"Our excessive disconnection from nature produces our dysfunctions. Now, they can be overcome through a social technology that genuinely reconnects our thinking and psyche to nature. But, will we use and teach this process?" – Michael J. Cohen
A broken computer cannot repair itself if its malfunction prevents it from making the repair. Similarly, we suffer our personal, social and environmental dysfunctions because we have "broken" our computer, our ability to think clearly with regard to our human relationship with nature.
Our broken thinking creates and sustains our dysfunctional relationships because, thinking out of contact with nature, our mind can’t repair itself.
Nature can be seen as an energy of God and we are part of nature. Normally, nature’s creative intelligence produces the non-polluting perfection and healing ways of natural systems within and about us. But we live excessively nature-separated lives. Our separation removes our thinking from nature’s universe of grace, balance and restorative powers. This loss creates a wanting, natural system absence in our psyche, an emotion and information void that produces dysfunctions in our thinking.
We must replace this loss by connecting our psyche with nature, for our thinking is our destiny. Today, an organic, nature-reconnecting education and counseling tool is readily available on the Internet. It enables us to genuinely tap our psyche into natural systems and think just as nature’s perfection works. This tool helps us remedy our mental dysfunctions by inviting nature’s regenerative ways to fill the void we have produced in our mind and heart and to help us recycle our polluted and misguided thoughts.
This article suggests that our thinking has become so dysfunctional that, without help, our thinking may not appreciate or use the new nature-reconnecting tool and the opportunity it presents. However, this article also empowers you and your friends to provide the help our thinking needs to use the tool.
"Nurture your felt love for nature. Never deny it. That love is the eons, the purifying intelligence, beauty and diversity of nature sustaining us in its perfection. Our disconnection from this love and its advice produces our hurt, greed and destructiveness. We must reconnect and restore its peaceful voice in our thoughts, soul and surroundings." – from the author’s "The Web of Life Imperative"
"We are dysfunctional socially and environmentally because we are cut off and isolated from the world of nature and the natural." – Albert Gore, former U.S. Senator and author of Earth in the Balance
Since the publication of his 1992 book, Earth in the Balance, we have heard little from Al Gore about how to deal with the destructive dysfunctions he identifies in our society, dysfunctions that he recognizes are produced by our excessive disconnection from nature.
In 1990, I personally described to Sen. Gore an easily applicable social technology that empowers us to genuinely connect our mind with nature and reverse our dysfunctions. In addition, I gave him the published blueprint of this nature-connecting tool and he included it in the bibliography of his book. Today that tool is readily available. The burning question is "Are we, including Al Gore, too dysfunctional to appreciate and use the tool?"
Here is what our mind does not want us to hear. With rare exception, the mentality of industrial society is walking a self-destructive treadmill of denial. We unnecessarily suffer our troubles because we deny that our thinking is dysfunctional and we deny that a readily available, nature-connecting tool enables us to transform our dysfunctions into constructive relationships.
Converging evidence and process
Significantly, in the past decade the often opposing physical, biological, social and environmental sciences have discovered a body of evidence upon which they agree. In addition, this evidence also agrees with findings in ethics, philosophy and spirituality. During this same period, the fields of education and psychology have produced a learning tool that enables any individual to access this validated knowledge and use it to build human and natural relationships that improve self, society and the environment.
The evidence mentioned above authenticates what outdoor researchers like myself distinctly sense in natural areas. A fundamental, binding, energy underlies every aspect of the world we know. Be it a basic form of love or the Unified Field so highly sought in physics, a cohesive natural attraction holds together, sustains in balance, and is an essence of communication for relationships, be they sub-atomic, human or global.
Natural attraction connects everything into a system and subsystem so that everything belongs, nothing is isolated or not wanted. For this reason, nature produces no garbage.
Nature grows from seeds and roots, past to present. The existence of an original natural attraction throughout nature is consistent with how nature works. It makes perfect sense. If the Earth yesterday and today was not held together by natural attraction, it would fall apart, which it hasn’t and doesn’t. Rather, its natural systems are attracted to increase in growth, diversity, resilience and their ability to support and renew life in balance without producing pollution.
All material and non-material "things" in nature, including people, consist of natural attraction relationships. Thus, as natural attraction produces us, it manifests itself as us, as our attractive molecules, body, mind, sensations, feelings, personality and spirit.
Our senses are not sterile. Like everything else they, too, are natural attraction expressing itself. For our survival, our senses intelligently give us advice. They help us consciously, feelingly, register nature’s ways as they seek fulfillment from their attractions to their origins in nature. For example, our sense of thirst intelligently "knows" when we are dehydrated, as well as "knows" to bring to our consciousness our attraction to water. This attraction (sense of thirst) brings us to water and, in addition, helps us survive in balance with at least 52 additional natural intelligence senses that we register – senses like hunger, community, trust, place and companionship.
Effects of disconnection
Biologically, humanity is a seamless continuum of nature and natural attraction. However, a contemporary person mostly lives indoors and thinks more than 99 percent of the time while disconnected from natural attractions and fulfilling origins in natural areas. This profound disconnection corrupts our thinking to the point that we consider this severe dismemberment normal. We often applaud it as progress and independence, even as we suffer its abnormal effects upon ourselves and on the environment.
The missing attraction rewards in our nature-disconnected sensibilities and emotions produce our wants and greed. They arise from our severed, frustrated natural attractions. This stressful void makes contemporary people the only organisms on Earth whose mentality destructively produces garbage, pollution, war, mental illness, loneliness, excessive stress and abusive relationships. These maladies, with rare exception, are absent in nature or people in tune with authentic nature.
The objectivity and science of disconnected contemporary thinking dismisses as subjective most of the natural attraction sensitivities that nature and we hold in common. For example, sensory attractions to water (thirst), life (survival), appetite for air (to breathe), home (place), safety (trust) and belonging (community) are not even included in the five senses that we say we learn and know from. Satisfactions and advice from our natural attraction to pets, friends, family, lakes, wind, hills, sky, peace, sunshine, justice and community seldom play a key role in forging our self-esteem, economics and technologies.
In our nature-isolated thinking, we learn to view at least 45 natural attraction senses and feelings as unimportant, as non-measurable, childish or unreasonable loves. We condition ourselves to become sensuously sterile and oblivious to them. To our loss, we omit them from most thinking and equations. This corrupts us. Our thinking and resilience lose nature’s essential, unifying energy, our inherent natural attraction way of knowing and relating that peacefully holds the natural world in a mutually supportive, cooperative, equilibrium. Disconnected from this common bond, we and Earth are becoming increasingly dysfunctional.
Life’s hidden purpose
The absence of natural attractions from our thinking leaves us to conclude that life systems, including ourselves, operate by the laws of chance and are without purpose. However, any thoughtful person may observe that, locally or globally, a life system does have a purpose. It is to survive by following its natural attraction to grow in support of life. Throughout nature, minerals, plants and animals achieve this purpose and perfection by fulfilling a multiplicity of natural attractions that resonate and beneficially modify each other. Things in nature thereby intelligently, by "consensus" (many sensitivities together), unite as transpersonal global citizens to their mutual benefit. The "fittest" are those that best sustain mutually beneficial cooperative relationships with their neighbors and environment. As part of nature, when our senses and feelings are not thwarted by nature-conquering stories, artificial substitutes or social pressures, they attract us to responsibly support life. Each time we do they reward us with joys that keep us on nature’s peaceful path.
Most therapies, healing and learning work better and produce greater cures and responsibility when connected to natural attractions in nature. It is no longer heresy to say that the greater a person’s natural attraction desensitization or disconnection, the greater are the problems that person suffers and causes. Conversely, sensuously reconnecting with attractions in nature is our salvation. Many studies show that connection enables us to benefit from the real thing, the unique supportive and regenerative powers of nature. They, in turn, help us transform our disorders into unifying, constructive relationships. For example, people in hospital beds whose windows view natural areas, instead of brick walls, recuperate faster from their ailments.
To repair our mentality’s destructive disconnection from nature, at the Institute of Global Education a newly researched Natural Systems Thinking Process (NSTP) provides a psychologically organic missing link that does the seemingly impossible. It enables anybody to safely make thoughtful, conscious, sensory contact with natural attractions in nature, backyard or back country. Through this process, people reduce their nature-disconnection stress and improve their thinking and ways of relating. They think and co-create with, rather than against, nature.
Our authentic reconnection with our natural attraction origins renews at least 53 inherent natural attraction sensitivities in us. It energizes them to register in our consciousness as attractive felt senses and logic. The presence of these additional senses in our awareness enables us to enjoyably think and speak with and through them, to make greater sense and thereby improve our relationships with our selves, each other and the flow of natural systems through, within and around us. This regenerative process feels good. It becomes very attractive, therefore repeated, and thereby lasting.
By enabling us to genuinely connect our mind with nature, NSTP helps anybody restore the inherent joy and benefits of our culturally suppressed natural attractions. Senses of community, trust, place, compassion, reason, belonging, consciousness, global citizenship, empathy, literacy, humor, spirit, relaxation and sustainability, along with our 41 additional natural senses, come into play in congress. This helps us to come into balance as our thinking taps nature’s uncontaminated intelligence, peace, spirit, community and Higher Power.
Neither sensible nor attractive
It is neither sensible, necessary nor attractive for us to remain sensuously disconnected from nature and to continue to produce the destructive effects we and Earth presently suffer. To help us end this deterioration, NSTP is readily available through holistic online grants, courses, degree programs and training for nature-connected education, counseling and leadership. NSTP empowers caring individuals to help people, nations and religions share with each other what they deeply hold in common, an innate ability to make conscious sensory contact with natural attractions in natural areas and reap the unifying rewards. This unification improves personal, social and environmental relationships and restores peace. To knowledgeably omit this supportive nature-reconnecting process from any endeavor simply reinforces our dysfunctions.
"Personal transformation is best cultivated by partnering with the supreme agent of change, the Earth. Life is change, and nature is the wizard who enlivens its magic cycles." – Philip Sutton Chard
"Scientific research is based on the idea that everything that takes place is determined by laws of nature, and therefore this holds for the action of people." – Albert Einstein
Further information about NSTP is available at www.ecopsych.com.
Copyright © 2005 Michael J. Cohen. All rights reserved.
