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Thinking With Nature: Today's Rendezvous
with Destiny.
Michael J.
Cohen, Ed.D.
Part Three: The Process
On average, in industrial society we spend over 95% of our
lifetime indoors, only .000022% of our lives in tune with nature.
Early on, at home and school, we learn to stay indoors, to become
attached and dependent on indoor fulfillments. We spend 18,000
developmental indoor childhood hours alone doing schoolwork to
become literate and graduate high school. During this same period,
on average, through our literacy and the media, we witness 18,000
murders. Most of us grow up not recognizing that in every outdoor
natural area, like the wild area next to Karen's school, natural
life is not murdering life. It is nurturing it. Throughout the
eons, natural life has been wise enough not to commit murder
as we know it. The natural world has also learned how to nurture
and sustain life and diversity without producing garbage, pollution
or insensitive abusiveness. Nature is an unimaginable intelligence
that we inherit but suppress.
It is now 1998. We continue to abuse the world and ourselves.
As human populations soar, seventy percent of the world's bird
populations are declining. Species, habitats , topsoil and interpersonal
integrity are disappearing at an alarming rate. So are young
people with the fortitude of Karen. Runaway stress, greed, violence,
crime, AIDS, and substance abuse continue to plague us. So do
our runaway costs to contain these problems. People have little
hope for living in an economically and environmentally sound,
safe society. These evils have one thing in common. All of them
are unknown in natural areas. Their root is not nature. Their
root is our thinking's estrangement from nature's ways,
A wise, vital aspect of natural life is missing from our mentality.
We have taught ourselves to disconnect from and assault the natural
intelligence of life that sustains life in balance, peace and
beauty. That natural wisdom lies buried alive within us, suffocating.
It only fully expresses itself in natural areas and natural people
for there it is safe to do so. Globally, that intelligence knows
how to support and sustain itself. Throughout Earth it pervades
nature and us. It manifests its sensibility in us through at
least 53 natural senses, senses I and many other researchers
have identified. At any given moment in our life our every thought,
feeling and act, consciously or subconsciously, results from
the motivating intelligence or hurt coming from one or more of
these senses.
By assaulting our natural senses as we assault nature, we injure
and remove their guiding signals from our consciousness. It becomes
too painful to be conscious of them. We become insensitive. As
we lose our innate awareness of our natural senses, our thinking
loses its natural ability to make sense. In industrial society
we learn to demean at least 48 of the natural senses we inherit.
We begin to lose sight of them in kindergarten. They start to
disappear from our thinking as we learn we only have 5 senses.
In a society hell bent on conquering nature, it is normally taboo
to learn or teach that each of us is born with, and contains,
a multitude of intelligent natural sensitivities that wisely
govern nature and our inner nature. In our society, where can
an individual learn that? Education is a pawn of society. In
your school, did they teach you how to use nature's multisensory
intelligence? Even if we learn this fact cognitively, it does
not mean we will actually feel the natural senses we have buried
in us. We need to learn how to rejuvenate them and bring them
feelingly back into our consciousness. Then we can think with
them. Without them, we will continue to lose our joys, sense
of wonder and responsibility.
Special reconnecting with nature techniques allow us to personally
experience, support and reinforce our natural senses and thereby
become conscious of them. In nature, of themselves our natural
senses safely make us aware of their existence. They become the
teachers. When we bring them into consciousness, they wisely
guide our thinking, just as they have wisely guided nature centered
people since prehistory. We need to validate, strengthen and
heed each of these senses rather than ignore, demean or abuse
them.
The distortion that we only think and know through 5 senses short
circuits our common sense. For example, despite evidence to the
contrary, we still believe our present irresponsible way of thinking
can responsibly manage our lives and Earth. Can we objectively
make sense if we deprive ourselves of the natural sensory signals
and wisdom that we need to make sense?
In the army, my platoon jested that the food was lousy because
the cook's taste buds were shot off during the war. During our
education to conquer nature, most of our 53 natural sensory "taste
buds" are shot off with respect to walking our talk about
relating responsibly. You may easily test this allegation. You
already know your 5 natural senses: touch taste, smell, sight
and sound. Ask yourself this: what is your 18th, your 28th or
your 39th natural sense? If nothing comes to mind it suggests
that either you don't have a working knowledge of your natural
sensory self or that these senses are my fantasy and don't really
exist. You can easily test the latter hypotheses. Simply trust
your sensory experiences. Don't you personally experience many
distinctly different sensations such as thirst, motion, trust,
nurturing, beauty, sex, community, place, gravity, empathy and
balance? Aren't these sensations real and innate, not just imagined
or learned? Each of them is attractive, each offers us something
worthwhile. You would not want to give up any of them for you
would lose part of life's richness. They are fact. They have
value. Each of these natural senses is an aspect of love, knowledge
and aliveness, yet none of them are one of the 5 senses that
we are taught we inherit from nature. We observe them, in some
form, alive and well in intact wolf populations and microorganism
communities too. They pervade nature.
Our 53 natural sensitivities are wise intelligences of, by and
from nature. Our conquest of nature prevents us from validating
their existence and consciously thinking with them. We are extensively,
intensively taught to know and think mostly in language, (natural
sense #39,) and reason, (natural sense #42). That is what you
are doing right now. This limits and conditions our natural sense
of consciousness (natural sense #43) to think with less that
8% of our natural capacity for profound thought. Our impaired,
sensory deprived, conscious thinking can not solve our problems
because we dismiss, rather than incorporate, nature's intelligence
in our thinking. Remember that in nature, that intelligence wisely
sustains an optimum of life, diversity and beauty without producing
the runaway garbage, pollution, war and abusiveness of our lives.
Part Four: Challenges
Select here
Thinking With Nature Article Part 1 ..Part 2
..Part
3 ..Part
4 ..Part
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