Q&A With San Juan Island’s Mike Cohen

Below is an interview that Janet Thomas of San Juan Island did with Mike Cohen of San Juan Island. For more information on the interview, visit www.ecopsych.com/janetinterview.html.

By Janet Thomas, San Juan Island

Mike Cohen has decades of educational experience with his Project Nature Connect work.

He is also a widely experienced musician. Due to Covid 19, his Monday night contra-dances are on-hold at the grange, where Mike is a long-time member. The grange sells his books at the farmer’s market.

And because he was a National Park volunteer of the year, the National Park sponsors his weekly contra dances. Mike has played with local musicians at the market, at the grange and in many other venues for 27 years.

Q: Tell me about your childhood: where you were born, grew up and a bit about your immediate family.

A: My parents were born in Russia. They fled the Russian Pogroms against Jewish folks when their neighborhood friends were beheaded. They immigrated and re-settled in New York City.

My parents’ families survived thanks to the settlement-house programs that formed like-minded protective communities. One way or another, all of us children held that Russian atrocity in common.

In 1927, this lovingly united “ethnic” group moved to Sunnyside Gardens in the borough of Queens, NYC.  Presently a national historic site, it was then a revolutionary, nature-based, planned community promoted by Louis Mumford and Elenore Roosevelt who said to the effect “People lose their humanity if they are not close to nature.” We all lived within blocks of each other and for forty years our families joyfully kept together motivated by political and ethnic super-awareness, fear, and fun, along with strong settlement house summer camp community values.

The families bonded this way while cautiously avoiding Gerald L.K. Smith’s or was it Father Coughlan’s beating of the local rabbi with a hose so that the bruises would not show.

Our extended family community’s tenets included folk and contra dancing, old-world traditional song singing, a love of nature, cooperative community decision making, and recreation devoid of chemical dependencies.  I remember performing an off-color song in public, “Samuel Hall,” at age five and I think that launched me on that part of my livelihood. Born and raised there, I lived a “different-than-most New Yorkers’” garden community life in the shadow of the Sunshine Biscuit Company, the Breyers Ice Cream factory, and Silvercup Bread.
 
My elementary public school, P.S. 150, established one of the first progressive education programs in the USA. This was similarly later true, too, of the progressive summer camps I attended and later worked for until I established my own.

My childhood was guided by reasoning and funny stories or being sent to my room, but not spanking, as my mother proudly noted a few too many times.

Today, I remain a 90-year-old-holdout for these childhood values. I survive, and have survived for 55 years, by achieving and awarding advanced degrees for my special 54-sense organic science paradigm. It helps us remedy most of the problems we face by creating moments that let nature teach and beautifully fulfill us with its unifying wisdom.

“54-senses,” you say? That may appear funny to some folk’s sense of humor. To them, I respond, “Keep thinking. Is humor one of your 5-senses?”  Truth to tell, right now is the beginning of my excellent childhood. This also is true for most other folks I know, too.  However, they have been deprived of the organic science they need to believe it.

I am very attracted to share my excellent childhood’s 54-sense perfection here. That makes responding to your questions, ‘in the now’, help my excellent childhood to more responsibly enjoy my future moments.
http://www.ecopsych.com/insight53senses.html

Most of us suffer because our childhood education’s half-truths from higher education’s Ivory Tower leadership become today’s lies around, in, and as us. To avoid truancy, we are legally forced to learn these half-truths for 18,000 impressionable childhood hours of our youth just to graduate high school.  Add another 6,000 for college.

Today, I continue to do what I have done since 1939, including what I’m doing at this moment. I am using this computer technology in a natural area to help establish the organic science paradigm we must establish to stop our world from breaking apart. To our misery, since 1974, Ivory Tower “Cattle Hauling” (CH) does not teach us to do this, painfully diminishing, by 50%, our planet’s need and ability to replenish its/our life every day. Instead, it’s fortressed-apart from that realization while it treats CH depression by too much coffee or whatever. (Cattle Hauling scientifically means toxic waste or in nature-prejudiced organic fertilizer vernacular, “bull-shipping.”😄)
http://www.ecopsych.com/zombie2.html

Our excessive, inside the Ivory Tower learning molds us to live, on average, 99 percent of our time out of tune with how nature works. We spend 95 percent of our life indoors. This extreme and unwarranted detachment produces the Cattle Hauling (CH) worries and abuse that our biologically balanced and beautiful natural life daily suffers in conjunction with Earth’s life.

If our planet was a car, our abuse of its life made it run out of fuel 45 years ago. Now it runs 50% crippled by increasingly devouring itself day by day and we have yet to start refilling the gas tank.
 
And don’t you worry about me offending my Ivory Tower friends for what I blame on them. Although as benighted as most of us, their function and role in society is to guide us responsibly. They relish and get paid for what they do. They well know that our extremely nature-disconnected Ivory Tower defines itself as “An attitude of aloofness from or disdain or disregard for worldly or practical affairs.”

How about this example? Why does the Big Ten consist of fourteen Universities? Each consists of an indoor classroom, 54-felt sense, excessively natural-area disconnected CH. Their value symbols are feudal shields and Latin mottos. What does that make each of us? Serfs?

As news reports demonstrate, the Ivory Tower does not teach enough of us that it matters to know how to enjoy and share our life as a justifiable, peaceful, and equal part of our planet’s web-of-life.

Earth’s life is so pure and wise that it does not produce any garbage. In our heart of hearts, we know that we scapegoat our undue loss of its love and self-correcting ways through undue CH racism, prejudice, violence, corruption, abuse, ad nauseum. This is because we absurdly learn to omit that the life of our planet matters.

Please note that I’m sitting here in a natural area as I answer your questions. When I feel outrage about how our CH education affects us, I just look around and find an attraction in the area. This scientifically jumps my mind off my stressful Ivory Tower thoughts and into the natural world’s loving safety net. I love it in return. This recreation is also re-creation for me and the area.
http://www.ecopsych.com/nineleg.html

Right now, my excellent childhood, moment-by-moment, can see and feel that what is going on in the world is anything but excellent. We have learned to create and suffer our IvoryTower’s organically false distortions of Earth/us. These abusive detachments from the web-of-life are 54-sense painful. They constantly seek satisfaction, so we seldom feel that we have enough. We need more of everything. Our CH blames our woes on each other and treats others as garbage.

A towering Douglas Fir scientifically brings to mind how our excessive Ivory Tower learning breaks apart our 54-sense attractions to nature. This removes nature’s support of our lives and blinds us to its healing purity. By fourth grade, in 1939, my father (Phi Beta Kappa and Cum Laude, CCNY) made me aware of Albert Einstein’s work and what it was about. As was his custom, he conveyed this information with a story or joke, seldom stating facts alone. 

My dad’s Einstein joke information was about the fact that our past and present relationships are always attached to and influenced by each other. In frightening ways I was aware that this applied to their effects of on my parents’ families and consequently to me because of their flight from Russian Pogroms.

I suppose I should tell you what my father told me about Einstein and relativity. I’m sharing this because it’s part of our CH Ivory Tower education here as well as the way I habitually think:
“So what does Einstein mean when he talks about relativity.”
“It’s like if you sit alone by yourself for a minute it can seem like an hour but if you sit by your girlfriend for an hour it seems like a minute.”
“On this he make a living?”
Just substitute “Get molested in Russia” for the words “sit” and see how that background story works for you.

My 1985 “retirement” to San Juan Island from decades of year-long, cross country, natural area expeditions, consists of scientifically validating and continuing my childhood community nature-connected experiences. I do this so the life of others and our planet may benefit by painstakingly applying these truths. I heartfelt science know myself as a personification of the natural world’s essence. This is an example of what too much of a good thing can do based on people’s CH reactions to it.

I still create onsite and online natural area expedition groups that center around the corrective benefits of my organic science paradigm.  Childishly, I boast that my outstanding work is funded by the federal government, seldom mentioning that it’s in the form of my Social Security check.

Q: I know that being born left-handed had a big impact on your life. Could you please share about that experience and how it impacted your childhood and your life?

A: No matter how you ask that question, it is such an understatement that if you shoved it up a mosquito’s nose it would bounce around like a BB in a boxcar.

Although I threw a ball, skipped stones, and peed using my left hand (overcoming the challenge of right-handed underwear) I also did not die of thirst due to right-handed water fountains.

I never experienced left-handedness as a problem until my first day in elementary school. I picked up the dip pen in my left hand and the teacher told me I had to use my right hand.  That didn’t feel right so I continued to use my left hand. That’s when I fully realized that the inkwell was drilled into the right side of the desk.

I had to reach across the desk to dip the pen. I did it, wrote some required alphabet letters on my paper and went to dip the pen again. As I began to write more letters, I noticed that my previous letters were now smeared, and I had blue ink on my shirtsleeve.

With the intention to help me in this time of need, my teacher, whom I loved, gently took my pen out of my left hand, and placed it in my right hand.  Soon after that, something strong in me put it back in my left hand. It was part of my security. As you will see, it remains so strong that I start coughing when it appears. My physician’s stool tests indicate that I’m allergic to CH.

This changing-handedness challenge proved to be disastrous for me, but not any of the other left-handers in the class. They switched to writing righty. They bit their lip and buried the joy of their true lefty self to be what it genetically was:  “To feel happy to be left-handed.”  At least 10% of the population is born with this gift.
Note that the Declaration of Independence gave us the “right to pursue happiness” but happiness did not appear in the Constitution eleven years later and it remains missing. It was replaced by the “protection of property.”

I didn’t or couldn’t switch my handedness. Somehow, my inner nature, knew, for reason unknown, the teacher and school were abusing my inalienable right to be lefty. This felt unjust and wrong.  Without my awareness of it, I had hooked my family’s feeling, so it was as if I as if I was in persecuted Russia circa 1899 A.D., not in beautiful Sunnyside Gardens in January 1936. 

To me, “Use your right hand,” became pure Cattle Hauling, bull-shipping. The source of CH is how our nature has been misguided or abused. This recognized fact is not CH.

In 1977, a publisher told me to omit my humor when writing about serious matters because it sapped away their significance. Because I’m not taking that “no-fun” advice here, to offset its weakening effects, I beg readers to recognize that the following outcomes still shade left-handed folks. Nobody’s stories fully disappear, they are simply overshadowed by other stories that produce more hopefully desirable effects. This is the same as how our lap disappears when we stand up and it pops out behind us under an assumed name.

Our old stories along with our reactions to them often return when we are stressed.

• Left-handers are unlucky, malicious, awkward, dishonest, stupid, clumsy, insincere, backhanded, dubious, evil, satanic, sinister <grrrr>.
• The right hand of God is the favored hand. Jesus sits at God’s right side,
• Those on the left side of God are “cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels.”
• Sinister comes from a Latin word meaning “on the left side.”
• Evil “Left” comes from a majority of the population being right-handed, biblical texts describing God saving those on the right on Judgment day, and images depicting Eve on Adam’s left,
• Left shows demonic possession, leading to accusations of witchcraft,
• Black magic is the “left-hand path” along with Satanism and Witchcraft.

The Devil is portrayed as being left-handed (No less as Nature with his horns, fangs, claws, scales, and tail <grrrr>).

Perhaps a saving grace that sets me apart from lefties turned righty are studies that show unsuccessful attempts to switch to right-handedness can establish and/or strengthen resisting factors.  While I have a couple of PhDs in resisting on behalf of the natural world around, in, and as us, too many folks think my personal physician must be a proctologist.

Note that the requirements we meet in order to belong to an institution–its dogma, colors, uniform, hierarchy, music, value symbol and rituals–are similar to CH changing handedness along with its adverse, emotionally buried, psychological effects.
http://www.ecopsych.com/journalinstitution.html

That repressed energy is often the missing supportive element we need to produce the missing peace and justice of life-in-balance that we crave and deserve. 

Freeing up our inherent unifying energies is what matters if we desire to live in reasonable happiness. It is our fourteenth amendment right to the wellness of unadulterated life.

“Hello Ivory Tower administrators, where’s the lawyer that protects that right for us “excellent childhood now” folks?  Are you afraid if we get it we are going to demonstrate so everybody can have it? EXCELLENT CHILDHOOD NOW!”

The truth is, I wrote with my right hand most of grades 1-3 while continually attempting to write left-handed as well as complain about the immovable desk inkwell. This CH stress created my speech disorders, posture changes and leg cramps along with my blue-stained left shirt sleeve and arm accompanied by mother’s annoyance for having to remove the ink. This was aggravated by bad report card grades for neatness and deportment. I went to an appropriate therapist and doctor for all this.

My parents sometimes came up with new solutions for avoiding this conflict and complained to the school because it refused to apply them.  For Christmas, I thought my teachers would give my father a gift certificate for a vasectomy.

Finally, in fourth grade, we convinced the school to let me use a scientific technology solution, a Waterman fountain pen. It was otherwise taboo, probably due to its unaffordable-to-all $10 price while gas was 19 cents/gallon.

Note that Left-hand desk chairs were still missing in schools as late as 1998 and some youngsters had broken left wrists and/or emotional scars from their school’s righthanded training CH.

My fountain pen changed everything. I could more skillfully write lefty and also not smear my paper. I soon became a prize-winning student who uniquely held this special knowledge that I’ll share with you now: an appropriate technology wisely applied can help us transform our abuse of nature into loving nature and being loved in return, moment by moment, around, in and as us and in others.
www.ecopsych.com/natpsych.html

Here is one of several additional CH-Antidote Facts that my left-hand resistance has established since 1974 and this interview will further authenticate. These facts have already been refereed in a double-blind, peer-reviewed international scientific journal where I stick my left-handed neck out to brazenly proclaim:
www.ecopsych.com/66IJMRA-11682

CH (Cattle Hauling) ANTIDOTE FACT:  We have at least 54 natural sense groups.
Supportive Observation:  Show me a person who is convinced that we only have five senses and I’ll show you a person who never learned to count up to six.
http://www.ecopsych.com/insight53senses.html

 

Q: What is your first recollection of your connection to the natural world?

    
A: While thinking about it in this natural area, I recognize that it was me hugging a Sycamore tree in my Sunnyside Gardens backyard as I climbed it at age four or so.  I felt, 54-sense, knew it supported and appreciated me as it waved me in the wind while I held it tight. And thanks for asking, Janet. Nobody has ever asked me this question before yet now it’s valuable answer is as real as life, 86 years later. That’s how and why nature works.
As I look around me at the trees here, I feel my Sycamore experience again. I acknowledge it, it is a fact, it’s here and now.  It is my sense of time.  It has right now energized into registering in/on my sense/screen of consciousness along with my other senses: gravity, self, sight, motion, trust, sound, space, community, belonging, stress, distance, color, and love.  Of course, in the Ivory Tower’s CH world this is threatening nonsense. CH dogma teaches us, from kindergarten on, that we only have 5-senses. What I am experiencing must be a mental health disorder, freakiness or our yet-to-be-identified biological instinct to cop-out.  Maybe it’s some kind of secret political conspiracy.

Two years after hugging my Sycamore tree, my sense of myself was CH disturbed as I sat at my desk while my first-grade teacher lifted my dip pen out of my left hand and put it into to my right hand.

Now I’m sad. I was a really nice lil’ kid. What science or law made it reasonable for the school to put me through that CH? BUT IT IS AN EXCELLENT CHILDHOOD NOW! I’m attracted to a freely waving tree and I feel better. And now I can scientifically identify it, too. It’s my Alder Ego.

Today, my disturbance’s reason to resist is 100 times stronger.  It never became a suppressed emotion or mental health issue. Instead, to the inconvenience of the “rightness” of others, it is the integrity of total me being me.

Sometimes it’s even inconvenient to me. The difference is that I respect it so much that I just want to work harder at what I do.
www.ecopsych.com/coheninterview.pdf

Q:  Many years ago, when I took one of your workshops, you asked us to go into the natural world and be aware of what attracts us. Then we were to ask, “What do you have to teach me?” I remember my first experience with that and how it became a natural part of my ongoing life within the natural world. What was the first experience you had that initiated that awareness in you?

A: On a subconscious level, this question is already asked and answered in the previous question. By staying on my lefty track, at age 15, my reasonable organic science paradigm attracted me, with parental approval no less, to become a Camp Director. After that, everything I learned and did was pointed in that direction including my occupational aptitude test results at college.

I made all things lead me to having my summers available for applying my Camp Director inclination and increasingly developed expertise. When I went on furlough in the army, my vacation leave time was spent working at my former summer camp position. No surprise that now, 35 years into my retirement, I’m still helping folks support the CH abused life of nature in and as themselves.

In August 1965, thirty nature-connected years and six science and Applied Ecopsychology degrees later, as a travel-camp owner/director I was with my expedition program exploring the mile-deep bowels of the Grand Canyon Wilderness.  A freak thunderstorm made me uncomfortably aware that the balanced and beautiful lifeways of our planet were scientifically identical to the way my human life functioned. This could not be a planet-wide coincidence, they had to both be the same thing.

Somewhat desperate, but obviously not “be-wildered,” I summed up the courage to directly ask the spectacular 1.5 billion-year-old Grand Canyon walls and trees how their planetary life was different than my human life.  Soon, my 54-natural senses registered their reply. It was that my human form of life had been lovingly gifted with the ability to grow relationships based on creating and using abstract stories and storytelling and that no other part of Earth’s life could do this, or understand stories. It became more and more obvious because I was doing it while discovering it.  It was self-evident, it had to be real. I/humanity could talk, our living planet was non-verbal.

Our ability to speak is artificial. Whenever it does not connect us with how nature works it CH replaces and disconnects us from the 13.7 billion years of the way the non-verbal life of the Universe/Nature/Earth produces its perfections in a natural area or a weed.
http://www.ecopsych.com/livingplanetearthkey.html
 
This makes every aspect of our living planet vulnerable to today’s excessively nature-disconnected fiction and Ivory Tower CH.  Our Ego is our self-identity story about who we are individually and collectively. When our Ego story is excessively nature-disconnected we are trapped in an unreasonable and destructive CH short circuit, a story that, like a cancer, can’t stop abusing or destroying life, and that life includes us. That’s the origin and source of this moment’s personal, social and environmental Ivory Tower CH crisis.  How it works is exemplified by fact that our Ego CH knows its stories can be used as unstoppable weapons against “dumb” nature and convert it into our stories; Redwood Forests become cigar boxes.  It is aware this is true, but, when excessive, it doesn’t change its “addicted” ways. It’s a broken computer that can’t repair itself because its broken. Like: “I lost my eyeglasses and I need them to find them.” “I need to excessively conquer nature so I can enjoy the egotistical CH pride of ‘I am a winner’ that I so desperately need.” And as of today, I could add to it “I am a Proud Boy.”  Now, there’s a moment of irony.

It is 55 years later now. Nature remains non-verbal. Nobody has yet produced information that shows that nature conveys or responds to stories.

As I sit by the bay here, I find nothing in this natural area that has our advantageous storytelling gift. This grassy field could not tell me not to mow it or that to hundreds of mice and other life forms, it is home. And thanks to valid Ivory Tower research and education, I know that one teaspoon of soil consists of water, minerals, and hundreds of other microorganism species: five million bacteria, twenty million fungi, one million protozoa and two hundred thousand algae, all living, all connected, all good CH that recycles and fertilizes.  
                          
My Grand Canyon Wilderness contact completely accepted my core fact that Earth was alive. And my 54 senses have never registered any denial of “nature is alive” from the natural world when I mistakenly said that rocks were dead. After all, if the life of Earth dies, I die, but not vice versa. Instead, I become a different part of Earth’s web of life. What else do I need to know? Google “Is Planet Earth alive” Note that CH science say’s “no.”  Oh, and we don’t have 54 senses either so my sense of Reason (# 40) or Balance (#14) can’t exist so CH can’t be unreasonable to unbalance me?

How about us unifying “in the now” on just this one, scientifically validated truth of the world: “Nature is word-less, and it has no name.”  Not to worry. No risk involved.  This seemingly obvious “Nature is non-verbal” fact remains true to this moment.

CH ANTIDOTE FACT: Nature and Earth neither use or understand stories. Supportive Observation: Show me one place where Nature uses stories and I’ll show you the one and only Bugs Bunny.

Nobody has yet shown me anything and this is just one of twenty-four similar true vast facts of life that the limits of Ivory Tower’s righteous CH make half-vast.

Consider this: Most people’s Ego CH-story believe that it is obvious that we live on our global sphere. However, a self-evident fact in Climate Therapy is that we don’t live on Planet Earth. Look around you. Trust what you 54-sense and relate to in this now moment.  The fact is that our lives are embedded in the life of Earth’s climate and atmosphere, under its clouds, rain and flying creatures, below its mountains and trees, in the unified streaming of its biosphere around, through and as us.

We are an equal part of the web-of-life animal, vegetable, mineral and energy kingdoms. They flow through and with us because we are imbedded in their life.

Every 5-7 years every atom in our body is replaced by and becomes Earth’s life and vice versa.

Climate Therapy helps you realize the “obvious fact” that  “We live on Planet Earth” is a serious, nature-disconnecting lie of omission that deteriorates the climate of our life.  Which of your 54 senses has been CH abused into escaping this fact of life and now makes you/us suffer?

We don’t swim on a pond, do we?

CH ANTIDOTE FACT:  We live in, not on, the life of Planet Earth.

Supportive Observation: Show me someone who says we don’t live in Planet Earth and I’ll show you a “we” from another planet or E.T. from Spielberg, USA, 90209.

Here is a question: Is your natural-born Ego story healthy enough to accept these evidence-based truths or are you in Ego CH-story denial? 

Note that my organic science paradigm helps others and myself strengthen our resilience and remedy our malfunctioning Ego CH-story. It can surely help you, too.
www.ecopsych.com/survey.html

Q:  You are now 90years-old and as active as ever as an educator, a musician, a writer, and a hiker who treks up Mount Young every day. Can you share about what it is that links all these accomplishments and what advice you have for the rest of us as we age?

A: What the link consists of is me or my students, in natural areas, backyard or back country, invoking into our relationships heartfelt, unadulterated, and organic, 54-sense scientific facts, moment by moment.  Doing this helps us heal our injured Ego CH-story. Anybody can accomplish this when they are motivated enough to rise above their crippling CH education. I’ll show you how, exactly five paragraphs below.

By creating moments in natural areas that let Earth’s life teach us what we need to know, our 54 natural attraction energies connect our Ego story with our planet’s homeostatic power to recycle into whole truths our CH-limited, yet righteous, Ivory Tower “5-sense” nonsense.

In short, “Composting CH matters.”  When do you think that bumper sticker will go viral?  It should have made money in 1974 when our deadly natural resource deficit began. At that time, and for 26 previous years, the public knew about our global catastrophe from Fairfield Osborn’s bestselling book Our Plundered Planet or William Voight’s Road to Survival. Of course, their facts were CH Ivory Towered like most other natural things, especially since ecology was still being invented and, of course, resisted it. At that same time, 1948, Gypsy Boot’s top of the chart’s “Nature Boy” song had most folks singing “The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.” Gypsy Boots and his nature-boys lived in caves off wild food in Palm Springs. I was 18 and being CH science trained I thought they were just more fruits and nuts from California.  Now, with respect to the Ivory Tower, I’m like them before they became famous.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gypsy_Boots

Meanwhile, in 1974, my organic science paradigm, year-long, nature-reconnecting expeditions had been successfully operating for five years. Ivory Tower education was fully aware of this since our nationwide outdoor journeys included accredited courses offered in catalogs from accredited Universities. Their process was also described in my first of fourteen expedition education books, Our Classroom is Wild America.  My significant living and learning in natural areas course in 1974 was: An Objective Search for Mother Earth.

I have shared here how my left-handedness led to my organic science paradigm and how my wonder about earth’s life validated the fact that “Nature is wordless” and “Nature has no name for itself.” 

There is the following, single, key activity that empowers nature’s essence in, around and as us, and in other people, to complete, transform, correct, or remove the deleterious effects of CH education from our Ego story. As moment by moment, this happens in reality and imagination, we return to our origins. Connected to their organic purity, then, our Ego story scientifically creates more just and reasonable well-being for all of life.

If you desire these results you start by responding to this question whose answer you naturally know because you were born with it, but it probably became an Ivory Tower CH distortion in your Ego story. That CH is our “normal abnormality” that creates our runaway problems.

“What is the greatest truth in your life that you can trust, and it is not Nature, God, Love or Honesty?”

The easiest way to check out your answer is to call me, 360-378-6313, because most people get the answer wrong, but they completely agree with the right answer once they are given it. 
Your Ego CH-story probably has some fears about calling since it may expect to be remanded if it has been misleading you, as was my left-handedness. However, I can connect you to today’s social technology “fountain pen” and its rewards that you can use and enjoy forever.

Think about this. Archers can’t improve their skills if they don’t know where their arrow has landed. No? Then how about: time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.

The next easiest, but not necessarily accurate answer, is to read it below and then explore it further at www.ClimateTherapy.org or www.ecopsych.com/GREENWAVEBETA.pdf. Note that neither has a real-life archery instructor there to ensure that you hit the mark, but they have much helpful information.

1. If you can’t answer the question correctly (and most people can’t) then part of your life is warped and excessively vulnerable to CH. It no longer has your critical inborn ability to correctly determine if something is basically true or false or how true it may be. This is because you have lost your prime grounded, planetary truth to compare them to, so you are vulnerable to their falseness. This means that, too often for your own good, you find that you let things or relationships mislead you, or take advantage of you, or they make you physically or emotionally sick. That’s today’s “norm” because 50% of our planet’s ability to recover from our impact has vanished.
2. Pinch yourself.
3. While pinching yourself say and note that “The greatest truth in my life is that in this moment  I know, sense and feel, for sure, that I am pinching myself and that I am aware of this fact.”

Now repeat doing this to further validate it.

     4. While pinching yourself recognize that in this immediate life, now-moment what you sense, feel, or relate to is the only time you fully know that it and you exist.  This scientifically means that whatever is happening in the reality of the instant “now” is your Greatest Trustable Truth (GTT).

Your Greatest Trustable Truth includes your own existence, reasoning, thoughts, stories, relationships and 54 senses and feelings. Like everything else, in the Now, you are an active verb “to exist” because the Now is the life of the Universe/Nature/Earth (UNE) in action.

Synopsis: The Organic Science of the Now.

During the singular essence of any moment that we enjoy being in a natural area, our Greatest Trustable Truth (GTT) is our personal life consciously being part of the life of Universe/Nature/Earth (UNE). When our stories are not Cattle Hauling (CH) adulterated, this self-correcting unity stops and remedies our excessively UNE-separated Ivory Tower destructiveness.

Note that scientifically, things that don’t exist are never true because when you need or depend upon them they are not there. Also note that our GTT is different when it is limited by the confines of our artificial, nature-separating indoor walls than when we are in an attractive natural area.

The Organic Paradigm History: Science, Science, Science
Since 1930, the Universe’s life, after its big bang birth 13.7 billion years ago, has been scientifically recognized to create its own space and time for it to live in, moment by moment. This means that the essence of everything is UNE alive, unified and only exists in the moment.

This helps explain how our planet’s life responded to my question in the Grand Canyon.

Humanity and its unique ability to relate through Ego stories only first appeared in the last .0000015% (150,000 years) of UNE. Before that UNE was non-verbal.

The Egotistical Ego: As we create them, our Ego stories mislead us to think they know how UNE works. How could that be true? Our Ego story way of knowing has missed 13.7 billion years of non-story UNE life experience so its knowledge is unscientific until proven otherwise. If “In the beginning was the word,” scientifically that is a lie because the beginning was not a word; it was its Big Bang attraction to live by supporting life, just like right now.

Our Ego CH-stories are fiction if they are not evidence-based, 54-sense valid, even in the Ivory Tower. There, they are artificial CH replacements of natural area authenticity. That’s our problems’ source, not their solution.

     5.  Be aware that the only time you register or know anything is when it registers, moment by moment, in the space/time now of UNE’s life that is you. This includes your experiences in the past or future, real or imagined, because they only exist as stories in the present.

This also includes knowing God, Nature, Love and Honesty as well as stories you learn or create, memories you have and beliefs you were taught or follow. If you didn’t exist how could your stories about them.  First things first, because that’s how the  Big Bang works.

If they are not 54 felt-sense, evidence-based, natural area accurate and unified in the now, then they are un-trustable, Ivory Tower CH fiction and they mislead you.

If you don’t believe this phenomenon is true is it because it’s false? Or is it because the felt-sense shame felt by your Ego CH-story painfully warps your sense of reason (#40) into refuting what it knows at many levels is UNE destructive?  
 
The phenomenon has to be self-evident true because as UNE’s life, in sequence, makes its own space and time to live in, now is the only time anything, including UNE, exists.

We can trust it is united with everything else in the moment because, scientifically, that’s when all things exist, all is a unified one in the same.

CH ANTIDOTE FACT: Self-evidence is undeniably true and accurate.
Supportive Observation: Show me self-evidence that is inaccurate and I’ll show you the genome of Baron Munchausen

For example, if you know you are alive in any given UNE moment, it is just as true as the essence of everything else also being alive in that moment.

CH ANTIDOTE FACT. From its birth on, the Universe and everything in it was and remains alive.
Supportive Observation: Show me folks who think the Universe is dead, and I’ll show you folks missing out on life.

Our Ivory Tower myths and fable fictions are not repeatedly valid as scientific facts, especially with respect to how UNE’s life works in the purifying balance of now in a natural area.

This is because the now dependably includes UNE’s everchanging web-of-life climate and healing along with your personal experiences since the moment you were loved into being.

View a video that explains your GTT in a natural area, a certainty that is not available indoors https://vimeo.com/211249559

     6. Below is an example of UNE in action. Note again that your GTT only operates, moment by moment, in the now of UNE.

“It is GTT self-evident that you are reading this sentence now and I am writing it now. This means that the statement is a scientific, trustable, and unifying truth yet we are in different times and places and we come from different backgrounds and experiences. However, the now of UNE manifesting itself as the statement unifies us.”

CH ANTIDOTE FACT: Things only exist or happen in the now.
Supportive Observation: Show me anything that does not exist in the now, and I’ll show you myself denying that you are showing this to me from your experience.

SUMMARY
Our core challenge is that the abuse inflicted by humanity’s half-truth Ego CH-story is excessively breaking apart the life of UNE.
This stresses the 54-sensory bonds that we share and that hold us and Organism Earth together in balance. We are in pain and all the broken parts of UNE seek to remedy CH by transforming our hurt and its effects once again into UNE attraction love, moment by moment.
 
Organism Earth is compelled to stop our Ego CH-story invasion of it through its self-protecting virus “CH antibodies” while creating a climate that will transition CH into organic Ego-story GTT.
The reasonable ways and means for us to achieve this goal is to shift into an Organic Science Paradigm that makes us add Climate Therapy to everything we do so we can create GTT moments in natural areas that let Organism Earth teach CH what it needs to know so it stops CH-ing us.
http://www.ClimateTherapy.org

Q: You have a global network of students through the Project NatureConnect education system. Could you please share about the history and development of Project Nature Connect and its impact?

A: Once my GTT was empowered by a fountain pen in 1939, I used that pen to describe my 54-sense academic and life experiences, like an unintentional autobiography, as I am doing right now.
Like a haymaking machine turning a field of grass into haybale blocks, and by not being pacified or ambushed by cigarettes, drugs or alcohol, I followed the most reasonably attractive things our society had to offer and scientifically made sense of them.
http://www.ecopsych.com/ksanity.html

I and my partners produced educational programs and literature that were available to the public as my “GTT blocks of hay.” I often lived in them, year-round, and professionally offered some of them for sale to folks who found them attractive.

My Camp Director path led me to Applied Ecopsychology appropriate degree programs and livelihoods that appreciated and supported my natural skills and desires. This included me spending 26 GTT years forming and leading educational travel outdoor camping expeditions nationwide from Newfoundland to California, 16 of them year-round. My Expedition Education program was recognized as being a utopian learning environment, the most revolutionary school in the USA. Our classroom was wild America.
www.ecopsych.com/journalexpeditionedu.html

I did this independently and with others as the founder/director of National Audubon Society Expedition Education Institute program. I was/am also a traditional musician and singer and contradance caller. This helped unify the expedition groups with themselves and others that visited. It also keeps me independently sane today in organic ethical and moral ways that, too often, our “normal” lives have lost so we suffer.
http://www.ecopsych.com/mjcohen.html

I do all of the above in modified or enhanced ways as I’m GTT doing right now. In fact, my mountain walk in the National Park is calling me so I’ll take break and enjoy it for a couple of hours.

Q: When did you come here and what brought you to San Juan Island Island?

A: I was presenting a workshop for National Audubon’s Annual Convention in Bellingham in 1989 and I bicycled around the islands for a few weeks before it started.  Through a lucky purchase of land, I returned and settled here the next year because the Islands have a little bit of most things that I loved on my outdoor expedition decades. I still sleep outside year-round, as I have since 1969 when the year-round expeditions started.

Q:  You are a prolific writer and I use your nature connection work in my writing workshops. Thank you! Your awareness of our 54 senses is a great offering in your work. Could you please share how you came to discover, embrace, and teach about our 54 senses?

A: Before I retired from directing, living and learning on my expeditions, I put together, in 1985, an international symposium at the University of Massachusetts to validate my personal Grand Canyon affirmation that our planet is as alive as we are since it’s obviously the same life, except that we can relate via stories.  The conference, sponsored by the National Audubon Society, was the first of its kind. It lasted four days and I called it Is the Earth a Living Organism? In it I proposed that Organism Earth be added to the endangered species list since it was the only one of its kind that we knew. I was later identified as a maverick genius for my forty outdoor expedition years that created the symposium.
http://www.ecopsych.com/maverick-genius.html

I did workshops on the conference’s findings for the following five years and at one of them, in 1986, I ran across the amazing research of Guy Murchie that he published in his book The Seven Mysteries of Life.

Murchie spent seventeen years reading scientific studies to see which of our senses we might share with nature. These were hidden under the names of different kinds of ecological relationships we had, for example, we needed and returned water to the living Earth’s water cycle but seldom acknowledged that these were driven and regulated by our senses of thirst and excretion. He told me that in conjunction with the Harvard Biological Laboratories he identified 93 different senses that he combined to establish 37 senses and their functions that he could validate and reasonably publish.

With Murchie’s consent, I went through the list and identified which senses my students and I had experienced on our expeditions during the previous 26 years. I found 51 total and added two that were not on his list.
http://www.ecopsych.com/insight53senses.html

In 2012 I identified an additional sense that had just been scientifically validated as the Higgs Boson field so it could be included. It was the sense of unity/love of and between all the other senses and relationships found in nature and humanity.  Albert Einstein had predicted this as his Grand Unified Field but never could identify it as an equation.
http://www.ecopsych.com/journalgut.html

In my books and presentations, I use these senses to help describe what actually occurs in natural areas as its all-species members communicate, support and balance with each other, and this includes people. Today, this is a core of my Applied Ecopsychology Organics that was absent in all my field expeditions. It makes them possible to now operate online in conjunction with any natural area’s powers and desire to transform CH into GTT person/planet love.

Q:  You have devoted your life to advocating for, and teaching about, our connection to nature. Why do you think the destruction of the environment continues to be so prominent?

A: Because the Ego CH-story of our enforced Ivory Tower education is too ashamed and frightened to admit to itself and the public that it rejects, rather than includes, the GTT of our 54-sense UNE love that lives in authentic nature’s natural areas.  When UNE’s unifying life does not matter and is excluded in relationship building, apathy reigns and reasonable changes for justice and sustainability take centuries instead of months. This is because the world is not yet the heartfelt nature-connected expedition that it must become via the internet before the life of our planet’s climate instead traumatizes us into relating more reasonably.

A natural area’s GTT, not our Ego CH-stories, is the fountainhead of authority in how UNE’s wisdom works to peacefully organize, correct and balances its optimums of life, diversity, cooperation and sanity without producing garbage or abuse, including war, so everything safely belongs. Sadly, the Ivory Tower CH word for this momentous 54-sense phenomenon is “absurd,” or one of its synonyms. The tower continues to have us bank on “hope” rather than apply 54-sense science. The catastrophic results of this CH speak for themselves, but information alone seldom modifies entrenched behavior.

CH ANTIDOTE FACT. Climate Therapy makes a vital contribution to increasing personal, social and environmental well-being.
Supportive Observation: Show me those who say Climate Therapy is not significant and I’ll show you why tempers and temperatures are rising while the Little Blue Macaw and West African White Rhinoceros recently went extinct.

Q: You are an accomplished musician. Please share how music entered your life and stayed there.

A: The UNE Sense of Music (Sense #45) is one of my GTT 54-senses that attractively came into play in my life because when it appeared it was supported by my parents’ settlement house background rather than structured by CH. It functions in unity with all 54 of my natural attraction senses and it is most attracted to music, songs and dancing that is not commercially motivated or attached to our excessively exploitive CH disconnections from UNE. This delight played a vital role on my expeditions. The paradox is that I play my guitar and banjo right-handed.
http://www.ecopsych.com/pwcontraband.html

Q: What suggestions do you have to help those of us struggling with the loneliness and isolation of these COVID 19 times?

A: We need to validate that these and many additional “earth miseries” result from our 50%, and counting, deficit in our inherent and loving connections with the life of UNE. 

When our Ego CH-story becomes brave enough to admit that these miseries result from our excessive exposure to the destructive ways of Ivory Tower CH we become open-minded enough to want to transform these negatives into the supportive love and joy found in the GTT of my online or onsite eco-arts Climate Therapy activities and courses.

We need to form an alternative community whose organic paradigm helps us and others reconnect with nature to reduce our increasing natural-love bankruptcy.

Our paradigm activities work because they connect our personal and collective GTT to supporting the beautifully balanced and healing GTT of our planet’s life and vice-versa.

As a support group we could become a reasonable GTT family that in fun ways adds its person/planet unity to all our relationships as it teaches them to do the same with us.

Our organic paradigm group could transform into enjoying the satisfaction derived from becoming a Climate Therapy training program for our region in consultation with and support for the endangered Southern Residence Orca Whale population as it shares its GTT wisdom with us when we make 54-sense UNE connections with it.
www.ecopsych.com/wdfw.pdf

CH ANTIDOTE FACT. We must learn how to invoke Climate Therapy to produce and enjoy its benefits.
Supportive Observation: Show me a scientist today who does not believe they should invoke Climate Therapy unity and I’ll show you a hypocrite who will run for Congress and win.

Q: Do you see an end to the exploitative consumptive economy that has so desecrated the planet as well as the quality of life on the planet?

A: Yes, it will happen the day that either humanity’s sense of reason or climate crisis pain motivates our Ego CH-story to reasonably re-assemble itself around the organic paradigm of GTT Climate Therapy and social network it. Anything that omits this unifying process is, or will be, 5-sense limited, 111% less intelligent and effective than accomplishing their sustainable, quality of life goals using 54-sense wisdom. What’s your heartfelt eco-IQ?
www.ecopsych.com/iq.html 

CH ANTIDOTE FACT.  We have to exist to deny the truth of Climate Therapy while that is its core undeniable truth.
Supportive Observation: That’s a fact.

How can the “Big Fourteen” help us with our denial if it (they) doesn’t exist as such?

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Categories: People, Science