For a sustainable development environment should support us. Or should we support the envirenment? What is environment? When we think that it is the matrix we live in, we keep ourselves out of the environment, and generally we feel that the environment and me are seperate beings. The first and the main step for a sustainable development of human being begins with the understanding that I AM and the ENVIRONMENT is ONE.D.H. Lawrence shows why we search for, cry for oneness in the isolated, unique in-worlds perfectly: “What a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made personal, mere personal feeling, taken away from the sun, and cut off from the magic connection of the solstice and equinox! This is what is the matter with us: we are bleeding at the roots, because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars and love is a grinning mockery because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the Tree of Life and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilized vase on the table.”
The biggest mistake we can make is to try to create a way of sustainable development in the civilized vase on the table!
We should find a simple way to show, underline, prove, make sense, first hand experience that nature and human beings are one in the web of life. We must clearly see that we feel as if we are in the vase and control all the rest from there. On the contrary nature watch us and is deeply sad that we do not join in life and if we join life it is only to control, to destroy its functions.
I was lucky to reach Michael J.Cohen who says, “ Our story built world is a nature-disconnected fantasy for nature is non-verbal. To our loss, we addict to imposing our stories on nature’s balanced perfection within and around us. To improve our lives we must learn how to learn from nature, stories in agreement with nature.”
Cohen has set up a NATURAL SYSTEMS THINKING PROCESS that help people solve the personal, social and environmental problems that result from the difference between the disconnected way we learn to think and how nature Works. He thinks that the heart of our unsolveable problems are psychological. Yes, we are in complete denial. We deny that we are addicted to a story that says for us tol ive we must conquer, exploit and subdue nutare, including our inherent human nature.
The NINE BASICS of the NATURAL SYSTEMS THINKING PROCESS are summarized as below at http://www.ecopsych.com/iupsmswaiver.html
1. Nature can be seen as a unifying attraction process that organizes, preserves and regenerates itself to produce an optimum of life, diversity and balanced cooperation without producing garbage, madness or death as we know it. Nature's way of expressing love prohibits the pollution, abusiveness and stress that deteriorate life.2..We are born part of and attached to nature but learn to spend 99.9% of our conscious time and thought detached/disconnected from nature. Our psyche is dismembered from its origins. It silently suffers its 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 our disconnectioninto 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 (10, 16F).
3.When we provide material, social, or financial rewards for nature-disconnecting stories and technologies, we become psychologically bonded to them and their destructive effects. Things that experience these effects suffer.
4.The web of life is a global ecosystem of which people are part. To be part of a system one must in some way be in communication with the system. The Organic Psychology of the Natural Systems Thinking Process enables a person to restore their inherent 53-sense ability to consciously register, enjoy, and respond to communication with nature. It accomplishes this by helping us bring into our awareness the webstring attraction loves that we share with the web of life and make sensory contact with them in nature, backyard or backcountry.
5. People experience webstrings as sensory attractions, uncomfortable sensations are webstrings that attract us to seek additional webstrings and continue to participate.
6. Attractiveness is conscious of itself. When people think in consent and connection with webstrings they experience an attractive global consciousness that leads to unity at every level of endeavor.
7. There is an age old purpose and non-verbal process that sustains nature's web of life and its members, including people. That attractive purpose and process is to support life in balance. In this regard there are no known substitutes for the real thing. People must connect with genuine nature or suffer from the imperfections of the substitutes we create for it.
Since in this model there is no substitute for the real thing, if a person is not in conscious connection with webstring attractions, they are probably playing God in some way without the wisdom to do so.
8. Because we are nature renegades, to reconnect with nature, relationships must be entered by gaining consent and measured by their long term effects on global life in balance.
9. To reverse our imbalance and its discontents, continuing, thoughtful, shared, sensory contacts with webstring attractions in natural areas reconnect our thinking with nature's ways. This produces more sensitive and responsible personal, social and environmental relationships. A person can learn to trust and use nature connected experiences to help produce unity and balance.
And he has established an action plan where we can make it succeed in our daily life by following simple steps . To forget one of these steps/components is like forgetting to put a tire on one wheel of a car. NSTP will not work! It also deludes us into thinking that we are on the right track.
A. Validate that in your circumstances it is reasonable for you to learn about the webstring model by experiencing it through a webstring activity. Validate that the activity has an attractive rationale, as per the information above.
B Go to the most natural area that is convenient for you, the more natural the better, and do the activity there.
C. Understand and use the "Getting Permission Activity" to find an attraction in the natural area that gives its consent for you to visit it in a safe way
D. After obtaining consent from the natural attraction to do the activity, do it.
E. Journal what natural attractions you sense, think and feel during and after the activity. What memories does it bring to awareness? Use the guidelines on page 50 of the Web of Life Imperative.
F. By email or in other ways share what you have written in your journal with another person who has done the activity and can share their experience with you,
G. Share with the above person what you found attractive in reading or hearing each other's activity experience.
H. Share with friends and associates what value you found in the activity and how you feel about it.
This is a fantastic way of re-membering, re-uniting, re-connecting with nature and for me the main enterance door to sustainability of life.
In Eintein’s World book of Project Nature Connect, we are guided in a game which we can name as webstrings in order to learn;
-Learn how to speak to Earth and let it teach us, to know nature as nature knows itself.
-Recognize the culturally induced unbalanced relationship between the old-brain and the new-brain and conscientiously let tangible contact with nature re-balance them.
-Learn to personally or professionally organize, facilitate and introduce the ecopsychology of Project NatureConnect's Natural Systems Thinking Process and to network with others with similar goals for responsible personal and global balance.
I have read the book (Einstein’s World), made an outline of actions, and applied with three groups, with the aim to make them re-member the unity of Nature and plan their lives, visions accordingly.
1. A group of children, age 6-12 who came from an orphan’s school to a summer camp in our region.
2. A group of university students from University of Dardanelles, Tourism Faculty.
3. A white-collar group from Bosch Siemens Households company.
The main outline of the game as I apply is as follows:1. I take the people to a natural area.
2. Ask them to go around and find an attractive area and attractive natural being with whom they can non-verbally get connected with. (a bird, a tree. a stone, an ant…) I give them 10 minutes for this.
3. Take permission from that being and try to find out what type of a sense/feeling make you attracted to that being. If you feel that you are not permitted to get in contact with it, find another attraction.
4. Coming back, we make a big circle. I give tlem pieces of paper which they write the label of the being they are attracted to. (BIRD) (TREE) (ANT)….
5. I ask them to stick the labels on their shirts where all the others in the circle can see.
6. Two people are chosen as human beings in the circle.
7. I take a long rope and ask someone to be first. And as a BIRD ask him to what other natural being he feels attracted to. If he says to TREE, I ask him to share with others which is the feeling which makes him to connect with the tree. The feeling to have a home on the tree is the general answer I receive. One said that he feels to tired and to rest he needs a tree.
8. Now the BIRD has to keep one end of the rope and send the rest to the TREE, and we continue till the last one. The rope becomes woven in the circle like a carpet.
9. With the exception of the 2 human beings.
10. At the end when each natural being is connected with the other with a natural attraction/feeling with the string/rope; I take a red ribbon and connect the two humans. The red ribbon symbolizes the verbal connection of the human brains…. Which thinks they are over the natural kingdom.
11. I ask the two humans to disscuss on the opportunity to make a house where the tree is, so what action should they take.
12. They decide to cut the tree!
13. I begin to cut the string/rope where it connects the tree and the bird and the cloud… as the tree is dead so is the bird, the cloud…… till the last one in the natural web-string connection.
14. The two humans stay connected with their verbal connections the read ribbon…..
This game is an excellent tool to show ignorant people where they stay in the nature. From the game on, whenever they are asked to cut the connections, they remember the game and they don’t. Hopefully.
This game is a very good opportunity to begin SUSTAINABILITY in each sense….
Just as an end note, I would like to share with you one of my experiences with the orphan group. One of the children labeled himself as an ANGEL. I accepted it. She wanted to be connected with a cloud. At the end of the game, when I started to leave, she came running after me and gave a big hug. I felt that angels in the heaven hugged me..
Ayla Seyhun (from Turkey)
