Following is the tale of my emergence as an environMENTAList & "E-Co" (Energy Consultant), complete with appearances by Dr. Seuss, a near death experience, a satori, & imaginary Indian friends. I hope you have as much fun reading it as I did remembering it.

The Conscious Consumers Network was just an idea I carried in my head until my head 'exploded' in Feb. '04. Click HERE to read about that.

    Ever since I can remember, I've had a close connection with & affinity for nature. Recently I've come to question myself as to why I seem predisposed to anger when I see trash or a flying out the window of a car or when I read of corporations polluting our shared biosphere as they take it's resources for their profit.

    Why have I always felt so connected to the natural world? Why have I taken it as my personal duty to try to defend it? I have always done things like give to ecology defense funds, voted for political candidates based on their environmental platform, participated in & produced works in various media to help raise environmental awareness. (examples)

    When the idea for the Conscious Consumers' Network began to unfold in my mind, I knew it was something I had to pursue. As I fleshed out the idea it began to take on a gravity of it's own & pulled me into a tight orbit. The idea of "Conscious Consumers" began to consume me. I started to examine what I was doing with my life (musician, etc.) , & it made my other activities seem less important. The idea & what it would take to create it got bigger than me in some respects & I reached the conclusion that the only way I could do it justice was to quit other activities & give it all of my time & attention. However I am not one to jump without looking, so I figured that if I was going to quit things that I enjoyed & or brought me income, then I should closely examine why.

    My first examination led me back to the University of Miami, where I studied Eastern philosophies under noted scholar of Chinese antiquity, Dr. John Knoblock. I became enraptured by the Tao (The great Way). Taoism grew out of the minds of warrior-sages who reflected on the way nature functioned. From this pondering they developed a philosophy designed for survival during the turbulent warring states period in ancient China. This philosophy of being/ non-doing had found a home in me & I've often reflected on the great texts of Taoism (The Tao Te Ching, The Art Of War, etc.) ever since. I referenced them several times as I got to work planning the web site that would become The Conscious Consumers' Network.

    however, I felt there was something deeper driving me. Something from much earlier in my life had to account for my behavior before University. A tattoo would lead me a bit closer to the roots of my environMENTALism.

    That tattoo was on a girl named Danielle that I met not long after getting to work on the "Conscious Consumer" idea.
The tattoo was simply the word "Unless". I asked her about it. “That's from Dr. Seuss's’s The Lorax”. She began to relate elements of the story, & bam! It all came back.

    I had seen an animated version of this story as a child. As we talked, I saw that child in my mind's eye, sitting on the floor in front of the T.V. watching the story. I clearly saw the moments she described on that television through my 5 year old eyes. I had chills as we continued & I felt the sadness that I felt as a child watching the Lorax's world destroyed & as he lifted himself up by his tail to flee his poisoned homeland.

    Danielle saw my emotions & said: "So you get it. You get what 'unless' means". I said "It means, unless somebody does something, that could be our fate. " Danielle exclaimed, "Oh, you do get it." I went on; "Not only do I get it; I'm actually doing something about it."

I went on to describe the "Conscious Consumer Network" & what I planned for it to be. She proofed the first story I wrote for the site & encouraged me to continue. So I did.

    However, there was still something else I hadn't gotten to. The emotions recalled by the Lorax & the remembrance of viewing it as a child was leading me somewhere else. Then I wanted to slap myself for spending so much time getting to the obvious. I thought to my self.."Oh yeah, my 'experience' in the woods & my imaginary childhood friends."

    Mahopac is a small town about 50 miles north Manhattan. It was the kind of place where you could leave your doors open & children could wander about & play freely without worry to their parents. Our home was in wooded, hilly country where the most dangerous thing was swerving to avoid hitting a deer while driving along the country roads.

    If you walked out of my backyard of the house I grew up in you were in thick wooded country for miles.

    My "experience" happened at around
the age of 5 or 7. I've never really known exactly what to call it. I suppose epiphany, satori, or enlightenment experience would all suit whatever it was that happened to me one spring day in the woods. You can see those woods lurking in the background of the photo above. I'm a bit younger in this photo than the age where I was allowed to walk the woods alone & I've since learned the use of a belt. =->

My father & grandfather would take me for walks in these woods as a boy & teach me all kinds of things about them. As I got older, I was allowed to walk the woods alone.

   Walking in the woods became my favorite thing to do. I would often go wandering on my own when not playing cowboys & Indians with my neighborhood friends.

Continued, Top of next column

     If you've seen Oliver Stone's "Born On The 4th of July", you may remember the opening scene of kids playing army in the woods. This looks a lot like where I grew up. When I saw that scene I had a flashback to those times of my youth.

   When I decided I was going to walk in the woods my mom would pack me a lunch & tell me not to go out of site of the house. Then I'd take off, sometimes stopping at the creek about 50 yards beyond from where my back yard ended & the woods began. I’d fill my canteen & look around for arrowheads or my imaginary friend 'Abwoon'. To this day, I'm not sure if I had the normal childhood overactive imagination or if I was seeing 'someone' who may have in some way been "there". I would tell my mom & my "real" friends about the people I sometimes saw by the creek. These people looked & dressed differently than anyone else I had ever seen. They looked a bit like the people I sometimes saw in the movies my dad watched on TV. My father loved the Movie "Last of the Mohicans” & I remember watching that movie & a John Wayne movie called Rio Lobo with him as a child & telling him about the people who lived in the woods who looked like them. My parents took it in stride. 'Oh, the kid just has some imaginary friends. That's normal.' I remember my mom being a bit more nervous at times & my dad reacting.."Listen Rose, I've been back there a million times & there is no one living in the woods."

   I guess my Imaginary Indian friends faded over time as I was continually told they weren't really there & that I just had an active imagination.

   I remembered other things about myself stemming from these experiences; like how I've always rooted for the Indians in cowboy & Indian movies & how easily I was brought to tears when learning about the fate of most Native American tribes during westward expansionism in the 19th century.

   The Mahopac tribe was, as were most native American tribes, believers that the earth belonged not to man but to the great spirit. They resisted British rule (The British tried to recruit the Mahopacs to help fight the rebels during the American Revolution. In a battle on the island in the middle of Lake Mahopac, the tribe fought the Redcoats to the last. Perhaps some of these restless spirits lived on in my woods & found a place in me. Or maybe I just had an overactive imagination.

Click on the image of me @ left to see a short video I took of myself on a May'05 trip back to these woods where I grew up & where the Mohawks, Hurons, Wappinger & Mahopac native Americans once reigned with nature. Sorry the vid is sideways. You try filming yourself while balancing on rocks near the water's edge.

   Which brings me to my "Experience". One beautiful spring day, I think it was the first day school was out for the summer, I decided I would walk farther out into the woods by myself than I ever had before. I reached a spot on top of a hill & looked out over a wide vista of rolling hills covered with trees with new spring green bursting from them. I sat there & was overcome by a feeling of well being that I had not felt before & have only had faint glimpses of since. It was a feeling that everything was connected & made sense & that all I beheld & the all of the universe was there & unfolding everywhere at once in absolute perfection & that I was part & parcel of that unfolding. I can to this very day see that vista & & approach that feeling whenever I meditate on that moment. I see the scene, get a taste of the feeling & even see a group of birds that flew by me & zapped me back to normalcy. It has been my touchstone of serenity several times in my life & is perhaps the single moment that made me the environMENTAList I am to this day. Was this a satori/enlightenment experience, or, like the Indians, just the product of a boy’s active imagination?

   Do I think I was "enlightened? Well, not in the capital 'E', fully actualized way, & in looking back on the way I've lived my life up to this point, I would have to say NO.. I have a few ex-girlfriends that would probably strongly agree with that. There’s one ex who occasionally called me emotionally retarded. However in that moment in the woods, I was deeply & irreversibly interconnected with the natural world. That moment continues to be a renewable resource of peace & clarity. It still brings tears to my eyes when I reflect on it.

  I've come to grok this experience as a connection to the elemental life source & began to see myself as a "SOURCErer".. My word 'sourcerer' intends to take the mystical connotations associated with the word 'sorcerer' & remove it's connection to anything magical or incapable of scientific verification & change it to mean one who seeks to harness & optimally integrate with the empirically verifiable forces & natural resources that birth & sustain everything. The goal: symbiosis between man & the biogeochemical realm. More than anything, that's what that moment on that hill felt like.. It felt like: Homeostasis; like balance, stillness & speed in one. Many times while surfing, I had this moment come back to mind. It was like surfing the life force.

    That moment re-emerged during a recent brush with the death. I suffered a rare type of aneurysm known as an AVM in February of '04 that should have killed or at least permanently disabled me. A burst AVM has a 2% survival rate & a much greater rate of the afflicted becoming a vegetable. Click here if you'd like to read about that & learn more about me on my other web site.

    And so my life has taken me down different paths & into several different lines of work (filmmaker, musician, web developer), but my love of God in nature has never wavered & continues to grow. Now I will use my natural education as well as the Bachelor of Science degree in mass communications from the University of Miami to see how far I can take this quixotic mission. I guess I'll also use the writing that runs in my blood. My grandfather, Harry Haase, was a political science writer & engineer.
E-mail me with comments or recommendations for psychological help

Or help homeostasis between humankind & the biosphere take root by using technologies that integrate rather than incinerate. Check some out in my "Mindful Mall" & use my E-Co services to learn how to save money, live better & pollute less. The goal is a steady, sober shift to energy independence & the re-establishment of the U.S. as the respected, rather than the feared world leader. It's all summed up in my E=C2 equation. =->
In ∞ Love ,
E. Haase
( HawkIconoclast )