 . Web Site Navigation Introduction Education Information Validation Contacts  |
||||||
|
|
|
Project NatureConnect |
Michael J. Cohen: Maverick Genius at Work
Mardi Jones, Ph.D.
In 1955 neither an art nor science was available that explained how or why you could make conscious contact with nature and increase mental health, learning ability, conflict resolution and wellness. Then, as today, most great thinkers and leaders wisely expounded on what should be done about many important social and environmental problems. However, they seldom offered a tool or process that enabled people to accomplish what they suggested so these problems persist. Cohen's genius has made that tool readily available for anybody interested in reaping its benefits.
Throughout his adult life, Michael J. Cohen, Ed.D. has devoted his energies to bring into consciousness and identify webstrings, a unifying energy substance that is far more common than air. While all species enjoy webstrings, contemporary thinking is taught to ignore them.
Cohen has successfully demonstrated the power of webstrings to regenerate and preserve the purity of nature's balance, beauty and peace in natural systems around and within us (2). His work is an act of genius for it enables anyone to use webstrings to help resolve "unsolvable" personal, social and environmental problems (1).
Cohen has largely been ignored because contemporary thinking neither believes in nor respects webstrings and their potential for good. To our loss, our history has been to destroy or inadequately substitute for webstring relationships as part of our conquest of nature (3). For this reason, webstrings in their pure form are foreign to most people.
WEBSTRINGS DESCRIBED:
Environmental experts accurately portray webstrings, nature and the web of life by gathering a group of people in a circle. Each person is asked to represent some part of nature, a bird, soil, water, etc. A large ball of string then demonstrates the interconnecting relationships between things in nature. For example, the bird eats insects so the string is passed from the "bird person" to the "insect person." That string represents their connection. The insect lives in a flower, so the string is further unrolled across the circle to the "flower person." Soon a web of string is formed interconnecting all members of the group, from minerals to the solar system, including somebody representing a person. In this model each of the connecting strands is a webstring (4).Every aspect of the global life community, from the space between sub-atomic particles to weather systems, is part of the web of life. The diversity of natural system webstring
interconnections produces nature's regenerative balanced that prevents runaway disorders. Undulterated natural systems neither create garbage nor display our mental health problems or our abusiveness, stress and isolation. Everything that is part of nature, including people, belongs and is supported.
In the web of life activity, dramatically, people pull back, sense, and enjoy how the strings of the web peacefully unite, support and interconnect them and all of life. Then one strand of the web is cut signifying the loss of a species, habitat or natural relationship. Sadly, the weakening effect on all is noted. Another and another string is cut. Soon the web's integrity, unifying ability and power disintegrates along with its spirit. Because this deterioration and loss of support from the wholeness of the web of life reflects the reality of our lives, it triggers feelings of hurt, despair and sadness in many activity participants. In reality, Earth and its people increasingly suffer from "cut string" disintegration (5).
With respect to the webstring model, Dr. Cohen asks people if they ever went into a natural area and actually saw strings interconnecting things there. Usually their answer is something like, "No, if I saw them I'd be hallucinating or psychotic." Cohen has responded, "If you see no strings there, what then are the actual strands that hold the natural community together in its perfection and beauty?"
It becomes very, very quiet.
Too quiet.
Are you quiet, too?
Pay close attention to this silence. It flags a vital but missing element in our thinking, perceptions and relationships whose loss results in many troubles (6).Natural beings sustain their own and nature's wellness while in contact with the whole of the web through webstrings. As part of nature, we are born with this ability. Pulitzer-Prize winning sociobiologist Dr. Edward O. Wilson, of Harvard, affirms that nature's web of life holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive, and even spiritual satisfaction (7). Albert Einstein noted that, "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" (8).
Webstrings are part of survival, just as authentic and important as the plants, animals and minerals that they interconnect, including ourselves. The strings are as real and true as 2 + 2 = 4; they are facts as genuine as thirst. We ask for trouble by ignoring them.
As part of nature we are born with the natural ability to sense, register and respond to at least 53 different webstrings that we need for survival but contemporary thinking learns to neither acknowledge nor
exercise this ability. We usually subdue it along with nature. Without seeing, sensing or respecting the webstrings in nature and our inner nature, we break, injure or ignore them so they no longer register in our consciousness and thinking. Their disappearance there produces an unnatural void, a discomforting sensory emptiness in our psyche and spirit that we constantly try to fill. This emotional vacuum distorts our thinking and prevents the formation of many vital relationships. It causes depression and stress in us; we unnecessarily want, and when we want there is never enough. We become greedy, abusive and reckless while trying to artificially replace our natural but missing 53 webstring fulfillment satisfactions. This dysfunction places ourselves, others and Earth at risk for with respect to the perfection of the web of life there are few, if any, known substitutes for nature that do not produce destructive side effects (9).
Cohen's quest to understand and utilize webstrings brought him, for the last 40 years, to live and teach in natural areas year round. This led to his Grand Canyon discovery in 1966 that Planet Earth acted like, and could be related to, as a living organism, a realization substantiated twelve years later by James Lovelock (10). From this notion, Cohen personally risked founding the Trailside Country School and National Audubon Society Expedition Institute along with other organic webstring education programs, books, curricula, psychologies, therapies, courses, schools, institutions and processes. These include Cohen's Whole Life Factor, the Natural Systems Thinking Process, Organic Psdychology and the 5-leg addiction model (2, 16). Each is an enabling tool that helps people build balanced relationships and wellness from empirical evidence and genuine experiences with webstrings (11). Each gives people a unique means to implement their deeper hopes and ideals (15).
Because, on average, 95% of our time and 99% of our thinking is separated from nature, Cohen has recognized that our mind is uprooted from Earth's norm of life in purifying balance around and within us. "We are psychologically ungrounded, destructively grasping for straws. We are so disconnected from our natural selves and webstrings that our stricken psyche considers our nature-separated lives to be "normal. We deny this mental dysfunction rather than address it as such. For this reason, most of us don't use available organic psychology tools that that help us reduce our troubles by enabling us to reconnect our thinking with nature and its recuperative powers."
In the 1985 Bureau of Applied Sciences International Symposium on the Promotion of Unconventional Ideas in Science, Medicine and Sociology, the so called "Maverick Genius Conference" in England identified Dr. Cohen as a maverick genius because genius has been described as "One who shoots at something no one else can see, and hits it" (13). Dr. Bruce Denness, the conference convener, partially in jest suggested that Cohen, who still today sleeps outdoors year round, might be the reincarnation of Henry David Thoreau as a Psychologist.
If our society was dedicated to living in peace and balance with people and the environment, "genius" would accurately describe Cohen and his work,
for which he received the 1994 Distinguished World Citizen Award (12, 14). However, in our nature-conquering society where profit, power and exploiting nature are often rewarded, Cohen's webstring learning and relationship building tools go against the grain. His nature-connecting art makes him a maverick, a genius who teaches the science of co-creating with nature in an "anti-nature" society (2, 16). He argues, "With respect to the Web of Life, we are part of the whole; when connected to the whole, webstrings renew themselves and thereby us. In our nature-separated society, a person who succeeds in helping us sustain wellness by genuinely reconnecting injured parts of us with nature is, by definition, a maverick."
References:
1. Descriptions of genius to which Cohen's work applies:
"The principal mark of a genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers."
Arthur Koestler"Genius not only diagnoses the situation but supplies the answers."
Robert Graves"Genius is the ability to reduce the complicated to the simple."
C. W. Ceran"It takes immense genius to represent, simply and sincerely, what we see in front of us."
Edmond Duranty"Genius . . . is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one."
Ezra Pound"A genius is one who shoots at something no one else can see, and hits it."
Author unknown"Genius is the capacity for productive reaction against one's training."
Bernard Berenson"True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information."
Winston Churchill"Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored."
Abraham LincolnCreative genius: "Individuals credited with creative ideas or products that have left a large impression on a particular domain of intellectual or aesthetic activity."
Author unknown"Persons of genius, and those who are most capable of art, are always most fond of nature: as such they are chiefly sensible, that all art consists in the imitation and study of nature."
Pope"What makes men of genius, or rather, what they make, is not new ideas, it is that idea - possessing them - that what has been said has still not been said enough."
Eugene Delacroix"Some superior minds are unrecognized because there is no standard by which to weigh them."
Joseph Joubert"A good criteria to determine a genius is to see whether he has caused a paradigm shift in his time."
Author unknown"My father taught me that a symphony was an edifice of sound, and I learned pretty soon that it was built by the same kind of mind in much the same way that a building was built.... Even the very word 'organic' means that nothing is of value except as it is naturally related to the whole in the direction of some living purpose, a true part of entity."
-Frank Lloyd Wright, quoted in Jonathan Hale, The Old Way of Seeing"Those individuals that rise to the particular challenges of emerging in a civilization when it is in some way endangered and who make a response to ensure the continuity of the civilization."
Arnold Toynbee"The willingness and ability to challenge conventional wisdom. Perhaps even more importantly, scientific genius depends on an instinct for invention, an ability to focus on the problem at hand, and a determination to pursue that problem to a successful conclusion."
Author unknown"What is called genius is the abundance of life and health."
Henry David Thoreau"A genius adds to every equation our inborn love of nature and its global intelligence."
Michael J. Cohen
2. Cohen, M. J. (2003). The Web of Life Imperative, Trafford, Victoria, B.C. Canada and (1997) Reconnecting With Nature, Ecopress, Corvalis, Oregon, and Einstein's World, Project NatureConnect, Friday Harbor, WA. Also see Nature Connected Psychology: creating moments that let Earth teach. Greenwich Journal of Science and Technology, July, 2000.
http://www.ecopsych.com/natpsych.html
3. McKibben, W. (1999). The End of Nature Anchor Books/Doubleday.
4. Storer, J. Title: The Web of Life. Devin-Adair 1953.
5. Cohen, M. J. (2000). Einstein's World, Institute of Global Education, Friday Harbor, WA
6. Cohen, M. J. (1997). The Natural Systms Thinking Process, How Applied Ecopsychlogy Brings People to their Senses. PROCEEDINGS, 26th Annual Conference of North American Association For Environmental Education, Vancouver, British Columbia.
7, Wilson (1984). The Biophilia Hypothesis, Harvard Univ Press,
8. Einstein, A. (1997) in Neligh, R.D. The Grand Unification: A Unified Field Theory of Social Order, New Constellation Press
9. Pearce, J. (1980). Magical Child. New York, NY: Bantam.
10. Cohen, M. J.(ed.) and Lovelock, J. (1986). PROCEEDINGS of the 1985 international symposium Is The Earth A Living Organism? Sharon, Connecticut: The National Audubon Society.
11. Cohen, M. J. (2003). The personal page of an innovative scientist-counselor-ecopsychologist
http://www.ecopsych.com/mjcohen.html
12. Jones, M. A Genius at Work. http://www.ecopsych.com/think3genius.html
13. Cohen, M. J.(1986). Education as of Nature Mattered: Reaffirming Kinship with the Living Earth. in Denness, B., Editor, PROCEEDINGS of "The Maverick Genius Conference" The International Symposium on the Promotion of Unconventional Ideas in Science, Medicine and Sociology. Bureau of Applied Sciences, Isle of Wight, England.14. Kofalk, H (1995) The Distinguished World Citizen Award, Taproots, Journal of the Coalition for Education in the Out of Doors, Cortland, N.Y.
http://www.ecopsych.com/overview.html15. Evaluation and Testimonials http://www.ecopsych.com/testeval1.html
16. Cohen, M.J. The Stairway to Personal and Global Sanity Institute of Global Education http://www.ecopsych.com/wholeness2.html
As stated elsewhere, after you obtain information about the Project NatureConnect program from the web site by using the Navigation guide (left column), a free, helpful 15 minute discussion by phone with a faculty member is the most effecient way to customize the program to your goals.
|
|
Friday Harbor, WA 98250 360-378-6313 ORGANIC ADVANCED ECOPSYCHOLOGY IN ACTION Dr. Michael J. Cohen, Director send email
... |