9/10/2014

Holistic Living | Sustainability Courses | Schumacher College

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The Living Touch of Wild Earth - Reinhabiting the World Around Us

6 10 October 2014
With Stephen Buhner
This course is open for bookings.
The reductive paradigm in which nearly all of us have been immersed since childhood has
trained us to see and experience the world around us as a grouping of surfaces surfaces that
have no essential interior, or an interior life. This has effectively isolated us from the
metaphysical background of the world, keeping us, and our awareness, restricted to a narrow
range of experience and communicatory relationship with the world around us.
This situation produces not only the exterior wounds that we perceive as ecological devastation
but also interior wounds in ourselves, among them the depression that affects most people in
the Western world. All of us, somewhere inside, know we need the Wild Redeemer, the living
touch of Wild Earth, Plant, or Stone, deep inside, in the place where our deepest self resides.
At core, it is this touch that we will explore during these five days.

Nothing is what we have taken it to be..

We must understand, as Henry David Thoreau once put it, that nothing is what we have taken it to be.
There is tremendous depth to the material world that reductionists do not understand. To perceive it, interact with it, immerse ourselves in it, necessitates an entirely
different kind of thinking. It is, rather than reductive thinking, a holistic thinking that utilises our heart as the primary organ of our perception and cognition. The brain
retains a crucial, but supportive rather than dominant, role in the process.
This shift in the location of consciousness, from brain to heart, opens up the capacity for depth, empathic, holistic perception of the world around us. It allows us to
perceive the reality of the Earth, plants, and ecosystems from their orientation, allows them to speak about their interior lives rather than us imposing our frame upon
them. Our role remains one of listening and understanding. We go to the world with our deepest self unconcealed. We find ourselves, ultimately, not disconnected
parts, alone in Universe, but once more reinhabiting our interbeing with the world.
This shift in perception engenders the state that many indigenous peoples, as well as Masanobu Fukuoka, Luther Burbank, Goethe, Henry David Thoreau, Barbara
McClintock and others have utilised to understand the Earth, plants, and our human relationship with them. It is how they achieved the remarkable results they did,
from natural farming to the metamorphosis of plants, to the creation of most of the food plants we use, to the understanding that the genome is a flexible organ of the
cell. It is the source of all indigenous medicinal plant knowledge. Such an approach allows a continual experience of what the ancient Athenians called aisthesis, the
exchange of soul essence between the human and non-human inhabitants of our world.
Using his unique blend of deep humour, storytelling, trance techniques, depth information about Gaian functioning, and experiential exercises, Stephen will convey not
only leading-edge information about Gaia and Gaian systems, but will take participants into a personal experience and exploration of the states of mind, feeling, and
cognition involved in this kind of perception and communication with the living intelligences that surround us. Among the topics and experiences Stephen will explore
are the self-organisation in biological systems, neural networks in Ecosystems, plant and bacterial intelligence, the ecosystem function of hallucinogens and medicinal
plants, the dynamics of aisthesis, golden threads, duende, heart perception and cognition, imaginal thinking, the experience of interspecies communication, the
dynamics of sensory gating channels, and a great deal more.
Please come prepared to have core beliefs challenged . . . and to laugh; Stephen is completely irreverent.
Note: This is Stephens last experiential workshop. Other than the odd lecture here and there every so often, he is retiring after this year. Please join us if you can.

Teacher
Stephen Buhner
Stephen Buhner has been called an Earth Poet and Bardic Naturalist by many of his contemporaries. He has been, for the past two decades, the
senior researcher at the Foundation for Gaian Studies. Over the past twenty years, Stephen has written 19 books across a broad range of
interrelated subjects: the deep intelligence in non-human biological organisms, plant dynamics in ecosystem functioning, the source of indigenous
plant knowledge, herbal medicine, the dynamics of human and non human language and communication, bacterial resistance, Gaian perception,
aisthesis, heart perception, and, of course, the history of alcoholic fermentation and ingestion. He is, as Rosemary Gladstar once put it, one of the
plant geniuses of our time and one of our most potent, experiential teachers about the living intelligence of plants and Earth. His most recent book
is Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception into the Dreaming of Earth (Inner Traditions, April 2013). For more
information visit www.gaianstudies.org

Course Fees
895 All course fees include accommodation, food, field trips and all teaching sessions.
For further information about Schumacher College please see About the College

Book Now
Click here to book this course via our on-line booking system >>
Click here to find out how to book by fax or mail >>

http://www.schumachercollege.org.uk/courses/communication-with-wild-earth-systems

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9/10/2014

Holistic Living | Sustainability Courses | Schumacher College

Click here to find out how to book by fax or mail >>

Reserve your place now

To provisionally reserve a place for 5 days, email us your contact details and the name of the course jane.pares@schumachercollege.org.uk
We will hold the place for five working days for reservations three weeks before a course or earlier. After five days we will automatically offer your place to someone
else if we have not received your application.

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