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Project NatureConnect |
ECO 100: Achieving Personal and Global Sanity:
Explore the Power of Nature-Connected Thinking
and Relationships
A free home study on-line Organic Psychology course ( 1 credit or fifteen CEU Clock hours optional) that can be done alone or shared with others by email.
(NOTE: This course explores an essence of the Orientation Course Psychological Elements of Global Citizenship. The latter enhances personal and community sanity and/or satisfies requirements for formal degree, certification and personal growth programs. To save time and duplication, applicants here should be familiar with the scope of the Orientation Course before applying for this course.)
Course Rationale:
"What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?"-Ursula K. LeGuin US author, "The Princess"
People are part of nature's sanity; our body, mind and desire to live are part of nature's creative and balanced biological systems and spirit. As exemplified by a sprained ankle healing by resting it, as part of nature, we each inherit its perfection, love of life and restorative powers.
A major challenge for us and our society is that we spend, on average, over 95 percent of our lives indoors. Less than 99% of our thinking is genuinely connected to nature's ways and wisdom.
The extensive disconnection of our consciousness and thinking from our nurturing origins in nature reduces our information and sensory satisfactions from nature's regenerative and balancing powers. This produces stress, reduces our ability to think clearly and erodes the health of our psyche and spirit.
We learn to deny that our stressed and limited thinking deteriorates our health and sanity, our relationships, our destiny and the environment. In denial, we ignore that through money or prestige our socialization rewards our wanting psyche to attach or addict to questionable technological substitutes for nature or other detrimental dependencies. Out of hurt and fear we deny that we psychologically bond or addict to our nature-conquering ways and materials along with their destructive impacts.
Our psychological bonding or addiction problem demands psychological attention that, in our denial, we seldom provide.
We must discover and use nature-connecting psychological tools that help our thinking address our addiction to destructive fulfillments. The tools help us reconnect our thinking with nature's therapeutic beauty, recuperative powers and peaceful balance.
"America is an insane asylum run by the inmates."
-Lester Roloff
COURSE DESCRIPTION
Explore nature-connected readings and activities that help people transform the destructive bonds in their thinking into rejuvenated and more balanced ways of knowing. Strengthen your resilience by learning how organic psychology helps you counteract your socialization's omission of nature's sane balancing and resorative powers. Discover how to cooperatively reconnect your reasoning and senses to their nurturing origins in nature's vigor, intelligence and peace.
Or-gan-ic Psy-chol-o-gy : 1. The peaceful art and science of building responsible relationships by thinking, feeling and interacting while in conscious, sensory contact with genuine natural systems and their unifying, restorative powers. 2. A nature-connected, non-polluting, counseling, education or healing process whose rewards strengthen natural systems and their sanity in people and the environment.
This is a fully accredited and transferable, tuition-free, on-line, academic course for professional or personal education and maintaining a license in most fields. It is open to any adult or student in any field as a counseling, education or self-help course in nature-connected learning.
An official transcript for this environment and psychology course is available upon its successful completion. A financial donation is suggested, but not required, to help support the course, its transcript and transfer.
This one-credit course requires a total of thirty hours (15 clock hours) of work with program methods and materials. This comes to approximately ninety minutes for most assignments (1-4 are shorter). We suggest two assignments be completed each week.
"Nature is an ever-present power of recuperation."
--Richard E. Dodge in a 1915 Journal of Geography.
Procedure:
Complete the application for the course
Join this course's naturequote discussion group by contacting the Faculty and getting on a mailing list of students who will do the course together.
Optionally obtain a copy of the text, Einstein's World to further the benefits of this and other courses.
COURSE ASSIGNMENTS
Preparation Assignment 1:
Since this course can present a new way of thinking for some people, or maybe just a slightly different twist, it makes good sense for you to use this self-educating technique: Open up a new, fortressed, empty room somewhere in your mentality; in the place you daydream; on your screen of consciousness within your mind. Into that uncontaminated protected room, to which only you have the key, carefully place the reasonable experiences, thoughts and feelings this course helps you discover. In your protected room they can remain intact and strong for your use at will. When you need them, simply open the door to the room and avail yourself of the empirical facts it will contain because you sense of reason placed them there.
Preparation Assignment 2:
On-line, (or in hard copy,) create a page(s) on to which you will collect, (and later use for your final short paper) the reasonable experiences, thoughts and feelings you encounter on this course and that you place in the protected room described in Assignment 1, above.
Preparation Assignment 3:
Thoughtful Contemplation
Think about a good attractive experience in nature that you have had with nature as a child or adult. You may use the experience that you shared on the Application Form or you can use another attractive experience you had in nature. Think about where you were, how you felt, what you sensed, then ask yourself if you would want to repeat that experience.
Ask yourself these questions, and write down your thoughts and answers :
What was enjoyable or rewarding about the experience?
What sensory feelings and attractions were involved in the experience? Colors, sounds, feelings, aromas, sensations, moods, contrasts, textures, sizes, distance.
Were you taught to have this good experience in a class? From a book? A person? Or was it the working of your natural sensory attractions?
When possible, share your experience with your online classmates and read their experiences that they send you. Write them and tell them what you liked and learned from reading their descriptions and invite them to do the same for you.
In your protected room, place the reasonable experiences, thoughts and feelings you enjoyed while doing this assignment
Preparation Assignment 4:
Follow the instructions and complete the Personal Inventory. Save your results for use later in the course. With your on line classmates share what you feel were interesting or attractive aspects of the inventory.In your protected room, place the reasonable experiences, thoughts and feelings you enjoyed while doing this assignment
INSTRUCTIONS: Assignments 5-12 (up to ninety minutes each)
Leave at least one full day between each assignment in the sequence below. Read twice each of the on-line articles in the assignment.
The first time read the article for content.
The second time, follow its links and explore the links that are new to you.
Write down the parts of the readings that are most attractive or important to you.
NOTE: These articles have been published separately and will therefore repeat some points a number of times.
Your general assignment:
For each article or activity, identify the part of you, if any, that it helped you find or further educated.
In your protected room, place the reasonable experiences, thoughts and feelings that attracted you while doing this assignment. Also convey these to you classmates online and place in your protected room attractive ideas, thoughts and feelings you receive from them that make sense.
Assignment 5:
Applied Ecopsychology: Healing Ourselves and the World an investigative reporter considers his findings (suggested for applicants)Read this article without following links, then with them, and notate attractions, then complete your general assignment (above).
Assignment 6:
Overview: How Nature Works The value of conscious sensory contact with strands of the web of life.Read this article without following links, then with them, and notate attractions, then complete your general assignment (above).
Assignment 7:
Do the Secret of Natural Attractions Trail all the way through Station 22 Part 4. Note that the trail shows that in nature it is reasonable to have attractive experiences.Read this article without following links, then with them, and notate attractions, then complete your general assignment (above).
Assignment 8:
Read through "Sections 1-7" and "Additional Results" on the Survey of Participants page links. They convey the thoughts, feelings and experiences of people who have participated in the Natural Systems Thinking Process at Project NatureConnect. Identify and notate those that seem most important or attractive to you.Read this article without following links, then with them, and notate attractions, then complete your general assignment (above).
Assignment 9:
Are You/We in Denial? This intervention attempts to help increase supportive personal, social and environmental relationships. Is it effective?Read this article without following links, then with them, and notate attractions, then complete your general assignment (above).
Assignment 10:
The Stairway to Personal and Global Sanity: wellness through wholeness Key concepts and findings about Organic Psychology and the Natural Systems Thinking ProcessRead this article without following links, then with them, and notate attractions, then complete your general assignment (above).
Assignment 11:
The Nature of Life -In Which Wealth Has Nothing To Do With Money by Janet Thomas
(From The Battle In Seattle, Fulcrum)Read this article without following links, then with them, and notate attractions, then complete your general assignment (above).
Assignment 12:
ATTRACTION The Unified-Field Voice in Natural Systems: Why counseling, learning and relationships work better in natureRead this article without following links, then with them, and notate attractions, then complete your general assignment (above).
Assignment 13:
Disconnection From Nature In Action: how to reduce our troubles by learning to use an organic psychology process.Read this article without following links, then with them, and notate attractions, then complete your general assignment (above).
Assignment 14:
Nature Connected Psychology: what they won't teach you at Harvard and Yale: From Chapter One of The Web of Life Imperative.Read this article without following links, then with them, and notate attractions, then complete your general assignment (above).
Assignment 15:
Natural System Dysfunction(NSD); its origins and remedy for thinking in balance with natural systems within and around us.Read this article without following links, then with them, and notate attractions, then complete your general assignment (above).
Assignment 16:
Who's the Boss of You? The destructive secret of mind pollution and how a nature-connected psychology helps people overcome their addiction to unreasonable thinking.Read this article without following links, then with them, and notate attractions, then complete your general assignment (above).
Final Assignment 17: a short paper and re-inventory
Read and respond to this study:
Two isolated experimental living and learning communities, "A" and "B," were set up in similar but isolated environments. The goal for each of them was for their wide ranging mixture of thirty people to discover how to live harmoniously with each other and the natural environment. After a period of twelve months:
Community "A" had established enjoyable ways of relating that sustained them and the land and they wanted to continue to live together.
Community "B" was uncomfortably in disarray, had excessively impacted the land and wanted to disband.
A: YOUR FINAL PAPER: Using your "protected room" experiences and other thoughts and feelings from the course, write a three page paper that describes the things you think Community A did to achieve their success.
Share your paper with your online classmates and read their papers. Write to them what you found attractive or learned from their papers and tell them what you think their grade should be.
If you are doing the course "solo" and want a grade, send your paper to nature@interisland.net.
B: REPEAT PREPARATION ASSIGNMENT 4 (above). Compare your Personal Inventory score this time with your score from the first time and report if you note any changes and their significance.
NOTE: Additional courses from Project NatureConnect consist of doing up to 130 activities like those in assignments six and sixteen, and then placing additional information in your protected room. Certification and Degrees are obtained by showing what you place in your protected room and how you apply it to improve your personal and/or professional life and its contribution to reducing our insanity. The program starts with the Orientation Course and The Web of Life Imperative book (from which this free course for has been drawn.) You have completed 20% of that course here.
"Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives.... I think we're being run by maniacs for maniacal ends ... and I think I'm liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That's what's insane about it."
John Lennon, Interview BBC-TV (June 22, 1968)
Receive inspiring nature-connection quotations by email weekly. Send a blank email to naturequote@aweber.com
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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 spiritP.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.
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