Living Earth Psychology Fan Club Team Cheers Game of Love, Life and Happiness

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Contents

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The Earth Avatar Track

Introduction

This website invites you to become part of what might be called a “Living Earth, Gaia-Psychology Fan Club,” a team that supports and cheers for our Planet's ability to play the game of life fairly, to the benefit of all.

We are folks that learn and practice mutually supportive relationships based on self-evidence obtained from sensory, contacts in natural areas, backyard or backcountry. We find happiness by learning how to create moments in natural areas that let Earth teach us what we need to know to increase personal, social and environmental well-being and decrease our society's corruption of nature and sensibility, in and around us.

Have you ever spent quiet time in a natural area and felt the joy of a special relaxation, belonging or clarity? If so, that feeling is self-evidence for you. It conveys the fact that your body, mind and spirit inherently have the ability to be connected with nature and benefit from the connection. You unquestionably know from the experience that your respectful contact with authentic nature can energize nature’s restorative powers into your awareness and that greater health and wellness results. In the process, by receiving gratitude from you, nature benefits from your protective love of it. Considering our constant assault on it and its detrimental effects, Nature in and around us needs all the assistance we can give it.

Implementing this mutually supportive sensory process with Earth by becoming a practitioner or supporter of it increases balance and purity throughout the Web of Life. We become true to life, Living Earth Avatars (ambassadors). Our accredited training and degree program acts like a cheering section and support group for our living Planet Earth and the wonderful game of life that it plays.

All things in the web of life, including folks who choose to be included, are members of the club and all are winners in achieving the Planet’s goal of survival in balance and beauty for all.

It is self-evident that you are reading these words right now. As in a natural area connection, this reading experience you are having is an undeniable fact for you. It is a trustable, lifelong truth that you can share. This is same process that the heart of how the Planet’s game works as a Dance.

Experience is the strongest and most valid form of knowing because experiences register directly on our 54 natural senses, senses that all human beings genetically inherit from Nature to keep our thoughts, feelings and relationships connected to Nature and its self-correcting purity and balancing powers. You know this is true for yourself because, as above, you have already experienced it at some time. For this reason conscious, sensory, present moment contact with the Dance of Nature and its powers in a natural area provides you with a significant scientific anchor. It can help you stop our society’s juggernauting corruption of our natural integrity and enable you to happily increase person/planet unity.

Sadly, because the science of connecting with nature is a potent medicine that reforms the corrupt parts of Industrial Society, these corrupt parts are rightfully threatened by it and often omit it from our socialization at home, work and school.

“All sciences are vain and full of errors that are not born of Experience, the mother of all Knowledge.”

― Leonardo da Vinci

"Empiricism says we gain knowledge through sensory experience. The most basic form of necessary truth is self-evident truth. Self-evident means you don’t really even have to think about it. It has to be true. It's innate.

― C. George Boeree

History of the Living Earth/Gaia Psychology "Fan Club"

After a decade of studying and living in expeditions through natural areas, in 1965 during a storm in the Grand Canyon of Arizona, self-evidence from contact with Nature demonstrated to Dr. Michal J. Cohen that there was nothing that Planet Earth did that he as a person did not also do and vice versa. This self-evidence convinced his senses, thoughts and feelings that if he was alive, so was Planet Earth. He realized that until shown otherwise, the citizens of Industrial Society (CIS) that did not recognize or respect our Planet as a living Mother Earth had been corrupted by Society and it was wise to respond to them accordingly for the corruption was contagious.

For the following half century Cohen has created and directed whole life education, counseling and healing with Nature outdoor programs based on Planet Earth being a living organism. His work rediscovered and applied the Process Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead to life in natural areas. This was supported by the biological research that produced the Gaia Hypothesis and it included Cohen’s conference “Is the Earth a Living Organism” the National Audubon Society International Symposium at the University of Massachusetts in 1985. At it, 116 studies were presented that confirmed Cohen’s original living Earth observations that were based on his experiences in natural areas. Moment by moment, Nature’s dance, including humanity was an alive and self-organizing intelligence of the eons that had the ability to create optimums of life, diversity and cooperation without producing garbage/pollution, excessiveness or unreasonable abuse.

Additional self-evidence during his 50 years of outdoor contact made it undeniable to Cohen that a singular major difference between himself and Organism Earth existed. He was literate and Nature/Earth was non-literate, a self-evident fact about humanity and Earth that remains true today. People know and relate to the world via thinking and feeling with stories that are unavailable and unintelligible to the non-literate web-of-life or Nature/Earth. Cohen also became aware that in contemporary society we spend over 99 percent of our lifetime with our literate body, mind and spirit out of tune with the way non-literate Nature/Earth works.

Cohen, the author of How Nature Works and Educating, Counseling and Healing With Nature, observes that the twisted rewards from Literacy-Stories that inaccurately convey or demean, exploit or conquer the dance of Nature’s eons subversively addict Citizens of Industrial Society (CIS) to devastate nature in and around them, moment by moment. This madness, he says, is a form of literary insanity that economically and socially rewards our reasoning and consciousness for destroying our own life support system. It is a prejudiced against nature dementia against which our living Planet Earth is helpless because it and Nature are non-literate. Cohen sees this insanity as an addictive weapon of mass destruction sometimes known as crazy making or death by ecocide. Its roots are a “normal” CIS prejudice against nature (PAN) that is the corrupt point source of our unsolvable troubles and disorders, a prejudice that we have yet to acknowledge no less address.

"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country... corporations have been enthroned, and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war."

– Abraham Lincoln

From his experience in and with natural areas, Cohen realized that at any given moment he was living in two worlds, his literate thinking world and the non-literate world of Planet Earth. He declared that the wholeness of his body, mind and spirit consisted of having two bodies, one was his CIS literate body and his other body was non-literate Planet Earth, a body that he experienced communed with him via 54 (not just five) natural senses that were already validated by researchers in Developmental Psychology and other sciences. He sensed and felt that whenever the prejudice against nature stories of our CIS body disturbed the environment, it simultaneously disturbed our Other Body/Earth, and vice versa.

Cohen determined that our prejudice against nature was an addiction of our senses of Consciousness and Reasoning to false, nature-disconnected or prejudiced natural Literacy stories that only reside in humanity’s literate body. He reasoned that our Other Body/Earth being non-literate has no misleading stories about itself that would prejudice itself against itself so it neither produces nor displays our problems. Our stories, however, make it suffer our prejudice.

Cohen could see that our literate CIS body could not turn to itself for solutions to our PAN because it was faulty, it was the source of PAN. He also recognized from self-evidence, as in the paragraphs above, that our balanced Other Body/Earth has self-correcting, healing and purifying powers that restore it and sustain its perfection. For this reason, Cohen designed training programs, accredited courses and degrees in Educating, Counseling and Healing with Nature (ECHN) whose core was to, backyard or backcountry, help individuals learn how to create moments in natural areas that let their Other Body/Earth teach them what they needed to know. This enabled any individual to reunite their two bodies in their single, whole-life, peace and well-being body of our pristine and balanced living Planet process, before it was assaulted by our addiction to CIS nature-disconnected stories. His program is called Project NatureConnect. It consists of invoking the art of Organic Psychology and science of Natural Attraction Ecology through his Webstring Model.

Based on Cohen’s prerequisite book, “The Hidden Organic Remedy: Nature as Higher Power” some ECHN practitioners are following a degree or certification track that enables them to be recognized and teach as personifications of Organism Earth, Gaia, their other or single natural body. They learn to help their Other Body represent itself as a CIS, as a real-life Earth Avatar that has learned to think like the Nature works and help others do the same.

The pages that follow describe the Earth Avatar Track program and identify its “fan club” participants and their team spirit. Each of them are guides and learners simultaneously because experience in and with natural areas is the best teacher.

Continue on to the Abstract and Overview page
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Enjoy further information about Organic Psychology and Natural Attraction Ecology:

Achieve a degree or certification with attitude that strengthens your contributions as a counselor, healer, teacher, environmentalist, coach, therapist, spiritualist, leader or health and wellness mentor.

You may obtain an Educating, Counseling and Healing With Nature degree or certificate in conjunction with:

Recipient of the 1994 Distinguished World Citizen Award, Applied Ecopsychologist Michael J. Cohen, Ph.D., is a Program Director of the Institute of Global Education where he coordinates its Integrated Ecology Department and Project NatureConnect. He also serves on the faculty of Portland State University and the Akamai University Institute of Applied Ecopsychology whose program he initiated and has directed since 1990. In 1965, Dr. Cohen discovered that Planet Earth acted like a living organism and based on this he founded sensory, Gaia based, degree granting Environmental and Expedition Education outdoor programs independently and for the National Audubon Society and Lesley University. He conceived the 1985 National Audubon International Symposium "Is the Earth a Living Organism," at the University of Massachusetts and established the science of Organic Psychology in 2005 and Natural Attraction Ecology in 2008. He is the Editor of the Journal of Organic Psychology and Natural Attraction Ecology and an award winning author of ten books dealing with Applied Ecopsychology including "Educating, Counseling and Healing With Nature," "The Web Of Life Imperative," "Reconnecting With Nature" and, new,"The Hidden Organic Remedy: Nature as Higher Power." Dr. Cohen is also an accomplished folk song artist and contra dancer who presents traditional music programs using guitar, banjo and accordion for the U.S. National Park Service and Skagit Valley College Road Scholars on San Juan Island, Washington.

INSTITUTE OF GLOBAL EDUCATION
Special NGO consultant United Nations Economic and Social Council

PROJECT NATURECONNECT

Readily available, online, organic psychology tools for the health of person,
planet and spirit

P.O. Box 1605, Friday Harbor, WA 98250
360-378-6313 <nature@interisland.net> www.ecopsych.com

APPLIED ECOPSYCHOLOGY IN ACTION

The Natural Systems Thinking Process

Dr. Michael J. Cohen, Director

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All programs start with the Orientation Course contained in the book
The Web of Life Imperative.