As I have written elsewhere on this site the way humans see and experience life inside and outside of themselves has changed over time. Prior to the Renaissance people saw in two dimensions, in other words they didn’t see so much in subject and object or in perspective. There was still a connection with what was around and inside themselves, an embeddedness in the world of nature and in their psyches. Yet they lacked a certain self consciousness. So the further development of ego awareness since then has gradually created a separation or disconnection of me the subject from you or nature being the object. This separation also occurred between our egos and our inner world or psyche. As Carl Jung has said we have been quite successful in using our subject object separation to be able to build a civilization and technology outside of ourselves. Yet this separation is now leading us down the path to our own demise because we cannot remember or see or feel our connection to nature and to our natural inner life.

This blog is about helping all of us to remember these connections.

In my previous blog I tried to provide a story and picture of the experience of relating to nature differently. The first thing that happened to me was that I was able to still my mind by getting out of the chatter of my ego and other inner voices. So a first step in reconnection is to be able to still our inner voices/thoughts long enough to be able to open space in ourselves to allow a different story or way of seeing to arise. This can be done through a variety of different forms of meditation. It doesn’t require one to sit for hours. Simply develop the skill to notice when your mind is quiet. Another way in to this state is to feel with the passion of the heart. In this way our heart leads and the ego and sundry voices fall more or less silent. A caveat here. I do find sometimes that the passion of the heart can be so intense it will not allow the quieter reflecting required to connect with the “other”. If one can bring heart-mind to this process all the better. Opening ourselves like this takes practice. So I would suggest that one work on first becoming aware of the ” I” voice inside yourself. Once you can create this awareness without looking at anything in particular practice with something that you can simply observe or contemplate. See if you can let your mind remain fairly quiet. Then go outside and find something in nature that calls to you and try be still inside now that much more is going on around you.

When we attempt to do these activities our egos will want to start separating when we start to look. By this I mean, describing, comparing, categorizing, defining, thinking about “texting”, etc.,. All of this activity separates whatever we are looking at from us. We are no longer in an equal relationship to that something.  Over time as we have become more egocentric, more of nature and our inner world became other. With the ego dominant our hearts no longer can be heard telling us that something is terribly wrong.

After some practice what I experience when I go through this process is that I begin to see differently, a kind of true clarity and I have a feeling of a light, open heart. I guess one could call it seeing and feeling without judgement or preconception. This creates space for something else to arise. I sense that it is the beginning of a reconnection of my repressed natural inner human with nature. In the moments of this remembering and reconnection I feel an expansion of myself that encompasses me and the former object. From this place the energy moves into a heartfelt sense of joy. I sense that something in what I am relating to is also trying to reconnect with me and I feel love blossom. The separation has dissolved into interdependence and the beginning of a felt sense of wholeness. I feel life.

At no time do I feel that going out and being in nature in the “old” way is now passe’ or not good enough. Any connection is helpful to us and to nature. I am attempting to deepen the experience so that we might heal the wound created by our separation. Heal our own souls and the soul of the world, Anima mundi, together.

In the next blog I will talk about intuition and its relationship to reconnection.