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Interdisciplinary Consciousness
 The Socialization of Four-Leg Thinking
(continued from The Nine Leg Process. Please read it first to best understand this page )
In August, 2004 I did a 5-leg exercise with a group of environmental educators. I had done this activity fourteen years previously with a different group of participants that included Al Gore. The responses were the same in both groups. Nothing major seemed to have changed during the fourteen years with regard to the exercise. In the exercise, I write the
symbol H20 on the blackboard and ask the group what it represents.
Most people in both groups recognized H2O as the chemical formula
for water, that H stood for hydrogen, and O represented oxygen.
Participants acknowledged that they neither sensed nor saw
hydrogen or oxygen, that the formula informed them about some
things they did not concretely experience. I then familiarized
these participants with the following water cycle:
I asked both groups if they were aware of what it was about their bodies that drew water into them and through them in a regulated way that did not result in too much or too little water. "Can you define the arrow -> that attracts water to run through you in balance?" I asked them. Do you know what it is? Although there were a great
number of highly educated people in the two groups, nobody could
come up with the correct answer, even though they had all experienced
that arrow (->) continually throughout their lives. I
suspect that you, too, dear reader, are not able to come
up with an answer either. 
The arrow The -> of attraction that
brings water into our bodies is the sense of thirst;
the arrow represents a 4-leg attraction/sensation to water, a
sense that we inherit from the natural world. Thirst is our
natural 4-leg ability to register this attraction for water
in our consciousness, if water did not exist on Earth, neither
would thirst. However, our 5-leg socialization keeps thirst,
along with our 48 additional natural sensitivity attractions,
out of our thinking. It 5-leg socializes us to include H20 as
a symbolic formula for water while ignoring the 4-leg natural
senses we have that actually register our attractions to
water. Disconnection We lose sight of our 53
natural senses and their value because, on average, we spend
99% of our time disconnected from the balancing and restorative
abilities of our 4-leg natural senses in conjunction with their
origins in nature. We spend 18,000 to 24,000 hours of our formative
years indoors engaged in socially rewarding, 5-leg academically
judged, 5-leg school work. We spend over 95% of our time in culturally
rewarding, but nature-disconnected, indoor activities and relationships. When, for example, a special interest group like the Ku Klux Klan or the Nazi Party, similarly socializes its members to their 5-leg way of relating to the world, we call it destructive programming, bonding, addiction or brainwashing. However, when our nature-conquering 5-leg thinking defines our lives, we often call it exceptional intelligence, education or progress. Our disconnectedness so deludes our 5-leg thinking that we believe we get in tune with nature just by visiting a natural area, even though while we are there, we usually mentally involve ourselves with relationships, stories and problems from elsewhere. Over 90 percent of the people I overhear talking on wilderness trails are discussing topics that have nothing to do with the natural area they are visiting or the natural moment they are experiencing.  The normalcy af denial With respect to our relationship with 4-leg natural systems and their senses or sensitivities within and around us, we are doing the same thing as in the KKK example, above. We emotionally separate our 53 natural senses from their nurturing and fulfilling origins in nature. But that's not all. We then rebond these sensory imperatives to nature-disconnected artifacts, economics and laws along with their often destructive and polluting side effects. We attach/bond our 4-leg selves to many 5-leg institutions and their uniforms; we then march to the hierarchy, values, symbols, dogmas, rituals, laws, colors, education, beliefs, terminology, artifacts, shrines and leaders of our nature-disconnected institutions. And we continue to select as leaders those who best practice and reinforce our institutionalization. When we ask ourselves "Who am I?" we too often discover the confusion of knowing ourselves as a cultural object rather than as a natural person. We lose a major factor in enjoying self-esteem. It is not at all surprising that our profound disconnection from and insensitivity to nature, produces destructive effects on nature: on natural/indigenous peoples, people of color, the natural environment and our natural "inner wisdom" sensations and feelings that were a natural part of our childhood and that we often call our subconscious "inner child." Being logical, our sense of reason, along with senses of decency, compassion and community, can not tolerate their awareness of the unreasonable, heart-wrenching suffering our nature-disconnected ways cause so we protectively go into denial of the problem. We feel our discontents and their irrationality but refute that we are addicted to the disconnection of our inherent compassion for natural systems within and around us, that it limits us and produces the disorders of broken love. We need help to stop this behavior
but we have few places to turn to get help because
our way of relating and denial is "normal" for us.
It is everywhere, including in those people who speak out against
its trespasses, people who offer different but still disconnected
5-leg thinking. 
Attributes of nine-leg thinking The great contribution and
positive power of nine-leg thinking and relating is that it offers
more reasonable and fulfilling rewards. It is easily learned
and accessible, too. Nine-leg thinking intelligently entices,
and then releases, the bonds that keep us attached us to our
destructive drummers. It enables us to find gratification in
the balance and beauty of authentic natural systems within and
around us. This gives these systems added value. We develop a
love for them that demands we further protect them. Nine-leg thinking is a socializing process that has the wonderful ability to bring nature's grace, recuperative and restorative powers to the aid of our sense of reason. By creating moments that let earth teach, it makes a safe place for our many natural senses to recuperate and operate. Our senses of trust, community, place, pain, compassion, love, belonging, fear, transformation etc. come into play in a good way--for that is how "Reconnecting With Nature" works. (Cohen, 1997 Chapter 5, 13). It is our 4-leg sensibilities combined with our 5-leg intellect that strengthens our ability to responsibly address the personal and global problems we face and dissolve the destructive parts of our socialization.
Go to the Nine leg Thinking Page
MORE NINE-LEG INFORMATION: courses, degrees, grants, recovery, coaching, self-help Professional and Personal Training Books, Courses, Degree Programs, Grants and Nine-Leg Process Validation Burnout Prevention and Recovery: an on line nature-connected stress-management course The on line Exceptional Secrets of Natural The Great Einstein-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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 Readily available, online, natural science tools for the health of person, planet and spirit 360-378-6313 <email> www.ecopsych.com ORGANIC ADVANCED ECOPSYCHOLOGY IN ACTION The Natural Systems Thinking Process Dr. Michael J. Cohen, Director send email
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The Nature Of Nine Leg Environmental Socialization. How Do We Belong and Heal in Natural Areas?
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"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.'" "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." |
Because we live in a nature-separated society, we seldom learn during socialization that it is the personal and collective relationship of our mind and senses with nature and natural areas that determines our sanity, our future and the future of the earth. Much has been written about how we need to help the planet regenerate itself. Too often we overlook that, like the water cycle, restoring it is the lasting means to improve the environment of our mind, our wellness and our destiny.
How conscious are we about the interactions of our mentality and senses with the natural world attractions? How do we passionately incorporate nature's intrinsic health and recuperative powers into our sense of self, other and livelihood? Do we acknowledge this deep and penetrating partnership in a renewable path to sustainability that serves people, the environment and peace?
These are compelling questions for us as our society is in denial of our mentality's relationship with nature and we face a most precarious future.
We Lose What We Most Love
As nature's resources are diminished during socialization so
is the quality of our lives as part of nature. As the quality
of our lives diminish, we become desensitized and fearful. We
further lose touch with our natural ability to connect to the
web of life attraction within which we are so intricately bound.
It becomes a cycle of loss, unlike the water cycle. The nurturing
link between our human lives and our earthly home gets broken.
We are driven to seek more and more satisfaction in the material
world, which means we consume more and more of the resources
we need to sustain natural world and our inborn love of it. We
get further and further away from our innate sense of meaning
and being. We lose what we most love-about ourselves, the world
to which we belong and our sense of the sacred in everyday life.
Nature's Saving Grace
In these difficult times, we are virtually on the edge of losing
our ability to save both ourselves-and our earthly home. Yet
the saving grace is simple: We will save what we love. And when
we learn how to stop long enough to genuinely reconnect to the
nurturing attraction sustenance of nature, we emotionally reconnect
to what is most deeply satisfying in our human experience-belonging.
We re-learn to love the very essence of who we are as living
breathing perfect beings on a living breathing perfect planet.
It is a generative partnership that happens during socialization
when we reawaken and enliven all our senses with the awareness
of nature's grace, intelligence and sustenance. We find and feel
that we, too, are part of the very grace and intelligence we
celebrate in nature. We belong. Because this reconnecting process
is often foreign to contemporary life, an enabling tool, like
the water cycle, has been devised to help us engage in the process.
Restoring Our Sensory Connections
To Nature's Renewing Powers.
Project NatureConnect, a pioneering process in environmental
psychology and education, has developed an ecopsychology program
that is first of all committed to helping us-as individuals-restore
our connection to our place in nature's transcending grace. Then,
through its sensory nature-connecting, ecotherapy activities,
we learn how to genuinely unite our thinking to the web of life
that is always around us, always nurturing us, always waiting
to help us wake up. We help ourselves bond to living in awareness
and equilibrium with nature, in hope and in love. Living in that
organic awareness, like the water cycle, we create a lasting
attraction future for our loved ones and for our extended human
and ecological family.
The Organic Science of Nature's
Regenerative Attraction Ways.
Backyard or back country in natural areas, the idea and goal
of Project NatureConnect is special because it is doable by choice.
It offers a web of possibilities-for everything from personal
growth, stress management and depression recovery to professional
gain. It is based on the NatureConnect work developed during
socialization by Michael J. Cohen over a span of 50 years of
studying, teaching, writing about and experiencing the regenerative
power of our natural experience in the natural world. His work
is a science and an art, the result of decades of practice working
with communities of people in natural areas, all culminating
in a process that helps us recover what it is we have forgotten,
what it is we love, what it is we can save. (www.ecopsych.com)
Healing Our Relationships
It is time for us to come out from behind the addictive socializing
and economic forces that keep the environment of our mind disconnected
from the Earth and each other. It is time to re-learn how to
let the wisdom and renewing energies of nature attraction transform
our destructive patterns into balanced and loving relationships
that can help restore both personal worth and global harmony.
| "The indescribable
innocence and beneficence of Nature-of sun and wind and rain,
of summer and winter-such health, such cheer, they afford forever!" -Henry David Thoreau, Walden |
- from Janet Thomas Author, The Battle in Seattle
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The Essence of the Nine-Leg Equation
This tool offers a powerful process that deals with the problems of inspiration hope and integrity through books degrees and courses online
It is a health improvement formula that strengthens your vote, conflict resolution and nature healing as well as restores balanced relationships free of stress and dysfunction to earth, peace and environment workers.
Like the water cycle, This power equation contains the genius and support of Albert Einstein and Henry David Thoreau for use in self-help and supporting hope, cooperation, research psychologists, naturalists and good government,
It acts as a health and life experience intelligence that increases resilience, friendships, love wellness ethics education awareness counseling citizenship transformation and constructive bonding.
It rejuvenates anxiety burnout suffering disorder abnormalities that deteriorate mental health social justice peace community trust economics and cooperation.
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How does the Nine-Leg Balance of Life Equation help you improve the quality of your life and all life?
-Enjoy 53 sensory parts of
nature, like thirst, each a distinct way of knowing and relating
that, when intact, helps us sustain the wellness, balance and
resilience of natural systems in us and the environment.
-Transform the abnormal, desensitized corporation economics and
other omissions in the way our nature-disconnected society teaches
us to think.
-Rejuvenate natural life sensitivities and Earth-integrated,
whole ways of knowing
-Master how to reconnect your mentality to its nurturing origins,
to the regenerative vigor, sustainability and integrity of nature.
-Help yourself, and those close to you, benefit from the renewal
that lies in the magnificence of a beautiful day, the wisdom
of an ancient tree and the fortitude of a weed.
-Through life experience discover how to let the "higher
power" in nature's healing energies help your thinking transform
your stress, disorders, suffering and harmful bonds into constructive
personal, social and environmental rewards.
Strengthen your inborn natural genius.
-Use powerful tool and process books, degrees and courses to
tap into potent self-help healing and conflict resolution powers
of nature.
-Research and restore forty-eight inherent sensory intelligences
into your awareness that we normally learn to deny and subdue
so they deteriorate.
-Enjoy community ways of knowing and relating that, when intact,
sustain the wellness, peace, balance. health and resilience of
natural systems within and around us.
-Quadruple the power of your vote.
-Realize more completely your hopes and values.
Increase your resilience, support, social justice and friendships.
-Reduce stress, anxiety, burnout, dysfunction and loneliness.
-Improve your ability to think clearly and implement the power
of love.
-Strengthen personal, environmental, coaching and government
wellness.
-Produce cooperation and responsible professional opportunities
and ethics.
-Discover environmentally sound directions goals and satisfactions
-Enjoy nature-connected education, psychology and healing courses
and degree programs
-Increase personal and global peace and inspiration while reducing
dysfunction.
Add important new self-improvement dimensions to counseling,
healing and citizenship relationships.
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coaching
Although each of us is part of nature, our socialization erodes our personal, social, spiritual and environmental relationships because it excessively separates us from the recuperative qualities of nature. This disconnection causes us to lose the benefit of the purifying powers in nature that would ordinarily help us rejuvenate and regenerate our presently deteriorating thinking, as does the water cycle. Our relationships with ourselves, others and the environment would improve.
We live over 95 percent of our lives indoors, separated from nature; over 99 percent of our thinking is disconnected from how nature works to produce its non-polluting perfection. To our great cost, we omit nature's grace from our personal, social, spiritual and environmental lives.
At www.ninelegs.com a spectacular nature-reconnecting tool gives us the nine leg ability to tap into the unifying recuperative aspects of nature that sustain its balance and beauty.
Nine leg thinking and relating restores our power to co-create and sustain ourselves in balance with all of life.
The nine leg tool helps us reconnect ourselves to the nurturing biological and psychological origins of our mind over the eons. This improves our ability to think sustainably and improve our health and integrity. We raise our consciousness and can produce more rewarding, cooperative life-supportive relationships, like the water cycle.
In as little as fourteen days most people can learn how to enjoy the benefits of thinking like nature works. Surely, this is as important and revolutionary as Einstein's e=mc2 or the discovery by Copernicus that Earth and we are neither the center nor most important thing in the Solar System.
"Even though I'm a nincompoop,
I'm not very special at all. Any dumbell can see the reason our
major problems don't subside. It's because our leaders don't
resolve conflicts or issues by using the extraordinary unifying
and strengthening powers of nine-leg thinking and relating. I
don't use them because I'm an idiot. But, what's their excuse,
or, dare I ask, what's yours?"
- Alfred E. Newman.
"I find that being stupid
makes me really feel left out and different all the time. I just
can't register all the wonderful things that technology and the
media provide for the normal person. For example, I'm so retarded
that I couldn't even understand that E.T. was an extraterrestrial
like Spielberg and the movie and the stories said. To me, the
powers E.T. had were the same as those of Earth, he was just
like the plant animal and mineral community. Llke them, he was
very vulnerable to technology. But I'm so dumb that I thought
then, and I still think today, that E.T. was a terrestrial; he
was Planet Earth. He was in no way so special as to become a
movie star. After all, doesn't Earth all the time do what he
did if we let it? Nine leg thinking lets us do that, too.
- Alfred E. Newman.
QUESTION: What is so important about nine-leg thinking?
ANSWER: Nine-leg thinking is a supportive, therapeutic key to creating personal happiness through a rewarding and sustainable future for all people and the planet.
To understand the momentous significance of nine-leg thinking, during socialization consider this intelligence test question regarding mathematical aptitude:
"If you count a normal dog's tail as one of its legs, how many legs does a dog have?"
"Five," of course, is the correct answer.
Intelligent people answer "five" because it is valid in mathematical and scientific reasoning. Society applauds and economically rewards us for giving correct mathematical or technological answers. But something is radically wrong with this answer; something is missing. Because, somehow, even a dog knows that a dog has four legs.
Our sense of reason recognizes five as correct only until we are greeted by our friendly family dog, or the mean mutt down the street. Five legs only works in theory. When we experience a real dog, or a wolf, or a centipede, or any other natural being, many of our inherent natural senses come into play: our senses of sight, touch, motion, color, texture, language, sound, smell, fear, consciousness, community, trust, contrast, love, reason and recognition. Are you aware we have 53 natural senses?
No matter how conceptually clever we are with our five-legged thinking during socialization, it is our four-legged sensory awareness that grounds our experience in the true nature of reality. 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.
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) attraction ways. We can kill or hurtfully stress a dog if we make it run too fast or too far because we think that it has five legs. Isn't that what we are doing to ourselves and the environment?
Nine-leg thinking and relating helps us come back, like the water cycle, into personal and environmental balance by revitalizing our multitude of natural attraction senses through genuine contact with authentic nature.
Open Articles and Letters
Nature's Grace: A Nine-Leg Attraction Equation Provides an Answer to Hopes, Prayers and Dreams.
Dear Editor
The lack of finding inner peace, sustainable economics, trust, social justice and personal and environmental wellness during socialization had alarmed me. I sought and finally found a tool that transformed my depressing stress and anxiety into responsible stability. I thought I was stressed because the more I became aware of the destructive things happening to Earth and to people and places I loved, including myself, the greater became my lack of hope and feeling either mad, sad or depression. This divorced me from both my spirit and partner. I felt anger with God and beauty, a fear and disrespect of God for letting so much war, suffering and environmental deterioration occur that I was powerless to change. In time, I became aware that I was in denial. I denied that I, like many others, had an addiction to immediate rewards from my dysfunctions. They robbed me of the resilience to tolerate what I could not change. In fear, I came upon the description, on this page, of an amazing equation that combines the genius of Albert Einstein and Henry David Thoreau. Lost in depression, I only paid attention to it because it received super positive reviews from many conferences, spiritualities and publications that I respected, especially Psychology Today, Humanistic Psychology and the Journal of Environmental Education. In retrospect, during my socialization it was a love answer from nature's grace and beauty to my hopes, prayers and dreams.
Mr. Editor, Does writing about this make sense to you? Isn't it something your readers can benefit from?
Charles Drew, Acton
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The Equation for Personal Growth and Self-Improvement
A Sensory Education and Counseling Tool Strengthens Holistic Health, Inner Peace and Sustainability
Although we are part of nature, we are normally educated to spend, on average, over 95 percent of our time and 99 percent of our lives thinking and feeling while separated from nature's grace, beauty, and restorative attraction powers. Our mentality's profound loss of nature divorces us into apathy through denial. We deny that we are rewarded for fearing and exploiting, rather than embracing, the supportive ways of our planetary mother and her kingdoms. We deny that during socialization we are psychologically addicted to nature-disconnected thinking that creates our personal, social and environmental dysfunctions.
Contemporary society has taught us to be experts in conquering nature and natural areas, including the balanced ways of our natural self and its love of nature. The result: because we don't protect what we don't love, nature, our collective sustainability and our personal wellness suffer. To stop this insanity the Einstein-Thoreau Equation makes readily available the means to genuinely connect our thinking and feeling to Mother Nature's recuperative powers, perfection and love of us as her children. Using the Internet as a learning tool, during socialization we tap our psyche into nature's beautiful sane and balanced web of life and natural areas that produces an optimum of diversity and benefits without producing garbage, a web some people call God (www.ecopsych.com).
Through easily learned, nature-connected Organic Psychology attraction methods and materials, the Internet makes it possible for any individual, or 600 million people, to think in ways that, like the water cycle, invigorate resiliency and spirit and that reduce our addictive trespasses, denial and apathy. By genuinely reconnecting our thinking to natural systems during socialization we restore and trust more than forty-five natural senses that have been numbed out of our consciousness by our extreme disconnection from nature and natural areas. The self-improvement renewal of these senses increases our sensitivity, sensibility and love energies. This ecopsychology helps unbalanced parts of our minds and hearts benefit from nature's ability to rejuvenate and balance itself, including us, for we are part of nature. We reduce our stress, depression and abusiveness during socialization. We transform our apathy into constructive participation. Backyard to back country, , like the water cycle, during socialization we strengthen our life, our organizations and global society attractions to natural areas.
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