Accredited Nature-Connecting Online Alternative and Natural Holistic Degrees Courses and Careers that include the truths of life experience and prior training, independent thinking, essential networking and ecological grounding mentor careers.    Project NatureConnect Online Natural Attraction Degrees-Courses-Grants  Institute of Global Education Special NGO consultant United Nations Economic and Social Council ...... LEARN NATURAL ATTRACTION ECOLOGY Educating Counseling and Healing With Nature Subsidized Degrees, Career Training Courses and Jobs Online. Project NatureConnect offers core distant learning that enables you to add fulfilling nature-connected natural attraction methods and credentials to your skills and interests. We honor your prior training and life experience by providing grants and equivalent credit for it. You may take accredited coursework and/or obtain a Nature-Connected Degree or Certificate in most subjects or devoted personal interests. (see bottom of this page)  Visit our Homepage for complete information     Mental Islands of Nine Leg Thinking : How and Why Contemporary Society Destructively Blinds our Senses and Sensibility to the Value of Natural Systems and Nature   Hidden facts of life On average, Industrial Society conditions and indoctrinates contemporary people to spend over 95% of their time indoors, separated from nature. Over 99% of our thinking is separated from and out of tune with natural systems along with their ability to produce their self-correcting balance and beauty. Over 24,000 developmental childhood and adolescent hours are spent indoors in school learning to obtain a degree that helps us produce and enjoy the indoor, but excessively destructive nature-disconnected, at risk world that our thinking continues to create. Contemporary society insensitively exploits and conquers natural systems in places and people by not educating us to acknowledge, respect or register 48 natural senses that we inherit at birth. We falsely learn that we only think, know and relate through five senses, rather than 53 sensory intelligences. Society must to blind us to our multitude of natural senses because they are of, by and from nature. This empowers our strategy for survival, that being to conquer nature and monetarily profit by turning it into the products of our economy and indoor ways.  Our natural senses protectively reject society's exploitation and conquest of them and nature. However, as we hurtfully conquer them, their pain and abandonment is suppressed by our ego, parents, teachers and leaders. Our psyche hides this discomfort from our awareness by making it subconscious. We become psychologically dependent upon discomforting relationships. Our extreme disconnection from nature leaves an agonizing void within us. It is our frustrated 53 sense appetite to regain and enjoy the rewarding benefits of nature that we have lost.  Our psyche's love for enjoying reasonable sensation makes sense, yet that love is seldom satisfied in a good way. Disconnected from its sustained fulfillment through conscious sensory contact with the sanity of nature's balance and purity, the frustrated void in our psyche gains fulfillment by unreasonably building addictive, irresponsible relationships. They provide immediate rewards that are accompanied by damaging side effects for they are devoid of nature's self-correcting balance and wisdom.  Our prejudicial disconnection from nature is the source of our most challenging personal and global disorders. We desparately need a remedy for this destructive prejudice. Act now: books, courses, degrees, grants, recovery, self-help   .........  ............................................................................................... Elements of Sensory Loss Contemporary people, being blinded to 48 of our natural senses, today, are no different than the blind Governing Council of an island society that once consisted entirely of non-sighted people. Citizens on that island were content and adequate in their uniquely adapted ways, even though an incurable disease had totally numbed each person into blindness by the age of two years. One day, Gulliver, a shipwrecked castaway, half-dead, washed up on the island. Compassionately, many community members of the blind society nurtured him to full recovery. Then, because he was sighted, he became the bane of their existence. He demanded things unknown to them in their blindness: windows, lights, books, television, painted colors and sunglasses. The Governing Council investigated and discovered Gulliver's trouble. Gulliver had eyes that could see. The Council, in their wisdom, solved their problem; they took Gulliver's sight away. They surgically numbed his optical nerves in the same way theirs were numbed by their early childhood disease. Although Gulliver adjusted to his loss, he emotionally hurt whenever he thought about how this island society made him lose his precious sense of sight. Over time, Gulliver noticed that when he visited natural areas, in compensation for his blindness, many of his remaining 52 natural senses became stronger and more intensely registered in his awareness. This was similar to the mental renewal provided by a simple walk in the park or along a beach. The contact with nature invigorated him and improved how he thought and felt. Soon Gulliver invented a science that consisted of activities in nature that helped him strengthen his nature-reconnecting, sensory enhancing process. As he practiced it, his connections to the restorative healing powers of natural systems within and around him increased. Slowly his eyesight un-numbed, recovered and returned. Gulliver introduced his blind friends to his activities that improved the resilience, energy and sensibility he had gained along with his delight in improving his sight, life and health. They learned to use his applied science, thrilled to similar results and helped others do the same. In time, most of the society of the island community regained sightedness and increased their well being, pleasure and ability to think in whole ways. In the process, with gratitude and thoughtful passion they became protective of nature because their innate love for it had been reinforced in their consciousness and rewarded. That made sense, felt right and further helped them heal.  They became more happy and healthy. Act now: books, courses, degrees, grants, recovery, self-help   Restoration and recovery Although humanity is born part of nature, a seldom recognized disassociative process makes contemporary people as blind as Gulliver's sightless islanders to important values of the natural systems that flourish within and around us. We deny it, but we learn to be prejudiced against nature and the free sensory rewards that it provides. We plant the seed of blindness-to-nature in children by, as noted above, rewarding  youngsters for living indoors, separated from nature, over 95% of the time. This indoctrinates them to perceive that people are different from, and better than, nature. We nurture this seed by applauding youngsters for spending 24,000 hours of their developmental years being educated indoors, and learning to expertly think and relate through abstract words, stories and technologies that are foreign to nature and that often make us demean or conquer natural systems as they flow in and around us. What we produce is an adult whose mentality, 99.9% of the time, enjoys rewarded emotions, sensitivities and thinking that have been addictively disconnected from nature. They are desensitized and thereby unable to register, relate to, or benefit from cooperative ways and wisdom of nature's grace and regenerative powers.  They instead receieve satisfaction from the often-questionable artificial rewards they received from artificial stories, beliefs and technologies....to which, by repetion, they become addicted. In our benighted, nature-numb state, we claim to be king of the global life community, an advanced form of intelligence and consciousness. Like a cancer, from our loss of nature's balanced fulfillment we continually demand more and more of everything. We overrun, pollute and destroy natural systems in people and places while fully knowledgeable that these systems support our life and sanity. If somebody shows us how we are prejudiced against nature and reacting in ways that are harmful to the global life community, our society and ourselves, we deny it. Our senses can not tolerate such insensibility. It is "normal" and we have been rewarded to be "normal." In our denial, we offer progress, God's will and economic growth as rationale for our injurious effects. Act now: books, courses, degrees, grants, recovery, self-help Seven Blind Leaders and the Elephant. A story concerning seven blind leaders touching an elephant and arguing about what it is conveys the dilemmas of our society’s blindness to Planet Earth and our natural senses. In the story, each blind leader describes the Elephant based upon what part of her they are touching as they stand by her. While one calls the elephant a pipe (the tusk), another says the Elephant is a snake (trunk) or like a rope (tail) etc.  They stop there in confusion. Each goes back to their followers where the senses and feelings of the latter in time addict to the story of their blind leader. The story becomes the dogma of their leader’s Institution with a passion that leads to stronger unity in their community. However, this is accompanied by misunderstandings, stalemates, arguments, fights and wars with the other leader’s groups. The same story as above with a happier ending is that each blind leader, not knowing about the others, follows his or her attraction to learn more about the Elephant. With the elephant’s non-verbal consent that she conveys by attracting them to visit her (by attractively dancing), they crawl all over her, discover many new things and meet each other in the process.  Doing this exploratory connection “dance” they happily recognize from the experience that they feel healthier and while they are there each of them is attracted to what is happening including the Elephant, she cooperatively helps them be there. They thank the Elephant for her consent to let blind people explore and learn about her through their senses. They also bond to each other from the delightful meeting and agree that the major difference they can sense between the Elephant and themselves is that when they speak to each other the Elephant does not understand what they say, it is non-literate.  When they return to their followers, their group is attracted to them. They also easily unify with other groups and the Elephant, too, for they all hold the unifying Dance of their mutually shared attraction to her and each other in common. Attraction is the unifier in this story, because by definition unification is what attraction/(love) does in word and deed. To be part of a system a thing has to be in communication with the system. Otherwise things trespass each other and deteriorate into toxins/garbage rather than balance into stronger, unified and pure systems. The Elephant, Leaders and Followers are all expressions of Earth’s/Nature’s Standard Universe system whose dance communicates and unifies in purity by attraction. However, the Leaders mostly communicate by Literacy/Language that the Elephant does not understand and vice versa. The goal of this course is for our Literacy to learn how to articulate natural attraction so we may communicate with and join the Earth/Nature Attraction Dance to the benefit of all. We learn how to articulate by doing it in natural areas, one supportive moment after another.  Each natural area moment makes a safe space for the Elephant along with its non-literate web of life to teach our special ability to articulate what it has to know to be a better dancer.  This increases well-being for all. A source of hope Educating, Counseling and Healing with nature is a remedy for our disorders.  It science of Natural Attraction Ecology helps us think and feel via nine legs.  It enables contemporary society and people to recover from their blindness and its discontents, as did Gulliver.   Help nature strengthen your hope and your personal and professional life: www.ecopsych.com Act now: books, courses, degrees, grants, recovery, self-help ..   Read true stories that parallel Gulliver's demise and recovery. INSTITUTE OF GLOBAL EDUCATION Special NGO consultant United Nations Economic and Social Council PROJECT NATURECONNECT Readily available, online, natural science tools for the health of person, planet and spirit P.O. Box 1605, Friday Harbor, WA 98250 360-378-6313 <email> www.ecopsych.com ORGANIC ADVANCED ECOPSYCHOLOGY IN ACTION The Natural Systems Thinking Process Dr. Michael J. Cohen, Director send email All programs start with the Orientation Course contained in the book The Web of Life Imperative. .