|
|
Accredited
Nature-Connecting Degree Courses On Line: Natural Career
Education Personal and Professional Whole Life System Training Grants
and Jobs. ARTICLE: Prejudice Against Nature ....- Michael J. Cohen, Ph.D.
|
|
AUTHOR'S NOTE Dear Visitor, A critical moment is fast approaching. Now is the time to act powerfully if we care about the welfare of human and global life. We and Earth are at risk. Due to racial prejudice, it has taken 200 years to reduce our irresponsible exploitation of people of color. Due to sexist prejudice, it has taken 200 years to reduce our irresponsible exploitation of women. However, today, around and within us, we continue to irresponsibly deteriorate the natural world. Due to the frightening depth of our prejudice against nature, we have neither addressed nor significantly reduced our unreasonable exploitation of nature, in and about us. Truth to tell, we still identify our excessive exploitation of nature to be progress, economic growth and civilized action, not prejudice. We have yet to see our conquer-nature attitude as detrimental discrimination, no less remedy it as such. Most references to "prejudice against nature" on the search engines link to my 1982 book on the subject, or to my web pages and articles about it. It is as if this prejudice otherwise does not exist and I am mistaken. I take it that what I can clearly see as our assault on nature, is, in reality, an expression of our love. After all, "We always hurt the one we love." What is really going on is this: Industrial Society is aware enough to be deeply ashamed of its irresponsible prejudice against nature in people and places, just as we are ashamed of the holacoust. Our shame prevents us from admitting that we continue to practice this stupid prejudice and further deteriorate nature, that, instead, we believe nature is dangerous and it needs to be conquered. Being in blind denial of our prejudice, we don't recognize that, as part of nature, our destructive prejudice against it deteriorates parts of our natural self. This self-deterioration underlies most of our personal, social and environmental disorders. By not recognizing the underlying cause of our greatest problems, we also can't see that Natural Attraction Ecology and its practical Natural System Thinking Process provides us with a potent antidote for our prejudice. It is a remedy for what ails us. It works because its activities empower us to connect our psyche with nature and think like nature works to produce the wellness of its self-correcting balance and beauty. Most nature lovers and outdoor enthusiasts are compassionate about the plight of nature. They are key to helping us remedy the prejudice that ails us. NATURE LOVERS, HELP WANTED: Let your deep respect for nature and its spirit improve your life and all of life. Learn and teach the balanced sensory science of Educating Counseling and Healing with Nature. Take advantage of subsidized nature-connected degrees, courses and careers online. Enhance your profession and your personal relationships Empower your passion to "green" industrial society and stop global warming. If you have ever had a good experience in nature, I invite you to visit www.NaturalAttractionEcology.com Owls and Howls, Michael J. Cohen, Ph.D.
This
article demonstrates that an
unreasonable prejudice against nature in Industrial Society underlies
our greatest personal, social and environmental disorders.
It describes an antidote, a funded sensory science that identifies,
addresses
and transforms our
overlooked, but ingrained, prejudices against nature into the
well-being
of balanced relationships.
It shows that an organic psychology anti-prejudice tool
identifies the causes of our prejudice and stops its discriminatory bias and
effects. Its process helps us improve health,
wellness and counseling today by enabling our
thinking and feeling to safely tap into the nature's grace, balance and
restorative powers. These powers help us deal with national prejudice facts and stereotype
stories in schools, teaching and the workplace. The participants who use the organic psychology process
benefit
from activities, articles, books and essays about forms and types of
implicit,
modern prejudice. These participants strengthen their
inborn love of nature as they master nature-connected alternative
therapist coaching,
stress release management and holistic spiritual psychology. PROGRAM
DESCRIPTION: Educating Counseling and Healing With Nature Supportive Degrees, Career Training Courses and Jobs On Line Project NatureConnect offers nature-centered distant learning that enables you to add the benefits of nature-connecting methods and credentials to your degree program and/or your skills, interests and hobbies.
We honor your prior
training and life experience by providing grants and equivalent
education credit for it.
Visit our Homepage for complete information
Our
viscious discrimination denies nature's and life's
right to life; it thinks it is "progress" to
manipulate or demean the flow of natural systems in and around us.
For this reason we applaud and fund our "improvements" that
interrupt or alter nature's self-correcting, restorative ways. They
often deteriorate its
self-organizing natural attraction process that has sustained Earth's
purity, balance and well-being through the eons. Our
anti-nature thinking results in in the deteriorating state of the
natural world. We have empowered ourselves to enact what we think and
feel upon the non-literate natural world. We don't listen to nature's
words because nature does not use words. Our
prejudice against nature makes us reject the supportive guidance,
healing and natural attraction balance that nature offers to all of life and reduces
prejudice. With its meaning and pictures
missing in our thinking, we become detrimentally unbalanced.
Prejudice
Against Nature: The Organic Source of, and Solution for,
our Most Challenging
Disorders If
we are to prevent the increasing environmental and social disasters
that now face us, it makes sense to clearly identify and address the
elusive core of how and why, against our will and better judgment, we
continue to deteriorate personal, social and environmental well
being. The heart of our major problems is that our thinking
is
flawed and the flaw prevents us from using a tool that can help us remedy the flaw. In
the webstring model, life itself, and all forms of life, express, and as best
they can, enjoy a natural attraction to remain alive. Without
stating it, our thoughts and acts are engaged in an undelared war
against nature, in and around us. In the 1980's a petition was
sent to ask Congress to officially declare war on nature so that people
would at least become aware of this secret conflict. It was, of course, ignored. A definition of prejudice is
that it is an unreasonable pre-judging attitude that is, due to
bonding, unusually resistant to rational influence. Uniquely, the Webstring
Natural Attraction Model
recognizes our prejudice against nature as the anomaly that we must
address to improve well-being. Every aspect of
humanity and all of life is
naturally part of and supports nature. The exception is our thoughts
and feelings
that are prejudiced against nature. Our prejudice excessively
separates us from Earth's life community. It destructively makes us
different than every other member of the plant, animal and mineral
kingdom and their spirit. "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
Blind
to 48 of our 53 natural senses and at least 17 axiom truths
about how nature works, contemporary people today are no different
than the blind Governing Council of an island society that consisted
entirely of non-sighted people. Citizens on that island were content
and adequate in their uniquely adapted ways, even though some disease
totally numbed each person into blindness by the age of two years old. One day, Gulliver, a shipwrecked castaway, half-dead, washed up on the island. Compassionately, many community members of the blind society nurtured him to full recovery. Then he became the bane of their existence. He demanded things unknown to them in their blindness: windows, lights, books, television, painted colors and sunglasses. The Governing Council investigated and discovered Gulliver's trouble. Gulliver had organs that could see. The Council, in their great wisdom, solved the problem; they took his sight away. They removed his "troublesome ability to see" from their island community society by surgically numbing his optical nerves in the same way theirs were numbed by some unknown early childhood disease. Although he adjusted to his loss, Gulliver emotionally hurt whenever he thought about how this island community society had deadened his sense of sight. Gulliver discovered that when he visited natural areas many of his remaining 52 natural senses became stronger and energetically registered in his awareness. This was similar to the renewal provided by us taking a simple walk in the park or along a beach. This contact with nature invigorated him and helped him clarify his thinking. Soon, Gulliver invented a reinforcing science for this nature-reconnecting process. As he practiced it, his connections to the self-correcting and restorative healing powers of natural systems within and around him strengthened. Slowly his eyesight un-numbed and returned. Gulliver told his blind island friends about the resilience, energy and sensibility he had found through his new nature-reconnecting tool and about his delight in improving his sight, life and health. Members of the island community learned his art, thrilled to similar results and helped others do the same. In time, most of the island community society regained sightedness and increased their well being, happiness and ability to think in whole ways. In the process, with gratitude and thoughtful passion they became protective of nature because they loved it for its gifts to them. This made sense, felt right and further helped them heal. * * * Although humanity is born as part of nature, a seldom recognized disassociative process makes contemporary people as blind as Gulliver's sightless islanders to important attributes and values of the natural systems that flourish within and around us. We plant the seed of blindness-to-nature in a child by, as noted above, rewarding the youngster for living indoors, separated from nature, over 95% of the time and to then perceive or think that people are different than nature. We nurture this seed by applauding the youngster for spending 24,000 hours of their developmental years being educated indoors, and learning to expertly think, feel and relate through abstract words, belief stories and technologies that are foreign to nature and that often mislead, demean or conquer natural systems in and around us. This is elegantly conveyed by observing the affects of labels and symbols on just one of our 53 natural senses, the sense of taste: 8/6/07:
Researchers gave a group of 3-5 year old children two identical
servings of many different kinds of food. The only difference between
the two servings was that one was wrapped in a McDonald's wrapper, the
other in a plain wrapper. Overwhelmingly, the children said the food placed in the McDonalds wrapper tasted better. Their natural self had been misled. Their senses and sensibilities had been prejudicially brainwashed by the "story" on the wrapper before they were age six. "Demonstrates that advertising literally brainwashes young children" - Dr. David Katz, Yale University School of Medicine What we produce in Industrial Society is an adult whose mentality, 99.9% of the time, enjoys rewarded emotions, sensitivities and thinking conveyed by prejudicial "McDonald-type" stories that provide rewards. We have been addictively disconnected from nature and are thereby unable to register, relate to, or benefit from the cooperative ways and wisdom of nature's grace and regenerative powers. In this benighted, nature-desensitized state, we claim ourselves to be king of the global life community, to be an advanced form of intelligence and consciousness. We can fly to the moon, but we can't live in balance with our supportive home planet or each other. Like a cancer we overrun, pollute and destroy natural systems in people and places while we are fully knowledgeable that nature designs these systems, like our sense of taste, to support our life and sanity. If somebody shows us how we are acting harmfully to the global life community, our society and ourselves, we deny it, for our senses can not tolerate such insensibility. We are paid and otherwise rewarded to be "normal." In our denial, we offer progress, God's will and economic growth as rationale for our injurious effects. Is education based on good information the answer? Does telling an adult that the two foods in different wrapper are identical change how the foods taste to them, or has that individual's taste become fixated? You have been given information here about our society's prejudice against nature. Has it changed your behavior?
Since we suffer
from our thinking being prejudiced against and therefore disconnected
from nature, the Model's process enables our thinking to appreciate
genuinely reconnecting with nature and its beneficial grace, balance
and restorative powers, backyard or backcountry. Mutually supportive familiarity is a
profound remedy for prejudice. The ways of the model help us
discover, build and strengthen a mutually supportive familiarity with
nature in and around us. The
Model contributes to
well-being by providing us with activities that enable us to
create thoughtful sensory moments in natural areas, moments that let
Earth teach. During these moments, natural attractions interlace with
and connect our ability to think and feel with its origins in the
corrective callings and ways of natural systems. This helps us
reconnect any or all of 53
natural senses
in our psyche, to nature's sensitivities and its eons of
whole-life experience. During
these connective moments, nature and our thinking become a flowing
continuum, as of old. This empowers our thinking to recycle
the
garbage that has been placed in our psyche by our prejudice, so we may
think clearly, like nature's perfection works. Over time,
this process
becomes a habit because it rewards us by feeling good and making sense. When
we practice this natural attraction habit, it helps us feel and act
more sensibly. We tend to be disenchanted with the manipulating
"McDonald effect" and might try to remove it from our socialization by
imagining a skull and crossbones on the McDonald wrapper. Can you remember colors, sounds, aromas, textures or flavors that might have been part of the experience? Did it contain comforting motions or attractive feelings of community, trust or place? Do you feel it was enchanting, self-enhancing or spiritually pleasing? Was it supportive, peaceful or both? Did it help you feel that you were part
of a greater whole? The above are some of the results that individuals
have reported from remembering their attractive experiences in
nature.
As demonstrated by the pre-Columbian natural
world
and its people in North America, nature produces these natural optimums
without creating garbage or pollution, nothing is left out. In
addition, things in nature seldom suffer the excessive abusiveness,
greed and disorders that result from the ways of contemporary society. A heightened
ability to thoughtfully map the world in our consciousness and to
design tools for survival was one of our adaptations to life in the
temperate and arctic zones. However, unlike nature-centered
societies, our map for survival short-circuited itself. Its
prejudice against nature rejected nature-connected relationships as a
prime source of information, survival and happiness. Instead,
prejudicially, the map's rationale said that we must conquer, exploit
and "improve" natural systems to survive, produce our artificial indoor
kingdom and achieve happiness. Our loss of the balancing and corrective
powers
of natural systems in our thinking made us destructively excessive as
well as unable to stop being excessive. Our
holocaust against natural systems has destroyed 85 percent of the
American wilderness and it has injured people. It has knowingly released toxic
pollutants that cause health disorders to most forms of life.
We
have been alerted en-masse to this situation since, at least, 1948
through the best-selling books Road to Survival and Our Plundered
Planet and Silent Spring. However, our socialized bonding to our prejudice
against
nature makes us continue on our destructive path, even while we admit
that our nature-exploitive relationships are excessive, irrational and
symptoms of insanity. Because, due to our prejudice against nature, we are missing sensible and rewarding co-creative relationships with nature, our unsatisfied wants drive us to inappropriately produce: -
excessive air, water, and land pollution, agricultural clearing, mono
cultures, livestock grazing, predator extermination and global warming;
To sustain its health, the river of
life
gives every part of life, including us, a diverse, but equal, right to life and
well-being This is nature's attractive way to support life in
balance. Due to our prejudice against nature we
suffer
because our prejudiced thinking injures natural systems, as described
above. Once injured in the environment, the flow of these injured
systems can't correctly support our body, mind and spirit, and vice
versa. Our nature-dysfunctional thinking seldom recognizes
that,
like a disease, we suffer from a nature bigotry that injures and
unbalances both our psyche and our planet. To remedy it, we must learn to expertly address it as such. The train's original track
consists of a non-polluting, unifying and balancing attraction dance that the train itself
designed. It followed that track for eons before we decided that we were super
intelligent so we could take over and run the railroad.
The
methods
and materials of the Webstring Model enable us to do exactly the same
thing with regard to our prejudice against the natural world. They
empower us to reverse our irrational thinking and feeling that pit us
against the inherent wellness of the unadulterated global life community. “If we don't use
and support the Webstring
Natural Attraction Model, is it because the
Model is not reasonable and it does not work or make sense? Or is it because, as with Gulliver, our sense-numbing
prejudice against nature
has blinded us to the model's important contribution?” Support and
training to use and
teach the Model is available to those who recognize its value and benefits.
http://www.ecopsych.com
|
|
| Yoga Reiki Self-Improvement Self-Confidence Self-Esteem Weight Loss Ecotherapy Intimacy Holistic Leadership Organic Psychology Friendship Happiness Unitarian Universalist Pantheism Mental Health Peace Climate Change Shamanism Earth Day Activities Retreat Centers Energy Medicine Natural Systems Parenting Child Development Alternatives Dog Cat Pet Care Return to the top of this page ................................................. |
Art
Therapy Massage Therapy Ecopsychology Therapist Training Hypnotherapy Wilderness Therapy Human Services Social Work Counseling Teaching Life Coaching Integral Therapy Hospice Caregiving Home Schooling Creative Writing Life Experience Naturopathy Consciousness Jesus & Wilderness Biophilia Herbal Remedy Life Science Violence Prevention Outdoor Education Continuing Education Anger Management |
Hope
& Life Relationships Recovery
from: |
|