The Millenennium Community
Study & Activity
Continued from Instructions
The GBT Score:
A sensory ecology study of the web of life.
"In learning how to think with nature is the salvation of our sanity and Earth. Stressfully separated from nature's rewards, we psychologically crave and bond to questionable gratifications and their destructive effects. Genuinely reconnecting our thinking with nature replaces our destructive bonds with constructive passions and relationships."
- Dr. Michael J. Cohen, Project Director
This study/activity is designed to help those of us who recognize that the way we have learned to think has placed Earth and its people in crisis and at risk, globally and locally.
"Have you ever sat near a roaring brook and felt refreshed, been cheered by the vibrant song of a thrush or renewed by a sea breeze? Does a wildflower's fragrance bring you joy, a whale or snow-capped peak charge your senses?"
This is Dr. Michael Cohen's response to an interviewer's question as to how connecting with nature can heal and uplift the human psyche.
From his three decades of living and teaching in natural areas throughout the seasons, Cohen has pioneered the Natural Systems Thinking Process, a synthesis of ecology and psychology. His applied ecopsychology process was experientially derived from the observed effects of people connecting with mountains, roaring brooks, and wildflower fragrances. Cohen noticed that intimate contact with nature puts people in touch with an innate wisdom that affects a deep healing of self and planet. Cohen verifies that the distortions in the way humans think have arisen from our loss of contact with nature.
Harvard biologist, Pullitizer Prize winner, Edward O. Wilson, observes that "Only in the last moment of human history has the delusion arisen that people can flourish apart from the rest of the living world. Preliterate peoples were in intimate contact with a bewildering array of life forms." By contrast, as citizens of Western civilization we spend, according to Cohen, "an average of over 95 percent of our lives indoors, cloistered from nature. We live over 99 percent of our adult lives knowing nature through detached stories and pictures." This detachment stressfully and hurtfully estranges us from creation, and from nature's wisdom, spirit and love within and about us. It creates and fuels the insatiable wants that underlie our disorders. The consequences of our psychological alienation from nature manifest as the myriad of addictive personal, social and environmental problems which beset the modern world.
A source of psychological separation from nature
Even the most untrained eye can distinguish a major difference between how people and the natural world communicate and reason.
People have the natural capability to think, communicate and relate through abstract verbal language. No mineral or other form of nature enjoys this gift of literacy.
Nature, unlike humanity, is preliterate. It intelligently organizes, preserves and regenerates itself through non-verbal communication. Through this process, it neither displays nor causes the destructive, "unsolvable" problems that we face today.
From early in our lives, rewards from industrial society educate, condition and addict us to bring the world into our consciousness through words, symbols and images. We learn to think with them. As you read this sentence you are engaged in this process. It overrides your preliterate self, you inner nature. Few of nature's non-verbal communications and values are in your awareness at this moment. Without their guidance, our thinking destructively trespasses the natural balance and community found in the environment and our biological selves.
How can we learn to register, know and co-create in balance with nature?
White
When I ask people to tell me the color that appears in the line above this
line, most of them answer "white." Few say "black,"
the color of the ink, and fewer still say "yellow," the color
of the screen. This demonstrates our addiction to words. If it could speak,
Nature would say either yellow or black. Our inner nature (inner child)
would say that, too.
When we know something natural, for example, the green color of a leaf, or of greenness (as in box A. below), two different natural sense groups lying in two different aspects of our mentality are at work. We call them the old and new brain.
In the box in example A, below, like nature and creation, our anciently evolved, preliterate old brain, registers the colors as the sensation of greeness (or as blackness, in example B) without using words.
The recently evolved new brain adds the word "green" or "black" to the experience. It has been trained to mostly think and relate using the word(s).
..........Example A:
Old Brain................................New Brain
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GREEN |
..........Example B:
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BLACK |
Let us briefly learn to recognize some important characteristics and contributions from the old brain and the new brain
THE OLD BRAIN
Using our sensitivity to register color as an example, as does nature itself, our natural sense of color lying in our large, mamalian old-brain enables us to experience a leaf's green color as an unlabeled, non-verbal sensation or feeling. We, and other color sensitive organisms, are born with this natural old brain ability to register and think with color and 52 other natural senses, as well.
The old-brain registers non-verbal attractions, tensions, sensations, feelings and emotions. It makes up approximately 87% of the brain and is the home of 52 (not just 5) natural sensitivity groups that pervade nature. Color is but one of them. We inherit them from, and share them with, the plant, animal and mineral kingdoms. Throughout nature and our old brain, sensitivities to smell, place, nurturance, taste, gravity, community, pain, consciousness, intuition, motion, chemicals, touch, form, distance, spirit, temperature, and at least 36 others, touch and guide nature and our inner nature
Natural senses and sensitivities are facts as real as rocks, oceans and gravity. For example, most people agree that:
Our desire to breathe is as much a property of air as is the wind.
Thirst is as real as water.
Color is as real as a leaf.
Sourness is as real as a lemon.
Beauty is as real as a sunset.
Motion is as real as a waterfall.
Sensations and feelings are as real as a living person.In multisensory concert, natural sensitivities make the balanced "natural sense" that is nature's beauty, peace and intelligence. In the natural environment natural sensitivities provide a preverbal, interspecies attraction communion. This communion permits natural systems to act sensibly as a community, "to make common sense," "work by consensus," to organize, preserve and regenerate themselves responsibly, reasonably and diversely without producing garbage, war, or insanity. Participating in this process is very attractive, it is the urge and will to survive.
If assigning these sensory powers to nature and the old brain seems invalid, consider the observation of bacteria, an early, unicellular form of life. The behavior of these earliest forms of life as we know it, shows that they change their behavior in response to sensing changes in environmental conditions, not through random genetic mutation alone. They cooperatively signal, calculate, network, regulate and control their community behavior, then their genes mutate and reorganize to best respond to environmental conditions. The patterns they produce are often the same as those found in minerals, suggesting that the same process exists on molecular levels.
THE NEW BRAIN:
Our two senses of language and reason are "hard wired" in our small, more recently evolved, "new-brain," the cerebral neocortex. These two senses learn to know greenness as a culturally correct word or label (like the word "green"). The new brain substitutes words and images for direct sensory experiences.
Once it learns the meaning of the word green, new brain thinking operates in a story. That story says it is reasonable for the new brain to no longer need to continue to experience the color green. It already knows green as an abstract, it can think with it and act from it.
The new-brain makes up only about 13% of our total mentality. It creates, experiences, validates and processes culturally trained symbolism: language, letters, words, numbers, drawings, logic, abstractions and stories. Society stringently teaches/programs/addicts and rewards us to reason and communicate in new-brain symbols and stories. We become literate. The effects of our story later determine whether the story was accurate or inaccurate, destructive or constructive, limited or wide-ranged.
New brain thinking that does not include old brain experiences and input always leads to thinking and relating in conflict. This is exemplified below:
What color is the following? green
What color is the following? white
The small new brain, that determines our destiny, says green and white. In contradiction, the large, old brain --along with the rest of nature-- says orange and black. Does it make a difference as to which we heed?
We train our new brain to addictively view, think and manage the world through its green-in-orange conflict and stress. Are we satisfied with the effects? Can we learn to do better?
Doesn't it make more sense and feel better to register and relate to the world with our total mentality connected as follows? green, black, red. Can you sense or feel a difference between these colored words and green and white above? Have you learned to trust what you sense and feel? As a study shows, society programs us to know and feel green, not green.
To view additional effects of new brain stories on what we perceive, select here.
SUMMARY AND DISCUSSION
From early in our lives, the ancient, preliterate sense of color, lying in the old-brain, enables us to naturally register green color as a sensation. This sense, along with 51 other natural senses, experiences green directly as "greenness", as an immediate, non-language, unadulterated, unedited, unmediated sensation and feeling experience. The old brain brings to awareness how we naturally feel and is often called our inner nature, our inner self, or our inner child (Is it really a child?). When we operate from the old brain, in western culture we often say we are being too loving, emotional, sensitive, childlike, feelingful, intuitive, subjective, inexperienced, flaky, illiterate, spiritual or overreactive. However, Carl Jung and many others note, "Our feelings are not only reasonable, they are as discriminating, logical and consistent as abstract thinking." Natural senses and feelings are the foundations of bio-logic, of nature's wise civilization. Bio-logic can best be unprejudicially measured by its long term survival effects, by its ability to create an optimum of life and diversity without producing garbage, insanity or war; without our civilization's violence, abusiveness, stress or pollution.
In the small, more recently evolved new-brain, Western culture stringently trains the senses of language and reason to apply cultural words, labels or stories to the natural senses. We teach the new brain that it is reasonable and responsible to know greenness as the written or spoken word, green, or verde (Spanish) or vert (French) or other words in different languages and cultures. We constantly reward the new brain for doing so. Reason and language capture and control our sense of consciousness leaving little room for us to be conscious or to think with our multitude of other natural senses. When we operate from senses of language and reason we proudly say we are literate, cerebral, sensible, abstract, cognitive, reasonable, logical, educated or thoughtful.
Most of our previous study participants were unaware that a cause of their inability to express their inner nature is that the average American spends over 95% of his or her life indoors, isolated from nature. Studies indicate that we spend almost 18,000 critical developmental childhood hours in classrooms alone. Remember, collectively, we average less than one day per person per lifetime in tune with the non-languaged natural world. We live over 99.9% of our nature-estranged adult lives abstractly knowing the natural world through detached words and stories about it rather than include conscious, sensory, non verbal, old brain connections to it in our thinking. We become indoctrinated with a story that says our survival and happiness depends upon our new brain thinking. We become dependent on the story and psychologically addict to it and its premise that our survival depends upon us conquering nature and our old brain.
Decades of observations outdoors show that our physical and mental estrangement from nature restricts our natural sensory inheritance from being nurtured by normal connections with the natural world. This disconnects us from the wisdom, spirit and peace of nature and creation.
Our "Cradle of Western Civilization" old brain-new brain disconnection (green/orange) (g/o) is the point source of the psychologically polluted way we learn to perceive and relate to nature and each other. Conversely, when we use activities to sentiently reconnect (green/green) (g/g) people to natural areas, their problem solving abilities and harmonic relationships have improved dramatically.
The Natural Systems Thinking Process enables people to enjoyably let thoughtful, shared, sensory connections with attractions in nature improve our thinking, relationships and spirit (g/g). Its challenge is that to enjoy its benefits you must engage in the process, (g/g), not just "new brain" it (g/o) as you are doing now by simply reading about it. Fun, reasonable nature reconnecting sensory activities make this possible. They produce thoughtful moments of conscious sensory contact with nature (g/g) that we can share in language (g/g).
When we do not think green in green, for example 1 + 0 = 1, we reinforce the problems we try to solve, including the often misguided fantasy process by which we think. (For instance, in this example, neither one nor zero actually exist in nature. In nature, one thing is never exactly the same as another or as itself in the next moment. And seldom, if ever, in nature do we find nothing. Have you ever found nothing in nature? Do you trust your experiences there?)
Numerous studies show that, habitually, addictively, we hurtfully enact abusive new brain stories until naturally unifying attractions come into our consciousness and modify the stories.
Each time we think we have succeeded in solving a problem or we gain satisfactions or rewards without contact with nature, don't we further reinforce the notion that we don't need nature in our lives? Isn't that a source of nature's disappearance, a major problem that we face today?
We have created a nature disconnected blind spot in our thinking that short circuits our ability to i reason ntelligently. We think we can resolve our problems using the same nature disconnected new brain thinking that causes them.
(If you want to strengthen your ability to deal with this challenge, do the Secrets of Nature Trail and Game. Additional information about old brain and new brain ways of knowing are found in the article Education and Counseling With Nature. )
At any given moment we can experience the world as one of the following 3 mental states:
1) conflicting, nature disconnected new brain story (g/o), or
2) as non verbal old brain sensation(s) (g), or
3) as a harmonious, nature connected, whole brain story (g/g)
| OPTIONAL: On a piece of paper, record the SUMMARY letter above (A: B: C, etc.) along with the numbers (below) that indicate your amount of agreement with the summary statement a) as a stated truth (1-10) and b) as a 0-100 % percentage of your daily time that you think you practice this truth. Note how you feel about the difference, if there is one, between your a-score and b-score. 1.........2..........3........4.........5.........6.........7.........8..........9.........10. |
The best way to learn and teach the Natural Systems Thinking Process is by doing it. Take our short online Orientation Course