THE NATURAL SYSTEMS THINKING PROCESS
How can we come to our senses? Questions to ask yourself.
(In this article I quote noted leaders to show that the information being presented is not new but it has been ignored due to our prejudice against nature.)
"I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order."
- John BurroughsA responsible society acknowledges its destructive effects and acts to eliminate them. The destructive effects of industrial civilization are undeniable with respect to its impact on the web of life. The web is nature itself, a biological connective process that the natural world and the inner nature (inner child) of people hold in common.
Our basic tenet has been to conquer nature in the name of progress and survival. We have done this so successfully that our personal, social and environmental problems have become runaway. We no longer know how to stop. With respect to our relationship with the web of life, we must go back to basics. We must learn how to be part of the web in a good way.
Question: What process can I use that will enable me to benefit from being a cooperating member of the web of life?
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Experts often depict 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 is 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, including that member who represents a person.
Dramatically, people pull back slightly and sense how the string peacefully unites, supports and interconnects them and of all life. Then one strand of the web is cut signifying the loss of a species, habitat or relationship. Sadly, the weakening effect on all is noted. Another and another string is cut. Soon the web's integrity, support and power disintegrates along with its spirit. Because it reflects the reality of our lives, this has brought some participants in the activity to feelings of hurt, despair and sadness.
Earth and its people increasingly suffer from "cut string" disintegration, yet we continue to cut the strings.
Question: To my loss, do I unknowingly cut or injure strands of the web of life excessively? Do I know how to stop myself from doing this?
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Every part of the global life community, from sub-atomic particles to weather systems, is part of the web of life. The intelligent process by which they interact produces nature's harmonious, supportive ways and prevents runaway disorders in nature. The process nature uses consists of interacting while in contact with the whole of the web through its strings. As part of the Web we, along with everything else, are born with this ability. Our troubles begin when we don't recognize or use it, deny its existence or hurt it. It usually remains alive in us but it becomes subconscious to protect us from constantly feeling its frustration or hurt.
Question: Am I aware of the strands of the web of life that I was born with and still contain? Do I use them and their ways to build responsible relationships with people and places? Have I been taught to render them subconscious?
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Recently, I asked this activity's participants if they ever went into a natural area and actually saw strings holding things together there. They said no, that would be crazy. I responded, "If there are no strings there, what then are the actual strands that hold the natural community together in balance?"
It was very, very quiet.
Too quiet.
Would you be quiet, too?
That silence symptomizes a missing link in our thinking, perception and relationships. The web strings are just as real and important as the plants, animal and minerals that they interconnect. They are as true as 2 + 2 = 4, as genuine and authentic as we are. Without seeing, sensing or respecting the strings in nature and our inner nature, we break, injure and ignore them. For this reason, Earth and its people are now at risk.
Question: Am I aware of the strands of the Web that lie within and around me? Is it important to me to stop thinking in nature disconnected ways that place Earth and its people at risk?
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Source Of The Strings
The strings are biologically of, by and from nature. Profound disbelief registered on many faces when I told the participants that since they were part of nature, the strings were in them and they could learn to nurture them and relate harmoniously to them through a nature centered self-improvement process. They disbelieved this because we are taught to conquer, not respect, nature. We have also learned that the strings, our inner nature (inner child, inner self ), are taboo, flaky, subjective, spiritual, unscientific, bad, wrong etc. They have some hurt attached to them and that blocks them from freely entering our consciousness, values and thinking. They are often as alien to us as were the "Indians" to many frontiersmen. Often, out of hurt and frustration, they attack rather than support us.Question: Is my thinking prejudiced against nature's ways to the point that it influences my relationships?
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"We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads, and along along these sympathetic fibers our actions run as causes and return to us as results."
- Herman MelvilleScientifically, it is clear that natural systems organize themselves with the string. Moment by moment systems create additional string and connections that increasingly weave, balance and repair the web of life. This is not done haphazardly, rather it forms an intelligence that produces nature's optimum of life, diversity, cooperation and beauty. It is worth remembering that the process is inclusive and caring enough to globally produce and sustain the web of life without creating garbage. Nothing is left out, unattached or unwanted, a way to define unconditional love.
Question: Can I allow myself to believe that natural relationships contain, or are, a form of unconditional love.
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Natural systems and nature centered people don't display the runaway war, abusiveness, pollution, mental and environmental disorders that plague our lives. These problems arise because our estrangement from nature prejudiciously and addictively deprives our thinking from conscious contact with the string, its intelligence, nurturance and energies (If you don't believe this is a psychological addiction, just try and change it.) We spend, on average, less than 12 hours per lifetime in conscious sensory contact with nature. Without ongoing sensory contact with our sensory origins, for example, our thinking still foolishly lets us sell and smoke cigarettes while fully knowledgeable that they contain poisons. In addition, our "stringless" solutions for runaway personal and global problems are as ineffective as the warning labels on cigarette packages.
Question: Does my life lose its potential due to problems that eminate from my disconnection from nature's balancing intelligence within and around me?
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There must be the generating force of Love behind every effort that is to be successful
- Henry David ThoreauAn essence of separation:
It is common knowledge that, with the exception of humanity, no member of the web of life relates, interacts or thinks through words. The web is a non-verbal "illiterate" experience consisting of direct attraction relationships, not words, stories, videos or images. No plant, animal or mineral string of nature's ancient web consists of literary communication or attachments.Language is a great asset to human survival when we use it to help make and sustain sensory contact with the the web and its intelligent ways. However, language becomes a source of our problems when it, through nature disconnecting stories, excessively removes our thinking from our sensory origins in the web and its wisdom. For example, sensory discontents initiated by our separation from nature psychologically addict us to the story that we must conquer nature to fulfill our natural senses: hunger, thirst, taste, love etc. Since we are nature, we addict to conquering ourselves and each other, thereby producing mental anguish and war. To find lasting peace we must heed a new story: "Learn how to reconnect your ruptured sensory strings with their brilliant, fulfilling origins in the lifeweb."
Question: Am I a victim of thinking in language and stories that isolate me from the web process that peacefully holds the global life communty and people in balance? Do I have symptoms of this such as undue lonliness, sadness, stress, excessive wants, depression, lack of attention, underlying anger?
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A new science, a natural systems thinking process, reverses many of our troubles because it effectively addresses their source. The process starts by having us learn how to consciously make enjoyable, non-verbal, sensory contacts directly with the lifeweb and its members, not with substitutes for them. These sensory contacts enable us to consciously, sentiently, reattach the strings within us to the strings in the web. We can feel and enjoy the connection, it is an attractive experience in nature. The process then helps us safely translate these sensory attraction feelings into verbal language and share them. This lets our sensory connections with the web feelingly validate themselves in words in our psyche and reasoning. By using the Process, we help nature guide our thinking to work like nature works. We sensuously enjoy nature's harmonious wisdom and support as it enters our relationships. In this nature reconnecting process, the natural world, be it potted plant or wilderness, becomes our classroom, mentor and library. It helps us peacefully co-create a sustainable future with the global life community.
Question: Does it make sense for me to want to learn through contact with natural systems? Have I prejudicely learned that doing this is "flaky" or "fuzzy thinking" and may make me look foolish like a "hippy" or "earth muffin" so I won't do it?
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"Nothing is more indisputable than our senses."
- Jean Le Rond d'AlembertSensing the Strings
The natural systems thinking process helps us recognize that the strings are actually natural attractions. Every atom and its nucleus consists of, expresses and relates through natural attractions. All of nature, including us, contains these attractions.Attractions feelingly register in our consciousness and psyche as sensations we call senses. For example: as natural loves for sight, touch, and sound; as our attractions to water (including thirst), color and community; as attachments for nurturing, belonging and trust, as affinities for contact with nature, for wholeness. When energized and nurtured, each attraction registers and plays in our conscious awareness.
Question: Wouldn't my relationships be more rewarding if I could learn to increase my sensitivity to the nature of people and places around me?
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"The senses, being the explorers of the world, open the way to knowledge."
- Maria MontessoriThe preliterate world of natural people and things thinks and loves through at least 53 distinct natural attraction sensitivities(2). Each is a web string that inherently attracts to and blends with other strings for the common good. Nature helps create, sustain and balance life through these powerful 53 sensitivities in concert. To our loss, our excessive separation from nature educates us to think and relate with less than six of them. The loss of our sensory wisdom unbalances our thinking.
There's nothing either good or bad...but thinking makes it so!
- William ShakespeareA metaphor about seven blind wise men touching and arguing about an elephant conveys the dilemmas of our blindness to nature and our natural senses. In the story, each blind man argues their case based upon what part of the elephant they are touching. While one is conscious of the elephant as a pipe (the tusk) others say it is a snake (trunk) or like a rope (tail). Such differences often lead to demoralization, hate and war because we psychologically bond to, and fight for, stories we know to be "the truth." We seldom reconcile our differences by making further common contact with the integrity of the whole elephant or whole of the web of life. Satisfying many of their natural attraction senses would have led each wise man to further explore the elephant and further discover the diverse integrity of the animal, each other and themselves.
Question: Has my extensive disconnection from nature unknowingly blinded me to the existence and value of my sensory attraction strings?
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"It is difficult to get people to understand something when their salary depends upon them not understanding it."
- Upton SinclairOur troubles remain because our society is fighting an undeclared war with nature. At basic training, our thinking is indoctrinated and gets paid to conquer nature. Our civilization's story considers conscious multisensory contact with nature's web of life to be controversial or even taboo. The process is seldom part of our education. Our thinking blindly loses contact with the truths that it needs to recover from the absence of these truths. That is why, in our nature estranged society, you best learn the natural systems thinking process by doing it. Doing it lets your 53 natural senses plug directly into their attractions in nature and energize. This recharge brings the web's supportive string signals further into your consciousness, thinking and being. It helps you let contact with nature increase your sensibility, balance and wellness. You feel better and your outlooks and relationships improve. Anybody who has had a good experience in nature has momentarily enjoyed this phenomenon. Through the natural systems thinking process these moments and their benefits become available at will.
"One touch of Nature makes the whole world kin."
- William ShakespeareQuestion: Am I missing contributions that my natural self can make to my relationships? Have I been trained to deny my natural self ?
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"The laws of the universe are not indifferent, but are forever on the side of the most sensitive."
- Henry David ThoreauEarth and its people are at risk. Isn't it time that we come to our senses by letting the attraction strings bring us to them through enjoyable nature reconnecting activities? The strings can do this because they are natural sensory loves, an essence of life itself. D. H. Lawrence beautifully validated this when he said:
"Oh, what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made personal, merely personal feeling. This is what is the matter with us: we are bleeding at the roots because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars. Love has become a grinning mockery because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the Tree of Life and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilized vase on the table."
- D. H. Lawrence
Question: Do I want to professionally and personally further my life and all of life by learning to let contact with Earth itself nurture my inner nature's isolation, hurt and fear of additional rejection? Can I really get to know who I am and help people and Mother Earth if the thinking part of me seldom registers or validates my inner nature and the web of life?
Return to the Basic Element Course Part C
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Reminder: the best way to learn the Natural Systems Thinking Process is through our online Orientation Course.
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