TITLE
The
Hidden, Unified-Field Voice in Natural Systems: Why Counseling,
Learning and Relationship Advice Work Better When Connected to the
Unified Field and Web
of Life.
ABSTRACT:
A broken computer cannot repair itself if
its
malfunction prevents it from making the repair. Similarly, we suffer
our personal, social and environmental dysfunctions because we have
"broken" our computer, our ability to think clearly with regard to our
human relationship with natural systems.
Our broken thinking
creates and sustains our
dysfunctional relationships because, without help, it can't repair
itself.
Nature can be seen
as an prime energy of life and we are
part of nature. Normally,
nature's creative intelligence and basic powers of love produce the
non-polluting perfection and healing ways of natural systems within and
about us. But we live excessively nature-separated lives. Our
separation removes our thinking from nature's universe of grace,
balance and restorative power. This loss creates a wanting natural
system void in our psyche, an emotion and information frustration that
produces dysfunctions in our thinking.
We must replace
this loss by connecting our psyche
with nature for our thinking is our destiny.
Today, an organic,
nature-reconnecting education and counseling tool is readily available
on the Internet. It enables us to genuinely tap our psyche into natural
systems and think like nature's perfection works. The tool helps us
remedy our mental dysfunctions by inviting nature's regenerative ways
to constructively fill the void we have produced in our mind and heart.
Through this process we compost, recycle and renew our polluted and
misguided thoughts.
This Article
suggests that our thinking has become
so dysfunctional that, without help, our thinking may not appreciate or
use the new nature-reconnecting tool and the opportunity it presents.
However, the Article also empowers you, your friends and your
supporters to provide the help our thinking needs to use the tool.
ARTICLE
"Nurture
your felt love for nature. Never deny it. That love is the eons, the
purifying intelligence, beauty and diversity of nature sustaining us in
its perfection. Our disconnection from this love and its advice
produces our hurt, greed and destructiveness. We must reconnect and
restore its peaceful voice in our thoughts, soul and surroundings."
- Michael J.
Cohen
.........Author, The
Web of
Life Imperative
"We
are dysfunctional socially and environmentally because we are cut off
and isolated from the world of nature and the natural."
-Albert Gore, (edited).....
.........Author, Earth in
the Balance
Since
the publication of his 1992 book, Earth in the Balance,
we have heard little from Al Gore about how to deal with the
destructive dysfunctions he identifies in our society, dysfunctions
produced by our excessive disconnection from nature.
In
1990, I personally described to Senator Gore an easily applicable
social technology that empowers us to genuinely connect our mind with
nature and reverse our dysfunctions. In addition, I gave him the
published blueprint of this nature-connecting tool and he included it
in the bibliography of his book Earth in the Balance.
Today that tool is readily available. The burning question is "Are we,
including Al Gore, too dysfunctional to appreciate and use the tool?"
Here
is what our mind does not want us to hear. With rare exception, the
mentality of industrial society is walking a self-destructive treadmill
of denial. We unnecessarily suffer our troubles because we deny that
our thinking is prejudiced against nature and therefore dysfunctional
and we deny that a readily available, nature-connecting
tool enables us to transform our prejudice into constructive
relationships.
Converging
Evidence and Process
Significantly,
in the past decade the often opposing physical (7), biological, social
and environmental sciences have discovered a body of evidence upon
which they agree. In addition, this evidence also agrees with findings
in ethics (10), philosophy and spirituality (9). During this same
period, the fields of education and psychology have produced a learning
tool that enables any individual to access this validated knowledge and
use its advice to build human and natural relationships that improve
self, society and the environment (3).
The
evidence mentioned above authenticates what outdoor researchers like
myself distinctly sense in natural areas. A fundamental, binding,
energy underlies every aspect of the world we know (13). Be it a basic,
organic form of the Power of Love or the Unified Field so highly sought
in physics (and affirmed in 2012), a cohesive natural attraction holds
together, sustains in
balance, and is an essence of communication for relationships, be they
sub-atomic, human, or global (8, 6).
Natural
attraction connects everything into a system, a subsystem or "thing" so
that everything belongs, nothing is isolated or not wanted. For this
reason, nature produces no garbage.
Natural attraction
roots
Nature
grows from seeds and roots, past to present. The existence of an
original natural attraction throughout 
nature is
consistent with how nature works. It makes perfect sense. If the Earth
yesterday and today was not held together by natural attraction, it
would fall apart, which it hasn't and doesn't. Rather, its natural
systems are attracted to
increase in growth, diversity, resilience and in their ability to
support and renew life in balance without producing pollution.
To
physically see one of our body’s atoms we’d have to enlarge it to the
size of a 16
story building. In this building the nucleus would be the size of a
grain of salt.
And somewhere in the 16 story "empty" space would be the electrons
orbiting the nucleus – these would be 2000 times smaller than the
nucleus. If the building was a hydrogen atom, there would only be 1
electron in the "space." Yet, the building holds itself together. So
what are it and we made of? We are 99.999999999%
space filled with attraction.
Even the nucleus and each of its subatomic particles are packets of
attraction that are immerging from a universal ocean of the unbroken
wholeness of attraction. This is also true of the electron. Every
atom in our body – though there for a relatively short time, was once
born somewhere in the universe in the heart of a star. Atoms are formed
from raw materials in stars that are attracted to form nuclear
explosions that occur millions of times a second.
The
atoms in our body are ancient. Each is recycled and being exchanged
with other atoms from around us. Each has been in many places in the
earth, they are shared. They belong to no one. They visit temporarily
to be you or me, they then leave and become a part of the rock, the
tree, our neighbor. This flow is the attraction intelligence
that drives and manifests our body mind and spirit, it is who we and
the web of life are before our story world socializes or civilizes us.
We are attractive
All
material and non-material "things" in nature, including people, consist
of natural attraction relationships. Thus, as natural attraction
produces us, it manifests itself as us, as our molecules, body, mind,
sensations, feelings and spirit. This acts like an "attraction
sensitivity symbiogenesis" that operates to develop new atoms and
molecules and continues to play a role in the development of new genes
and species.
On
our first real birth day, together, all members of
nature's plant, animal and mineral kingdoms "love" us so much that they
are attracted to physically and spiritually become us. They
supportively flow their eons of balancing life attractions, wisdom and
experience through us. In time, they birth us out of our human mother
and into the more supportive and universal womb of Mother Nature, so
that, as part of the natural attraction process, we help support all of
life as it helps support us. We
are born as contributing planetary citizens
with unique attraction contributions. We are also born as equals; every
other member of the global life community has the same natural origins.
Our
senses are not sterile. Like everything else they, too, are natural
attraction expressing itself. For our survival our senses intelligently
give us advice. They help us consciously, feelingly, register nature's
ways as they seek fulfillment from their attractions to their origins
in nature. For example, our sense of thirst intelligently "knows" when
we are dehydrated as well as knows to bring to our consciousness our
attraction to water. This attraction (sense of thirst) brings us to
water and, in addition, helps us survive in balance with at least 52 additional natural
intelligence senses that we register: hunger, community,
trust, place, companionship. Nature's attraction sensitivity way of
knowing and communicating makes up our older "horse brain," about 90%
of our mentality.
Effects of
disconnection
Biologically,
humanity is a seamless continuum of nature and natural attraction.
However, a contemporary person mostly lives indoors and thinks over 99%
of the time while disconnected from their natural attractions and their
fulfilling origins in natural areas. This profound disconnection
corrupts our thinking to the point that we consider this severe
dismemberment normal. We often applaud it as progress even as we suffer
its abnormal effects upon ourselves and on the environment.
Disconnected,
the missing attraction rewards in our nature-disconnected sensibilities
and emotions produce our wants and greed. The latter arise from our
severed, frustrated natural attractions. This stressful void makes
contemporary people the only organisms on Earth whose mentality
destructively produces garbage, pollution, war, mental illness,
loneliness, excessive stress and abusive relationships. These maladies,
with rare exception, are absent in nature or people in tune with
authentic nature.
Scientific
shortcomings
The
objectivity and science of disconnected contemporary thinking dismisses
as subjective most of the natural attraction sensitivities that nature
and we hold in common. For example, sensory attractions to water
(thirst), life (survival), appetite for air (to breathe), home (place),
safety (trust) and belonging (community) are not even included in the
five senses that we say we learn and know from. Because they are
missing, satisfactions and advice from our natural attraction to pets,
friends, family, lakes, wind, hills, sky, peace, sunshine, justice and
community seldom play a key role in forging our self-esteem, economics
and technologies.
In
our nature-isolated thinking, we learn to view at least 45 natural
attraction senses and feelings as unimportant, as non-measurable,
childish or unreasonable loves (12). We condition ourselves to become
sensuously sterile and oblivious to them. To our loss, we omit them
from most thinking and equations. This corrupts us. Our thinking and
resilience lose nature's essential, unifying energy, our inherent
natural attraction way of knowing and relating that peacefully holds
the natural world in a mutually supportive, cooperative, equilibrium.
Disconnected from this common bond, we and Earth are becoming
increasingly dysfunctional (4) (11). We can't adequately think or
relate to the whole of life with 90% of our capacity to do so missing
from our psyche.
From
womb to tomb, for profit, we are socialized to excessively transform
our inherited natural love of life into "McLove" of burgers and the
rest of what we appropriately call our "Gross National Product."
Life's hidden
purpose
The
absence of natural attractions from our thinking leaves us to conclude
that life systems, including ourselves, operate by the laws of chance
and are without purpose. However, any thoughtful person may observe
that, locally or globally, a life system does have a purpose. It is to
survive by following its natural attraction to grow in support of life.
Throughout nature, minerals, plants and animals achieve this purpose
and perfection by fulfilling a multiplicity of natural attractions that
resonate and beneficially modify each other. Things in nature thereby
intelligently, by "consensus" (many sensitivities together), unite as
transpersonal global citizens to their mutual benefit. The "fittest"
are those that best sustain mutually beneficial cooperative
relationships with their neighbors and environment.
As
part of nature, when our senses and feelings are not thwarted by
nature-conquering stories, artificial substitutes or social pressures,
they attract us to responsibly support life. Each time we do they
reward us with joys that keep us on that path.
Restoring
disconnection 
Considering
our mental loss due to our
disconnection from nature, it is not surprising that most therapies, healing, and
learning work better and produce greater cures and responsibility when
connected to natural attractions in nature. It is no longer heresy to
say that the greater a person's natural attraction desensitization or
disconnection, the greater are the problems that person suffers and
causes. Conversely, sensuously reconnecting with attractions in nature
is our salvation. The connection enables us to benefit from the real
thing, the unique supportive and regenerative powers of nature. They,
in turn, help us transform our disorders into unifying, constructive
relationships (5A-E).
To
help us repair our mentality's destructive disconnection from nature,
at the Project NatureConnect a newly researched Natural Systems
Thinking Process (NSTP) and GreenWave-54 application provides a
psychologically organic tool, a
missing link. To our "normal" way of thinking, the tool enables us
to do what seems impossible. It helps us safely make thoughtful,
conscious, sensory contact with healing natural attractions in nature,
backyard or backcountry. Through this purifying connective process, we
invite natural systems to "compost," or recycle or renew, polluted or
injured parts of our psyche. This is not unreasonable. We simply tap
into the normal ways of natural systems and let them do what they
usually do best. Through NSTP we reduce our dismemberment stress and
improve our thinking and ways of relating. We dissolve "mind pollution"
and its destructive effects. The sensory information that registers
from contact with natural systems helps us think and co-create with,
rather than against, nature (3).
This
authentic reconnection with our natural attraction origins renews at
least 54 inherent natural attraction sensitivities in us. It energizes
them to register in our consciousness as attractive felt senses and
logic (3).
The
presence of these additional senses in our normal awareness enables us
to enjoyably think and speak with and through them, to make greater
sense and thereby improve our relationships with ourselves, each other
and the flow of natural systems through, within and around us. This
regenerative process feels good. It becomes very attractive, therefore
repeated, and thereby lasting (2).
In
summary, by enabling us to genuinely connect
our mind with nature NSTP helps anybody restore the inherent joy of our
culturally suppressed natural attractions. Senses of community, trust,
place, compassion, reason, belonging, consciousness, global
citizenship, empathy, literacy, humor, spirit, relaxation and
sustainability, along with our forty-one additional natural senses,
come into play in congress. This helps us to come into balance as our
thinking rationally registers and integrates nature's natural
attraction to uncontaminated reason, peace, spirit, community and
Higher Power.
Conclusion
It
is neither sensible, necessary nor attractive for us to remain
sensuously disconnected from nature and to continue to produce the
destructive effects we and Earth presently suffer. To help us end this
deterioration, NSTP is readily available through holistic online
grants, courses, degree programs and training for nature-connected
education, counseling and leadership. NSTP empowers caring individuals
to help people, nations and religions share with each other what they
deeply hold in common, an innate ability to make conscious sensory
contact with natural attractions in natural areas and reap the unifying
rewards. This unification improves personal, social and environmental
relationships and restores peace. To knowledgeably omit this supportive
nature-reconnecting process from any endeavor simply reinforces our
dysfunctions.
"Personal
transformation is best cultivated by partnering with the supreme agent
of change, the Earth. Life is change, and nature is the wizard who
enlivens its magic cycles."
-Philip Sutton
Chard
"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."
-Albert
Einstein
ADDENDA
The
Growth of Attraction
Through
the Webstring
Natural Attraction Model, we see that:
1.
In the beginning of time, in what was to become our universe, a
resonating/dancing attraction "seed" appeared. It was aware that it was
attraction but had no name for itself since, as far as we know,
literacy had not yet been invented.
2.
In this original resonating attraction different resonances of itself
were attracted to connect and duplicate their connection. This was an
attractive thing
for attraction to do because it created greater attractiveness as it
danced with an attractive partner. To grow attractively was the nature
of its life.
3.
As additional resonating attraction partnerships were produced some of
their unique variety of dancing resonances were attracted to build new
attraction attachments to each other, split off, and become more bonded
concentrations of attractive identities. A diversity of bonded
attraction attachments attractively danced into being. They grew from
and with the natural attraction and intelligence that they held in
common to increase dancing individuality and diversity.
4.
All these interconnected yet differing attachment relationships were
attracted to the stability that their interconnections and diversity
produced. Stability was attractive because it enabled them to enjoy the
attractiveness of their attachments for longer periods of time.
5.
The attachments were attracted to continue to follow steps 2, 3, and 4
with each other because doing so grew greater diversity, attraction and
attractiveness. This process continued for 14 billion years. It
produced the attractive grace balance and beauty of nature's atomic
particles, atoms, elements, molecules, landscapes, kingdoms, weather
systems and all other natural things/relationships great and small,
including life as we know it. Humanity was produced as part of this
dance about two million years ago.
6.
Today, as through the eons, every aspect of the natural world's web of
life consists of, is connected to, and is held together by diverse
webstring attractions. We know this from experience. We rarely, if
ever, see things fall apart by themselves. Instead, see that things are
attracted to be the relationships that is/are themselves or that they
are attracted to. For example, when we split apart the nucleus of an
atom the attractions that formerly held the nucleus together release
themselves as nuclear energy. Similarly, Earth is attracted to stay in
its orbit around the sun. Human, plant or animal parents are attracted
to nurture their children. In the presence of sunlight, produced by the
attractions of atomic fusion, life is attracted to survive, flow and
grow in life supportive diversity.
7.
Through the flow and cycles of natural systems, in concert and
connectedness all things on planet Earth form and perpetuate the
perfection of nature's resonating river of diversity, the attraction
river of plants animals and minerals in the web of life all dancing in
community.
8.
Everything is a resonating attractive current in this river as well as
flowing into and being part of the river's greater current.
9.
Because everything is attractive and wants a dancing partner, nothing
is left out. For this reason the river doesn't produce garbage or
pollution as it grows its optimums of life, diversity, cooperation and
well-being.
10.
Human thinking and feeling are living currents in the river They
register natural attraction as an essence of all natural things and
relationships, We thoughtfully sense it as our need to be in attractive
relationship, as our natural love of life.
11.
As demonstrated in the
web of life circle activity, each interconnected filament of
the web of life is a conscious natural attraction webstring.
There are at least 53 webstrings that we can register, sense and feel
because life is attracted to give us the survival knowledge in these
webstrings in support of our attraction to survive. Each webstring is
an expression of the dance of life.
The
webstring attraction natural systems story, above, is a rewarding means
to help us see and feel:
-
how webstrings register in our consciousness as attraction sensations
that connect and coordinate our thoughts and acts with the balanced and
renewing ways of nature and its systems.
-how
and why natural systems, through attractions, either do not produce
garbage or pollution, or purify them when they appear.
-how,
through webstring attractions, everything naturally belongs, how
nothing is left out.
-how
natural systems and their grace attractively organize, preserve and
perpetuate themselves in nameless, self-correcting ways whose
attractions purify each other.
-how
nature produces optimums of life, diversity, intelligent cooperation
and peace.
-
how nature sustains its perfection without producing the excessive
abuse, stress, and disorders that we suffer in our disconnection from
it.
-
how nature/wildness has important rewarding values that our
disconnection from it makes us overlook, that the closest wilderness to
us that we can think and learn from is within ourselves when we are
connected to and dancing with webstring attractions in natural areas.
Further
information about NSTP is available at http://www.ecopsych.com and
in the companion books The
Web of Life Imperative and Reconnecting
With nature
(Ecopress).
LINKS to people that
have
expressed or shown support for the article."
REFERENCES
1.
Bloom, Howard. (2000.) Global Brain. New York. John Wiley and Sons.
2. Cohen, Michael (2005) A Survey
of Participants: Reactions to NSTP and Studies of Effects, The
Web of Life Imperative, Victoria, B.C. Trafford.
3. Cohen, Michael (1997) Reconnecting With nature: Finding
Wellness Through Restoring Your Bond with the Earth, Eugene,
OR, Ecopress
4. Cohen, Michael, Editor (2001) The State of Planet Earth: Results of
Ecozombie Thinking (http://www.ecospsych.com/zombie2.html)
5A-E.
Chard, Philip Sutton. (1994.) The Healing Earth: nature's medicine for
the troubled soul. Minnetonka MN. NorthWord Press.
5B.
Kahn, Peter H. (1999). The Human Relationship with nature: Development
and Culture. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.
5C. Frumkin, Howard (2001). Beyond toxicity: Human health and the
natural environment. American Journal of Preventive Medicine 20(3):
234-240 (March)
5D) Wilson, Edward O. (2001). Nature matters. American Journal of
Preventive Medicine 20(3): 241-242
5E. Stilgoe, John R. (2001). Gone barefoot lately? Nature matters.
American Journal of Preventive Medicine 20(3): 243-244
6. Einstein, Albert et al (1952) Science and Philosophy
http://www.aip.org/history/einstein/philos1.htm
7. Laszlo, Ervin. (1995.) The Interconnected Universe.
London. World Scientific.
8. Laszlo, Ervin. (1996.) The Whispering Pond: A Personal
Guide to the Emerging Vision of Science. Rockport, MA.
Element.
9. Newberg, Andrew. (2001.) Why God Won't Go Away: Brain
Science and the Biology of Belief. New York. Ballantine Books.
10. Pojman, Louis P. (2001.) Environmental Ethics,
3rd Ed. Belmont, CA. Wadsworth.
11.
Roszak, Theodore, Mary E. Gomes & Allen D. Kanner. (1995.) Ecopsychology:
Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind. San Francisco. Sierra
Club Books.
12.
Shepard, Paul. (1982.) Nature and Madness. San
Francisco. Sierra Club Books.
13.
Thomas, Janet (2005) On All
Nine Legs - Teaching Outdoor Love to an Indoor World, Taproot,
SUNY Cortland, NY, Coalition for Education in the Outdoors,
Reviewed material
Other
materials that appear in this article are drawn from Michael J. Cohen's
professionally reviewed publications in:
The Journal of Humanistic Psychology,
Journal of Environmental Education,
Interpsych Journal of Mental Health,
Greenwich University Journal of Science and Technology,
Councelling Psychology Quarterly,
Proceedings of the North American Association for Environmental
Education,
Journal of the Oregon Counseling Association,
The Trumpeter,
U.S. Department of Education Educational Resources Information Center,
Outdoor Communicator,
Clearing Magazine,
Nature Study,
Between the Species,
Cooperative Learning,
International Journal of Humanities and Peace
About the Author
Recipient
of the 1994 Distinguished World Citizen Award, Ecopsychologist Michael
J. Cohen, Ed.D. is a Director Project
NatureConnect and also serves on the faculty of Portland State
University, Akamai University and West Coast University. Dr. Cohen has
founded sensory outdoor environmental education programs independently
and for the National Audubon Society and Lesley University (AEI),
conceived the National Audubon Conference "Is the Earth a Living
Organism," and is the award winning author of Web of Life
Imperative, Reconnecting With Nature, Einstein's
World, and How Nature Works. He is an
accomplished folk song artist and contra dancer who presents
traditional music programs for the U.S. National Park Service San Juan
Island, Washington.
CONTACT: http://www.ecopsych.com nature@interisland.net
360-378-6313, Pacific Time Zone
"This
is the course
that every civilized person
will be required to take if we are to reverse our runaway disorders."
- Raymond Sierra, Counselor
"The
Natural Systems
Thinking Process provides a readily accessible ....and.wonderfully
effective means for students to acquire, understand, and act upon the
transforming experience of being connected to nature; of being in
respectful relationship with the natural world of which they are a
part."
J.Marc
McGinnes, J.D.
Senate Lecturer
University of California at Santa Barbara
Environmental Studies
"We
dramatically increased
our program's effectiveness by adding the Natural Systems Thinking
Process to it. It enables our participants to connect with their
sensory origins in nature and use that peaceful power to improve their
relationships with self, society and the environment."
James
Rowe, Ph.D.
Director of the Outward Bound School in Costa Rica
.
