTIONS:
In the remainder of this
grant
application article,
carefully consider each question
in the article and respond to it with a number from the
scale that honestly represents your thoughts and feelings. Write
down, numbers from 1-36 and for each blue question, below, save the number of your response as in
this sample:
1. To my loss, do I unknowingly deterioriate
life within or around me?
1...2....3....4....5...6...7...8...9...10
no.................sometimes..........yes
Note that
high numbered responses in some questions may indicate you do
not need nine-leg education or financial support for it so be
as accurate in your responses as is possible.
Can we help our thinking
reasonably enable us to
come to our senses?
"I go to nature to be
soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order."
.....- John Burroughs
A responsible society acknowledges its destructive effects and
acts to eliminate them. The destructive effects of industrial
civilization are undeniable with respect to its impact on the
health of the web of life and natural systems in people.
The web is nature itself, a
biological, connective, balancing, natural system process that
the natural world and people's sensory inner nature (subconscious
"inner child") hold in common.
Our basic 5-leg relationship with nature has been to conquer
nature and be rewarded in the name of economics, progress and
survival. We have done this so successfully that we are in denial that the rewards we have
obtained have psychologically conditioned or
addicted us to abusive, unsustainable
ways of thinking and relating. For this reason, our personal,
social and environmental problems have become runaway. Addicted,
we no longer know how to stop assaulting nature around and within
us although we know we should and we desperately want to. Again,
if you don't believe this is addictive thinking and behavior,
just try and change it.
With respect to our relationship
with the web of life, we must go back to basics. We must dissolve
our addictions to nature-substitutes and learn how to be part
of the web in a more constructive way. For too long, in spite
of great ancient and modern wisdom to the contrary, our prejudice
against nature has lead us down our detrimental path.
Knowingly destroying our own
life support system is a form of insanity.
.
"The purpose of life is to live in agreement with nature."
.....- Zeno,
circa 520 BC
"Wind over the lake: the
image of inner truth."
.....- I Ching circa 1200 B.C.
What is the web of life?
Experts often depict the web
of life by gathering a group of people in a circle. Each person
is asked to represent some part of nature, such as a bird, soil,
water, etc. A large ball of string then helps members of the
group see the interconnecting relationships between things in
nature. For example the bird eats insects so the string is passed
from the "bird person" to
the "insect person." That is their connection. The
insect lives in a flower, so the string is further unrolled across
the circle to the "flower person." Soon a web of string
is formed interconnecting all members of the group, including
the one or two who represent people.
Dramatically, people pull back slightly and sense how the string
peacefully unites, supports and interconnects them and of all
life. Then one strand of the web is cut signifying the loss of
a species, habitat or relationship. Sadly, the weakening effect
on all is noted. Another and another string is cut. Soon the
web's integrity, support and power disintegrates along with its
spirit. Because this activity reflects the reality of our lives,
this has brought some participants in the activity to feelings
of hurt, despair and sadness.
Earth and its people increasingly suffer from "cut string"
disconnection, yet we continue to cut the strings.
Something
to think about:
1. To my loss, do I unknowingly
cut or injure strands of the web of life within or around me?
1...2....3....4....5...6...7...8...9...10
no.................sometimes..........yes
2. Do I know how to stop myself
from doing this?
1...2....3....4....5...6...7...8...9...10
no.................sometimes..........yes
***
Every part
of the global life community, from sub-atomic particles to weather
systems, to sensitivities, thoughts and feelings is part of the
web of life. The intelligent process by which they interact produces
nature's harmonious, supportive ways and prevents our runaway
disorders from occurring in nature.
The process
nature uses consists of interacting while in contact with the
whole of the web through its web attraction strings. As part
of the Web, we, along with everything else, are born with this
9-leg ability. Our troubles begin when our 5-leg thinking doesn't
recognize or use it, denies its existence or hurts it. It usually
remains
alive in us
but it becomes subconscious to protect us from constantly feeling
its frustration or hurt.
"There is a constant and
intimate contact among the things that coexist and co-evolve
in the universe - a sharing of bonds and messages that makes
reality into a stupendous network of interaction and communication.
It is this 'sharing of messages' in Nature that keeps it in balance."
.....- Ervin Laslo
Something
to think about:
3. Am I aware of the strands
of the web of life that I was born with and still contain?
1...2....3....4....5...6...7...8...9...10
no.................sometimes..........yes
4. Do I enjoyably use them
and their ways to build responsible relationships with people
and places?
1...2....3....4....5...6...7...8...9...10
no.................sometimes..........yes
5. Have I been taught or forced
to make them subconscious?
1...2....3....4....5...6...7...8...9...10
no.................sometimes..........yes
***
Dr. Cohen often asks the web
of life activity participants if they ever went into a natural
area and actually saw strings holding things together there.
They say"no, that would be crazy." He responds, "If
there are no strings in nature, what then are the actual strands
that hold the natural community together in balance?"
It is always very, very quiet.
Pay close attention to this significant silence. It flags the
missing link in our thinking, perception and relationships that
produces many troubles. Dr. Cohen and others have identified
53 webstring natural senses
that people share with nature. For example, a sense of hunger
connects the bird to the insect, a sense of place connects
the insect to live in the flower.
The web's sensitivity
strings are a vital 4-leg part of survival, just as real and
important as the plants, animal and minerals that they interconnect,
including ourselves. The strings are as true as 2 + 2 = 4, sensory
facts as genuine as us. As part of nature, we are born with the
natural ability to register and know them (through 4-leg thinking
and awareness) but we learn to seldom recognize or exercise this
ability. Without 4-leg seeing, sensing or respecting the strings
in nature and our inner nature, we break, injure and ignore them.
We omit how we experience them so knowing the web of life becomes
complex
and mechanical.
The disappearance of the strings in our consciousness produces
a subconscious void, an uncomfortable psychological emptiness
in our thoughts and lives that we constantly try to fill. We
want, emotionally and materially, and when we want, there is
never enough. We lose inherent feelings of natural wholeness,
of self-worth and self esteem. We become greedy, stressed and
reckless as we try to gain webstring fulfillment and self-value.
This places the Earth, others, and ourselves at risk.
"We have these prejudices
and as long as we think that these prejudices are valid we exclude
huge subjects of thinking. And that exclusion is what is really
blinding."
...........- Dr. Amit Goswami
Now, the NSTP's
nature reconnecting activities enable us to bring webstrings
natural sensory attraction relationships back into
our lives. Their presence in our thinking helps reinstate balanced
9-leg personal and environmental relationships. They help us
register that our planet is a living organism, Mother Earth,
as Dr. Cohen noted in 1965 and describes in How Nature Works.
"The Earth
is a functionally integrated system -as much an organic being
as you and I- that exists not for man's benefit but for it's
own.
...........- David Laing, The Earth System
"We do
indeed belong here. The earth is more
than just a home, it's a living system and we are part of it."
...........-James Lovelock
"Speak to the Earth
and it will teach thee."
...........- The Bible, Job: 12, 7
Something
to think about:
6. Am I aware of the strands
of the web that lie within and around me?
1...2....3....4....5...6...7...8...9...10
no.................sometimes..........yes
7. Is it important to me to
stop thinking in nature-disconnected ways that place Earth and
its people at risk?
1...2....3....4....5...6...7...8...9...10
no.................sometimes..........yes
***
Source Of
The Strings
The strings
are biologically of, by and from nature and at some level of
sensitivity register as attractions in plants, animals and minerals.
Since you
are part of nature, the strings are in you. You can learn to
nurture them back into your awareness and and relate harmoniously
to them through a nature-centered self-improvement process that
helps us let the strings consciously teach us their knowledge.
Many people disbelieve this because we are 5-leg taught to conquer,
not respect, nature including the webstrings. We have also learned
that the strings, which manifest as dozens of senses in natural
systems within us (our inner nature, inner child, self or being),
are taboo, flaky, subjective, spiritual, unscientific, bad, wrong,
etc. Thus, many webstring senses can have hurt attached to them,
hurt that blocks the webstrings from freely entering our consciousness
where they can be felt and enter our values and thinking. Often,
out of hurt and frustration, the strings disappear rather than
support us when we need them. This removal of our natural power
leads to apathy.
Something
to think about:
8. Is my 5-leg thinking prejudiced
against the strings and nature's ways to the point that it influences
my relationships?
1...2....3....4....5...6...7...8...9...10
no.................sometimes..........yes
9. Am I apathetic when I'd
benefit by being active?
1...2....3....4....5...6...7...8...9...10
no.................sometimes..........yes
***
To connect with nature our
thinking must include a sensory 4-leg way of knowing. Our natural
senses connect us with the living Earth around us in every moment.
If we don't understand our interdependence and relationship to
nature, it is because we have 5-leg disconnected our webstring
senses from their source. We have dismissed them as irrelevant.
We have forgotten their significance. Yet, throughout history,
many people have cherished their webstrings and recognized their
importance, as follows:
"We cannot live for ourselves
alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads,
and along these sympathetic fibers our actions run as causes
and return to us as results."
.....- Herman Melville
.
"All things are connected
like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web
of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the
web, he does to himself."
.....-Chief Seattle/Ted Perry
.....
.
"There is one common flow, one common breathing, all things
are in sympathy."
.....- Hippocrates circa 450 B.C.
Scientifically, it is clear
that natural systems organize themselves with webstrings. Moment
by moment, systems are 4-leg attracted to create additional strings
and connections that increasingly weave, balance and repair the
web of life. This is not done haphazardly; rather it forms an
attraction intelligence that produces nature's optimum of life,
diversity, cooperation, balance and beauty. It is worth remembering
that the process is inclusive and caring enough to globally produce
and sustain the web of life without creating garbage. At the
macro level, nothing is left out, unattached or unwanted
a way to describe unconditional love.
"And the true order of
going, or being led by another, to the things of love, is to
begin from the beauties of earth."
.....- Plato circa 400 B.C.
.
Something to think about:
10. Can I allow myself to believe
that natural relationships contain, or are, a form of unconditional
love?
1...2....3....4....5...6...7...8...9...10
no.................sometimes..........yes
***
Attraction Energies
From subatomics to solar systems,
common sense and experts, including Albert Einstein, and Jonas
Salk, recognize that all intact relationships, physical or otherwise,
must be held together by something. Without this glue, they would
fall apart. That "something" is an essence of nature,
the natural attraction energies Cohen calls webstrings. By definition
alone, this makes sense. What we call repulsion can just as easily
be recognized as attraction to something more immediate and important.
For example, when in a dangerous situation do we run away in
fear (repulsion) or run for (in attraction to) our life? Both
are survival attractions. Was the "big bang"
a profound explosion or a profound attraction to growth?
"From atoms and molecules
to human beings with developed consciousness, all entities feel
attraction for one another. . . . attraction is the law of nature."
.....- P.R. Sarkar
Elements of Regeneration
Attraction energies in nature
are the heart of its recycling and purification process. These
unifying forces are the power in natural systems that reconnect
detached natural relationships and thereby eradicate contamination
and pollution. This helps Nature sustain its wellness, balance
and beauty. For example, nature purifies the contamination of
air and people through attraction energies that beckon air to
flow through people and natural areas. In so doing, air nourishes
people and nature with each other's "waste" products.
In the process, air also recycles its own purity as well as strengthens
the diverse integrity of the plant, animal and mineral kingdoms.
This same restoration process is also true in nature's other
cycles such as water, carbon and life. It is a source of nature's
perfection.
It is most
significant that on atomic as well as global levels nature's
recycling of air is fueled by attraction energies, a fundamental
binding force, a form of love that some might consider highly
intelligent or spiritual.
Something
to think about:
11. Can I believe that nature
is a perfection of its own, that it nurtures person and planet
and does not produce any garbage/pollution because it consists
mostly, if not only, of attraction relationships?
1...2....3....4....5...6...7...8...9...10
no.................sometimes..........yes
***
Whenever we safely make contact
with attractions in nature, they trigger our brain to release
Dopamine, a neurotransmitter that produces good feelings that
we constantly seek. These good feelings
are a vital natural gratification reward. They help our thinking
become aware that a beneficial survival connection to natural
attraction energies has been made, a connection that contributes
to replenishing, regenerating and sustaining all of life. Thus,
each attraction sensation, feeling or emotion in nature is a
rational, sensory, rewarding way of knowing and relating that
we biologically inherit from and hold in common with nature.
Neuroscientists identify attractions
as Freud's "drives" that they call "seeking urges."
Each encourages and shapes good citizenship and recycling in
the global life community. Sensing and appreciating the role
these attraction energy webstrings play is 5-leg thinking at
its finest. Reasoning that includes them is 9-leg thinking.
"This world - the shadow
of the soul, or 'other' me - lies wide around. Its attractions
are the keys which unlock my thought and make me acquainted with
myself."
.....- R. W. Emerson, circa 1860
Something
to think about:
12. Do I believe that nature's
Dopamine encouragement of my natural attractions in natural areas
is an origin of my ability to feel good?
1...2....3....4....5...6...7...8...9...10
no.................sometimes..........yes
***
Properly designed nature-connecting
activities help us create moments that let genuine contact with
4-leg natural attraction webstring energies realign and recycle
the misguided 5-leg attachments in us that draw us into destructive
relationships and dependencies.
At night, I open the window
and ask the moon to come and press its face against mine, breathe
into me.
Close the language door and open the love window.
The moon won't use the door, only the window.
.....-
Jedaluddin Rumi, 1207-1273
A major solution to many problems
is to genuinely enable our thinking to 4-leg return, backyard
or backcountry, to the "Garden of Eden," and use its
natural attraction wisdom to help us recycle our destructive
thinking and to co-create a brighter 9-leg future for the Garden
and ourselves.
"Life is a finely woven
net in which all worlds are joined - ancestors, spirits, humans,
animals and the natural universe - bonded by the timeless eternal
spirit of that which has always been and is."
.....- T. C. McLuhan
Our need
for connection
If we slice
off part of a ball, we make the ball and the slice dysfunctional.
Neither one will roll with the same perfection as when the ball
was whole. Similarly, we are born as part of nature and its globe,
Planet Earth, but, on average, 95 percent of our time and 99
percent of our thinking is 5-leg separated/sliced from genuine
sensory contact with the balanced, life-enhancing ways of Nature
and Earth. We exclude something very valuable from our being.
Slicing our
mentality from nature distorts our thinking. For example, we
learn to think that we "tame" the pets we love to fit
into our way of life. But, in actuality, what we really do is
restructure our pets so they become trusting enough for them
to invite us into their lives. When we become part of our pet's
attraction-based, nature-connected way of knowing and being we
enjoy a glimpse of nature's ways that we have lost.
The 5-leg slicing
away of our psyche from the 4-leg rewards and beauty of Mother
Nature's grace, perfection and renewing powers leaves us feeling
empty. Our self-worth declines while our needs for fulfillment
entice or bully us into entering relationships that are unreasonable
and result in destructive activities, greed and disorders. We
are bewildered (wilderness separated) and as such:
We are prejudiced
against nature because we recognize nature is not 5-leg intelligent
as we have become accustomed to define intelligence. As a disconnected
slice of life, we have lost the ability to relate fairly or favorably
to the whole of life because we 5-leg separate our thinking from
its life-supportive wisdom.
Our suppression
of our inherent ability to make conscious contact with the rest
of nature makes us think that we are unable to make this contact.
Good evidence to the contrary, our bigotry disputes sciences
and people that make beneficial connections with nature.
Each time we
build relationships without obtaining consent from nature for
them (because we have never learned how to obtain that consent),
we further denigrate nature and reinforce our our separation
from our planet mother.
We don't believe
that embracing rather than conquering nature increases a wholeness
that improves the well being of person and planet.
