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Thinking With Nature: Today's Rendezvous
with Destiny.
Michael J.
Cohen, Ed.D.
Part Four: Challenges
Each of us sincerely desires to live responsibly in a healthy,
safe social and natural environment. But, we still learn how
to think today as Karen was taught to think 26 years ago. For
example, today, as then, we pulverize the area around our home
and school into a lawn. We do this, even though we know that
lawns demand polluting chemicals and that they replace vital
wildlife habitat. But, our ingrained, nature-separated language
story floods our conscious thinking. That story says: "Lawns
are instinctive" "Lawns are not illegal" "We
are within our rights to have lawns." "We are cleaning
up the area." "A lawn beautifies this place."
"It improves where I live." "It's part of the
American dream." "It is against the town ordinance
not to have a lawn." "A lawn increases my property
value." "I'll feel out of place if my place looks different
than the neighborhood." "It makes it easier to sell
my home." "It gives me a sense of pride. " "I've
always had a lawn." "A natural area breeds dangerous
things." "It's the decent thing to do" "I'll
feel run down when my place looks run down." "It gives
me something to do" "It provides a safe way for me
to be outdoors." "Lawns are our culture and history."
Under this nature disconnecting barrage of stories, and without
being nurtured, our natural love for natural areas dissolves.
Lawns, and many of our other questionable choices, flourish because
our nature disconnected stories, not the wisdoms of our inner
nature, carve our destiny.
I know and enjoy the people that made the above statements about
lawns. They are wonderful friends socially, but about 85% of
their connection to nature has been amputated from their consciousness.
They enjoy the natural world through correct symbols and language,
not by sensitively thinking with their heart. They suffer from
our runaway problems because the natural integrity of their lives
and sensitivities has been as disintegrated as the natural areas
that once thrived where their lawns now exist. Their consciousness
is boxed in the limits of our society's indoor world view. Because
it is one in the same, as we assault nature around us, we assault
nature within us and vice versa. We can not do one without doing
the other.
My research using reconnecting with nature techniques shows that
without using these techniques, we do not have the capacity to
teach ourselves what we need to learn and know about living in
balance. Like many other products, lawns are not just a choice.
They are more often dependencies or addictions that substitute
for normal, powerful natural fulfillments from nature. Our runaway
greed and fixated relationships prevail because, disconnected
from natural fulfillments, we hurt. We deeply want, and when
we want there is never enough. Our soul misses the joy, wisdom
and profound satisfactions that fulfillment of our natural senses
normally provides when we gain fulfillment from nature. The absence
of nature drives us to attach ourselves to fulfillment from artifacts,
substances, stories and beliefs, no matter their adverse effects.
Without reconnecting to nature to revitalize and fulfill our
natural sensitivities, we remain insensitive to life in people
and places. That is how and why we place the world at risk. Ours
is not simply a technological or spiritual separation. It is
a profound biological and mental disconnection from how nature
works within us, globally and perhaps universally The good news
is that our disconnection can be reconnected through sensory
nature activities.
Today, as it did 25 years ago, our thinking denies the painfully
obvious: we are addicted to our present way of thinking, its
limited capacities and disastrous results. With our natural senses
missing from consciousness, we do not have the ability to become
unaddicted. We can't consciously think sensibly and reverse our
personal and global troubles. For our thinking to admit this
is degrading, so we deny it. It hurts our personal and collective
ego to recognize that our nature disconnected reasoning power
is far less capable than we say it is. We seldom admit that nature's
intelligence manages the world better than we do. A fungus thinks
better than us. For example, a fungus, not we, invented the miracle
of Penicillin in order for the fungus to sustain a responsible
balance with microorganisms. It is easier for us to suppress
this painful truth than face it. Never the less, even a spoonful
of soil contains far more intelligence than we do with respect
to responsibly sustaining life in balance. The state of the world
shows that our intellect's management of planet Earth and our
lives is similar to a lobster operating the control tower of
the Chicago International Airport.
It makes perfect sense to reconnect our nature disconnected thinking
with nature. Without the higher power available in nature-connected
intelligence, how can we recover from our irresponsible ways?
To cope with our senseless disorders, a majority of us are in
counseling or recovery programs of some kind. Counseling helps
us revive our senses and bring into consciousness deeper thoughts
and feelings about ourselves and our relationships. Karen was
in counseling long enough to act upon these sensibilities. Have
most of us yet learned to do that? Ask yourself: Are you satisfied
with your life and its potential? What you think the future holds
economically? What is the future with respect to living safely?
What future does the environment have? What are the chances of
finding healthy, supportive, personal and community relationships?
What confidence do you have that we can change the destructive
course we presently follow? When I ask these questions of myself
and others, I rarely receive positive responses. Most people
hold little hope. Over 75% of our population express that they
are dissatisfied with their lives right now. Many are in stress
and despair. They have been led to believe this indicates that
something is wrong with them personally. Something is dreadfully
wrong when, no matter how rich or poor they are, people say they
need about 20% more income to buy goods, services and security.
That dissatisfaction may fuel our economy, but the adverse effects
of it further unbalances our budgets, mentality and relationships.
It is no accident that the way of life we hold in common produces
life out of balance and places the world at risk. Vested interests
within and around us sustain our troubles. Many of our inherent
natural senses hurt so much that they need things to remain as
they are. These senses include feelingful loves for humility
(natural sense #40), nurturing (#28), community (#34), place
(#30) and trust (#34). Too often, we abuse and injure these and
other natural senses. Like refusing to touch a hot stove, these
senses won't risk further abuse. As with Karen, when real or
imagined situations confront us, our natural senses withdraw,
get hurt, or become abusive. Many say that this is human nature.
That story further misleads our thinking. Nature is nurturing,
not abusive. Things in nature are not abused. They are loved
into participation that further contributes to the natural community.
That is why nature does not produce our runaway problems and
garbage. On a macro level, nothing in nature is abused, left-out
or abandoned. Nature practices a form of unconditional love,
not abusiveness. Until we get that message into our thinking,
every time we think we deepen the rut we are in. It is the thinking
that allows us to assault nature within and around us, not nature,
that is the source of runaway personal and global abusiveness.
Before it was bulldozed, the small natural area by Karen's school
was a self-sustaining natural community. It was a showplace for
nature's beauty and integrity, an oasis of natural intelligence,
peace and global sanity. Who or what was being abused there by
nature? It makes no sense to blame nature for the crimes people
may have committed in that park. No doubt the abuse of their
inner nature was a motivating factor in their crimes. They became
desensitized to the life of their victims and their own welfare
too.
Study after study shows that psychologically and physically we
are part of nature and the global ecosystem. As does a drink
of water, nature provides beneficial fulfillments as it rewardingly
flows into, through and out of us. Although abusiveness is not
how nature works, it is how many of us have learned to think
nature works. It is the difference between our thinking and how
nature's intelligence works that initiates and fuels our greatest
problems. Our predicament is that this truth is unthinkable in
many circles. Similar thinking prevents the KKK from accepting
Afro-Americans as equals.
Can we solve our runaway problems without identifying the major
difference between nature and ourselves that causes them? Can
we avoid seeing any trap if it is invisible? Our thinking is
like an eye. It can see its environment but it can't see itself.
As you read these words you are involved in the difference between
how you think and how nature works. Do you know, can you say,
what that difference is? Are you sure or are you guessing? Are
you better equipped to recognize and deal with that difference
now, than were Karen, her principal or her teachers a quarter
century ago? You can be if you learn how to reconnect your thinking
with nature's intelligence.
The significant difference between us and nature is that we think
and communicate in words, while nature and Earth are illiterate.
The natural world achieves its perfection through self-regulating
natural sensory interactions, without using or understanding
words. We need to learn how to think with our natural senses,
to have our thinking tap and incorporate nature's nonverbal ways
and wisdom. Then we can verbalize wisely. The reconnecting with
nature process teaches this skill because it practices it. Once
we learn nature reconnecting techniques that let us tap nature's
sensory intelligence, we own the activities. We can use and teach
them anywhere. Their use becomes a habit, an improved way of
thinking. As it restores our deadened natural senses, it provides
us with a thoughtful immunity to many of the pitfalls that ordinarily
plague us.
Part Five: Outcomes
Select here
Thinking With Nature Article Part 1 ..Part 2
..Part
3 ..Part
4 ..Part
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