Re-Visioning the Earth: A Guide to Opening the Healing Channels Between Mind and Nature
Devereux's focus, in his informative and instructional book, is on our minds rather than on nature, because he believes nature has more power to help us than we have to help it. He calls for an end to the dangerous estrangement we've imposed on the land and for a move toward seeing ourselves as a part of the Earth. Although not an archaist , he does believe in investigating the mindset of ancient peoples and their relationship with the Earth to see how this might usefully be translated to contemporary times. The goal in this brand of "ecopsychology" is to heighten our awareness of our sense of place and then utilize the resulting benefits. He says, "We are now conceptually placed at random in a model of the universe whose center we cannot see and whose periphery we do not know: we are indeed lost in space." We've lost our direct contact with nature and with ourselves in the process. We filter the natural landscape through our urbanized eyes and negate its meaning?its power to heal. Devereux explores the spiritual history of place through such things as maps, pilgrimages and sacred places. He provides experiments at the end of each chapter to help readers incorporate these new-old perceptions into their daily lives. Devereux, a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and member of the Society for Scientific Exploration, believes that we see the natural landscape as merely a spoke in the wheel we call Earth instead of as the wheel itself. Unless we see it as the wheel, Devereux says, it will be us, not the Earth, that stops turning.Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.