Thinking Like Nature

By connecting with nature through consensual sensory contact with natural areas, we learn how to habitaully think like nature works. Our sense of reasoning makes our internal wranglers conscious that it is reasonable to trust nature's attributes. The intensity of your conviction about each of the following four statements enables you to become aware of how strongly your sense of reason support the nature-reconnecting process at this moment in time.

1. Nature is a nameless, nonverbal process.
2. "Natural Senses" and Nature are intelligent.
3. "Natural Senses" in people are attractions to parts of nature.
4. "Natural Senses" are forms of love that we feel.

The stronger your conviction, the greater your new brain readiness is to voluntarily let Earth teach you to live in balanced, sustainable, simplicity with it.

The four attributes of nature connectedness can be remembered by the acronym . . . NIAL

Namelessness: non-language ways of relating, knowing and feeling

Intelligence: the natural ability for attractions to blend in supportive ways

Attractions: the natural energies that draw things together

Love: our ability to enjoyably feel nature's attraction process

We think with nature when we are in conscious contact with NIAL within and around us. Connection with NIAL always feels good because it brings to our consciousness the awareness of the ability of natural attractions to balance themselves. For example, Earth stays on its course around the sun because it lies in balance between its gravitational attractions to the sun and its centribugal and other forces to move into space. On some level, this is the process that every entity in nature experiences, be it animal, vegetable, mineral, predator or prey...Moving toward mutually supportive relationships is how nature works individually and globally.

When we think in ways that exclude NIAL, we end up with stories and relationships that continuously conflict with each other. These stories often lead us to our stressed state of being. Without NIAL, we think our way into destructive perceptions of ware, race, nationality, sex, religion, and economics. Nature's intelligence in us avoids these problems. It is most unfortunate that we have lost this ability due to our estrangement from nature. Our disconnection has led us to DE-NIAL.

The stories told by nature-centered societies enable them to enjoy NIAL, the dream of the Earth that they genetically and culturally inherit. They disavow the fantasy of nature conquest that predicates our existence. Our troubles emanate from wrangling, subdividing, alienating, or killing our natural desire to be connected to nature. We regain wholeness by getting out of de-NIAL, by reconnecting and letting nature help sustain multisensory contact and balance.

~ Michael J Cohen, Reconnecting With Nature