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ProjectNatureConnect
The Pristine Truth of Natureness in Action
Funded, sensory,
accredited, courses, degrees and career training: Certification, BS, MS, Ph.D.
360-378-6313 <nature@interisland.net>
Homepage: Applied Ecopsychology: Learn
how to create moments that let Earth increase purity, balance and beauty around and in us
Special: take
our free, accredited, CEU course online
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THE PRISTINE TRUTH OF EXPEDITION EDUCATION
The Source and Teacher: creating moments in natural areas that taught me what you want to know.
Michael J. Cohen, Ed.D., Ph.D. Founder, President
Pristine Truth is the fact that since before forever, as this instant, Nature is wordlessly attracted to begin life and justifiably love its/our dance into being.
Through the Pristine Truth Solution of Natureness in Action any attraction in nature, backyard or
back
country, that we become conscious of,helps us bring the the pristine truth of Natureness into our lives. A weed growing through the
pavement can
do it. A park or a potted plant can do it.
Natureness is the self-correcting essence of the natural world as it seamlessly flows around, through and as us moment by moment.
For example, I
participated in a hurried, almost stressful training program for people
whose differences kept them arguing and in conflict amongst themselves.
They had little
interest or time to hear an explanation from me of the unifying and
healing benefits of my Pristine Truth reconnecting with nature process
so they
omitted it from their agenda.
In the midst of this hubbub, a
young bird flew into the meeting room through the door. It could not
find its way out. Without a word, the behind-schedule, quibbling
meeting screeched to a halt. Deep natural attraction feelings for life
and hope filled each person for the moment. For ten minutes that
frightened, desperate little bird triggered those seventy people to
harmoniously, supportively organize and unify with each other to safely
help it find its way back home through the entry door.
Obviously, neither a teacher, preacher or politician was present
to educate these leaders about the value of the bird's life and
supporting it. Although it said not a word, the bird,
nature
itself,
was that educator. Pristine truth, non-verbal sensory attraction
factors within the essence of its life touched these same factors in
the lives of the
leaders. That contact sparked into their consciousness their inherent
natural feelings of attraction/love in the form of nurturing, empathy,
community,
friendship, power, humility, reasoning, trust, place, time and many
more of
our inherent 54 natural senses.
That reconnecting moment with nature
engaged and nourished a
battery of their natural sensitivites and sensibilities. These inborn
natural intelligences led a contentious group to support rather
than deny the life of a bird, and to bring new joy to their personal
and collective lives for a short period.
Yet when they accomplished this feat,
they cheered their role, not the role of the bird. They felt like
hero's for the moment for setting it free and congratulated their humanity for its wisdom
and compassion in this effort.
In their story of the incident, the role and impact of
the bird went unnoticed. They returned to the hubbub of the meeting as
if nothing special had happened. They completely overlooked that the
bird had united them while it was there, something they continued not to do
without its presence.
I wanted to say something about the effect of the bird but I didn't.
People would have scoffed. They would have said that what happened was
not important or useful for it was uncommon to have a wild bird
interrupt their lives. It was their "human spirit" stories that they applauded,
not its origin and existence in nature even though several Native American groups were part of the training program.
Most people can see that reconnecting with nature during that incident
brought a special joy and integrity to their lives. The individual and collective benefits were evident. It is the
continual lack of such natural attraction contacts that creates
our disorders. People feel distraught, yet helpless, about Earth's life
and their lives being at risk, like the bird. Yet, if you use Natureness, the self-correction essence of Nature, even an
aquarium or pet
can produce the same benefits. I've seen it unify couples, families and
individuals in conflict with themselves or others, or suicidal. It is an organic, unifying tool.
We produce and suffer Earth misery because we excessively attach
ourselves to exploiting nature so we lose its
benefits. Pristine truth helps you learn how to reunite with nature to
regain them. That is the heart of the matter that Natureness addresses. Using it for the meeting would have been
appropriate because it utilizes tangible contact
with
nature, in backyards, parks, even with potted plants, a bird and
wilderness,
too.
There was a park near the meeting site where we could do, own
and teach simple nature-reconnecting activities. They could have
shared their conscious sensory contacts with attractions in authentic
nature to elicit an essence of cooperative life relationships. This would have enhanced the meeting's goals for unification.
Like playing
hide and seek, the Natureness activities are fun and interesting. They provide, at
will, the nature-reconnected moments missing from our lives. People can
make them happen anytime because they know the "rules" of each
activity. The process is uplifting and responsible. It helps us nurture
as many as 54 natural senses we genetically inherit and share to bring
about homeostatic consensus within and around us.
I mention the meeting and bird incident here because in 1959 I started heartfelt travel
camping expeditions whose essence was to create moments that explored
actualizing Natureness in different natural areas. Over a 26 year
period the process they created became known as Expedition Education.
An Expedition Process Summary
The Pristine Truth Expedition Process: Earth Alive
On an expedition in
1965 an unusual
thunderstorm in the Grand Canyon convinced my long sensory
contact with natural areas that the life of Planet Earth had to be an
immense
organism because there was nothing I did that it didn't do and
vice-versa, except talk.
It was like I and other people lived in it and as part of it as cells
that had the
unique ability to speak and relate through stories rather than simply
live out the attractive wisdom of Earth's life. That wisdom might let the value of
my
left-handedness speak for itself as well as for others whose lefty or
other "trespasses"
had been abused by our society's established ways. It felt like I
had found another, more loving society and I developed a fiduciary
relationship with it.
Following
its expedition-education 7-year
pilot project as a Project NatureConnect program, its 1968
catalog concluded "We believe the human race has lost its way.
The road
upward from the savage does not necessarily lead to the cluttered,
materialistic and, at times, desperate life that we presently live. To
find the right road the school must return its participants and itself
in reality as well as in imagination to the origins. From them one
might go forward again in a truly civilized, not a merely artificial,
way of life."
For this reason I designed and established
a expedition education learning community of twenty folks, the Trailside Country School. It made space for individuals who
would dedicate themselves to together
camp out on a nature-connecting expedition across the USA for a year.
The purpose of their exploration was to discover if they could produce
a consensual interaction, learn-by-doing process that was in
balance with the natural world.
Each year
each new
group would reinvent the expedition process so, as it succeeded, each
participant might know how to best live
harmoniously their life with the life of Nature in the environment,
each other and
themselves.
Guided by my living earth perceptions, commencing in 1968, for 16 years every
September my yellow school bus and its occupants embarked on a ten
month living and learning expedition into natural areas from Newfoundland to California. Outfitted
only with camping gear and a small library, it carried twenty students, my
staff and myself into a personal and academic growth utopia. It began
my sleeping out under storms and bright stars year round; camping
exploring and learning while enveloped in America's spectacular natural areas.
This all-season, consensus-governed, outdoor-living program that I
founded in 1959 immersed its intimate school community in rich organic critical
thinking, interpersonal experiences and natural wonders.
Participants thrived from all-season camping out in eighty-three different natural habitats, and
from keeping their commitments to open, honest relationships with the
environment, each other and with indigenous people(s), researchers,
ecologists, the Amish, farmers, anthropologists, folk
musicians, naturalists, shamans, administrators, historians,
counselors, teachers and many others. The experience deeply connected
our inner nature to the whole of nature.
As a result of our romance with educating ourselves this way, in the school community:
Chemical dependencies, including alcohol and tobacco, disappeared as did destructive interpersonal and social relationships.
Personality and eating disorders subsided.
Violence, crime and prejudice were unknown in the group.
Academics improved because they were applicable, hands-on, and fun.
Loneliness, hostility and depression subsided.
Group interactions allowed for stress release and management; each day was challenging, fulfilling and
relatively peaceful.
Senses that had been injured in childhood were recognized as being
vulnerable to individuals who, due to similar childhood injuries, were
less sensitive to the vulnerability of these senses. Connections with
natural areas replaced these vulnerabilities in both parties and
increased unity.
Students using meditation found they no longer needed to use it to feel whole.
Participants
knew each other better than they knew their families or best friends.
They risked expressing and acting from their deeper thoughts and
feelings; a profound sense of social and environmental
responsibility
guided their decisions.
When
vacation periods arrived, only a few wanted to go home. Each person
enjoyably worked to build this supportive, balanced living and learning
utopia. They were home.
All this occurred simply because every community member met their
fiduciary commitment to make sense of their lives by establishing relationships
that supported the expedition and the natural world within and around them. We hunted,
gathered and practiced such relationships; we organized and preserved
group living processes that awakened our 54 sense natural wisdom. We explored how to
let moments in Nature help us regenerate responsible relationships when they decayed.
The
social microcosm we invented to live in each year parallels the
languaged cooperative process used by Neanderthal folks whose genetics
are part of our own.
The secret to our expedition's success was to learn to 54-sense tap into and learn directly from the
natural world, the life of earth within and about us. Through our 54 natural
attraction sensations and feelings it taught our sense of reason how to trust the life of Nature and how to
validate and incorporate its reasonableness. The highlights of this process included:
- Starting
the school year in a classroom that had no individual or authority sitting in the front of
the room desk. The staff, unrecognized by some, sat with the students facing
the desk and blackboards. In time students and staff started to ask each other
what was happening and introduced themselves to each other. As
discussion proceeded the group rearranged the desk chairs so the were
now in a circle and folks could better relate to each other. That moment was when we started the school year.
- All aspects
of the program except driving the school bus and some administrative duties were self-organized and shared by all. This included
governing by consensus. Anybody could call an all-school meeting
at anytime to address challenges or discontents that arose. This process became the core of the curriculum.
-
The
daily
and all-year itinerary was reasonably developed based on weather
conditions, special connections and geographic logistics. It included
spontaneous opportunities as they arose and it could be
changed by consensus as new ideas and information appeared.
- By agreement, technological
assistance and dependence was limited so that the community depended
upon nature and each other for information and satisfactions.
Technologies were limited to the bus, camping equipment, cameras and a
small library, no radios, TVs or tape players. The only media
player consented to was a tape recorder that played back to us interviews,
songs, music and reactions to and from our expedition experiences.
- The
group was a justifiable combination of Kurt Lewin T-group encounter
processes, Progressive Education and Alexander Wolf group therapy. The
latter
recognized that group
members subconsciously registered a group they were in as their family
at home and often
were hooked to feel the joy or hurt of the latter and acted
accordingly. In doing so
in the nature-connected expedition family, we learned
from this experience how to let our senses of consciousness, reason and
literacy express and guide our relationships with nature's 54-sense
wisdom as we registered it.
- When
expedition members found that some of their senses were injured or
weak they discovered that it made sense to temporarily ride
on
the senses and feelings of others who were healthy in these same areas.
This continually made the expedition group a unified whole and helped
individuals restore their own balance through habitual bonding connections with
attractive natural senses of individuals in the group and attractions
in natural areas that surrounded us. An expedition was organized so
that in its membership a wide range of injured sense challenges supported
and educated it and them.
- In
reality and imagination each member of the community, including its
staff, was roped into each others' lives for the year as would be a
mountain climbing expedition that reasonably organized and maintained
itself to survive by helping its environment survive. This enabled us
to sense and feel our true relationship with the life of Earth and its
web members because, without today's "ticket to Mars," we are each on
an expedition to, in balance, enjoyably support the life we share with
our planet
home and each other. To succeed, we desperately need to invoke
Natureness as a tool that resolves the conflicts that are breaking
apart our lives and world
- Our special high motivation survival goal was consistently re-affirmed: this was a
one-year expedition that could dissolve if it did not maintain itself
appropriately. It was also the long-term goal and livelihood of some
group members that went far beyond one year's duration, (For myself it was sixteen years).
Again, it is significant
that in a short period of time, globally, within local areas, this
same organic, small-group expedition education Natureness process can be included in local groups that globally learn from each other via the internet.
The National Audubon Society identified the Trailside Country School
expedition education program as the most revolutionary form of learning in
America and selected it to be the official Audubon alternative
education program out of 116 programs that were considered. It became the National Audubon Society Expedition Institute in 1978.
Various Labels
For sixty years I have pioneered and promoted the scientific value
of creating moments that let Earth teach us what we need to enjoy the
wisdom of nature's garbage-free perfection. This has had various
names assigned to the process as information advanced including
1959 Trailside County School outdoor travel and camping
1977 An Expedition Education learning program via the Regents of University of the State of New York
1965 Organism Earth: the life of Earth having its own, self-correcting homeostasis
1978 National Audubon Society Expedition Institute at Lesley University
1990 Project NatureConnect in cooperation with Portland State University
1990 NSTP: The web-of-life Natural System Thinking Process
1990 Nature-connected 54-sense knowing and relationships,
1986 Organic Psychology at World Peace University
1991 Integrated Natural Attraction Ecology at the Institute of Global Education
2005 Akamai University Institute of Applied Ecopsychology
2 005 West Coast University life experience degree program
2013 The Organic Psychology GreenWave-54
Albert Einstein Unified Field process and equation for Eco-Art,
Eco-Yoga, Eco-Soma and Organic Therapies via University of the Pacific.
1972-2019 Accreditation select here
These years and results testify to my stubborn dedication to Nature's
welfare and that I experience it as a my peculiar integrity. I thank my
parents and Eleanore Roosevelt for this precious knowledge along with
the exceptional individuals who continue to participate in and
support Project NatureConnect.
Michael
J. Cohen, Ed.D, Ph.D.
President, Founder, Project NatureConnect
www.ecopsych.com/mjcohen.html
Contact me for information. 360-378-6313 <nature@interisland.net>
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