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Project NatureConnect |
Project NatureConnect Synopsis: An IGE program in Applied Ecopsychology produces scholarship funds as students cooperatively reduce administrative costs and receive donations.*
Welcome to Institute of Global Education home of the only Organic Psychology degree program legally established in the United States that presently have the insight and integrity to help you master the organic psychology of theNatural Systems Thinking Process (NSTP).
NSTP enables you to make a distinct, significant, contribution to building relationships in a supportive balance with self, society and the environment.
If NSTP reflects the truth of your values and experience, our scholarship program guarantees that you may attain your degree without financial hardship.
State of the world
Most caring people recognize that Earth and humanity are in serious trouble, largely due to the irresponsible demands and impact of the ways of industrial civilization.
When the effects of a democratic society are long known to be destructive it means the process by which the majority in that society thinks is wrong. It also means their thinking has been unable to identify or correct the destructive flaw in how it works. The importance of this program in Applied Ecopsychology or Integrated Ecology is that enables you to help people let the intelligent perfection of natural systems help them correct that flaw.
Our cooperatively mentored program empowers you to teach any person or group how to avoid being destructive. Through it people discover renewing, constructive energies in nature that we can use to creatively fulfill our responsibilities, loves and deeper ideals.
Sensory knowledge
To understand, through experience, the thrust of the Project NatureConnect IGE degree program, consider this intelligence test question for advanced standing regarding mathematical aptitude.
"If you count a dog's tail as one of its legs, how many legs does a dog have?"
"Five," of course, is the answer.
Intelligent people say "five" because it's valid in mathematical systems and thinking.
However, our sense of reason only recognizes five as correct until we additionally validate what we know from our, or other people's, contact with a real dog. Through that experience many of our multitude of additional natural senses besides mathematical logic come into play: senses of sight, touch, motion, color, texture, language, sound, smell, consciousness, community, trust, reason, contrast, and love.
Each sense helps our sense of reason make greater sense and recognize that a tail is different than a leg, it makes sense that a dog has four legs, not five
"Aristotle thought there were eight legs on a fly and wrote it down. For centuries scholars were content to quote his authority. Apparently, not one of them was curious enough to inspect a fly and count its six legs."
- Stuart Chase
Aristotle also wrote that we know, think and learn with five senses. He also believed the world was flat.
Although we no longer teach that the world is flat, we still teach and learn that humans function using five senses and we relate accordingly. However, we are aware from experience that on many levels that we enjoy, relate and learn, as with the dog's tail, using many more natural senses than five.
Survival
Most people recognize that just as our arm is naturally attracted or loves to be attached to our body, all people are biologically, psychologically and spiritually part of, and thereby attached to Nature
We hold a deep, often forgotten, love of Nature's "resources," -sunshine, food, water, earth, air, beauty- in common with each other and all of Nature. The name for that love is survival, the love of life.
However, we live very Nature disconnected lives.
Our thinking has very little genuine 4-leg contact with authentic Nature. We desperately need this contact if we are to be rational and sensibly combine 4-leg and 5-leg knowledge. Thoughtfully, the connection enables us to intelligently produce balanced 9-leg reasoning and relationships. It helps us harmoniously interact with the natural systems within and around us.
The Natural Systems Thinking Process is a 9-leg tool that enables you to co-create with nature as well as give the tool to others for their use.
Disconnection
We seldom engage in the nature connection process because, on average, we spend over 95% of our time indoors. This socially and educationally detaches and desensitizes us to Nature.
Over 99.99% of our thinking, is 5-legged; it is separated from and sensuously out of tune with Nature.
We mostly learn to know Nature from 5-leg, disconnected, "as if," stories about Nature, rather than from authentic sensory contact with Nature.
Be Astounded! Our Nature-estranged, 5-leg intelligence calls the extreme disconnection of our psyche from its womb and restorative powers in Nature "normal," "progress," and "excellence in education" rather than "desensitizing psychological and spiritual dismemberment."
As a nature-disconnected society we emotionally suffer from the dismemberment of our psyche. We equally suffer from our denial that this dismemberment lies behind many of our unsolvable problems.
As exemplified by caged animals or plants blocked from sunlight, when we remove a living thing from its natural surroundings the disconnection stresses it and its behavior becomes abnormal. Sometimes it recovers fully when it returns to its home in Nature. All this also holds true for our psyche, too.
Reconnecting
There is no known substitute for Nature's perfection. Most of the substitutes we invent contain the destructive side effects that now overwhelm us. It is unreasonable to think that we can resolve our unsolvable problems using the same Nature disconnected thinking that produces them.
Students who take reconnecting with Nature courses here find that reconnecting helps them address their ordinarily unsolvable problems. It has the additional benefit of helping them and others become more environmentally responsible.
For the past 32 years Dr Michael J. Cohen and his students have lived, taught and researched in natural areas, sleeping outdoors year round. From this 4-leg contact with Nature, unlike the norm, they have not learned to know Nature as something fearful to be conquered in the name of progress, safety and economic growth. Instead, as they learn to treat Nature's peace with respect, they enjoy Nature as a powerful friend and teacher. This relationship helps them increase their thoughtfulness and sensitivity. Through the organic psychology of NSTP it will do the same for you in your home locality. In addition, you will be able to teach NSTP to others.
Sensory knowing
Significantly, the major problems our society faces seldom exist in intact natural systems or genuinely Nature connected people. As a twig is bent, as we are conditioned, so grows the tree.
"It is difficult to get people to understand something when their salary depends upon them not understanding it."
- Upton SinclairDr, Cohen's forty years in contact with Nature show, and research agrees, that we inherit not just five senses, as Aristotle said, but at least 53 inborn natural attraction senses, binding energies, forms of love and unity, through which we can relate sensibly to the environment and each other.
Since 1952 Cohen and his students have researched, applied, and taught people how to incorporate parts of NSTP into their personal and professional lives. NSTP enables people to rejuvenate their 53 natural senses and restore their sensibility into their thinking and relationships. This is very important because in a democracy, the discovery of something worthwhile must be accompanied by a readily available process that enables people to implement the discovery.
The Organic Psychology of NSTP is verifiable. It is presently part of several advanced, accredited, training courses and degree programs. It has been reviewed and published in professional science and technology, psychological and environmental education journals.*
NSTP helps you to reattach our dismembered psyche to its intelligent origins in Nature in exactly the same way that a surgeon reattaches a dismembered arm to a person's body. The surgeon brings the arm and body together. This allows the natural attractions in Nature to biologically heal the separation as only Nature can.
NSTP History
In 1959, Dr. Cohen founded a camp and school program based on reconnecting with Nature. The National Audubon Society and many others called it the most revolutionary school in America. They said it was on the side of the angels.
School participants traveled and thrived by camping out in 83 different natural habitats throughout the seasons. They learned to cooperatively live out their commitment to have open, honest relationships with the natural environment, each other and with indigenous people(s), researchers, ecologists, the Amish, organic farmers, anthropologists, folk musicians, naturalists, shamans, administrators, historians and many others close to the land.
The experience deeply reconnected their 53 sense inner Nature to its origins and self in the whole of Nature.
As a result of the participants' romance with educating themselves this way, in the school community:
Chemical dependencies, including alcohol and tobacco, disappeared as did destructive 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 fulfilling and relatively peaceful.
Students using meditation found they no longer needed to use it. They learned how to sustain a Nature-connected community that more effectively helped them improve their resiliency to stress and disease.
Participants knew each other better than they knew their families or best friends.
Participants felt safe. They risked expressing and acting from their deeper thoughts and feelings. A profound sense of social and environmental responsibility guided their decisions.
Participants creative thought and expression in art, music and writing improved.
When vacation periods arrived, neither staff nor student wanted to go home. Each person enjoyably worked to build this supportive, balanced living and learning utopia. They were home.
Students sought and entered right livelihood professions.
All this occurred simply because every community member made sense of their lives by sustaining supportive, multisensory relationships that helped them restore conscious contact with the intelligence of the natural world within and around them.
How it works
The secret to each participant's success was to rationally learn how to learn through natural attraction sensations and feelings that arose from their newly regrown-grown sensory roots in natural systems. This freed the participants' 53 senses from their subconscious bonding to questionable 5-leg stories. It rebonded-bonded their sense of reason to conscious 4-leg contact with 47 other Nature connected, rejuvenated, natural senses. They operated remarkably well by means of 9-leg thinking and relationships.
From 30 years of travel and study in over 260 national parks, forests and subcultures, Dr. Cohen developed a repeatable learning process and psychology. It unleashes into our thinking our inherent 4-leg ability to grow and survive responsibly with the natural world. By documenting that it worked and could be taught, he earned his doctoral degree and the school became a nationally recognized and accredited graduate and undergraduate degree program.
From 1985-92, Cohen translated his Nature-connected, small group, expedition learning program into a readily available Natural Systems Thinking Process (NSTP) for public use via the internet or in locale. Through NSTP, backyard or back country, people recover their natural senses from readings, sensory Nature reconnection activities at home, work or school and email communication with supportive study friends.
The secret
The critical contribution of NSTP is that it empowers individuals to create genuine 4-leg contact with authentic Nature and thereby produce natural attraction moments that let Earth teach. It empowers our soul, spirit, and sense of reason to responsibly unify 5-leg and 4-leg thinking. It helps our our mind and heart benefit from the renewing powers, balance and beauty of nature.
We invite you to lean and teach NSTP to improve the welfare of people and our planet. It will personally and professionally honor you with responsible rewards.
Apply
To apply for this program, please use its special application and scholarship form
For additional information about the IGE program visit the program web site
The program includes a supportive tuition and scholarship plan
*Material that appears on this page and its links is drawn from articles that have been professionally reviewed and published in The Journal of Humanistic Psychology, Journal of Environmental Education, Interpsych Journal of Mental Health, Greenwich University Journal of Science and Technology, Counselling 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 and others. (see MJCohen personal page)
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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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