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Project NatureConnect |
Evidence:
My Natural Systems Thinking Process is a nature connected psychology, a beneficial scien
ce that demands verbally shared, thoughtful, sensory contacts with attractions in nature to improve personal, social and environmental responsibility. It connects our psyche with 53 distinctly unique attractions found throughout nature, including our inner nature (26). By "attractions" I mean things in nature that draw things together, including "gluons." This is the opposite of "abstractions," meaning to draw away from or disassociate.
Nature-connected psychology is based on a form of evidence that contemporary society teaches us to ignore. It is "Self-Evidence" as in "We hold these truths to be self-evident." Self-Evidence is a missing link in how we learn to think. Its definition is: to validate what we sense and feel. It critically applies our sense of reason to what we sense and feel while in consensual contact with attractions in Nature. It compares these findings to our Cultural attachments and their effects.
By Nature I mean the non-literate, unadulterated, biological and psychological attraction process that has existed for eons before and during humanity's arrival.
By Culture I mean humanity's abstract, literate, shortcut thinking process, its stories, artifacts and effects.
Validity of Evidence:
"At root, ecology is an erotic attitude of closeness, relatedness and care. We have made it into a rational/activist project and lost sight of its heart."
- Thomas MooreThe Natural Systems Thinking Process is super objective in that it welcomes all evidence. It includes sensuous information from non-verbal, transpersonal, connections rather than dismiss this evidence as subjective, unscientific, spiritual, psychotic or fuzzy thinking. The Process enables us to choose to think and relate like whales and nature work (5). For decades it has been taught and accredited in more than 58 Universities and published extensively (16, 6).
Self-Evidence often consists of natural attraction sensations and feelings in natural areas that, to help insure our survival, nature registers in our consciousness. Although often overlooked, Self-Evidence is valid because it is:
- REASONABLE: Mathematics, Archimedes' abstract "Mechanical Theorems," is considered to be pure rational fact. However, the self-evident fact that humanity inherently senses, feels and learns
from natural attractions is more ancient, true and universal. For example:
The sense of taste: When a natural substance is sweet it is attractive, often edible and digestible, it rewardingly satisfies our sense of hunger so, in time, our sense of reason may validate the substance as food and allow us to eat it again.
The sense of temperature: If the heat from a fire burns a person, he or she may learn to trust that sensation and be attracted to use their sense of reason or fear and keep a safe distance from the fire.- AVAILABLE: For survival, humanity is endowed by nature to continually register attraction sensations and feelings on conscious and subconscious levels.
- TRUSTABLE: For example: If people pinch themselves they register and trust that they feel something. They trust they will feel something again if they pinch themselves again.
- REPEATABLE: For example: If people pinch themselves many times over a period of time, they feel something every time. Other people demonstrate the same attribute.
- GLOBAL: For example: Humanity throughout the world senses and feels as well as trusts that the ability to sense and feel exists in themselves and others.
- TIMELESS: Records show, and we commonly reason that humanity, past, present and future contains and will contain the ability to sense and feel.
- PREDICTABLE: No matter where humanity goes, if people are conscious they will sense or feel attractions. Consciousness itself is an attractive sensation or feeling.
- DIVERSE: There are at least 53 distinct natural attraction sensations and feelings humanity can register and thereby know the world (26).
- EDUCATIONAL: Sensations and feelings provide humanity with a wide range of survival information.
- VALUABLE: Sensations and feelings enhance survival potentials as well as help establish a strong sense of self. "I feel therefore I am," is as true, significant and important as "I think therefore I am."
- HONEST: Sensations and feelings always offer us excellent information about the state of our being.
- WIDE RANGED: Sensations and feelings help humanity register the many attraction sensitivities displayed throughout nature by the plant, animal and mineral kingdoms.
- DEMONSTRABLE: Humanity can often register what other members of humanity are sensing and feeling.
- INDEPENDENT: Humanity can register and reason with attraction sensations and feeling that lie outside the accepted or destructive operants and dogmas of their culture or society.
- SPIRITUAL: Natural sensations and feelings enable people to register and relate to nature connected aspects of spirit and soul that, to our loss, some parts of society omit.
- ATTRACTIVE: Humanity embraces and seeks sensation, it is attractive, we normally never desire to give up our ability to sense and feel.
- INTELLIGENT: The natural world achieves its perfections by relating through non-verbal attraction sensitivities, many
of which register as sensations and feelings in humanity and add to our ability to make intelligent decisions.
- FREE: Sensations and feelings are of, by and from nature, no culture or individual lays claim to inventing or owning them or legally restricting their availability.
- SELF-REGULATING: Sensations and feelings help regulate and guide each other. For example if a person is attracted to pinch themselves too hard, another sense or senses (sense of pain, sense of reason, or both) attract him or her to stop pinching themselves too hard.
Self-Evident Thinking:
Our self-evident, non-verbal way of knowing and thinking (example) makes up the large, anciently evolved "Old-Brain" sometimes called the horse brain. In humanity, the Old-Brain registers non-literate tensions, sensations, feelings and emotions. It makes up approximately 90% of our mentality and is the home of at least 52 different sense groups. It enables us to sensuously experience nature as nature operates and knows itself.
The remaining 10% of our mentality, the more recently evolved Cerebral Neocortex or New Brain, consists of a bonding of the senses of verbal language, consciousness and reason to produce and act out abstract stories, be they accurate or inaccurate, constructive or destructive, connective or disconnective (7).
Disuse of Self-Evidence
In contemporary society, our New Brain trains itself to habitually avoid Self-Evidence. We spend over 99.9% of our thinking in abstract New Brain nature disconnected stories about how the world works and how to implement our stories. Thus, we know and manage the world with only 10% of our and the world's capacity to make sense.
Our psyche is dismembered from its origins in nature. It silently suffers a profound loss of contact with its nurturing sensory and sensibility roots in nature's ways and intelligence. However, any word or incident that reminds us of our psychological dismemberment breaks the silence. It triggers the emotional pain of it into consciousness and we feel it. As reflected by the state of the world, indoors or outdoors, our mentality is guarded, stressed, ill, wanting and destructive due to our painful deficiency of nature's peace, wisdom, and beauty
With respect to
achieving personal, social and global sanity, the questionable results of nature-disconnected abstracting speak for themselves (9). Our isolated New Brain ego story applauds itself for its potent conquest of nature. In denial, like a substance abuse addict, it refutes that with respect to relating responsibly, the nature disconnected way we think could define addiction, stupidity or madness (20). As the classic quotes I include in this article testify, the idea that nature can help us heal ourselves and Earth is not foreign to the New Brain. This information alone, however, is obviously not enough.
Unlike whales, our extreme severance from our inherent, balanced, attraction fulfillments in nature produces a void in our psyche. We crave our lost sensory support, sanity and gratification in nature. In response, we artificially fulfill our cravings to provide rewards. In the process, we become victims of destructive rewards and greedy, for when we want there is never enough. Our economy often operates by further irritating our natural senses and then selling us something to stop the irritation.
Although our disconnection from nature and its destructive effects disturb our sense of reason, despite excellent evidence to the contrary, few of us think it reasonable for contemporary humanity to satisfy its cravings by thoughtfully reconnecting to attractions in nature (14). Such denial is typical of addiction. Our problems are often psychological addictions but are seldom recognized or treated as such so they continue. We have become so bewildered (wilderness separated) that we try to resolve our problems using the same addictive, nature disconnected, thinking process that produces them.
Rationale: modeling how nature works:
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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
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The Web of Life Imperative.
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