How to Tap into the Feedback Loop of Mind and Nature

Want a free and easy way to boost your creativity and problem-solving capacity by 50%? All you have to do is tap into the feedback loop of Mind and Nature.

To understand how to accomplish that (for ourselves, our organizations, our friends and families, and also for the sake of our own highest values), we first need to acknowledge the fact that we have mistaken views of self and world — mistaken views of mind and nature — that make us functionally stupider than our own true capacity, in two related ways: We can become more creative and insightful, and, more importantly, we could begin to shift our style of thinking and our whole style of consciousness into far more empowering manifestations that benefit the whole community of life.

Let’s first consider what our mistaken views lead us to miss. Then we can consider some basic things that can shift our thinking, and the benefits that come from doing so.

However, because the science (as usual) has such a long way to go in catching up to the wisdom traditions, we need to make clear what a wisdom-based approach to improving our thinking and shifting our consciousness would demand as the first steps in making this improvement and this shift a vitalizing possibility for us. It’s easy to think a little better and a little differently, and then imagine we’ve done something significant.

But life itself now demands from us a more radical transformation in consciousness, which means we must step into the unknown. To accomplish that, we will benefit tremendously if we turn to the wisdom traditions of the world. If we try to improve our creativity and thinking in the manner of a hack or any other fragmented approach, we will only perpetuate our problems and our suffering.

With that caveat, we can begin by noting what our mistaken views cover over: We arise embedded in mind, with mind in every direction. Human beings in the dominant culture seem to miss the mindedness all around them.

The “modern” human walks around with “ideas” “in” their head. This localization of mind remains untenable on scientific grounds, and does not fit with most of the spiritual/philosophical traditions we have inherited.

Nature is already minded. Because of this, we need to mind Nature — that is, attend to Nature, and also allow Nature’s mindedness to spontaneously presence itself in/through/as us and our World.

We likewise need to allow Nature to mind us. That will mean liberating ourselves into the nonduality of Nature and Culture — liberating ourselves into larger ecologies of mind. We can’t really let Nature care for us, guide us, teach us, and even liberate us if we maintain a false duality between Nature and culture.

And one of the problems with human thought, speech, and action is that we have practiced them in ways that exclude the mindedness of Nature and all her beings, and so we have become unable to properly participate in and enjoy the fullest benefits of the larger ecologies of mind that constitutes our world. That larger ecology of mind can help us solve problems and heal our lives together.

For instance, we already know that the vast majority of our medicines ultimately derive from the mindedness of Nature. Scientifically speaking, evolution is a mental process, and by means of evolution, Nature has thought up antibiotics, anti-inflammatories, analgesics, antidepressants, and so much more.

But we in the dominant culture, generally speaking, don’t yet properly engage with the mindedness of Nature, and so we miss all the things Nature has to teach us. As I often say, when Frans de Waals asks his excellent question, “Are we intelligent enough to understand how intelligent non-human beings are?” we must answer, “No.” And that answer applies beyond other “animals”. It applies to the intelligence and mindedness pervasive in Nature.

If this answer persists, it may bring about the collapse of organized human life as we know it. Therefore, we must get beyond this ignorance — and only from beyond it can we say what our real potential is for creative intelligence, for wisdom, love, and beauty, for truly skillful thought, speech, and action.

Our problem in general is human ignorance — not liberalism, not conservativism, not capitalism, not socialism. When an ignorant mind does anything at all, this leads to negative consequences.

This thought properly frames the essential challenge facing most any group or individual in terms of realizing breakthroughs into genuinely creative and skillful patterns of action.

We have gotten saddled with insane notions of “innovation” and “progress”. In our culture, “innovation” and “progress” mean more of the same. We just keep elaborating the same pattern, and the world we depend on keeps getting degraded in the process. “Innovation” and “progress” mean more junk, more waste, more distraction, more little hits of dopamine to keep us going along with the process of making a small number of people wealthy while the world itself becomes depleted.

If we want to go beyond mere “innovation” or what is called “thinking outside the box,” and enter a new age, a new paradigm, something truly incredible (and incredibly needed), this will only come when we have attuned our thinking to the most creative thinking possible — that is to say, the thinking that created butterflies and lotus blossoms, the thinking that created the rainforests and the still-maturing species that must learn to live in harmony with the rainforests.

We must attune ourselves to the creative intelligence of nature. Put another way: We need to transcend so-called “thinking outside the box” and instead practice thinking outside.

That “outside” means thinking outside the skull, and thinking outside the built environment. Thinking is less “in” us than we are in it.

This does not reduce to so-called “metaphysical idealism” or some other “ism”. Nor should we latch onto it in a dualistic way, as if the suggestion that “mind” or the “mindedness” of Nature somehow stands in contrast with “body”.

From our current viewpoint, both “mind” and “body” remain conceptual abstractions. To liberate mind and body requires liberating all the minds and bodies of our world, and allowing those minds and bodies to liberate each of us.

As for time in Nature bringing us more into thinking — thinking properly construed, or, we could say, a more healthy mind, or a more healthy feedback loop between mind and Nature — we can turn to the experience of the cognitive neuroscientist David Strayer, Strayer realized that some of his best ideas came not from hanging around the university, which may seem like an excellent ecology of mind, filled as it is with well-educated people and lots of books and fancy technology to facilitate good ideas.

Instead, Strayer noticed that many excellent ideas emerged after backpacking trips into Nature of 3 days or more. In an interview he said,

Having hiked around the desert for years, I noticed in myself, and from talking to others, that people think differently after being out in the desert. Their thoughts are clearer, they’re certainly more relaxed, they report being more creative. If you can disconnect and experience being in the moment for two or three days, it seems to produce a difference in qualitative thinking.

Sophia — goddess of wisdom — demands a kind of rupture from us. Every genuinely spiritual or philosophical life demands this rupture from us, and so it applies to anyone at all who seeks to accomplish anything at all on the basis of wisdom rather than on the basis of ignorance or stupidity.

We may at first think that business, science, or engineering have nothing to do with such a rupture, but only fools would suggest that we should engage in business, science, or engineering on the basis of ignorance or stupidity. Thus wisdom becomes an inescapable demand for all of us.

This in turn leads us to look toward the wisdom traditions, toward philosophy as the love of wisdom and the wisdom of love. Entering a path of philosophy or LoveWisdom means a rupture with countless habits of daily life, a rupture with the limited and limiting ways of life for which LoveWisdom offers therapeia, therapy for our souls.

We sense the need directly in our own suffering, but also indirectly in the ways our thinking doesn’t accord with spiritual and ecological realities, and so produces unintended negative side-effects like injustice, inequality, pollution, the extinction of species, and so on. Philosophy in practice means we recognize the necessity of wisdom, love, and beauty to such an extent that we make a break with our habits of ignorance, and it feels like a rupture with our familiar life.

In our time especially, we need to see how this rupture with habitual life can become accomplished as reunion with Nature. In other words, we must face the ways in which “civilized” life as we know it stands in a tension with Nature, and how this “civilized” life goes altogether with a measurably degraded thinking — and perhaps also a thinking degraded in ways we currently cannot measure.

Of course, one needs to validate these sorts of anecdotal findings and suggestions — the best way being through practice-realization in, through, and as consummatory experience. But current science in the dominant culture has its own ways of working with experience, and they are not all bad.

Strayer and his co-investigators set up an experiment, the results of which they published under the delightful title, “Creativity in the Wild: Improving Creative Reasoning through Immersion in Natural Settings.” The researchers found something relatively astonishing:

four days of immersion in nature, and the corresponding disconnection from multi-media and technology, increases performance on a creativity, problem-solving task by a full 50% in a group of naïve hikers. Our results demonstrate that there is a cognitive advantage to be realized if we spend time immersed in a natural setting. We anticipate that this advantage comes from an increase in exposure to natural stimuli . . . (Atchley, Strayer, and Atchley 2012: 1)

If we pause and let these findings sink in, we might suggest they gave it the wrong title. They might better have called it “The Creativity of the Wild,” and maybe subtitled it, “Returning Intelligence to Its Proper Place.”

We can connect this study to many others. For instance, Leong et al. (2014) found that, “Students who were more connected with nature preferred innovative and holistic cognitive styles, while controlling for their general emotional status and well-being” (57). They note that their findings, “are the first to establish the link between connectedness with nature and cognitive styles” (57). [See, Are nature lovers more innovative? The relationship between connectedness with nature and cognitive styles. Journal of Environmental Psychology Volume 40, December 2014, Pages 57–63. https://doi-org.oca.ucsc.edu/10.1016/j.jenvp.2014.03.007]

It’s interesting that connectedness to nature may somehow relate to our being more innovative and holistic thinkers. That and the fact that these researchers refer to this as a style of consciousness seems significant. We can miss the ways consciousness has a developmental aspect. Consciousness always seems like . . . consciousness — as if consciousness simply reveals things as they are.

But how consciousness reveals things depends on its development. Development significantly confined to a built environment, and further confined by unskillful and unrealistic philosophies of life, yields a significantly limited consciousness. But we can’t see this easily because, to emphasize the point, consciousness reveals things as if that’s simply how they are; it doesn’t indicate that it only reveals things as we have constructed them.

We find this basic fact supported not only in the above findings, but in countless other empirical findings of both the wisdom traditions and the science of the dominance culture. One rather interesting finding comes from Zelenski et al. (2015). The researchers found that connecting with nature facilitates cooperative, prosocial, and environmentally sustainable behaviors — and this is precisely in contrast to behavior influenced by the built environment. [See, Zelenski et al. (2015). Cooperation is in our nature: Nature exposure may promote cooperative and environmentally sustainable behavior. Journal of Environmental Psychology Volume 42, June 2015, Pages 24–31. https://doi-org.oca.ucsc.edu/10.1016/j.jenvp.2015.01.005]

In a meta-analysis including over 2400 individuals, Shutte and Malouf (2018) found a significant relationship between mindfulness and connectedness with nature. In other words, the built environment seems to go with a style of consciousness that makes us less cooperative, less creative, less mindful, less ecologically sustainable. [See, Schutte, N. S. and Malouff, J. M. (2018). Mindfulness and connectedness to nature: A meta-analytic investigation. Personality and Individual Differences Volume 127, 1 June 2018, Pages 10–14. https://doi-org.oca.ucsc.edu/10.1016/j.paid.2018.01.034]

On the other hand, the style of consciousness arising from rootedness in nature seems more innovative, more holistic, more creative, more cooperative, more sustainable, more present and aware.

Other researchers have looked into things like “forest therapy,” “nature therapy,” and other interventions that support or replicate the findings of David Strayer and his colleagues. All of these lines of research can fall into the trap of keeping the findings and suggestions tame or even co-opting them into our pattern of insanity.

For instance, so-called “forest therapy” may encourage us to take up “forest bathing,” which some authors suggest we can accomplish even in city parks or short walks in relatively tame wooded areas. In an absolute sense, this is true. But the spirit of this sort of therapeutic intervention is not the same as the therapeia of philosophy, which would demand that we see a deeper problem than the need to occasionally “get away from it all,” and would encourage the more significant rupture that “forest bathing” might actually forestall (“forest bathing” can end up by functionally turning forests into our psychic bathtub, severely limiting the mutual empowerment of forests and humans in untold ways).

“Therapy” treats symptoms, while therapeia calls for rebirth and rejuvenation, a reorientation and a reorganization of experience. If extended exposure to Nature gives such startling gains in intelligence, along with other benefits, we have to pause and reflect on the whole organization of society, not try to take better advantage of its current forms of organization by seeking out nearby parks.

What ongoing clarity and coherence, what ongoing intelligence does our current context cut us off from?

If these were new findings, we might hesitate. But, if nothing else, we can recall that retreat into closer communion with Nature sparked Thoreau’s accusation that, “There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but no philosophers.” Such a finding runs through many philosophical and spiritual traditions, even in the dominant culture.

In a similarly Nature-inspired vein, Emerson wrote, in “Nature,”:

In the woods we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life — no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground — my head bathed in the blithe air and lifted into infinite space — all mean egotism vanishes.

Here Emerson properly associates Nature with whatever good thing we would want from what we call “reason” and what we call “faith” or even “emotion”.

These are problematic terms, and “reason” has almost become a disease (one we will not cure by simply abandoning critical thinking). We do want the positive benefits from the delusion we called “reason”. And we find these in our own rootedness — rootedness in the sacred, which we well practice and realize (which we discover-and-create) in/through/with/as forests, mountains, oceans, deserts, and all sentient beings and all of sentient being.

And both Emerson and dominant culture science get at the essence of what we seek: Transcendence of the ego. This is what we want from “reason,” but the dominant culture got lost, perhaps in the fallacy of intellectualism, and the dualities of path-goal, organism-environment, and so on.

Why would Emerson speak of a return to reason and faith? Because of the way a proper attunement with Nature accomplishes a single gesture of rupture and reunion. We can think about this in evolutionary terms. As the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht notes:

We used to get positive psychoterratic feedback between the Earth and ourselves as a natural part of being alive and human. But now if you go to the beach or try to breathe in the clean air in Oregon, you’re going to have plastic, rubbish, and smoke from wildfires all around you. It alienates us from our natural connections in a world that is polluted.

We cannot know, from inside our current epistemology, how we could know in a nurturing psychoterratic feedback loop, a loop that unifies Mind and Nature in ways that activate our creative intelligence and fuller capacities in/through/as styles of thinking we currently access in degraded fashion or not at all. It seems that people hunger for this feedback loop, and for the kind of Mind that emerges in a context more rooted in Nature.

But we cannot simply go rushing into the wilderness. The place to begin opening up the feedback loop of Mind and Nature — the nonduality of Mind and Nature — is right in the center of our own being.

To illustrate the spirit of this proper beginning, I often relate one of the great moment of LoveWisdom. In this great moment, a Brahmin approached Buddha and said, “Well, fortunate one, you are indeed a great medicine for so many people, a great inspiration and guide. And you went into the forest to become that medicine, to become that inspiring leader. But isn’t it hard to go into the forest like that? Isn’t it pretty terrifying and distracting?”

We have to keep in mind that Buddha wasn’t a Navy SEAL or a wilderness survival expert. He was basically raised in the equivalent of a royal family, with not much training about staying in a wild forest with tigers, snakes, and all kinds of other challenging beings and situations. And this Brahmin asking him about it would have been no better off. A Brahmin is a priest, not a wilderness guide.

We should also keep in mind the name given to this discourse: “Fear and Dread” (MN 4, adapted here from various translations). That’s a far more honest title than we may be ready for — perhaps especially so for the more bold and daring among us, who may have so successfully repressed the ego’s basic fear of reality that they no longer sense its presence in a typical hike in the wilderness (and, of course, we have suppressed, repressed, and degraded our wilderness . . . though the Wild itself remains eternal, we have precious little wilderness remaining).

Buddha replies to the Brahmin with one of my favorite expressions from any philosopher: “It’s good that you ask about this — and you’re right, so very right: Any driveller can go into the forest.” That cracks me up every time I share it, like a beautiful philosophical punchline: Any fool can go into the forest. But he actually refers to the fools he has in mind as droolers or drivellers.

This provocative criticism remains true. Anyone at all can wander into the forest today. Anyone at all can take ayahuasca, engage in an equine learning experience, go to yoga retreats in tropical places, or any number of seemingly delightful experiences. And nice things may happen. Why?

Because the forest remains a magical source of medicine — as do horses, mushrooms, and certain (shall we say) mind-body practices. We’re focusing on forests because our practice of place might very likely be (or be near) a forest, even a small one, and also because it helps us to sense the spiritual materialism that can infect our relationship with Nature and with place. In recent times, we have begun to recognize that going into the forest can make us feel really nice. It can feel profoundly therapeutic for some people.

We should honor that. We also need to ask what we might be missing, simply because we have no idea it’s possible anymore.

Buddha goes on to explain to the Brahmin that, when he went into the wild forest, he went with a mind of peace, a mind of love, a mind of compassion, a mind of incredible clarity and stability, a mind of incredible presence and awareness. Put a bit crudely: We will receive from the feedback loop of Mind and Nature only what we have made ourselves ready to receive.

So, the place to begin if we want to make a rupture with our own stupidity and open up to our greater creative intelligence, insight, and healing is the basic teachings of the wisdom traditions. They start us off with a deep discussion of ethics, values, and vision, and they then go on to help us cultivate the mind that Buddha presenced in the forest. When we can do that, the insights we become available to could change our whole world for the better.