Honor Griffin, Changing Human Nature?// Glen Mazis, Oneiric Materialism: Nature/Psyche…// Laura Shamas, Aphrodite and Ecology

 
Honor Griffith, PhD. Changing Human Nature? The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/ Drives my green age. These lines by Dylan Thomas move us so profoundly, I believe, because they capture our intrinsic knowing about our oneness with nature. In dominion over, the earth has spawned a view of human nature characterized by fear, mistrust, and the need for control. These beliefs are internalized in childhood at an age before we even acquire the brain/ mind equipm devastation of our man-made ecological disasters, those unconscious assumptions about our species will continue to undermine our efforts. We must have a new myth about human nature. Fortunately, the ingredients fo neuroscience, child and infant development, complexity theory, quantum biology, and epigenetics point to the possibility of the emergence of a human species embedded in nature and powered by Glen Mazis Oneiric Materialism: Nature/Psyche, Human/Animal, and Embodying Surround Psyche as soul or spirit is found by working with materiality--in the depth of embodied consciousness as enmeshed and reversible with the surround. Human existence as rooted in the earth, psyche accessible through a w exemplified by Jung's working in stone to build the tower integrating aspects of psyche, a concretization of individuation. Oneiric materialism, how matter holds depths of meaning akin to dream logic, correlated with an int emotion, thought and feeling. Depth bodies inseparably interwoven with surround, as are animals inseparably interwoven with surrounds in parallels of feeling, understanding, and even imagining, an interanimality of huma imagination like Gaston Bachelard. Brain science meets the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty in the inseparability of emotion/perception as grounding other understandings to be expressed poetically. The newest develo interweaving of the human and animal, and both of these with certain machines and creative, sensitive aspects of the built, technological surround. Glen A. Mazis teaches philosophy and humanities at Penn State Harrisburg where he is Full Professor, directs the interdisciplinary humanities Masters program, and is a poet who gives readings, performances, and haslove, cooperation and c research in contemporary science and psychology which traverses this terrain. Honor Griffith, PhD is a Jungian based psychotherapist and workshop leader practicing in British Columbia, Canada. Her current work focuses on building a bridge between research in affective neuroscience, attachmen Evoking the Embodied Image: Jung in the Age of the Brain (2006), a review of Phil Mollon's EMDR and the Energy Therapies in Harvest (2005), a review of Robert Romanyshyn's The Soul in Grief in The San Francisco J Divide in Psychology at the Threshold (2000).