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Project NatureConnect
Institute of
Global Education Organic Psychology
Special NGO Consultant, United
Nations Economic and Social Council
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, in this case mathematics.
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 natural 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 "unsolvable" 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 attraction 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.
Undeniable
truth consists of phenomena that registers directly in our
consciousness through one or more of our 53 natural attraction senses.
It is fact based on empirical evidence. The fact that you can
see
this sentence right now is irrefutable, "4-leg" knowledge because it
registers in you through your sense of sight, color, reason, literacy
and consciousness. This fact is not subject to
interpretation.
However, if it is labeled
as "reading," "information," or "a happening" and you relate to it via the label,
various intepretations, belief systems or indoctrinations can come into
play. They usually distort the original truth. They can change a dog's
tail into one of its legs, reality into imagination.
If
the preceding paragraph seems sensible to you, it is a fact because it
has registered in your sense of reason, especially if you have thought
about it and thereby repeated its message several times without
developing conflict with one or more of your other natural senses.
Using his or her natural attraction senses, even a
very young child who does not know math can determe 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 natural attraction reality,
no matter how Industrial Society socializes us to think.
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 attraction signals from natural
systems
within and around us. These senses are natural attraction
"communiques" to update us on what is happening in
the moment in our relationship with the flow of nature
through us. The interplay of these attraction sensitivities
is the way nature
works to
produce its perfection and invite us to embrace it. 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.
"The
unreasonable bias of Industrial Society is a five-leg story that we are
not part of nature, that our
planet is not alive, that we do not share the integrity of its life,
and that we don't need to do onto Earth and nature as we would do
onto ourselves."
-
Michael J. Cohen
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. We can register the sensation of thirst without knowing its
name, how to spell it, or how to use it in a sentence.
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 short 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 the dogma and labels of our society 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 that flow around and through
us, in the web of life that includes Earth's natural systems,
atmosphere and sunlight.
We "four-leg" sense and feel this. Our senses of distance,
motion and
color help us 4-leg know we are below clouds, birds and air, rain,
auroras, etc. Since they are part of
the Planet, we must be in
it, not on it.
We
survive as part of the life, flow and cycles 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 are living a
vicious lie that leads to many other distortions and that disconnects
our thinking from nature's ways. Our mentality and psyche lose the
self-correcting, balance and restorative powers of nature. We can't
afford to do that."
-
Anonymous
Course Participant
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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 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."
- 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 midlife, and otheer 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
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 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 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 is protected, or through
a cathedral, what we sense and feel about them 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 1) 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." and 2) we don't believe in or use a process that helps us correct
this error. In his quote, above, Einstein identifies our problem but he
neither identifies nor gives us a process or tool that helps us address
it. This finally catches up with us. We recognize that this
conflict leaves us dissatisfied and troubled and this motivates 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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grants, recovery, self-help
Start with an Orientation
Course online.
Help yourself and others overcome
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 5-leg 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 or make sense.
That is a way to describe delusion or halucination.
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 critical thinking, our multisensory awareness
of
natural systems around and within us and others. This
enables our
every thought and relationship to connect with and benefit from
registering nature's 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 Earth's well being.
"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 and are not connecting with nature on this screen. 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 senses, just as a child is also bonded to its human parents.
These senses are expressions today of the natural attraction continuum
through the eons that has held together the universe and all its
components since the beginning.
We are born with an innate natural attraction
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.
"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 follow my attraction to 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:
Show me a
thing,
place or relationship that, since the beginning of our Universe, has not,
or does not consist of natural attraction holding 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 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.
Our
disorders arise simply because we have excessively disconnected our
society and mentality from conscious sensory contact with natural
attraction that flows through and around us and natural areas, backyard or
backcountry.
There
is one 5-leg
exception to the above. However, it is not natural. It is the 5-leg
story that
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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Act now: books, courses, degrees,
grants, recovery, self-help
Start with an Orientation
Course online.
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
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The
on line Exceptional Secrets of
Natural
Attractions Trail
Outcomes; unedited: empirically
knowing ourselves and the world in a nine-leg way.
Act now: books, courses, degrees,
grants, recovery, self-help
Start with an Orientation
Course online.
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