one of the more compelling aspects of the stem cell horizon for me isn't so much the notion of an immortality quotient or cosmetic youthening. setting aside even the fascinating biomechanic leverage for tissue regeneration and disease reversions, the opening up of this research and longevity technologies in general suggests that as a sapiens sapiens species we are now at the point, in terms of psychospiritual progress, where we need no longer rely quite so exclusively on the macro gateway of the hardform death/rebirth mechanism in order to restage the problem set of our grappling. nor, perhaps, do we need to call forth with such hair-trigger destructive appetance the cleansing funeral pyre to achieve clear self-confrontation, or relinquish outworn, limited and therefore necrotic attitudes.
put another way, it means we're at a unique turning point wherein we've at last tapped and are slowly exercising the many means by which we can die and be reborn within a single, given lifespan. this type of broad regeneration and responsiveness is more conservative of the energies, and more elegant in terms of dramaturgic staging and wisdom implementation. it would also allow for upgraded inner researches, greater illumination in self-other-habitat relations, and would prove less reliant on collective needs for gross-level passion plays and their often damaging, traumatic upsets for the conveyance of information or experiential reconnoitering.
this indicates there are new psycho- and somanautic technologies pressing for revelation and use by individuals, further untapped potentials for the complete rewriting of ego interfaces, and new opportunities to benefit from karma bringing forth its dharma in a single lifetime, as opposed to along the course of several. the stones are still skipping across the cosmic fantastic, but we won't be needing the drug of dipping back into the hardest harmonic of regeneration for absolution of intractable conflicts and dead-end, stubborn patternings.
Saturday, February 26, 2011
Friday, February 25, 2011
the art of self-analysis
based on current research i've been doing in conjunction with significant dietary intervention, detox, intensive yoga practice, and journaling, its become clear to me that i've developed bipolar disorder with schizophrenic-type psychosis as an adaptation to early adverse experience and aspergers. my interest is to document how such conditions can be engaged and worked with self-reliantly, holistically, and used as biofeedback markers on the circuit back to health and balance.
the aetiology in this case is quite complex, beginning with a neonatal period in foster care marked by extreme neglect of providers and my consequent and complete vegetative regression by 6months. a subsequent period, following a hastily arranged adoption to desperate but ill-suited candidates, lead to a spell of fourteen years of extreme physical and emotional abuse, of the kind sufficient to still be visible upon radiography of pelvic bones. for otherwise well-meaning people with their own impingements of physical illness, alcoholism and post-traumatic-sexual abuse, the stress of coping with an abnormally linguistic and highly precocious child proved too great. degradation of human qualities in the parents was the result.
although extreme and depersonalizing controls remained the norm throughout, the physical violence became untenable around my 14th year following a particularly bad episode that lead to a head injury which in turn raised for the first the possibility of situational disclosure. following on this, the rod was spared and in its macabre place food supplies and basic civility were controlled and withheld, with locks installed on cabinets and cold storage. by 17 i could no longer hold appearances, despite my lifelong and ultimately deeply masochistic sympathy for a broken father and victim-mother. i finally turned to a family doctor for help. his concern was to get me out of the home environment and to medical treatment before i departed for university. unfortunately the restorative clinic he described and i enrolled in turned out to be the general psychiatric unit of the local hospital where more stressors were to be borne.
i drifted in and out of dysfunction until i motivated myself into a film school stream. in spite of a rocky start that included my reaping the price of my programmed-to-bone sympathy for the devil in the form of a short-order of disastrous choices that lead me bewildered into more of the same violences, i ultimately routed a career and a stable chapter of marriage where i encountered the balm of love and understanding for the first time. but as i recovered strength and found some meager promise of success as a restaurateur, the marriage, based in larger measure on the fixity of my wounded dysfunction, failed amicably.
abandonment issues triggered, i then launched myself with vigor into a period of slow dissolution and petulant fraying at the seams. after a misguided and failed reunion with a troubled ex-boyfriend and his subsequent suicide on the eve of my departure, i let go of all self-concern, plunged into depression and substance abuse. a failed suicide attempt brought visions of the kind that caused me to at last snap out of my pain-amplitude and seek a real 'way out.' i turned to a family friend for assistance which led to some healing with one of my abusers. i learned that contrary to the advice i'd been given about the necessity of galvanizing a counter-attack, survivalist posture, it was forgiveness that was essential to my quality of life and sense of purpose.
in the years since i danced on the edge of getting real, preferring to continue to escape much of the pain and insufficiencies i felt with drugs, alcohol and erratic personal behaviour. marginal social and coping skills led me to create opportunities which, when showing promise, were immediately scuttled or run away from, not to mention another round of placing myself in the hands of a few more predatorial opportunists. in the last six years i've had manic swings that've lead me to abandon more than ten employers and cancel every variety of engagement for a variety of reasons ranging from the justified to the completely irrational. i grew increasingly incapable of sustaining most conventional sorts of relationships, especially those of a conjugal nature, and i made repeated blunders in all my personal affairs and social judgements. in spite of talents demonstrated in multiple domains i remain unable to manifest more than the promise of fulfillment and service to society.
yet.
in just two short months of dietary interventions (no meat, no wheat, no dairy, no alcohol, no tobacco, no drugs, eating only plant-based whole foods with occasional baked fish, super minimal grains, cycling in and out of periodic fasting, megadoses of reishi and cordycep mushrooms) and the above mentioned practices, i've been gifted with an objective view on my circumstances that was always slightly out of reach. highly self-analytical and clever, i understand my experiences very well, but this sort of chronic over-analysis left me out of touch with the emotional carnage left in their wake. i now feel more hopeful of integrating my intelligence with emotional attunement, learning to love myself instead of enforcing rigid habits of fear and self-hatred, of exercising wiser choices in my actions, and most important, modulating my social skills to bring myself down from the ice tower and into the play of life with the right companions and larger community of allies.
it was in reading 'Emotional Intelligence' by Daniel Goleman that i was reminded of the healing power of coming clean about the truth. the whole truth. i've often tried to broach this kind of unloading inappropriately, with the wrong people at the wrong time. but in the final analysis, for the cycle of violence, and the exploitation of the once-victimized to end, people like me need to speak their truth, acknowledge their complicity in maintaining suffering where choice is always hiding, and to set about making amends to the life principle that has lent us its persistence. some might say that's what therapy behind closed doors is for, but i don't concur. we need to get our human and often very dirty secrets out in plain view where the sun can melt them.
nature makes her units according to need for this karma machine. thusly, there must be a reason why i've been crafted to have generally withstood the cabinet of horrors to get this far. and while i've made mostly a mess of my recovery and reintegration into what constitutes the normal human family, its only because i've been guided by an unquenchable (if sometimes pathologic) need to give people and life the benefit of doubt.
to reframe, i've been gifted with an understanding of how otherwise decent people can be twisted by their own pain to commit monstrous acts, surely an essential point of view that has broad implications for healing and forgiveness. but i also understand that the people who harmed me in those unconscionable ways were themselves human beings and _not_ monsters. this makes me think that i, like everyone else, have a right to feel a special guiding purpose and a point to my life that i've become newly eager to make good on... for however many chapters i have left.
energy moves through time along a chain of generations that transmits both wisdom and woe. the woe, i've found, can be turned to wisdom, and this is the dross to gold of alchemists' lore.
the aetiology in this case is quite complex, beginning with a neonatal period in foster care marked by extreme neglect of providers and my consequent and complete vegetative regression by 6months. a subsequent period, following a hastily arranged adoption to desperate but ill-suited candidates, lead to a spell of fourteen years of extreme physical and emotional abuse, of the kind sufficient to still be visible upon radiography of pelvic bones. for otherwise well-meaning people with their own impingements of physical illness, alcoholism and post-traumatic-sexual abuse, the stress of coping with an abnormally linguistic and highly precocious child proved too great. degradation of human qualities in the parents was the result.
although extreme and depersonalizing controls remained the norm throughout, the physical violence became untenable around my 14th year following a particularly bad episode that lead to a head injury which in turn raised for the first the possibility of situational disclosure. following on this, the rod was spared and in its macabre place food supplies and basic civility were controlled and withheld, with locks installed on cabinets and cold storage. by 17 i could no longer hold appearances, despite my lifelong and ultimately deeply masochistic sympathy for a broken father and victim-mother. i finally turned to a family doctor for help. his concern was to get me out of the home environment and to medical treatment before i departed for university. unfortunately the restorative clinic he described and i enrolled in turned out to be the general psychiatric unit of the local hospital where more stressors were to be borne.
i drifted in and out of dysfunction until i motivated myself into a film school stream. in spite of a rocky start that included my reaping the price of my programmed-to-bone sympathy for the devil in the form of a short-order of disastrous choices that lead me bewildered into more of the same violences, i ultimately routed a career and a stable chapter of marriage where i encountered the balm of love and understanding for the first time. but as i recovered strength and found some meager promise of success as a restaurateur, the marriage, based in larger measure on the fixity of my wounded dysfunction, failed amicably.
abandonment issues triggered, i then launched myself with vigor into a period of slow dissolution and petulant fraying at the seams. after a misguided and failed reunion with a troubled ex-boyfriend and his subsequent suicide on the eve of my departure, i let go of all self-concern, plunged into depression and substance abuse. a failed suicide attempt brought visions of the kind that caused me to at last snap out of my pain-amplitude and seek a real 'way out.' i turned to a family friend for assistance which led to some healing with one of my abusers. i learned that contrary to the advice i'd been given about the necessity of galvanizing a counter-attack, survivalist posture, it was forgiveness that was essential to my quality of life and sense of purpose.
in the years since i danced on the edge of getting real, preferring to continue to escape much of the pain and insufficiencies i felt with drugs, alcohol and erratic personal behaviour. marginal social and coping skills led me to create opportunities which, when showing promise, were immediately scuttled or run away from, not to mention another round of placing myself in the hands of a few more predatorial opportunists. in the last six years i've had manic swings that've lead me to abandon more than ten employers and cancel every variety of engagement for a variety of reasons ranging from the justified to the completely irrational. i grew increasingly incapable of sustaining most conventional sorts of relationships, especially those of a conjugal nature, and i made repeated blunders in all my personal affairs and social judgements. in spite of talents demonstrated in multiple domains i remain unable to manifest more than the promise of fulfillment and service to society.
yet.
in just two short months of dietary interventions (no meat, no wheat, no dairy, no alcohol, no tobacco, no drugs, eating only plant-based whole foods with occasional baked fish, super minimal grains, cycling in and out of periodic fasting, megadoses of reishi and cordycep mushrooms) and the above mentioned practices, i've been gifted with an objective view on my circumstances that was always slightly out of reach. highly self-analytical and clever, i understand my experiences very well, but this sort of chronic over-analysis left me out of touch with the emotional carnage left in their wake. i now feel more hopeful of integrating my intelligence with emotional attunement, learning to love myself instead of enforcing rigid habits of fear and self-hatred, of exercising wiser choices in my actions, and most important, modulating my social skills to bring myself down from the ice tower and into the play of life with the right companions and larger community of allies.
it was in reading 'Emotional Intelligence' by Daniel Goleman that i was reminded of the healing power of coming clean about the truth. the whole truth. i've often tried to broach this kind of unloading inappropriately, with the wrong people at the wrong time. but in the final analysis, for the cycle of violence, and the exploitation of the once-victimized to end, people like me need to speak their truth, acknowledge their complicity in maintaining suffering where choice is always hiding, and to set about making amends to the life principle that has lent us its persistence. some might say that's what therapy behind closed doors is for, but i don't concur. we need to get our human and often very dirty secrets out in plain view where the sun can melt them.
nature makes her units according to need for this karma machine. thusly, there must be a reason why i've been crafted to have generally withstood the cabinet of horrors to get this far. and while i've made mostly a mess of my recovery and reintegration into what constitutes the normal human family, its only because i've been guided by an unquenchable (if sometimes pathologic) need to give people and life the benefit of doubt.
to reframe, i've been gifted with an understanding of how otherwise decent people can be twisted by their own pain to commit monstrous acts, surely an essential point of view that has broad implications for healing and forgiveness. but i also understand that the people who harmed me in those unconscionable ways were themselves human beings and _not_ monsters. this makes me think that i, like everyone else, have a right to feel a special guiding purpose and a point to my life that i've become newly eager to make good on... for however many chapters i have left.
energy moves through time along a chain of generations that transmits both wisdom and woe. the woe, i've found, can be turned to wisdom, and this is the dross to gold of alchemists' lore.
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
long nights...
...researching the fairly recent advent of lateralization in brain function, its relationship to language and the act of externalizing knowledge on the printed page, epigenetics, the role of the thyroid and other microinformational substances in the blood and how all these factors serve to rewrite everything, deconstructing especially all those silly pinker- and dawkins-esque reductios about gene supremacy and brain-centric notions of consciousness...
some preliminary thoughts on ferguson's killer apps
the problem with competition
lauded as the engine and leading contributing factor of western ascendency, and a model for idea-harnessing, habitat-engagement and wealth management.
unfortunately, competitive cut and thrust has also been used as an excuse for exploitative and unjust practices, the squandering and mismanaging of both tangible and intellectual resources, and on an on-going basis, serves to lower the threshold of what people and organizations are willing to establish and accept as base benchmarks of human rights and respect for the planet.
what's more, now that the grand race for space and property acquisitions is nearing saturation point, the competitive dynamic itself, old hat and coming-of-age-banal, can only lead to ultimate and disastrous implosions. as necessary and inevitable a technological development as competition was, and notwithstanding the plateau of conveniences and infrastructure it's delivered us unto, as the song goes, it's just a phase we're going thru... and from here on out, there are better ways to get to rome.
we're on the cusp of a new era of commerce models that will look to constructive tactics for mutual betterment, harmonious use of the commons, and equitable treatment of manpower and units of production. such postures of business and interpersonal relations will not only bring enlightened-self-interest and compassionate stewardship to center stage, they will exponentially build benefit into a system that currently creates more social carnage and blood cost than it does substantive progress.
the problem with science
an epistemological dogma that brought with it a host of transitional advantages, but its basic tenets have been lost in its latter day translations and efforts to dominate power complexes, society at large and the life of the individual.
like organized religion, its counterpartner, science has become a denatured version of an original posture of investigation and is now responsible for enough madness, and obstruction of real inquiry, truth and progress as to shame its founding visionaries.
in future we can look forward to a deconstruction of science's central nexus, both philosophically, as flawed and limiting principles and precepts are exposed for truth, and politically, in terms of its beyond-reproach-or-question investiture with government, universities, and the agri-pharma complex, and the sour fruit such marriages of convenience have produced.
in its place, expect the emergence of a post-scientific approach, one which coalesces a more dynamically comprehensive platform of innovative investigations into the harnessing of matter and energy and ideas, incorporating what hitherto has been dismissed as irrational, unscientific, or 'supernatural hocus pocus' in nature.
the problem with property
the problem isn't with property ownership per se, but the impedances in place which prevent the majority from entering this equity stream. still, property ownership has more to do with serving the anxieties of colonialist expansionism, frontiersmanship, and personal and group security issues, than it does serving the interests of human infrastructure, transmission of assets, or prosperity wishes.
the problem with medicine
advances in infectious controls came in spite of the medical system, as the case of Semmelweis ably demonstrates, and as we harvest the just desserts of our misapprehension and misguided engagement of viruses and bacteria on the one hand, and the whole notion of hygiene, immunity and vaccination on the other, we can set to one side any notion that the history of medicine is purely heroic and a clear win-win for the books.
further, our record in disease management and drug intervention is only now coming to be known in its full and dastardly complexion. if one thing is certain, people have overcome illnesses more often in spite of conventional medical treatment than because of it.
the medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth and the disempowerment of women and children; the subordination of the intelligence of the body to white coat conjecture and objectification; the huge cost to society of the physician-endorsed disconnect around food habits and lifestyles, these are just a few of the liabilities of the current model. added to this, as a practical seat of operations, hospitals, diagnostic clinics, and rehabilitation centers are among the most inflationary institutions going, rapidly out-pricing themselves from the reach of either governments or individuals.
look to a future of true integrative medicine and a culture of prevention that brings to the fore all the rapidly-emerging holistic sciences while systemically re-introducing individualized, self-responsible care that sees people taking responsibility for their health under the guidance, not direction, of wellness advocates.
the problem with consumption
as a catalyst for economic growth, need-creation and consumption-chic are ultimately unstable and mostly lead to a host of toxic attitudes and unintentionally humanity-retarding side-effects.
expect a horizon event where manufacturers at last intuit that true innovation and progress, and therefore profitability, come when genuine human interests and delights are served. those who persist in making junk, units of planned obsolescence and/or insisting on the fossil forms of old will learn the hard way. no one ever factors into their economic forecasts seismic events at the level of collective affect that can suddenly shift our spending habits away from bullshit towards value, freedom, and longevity.
lauded as the engine and leading contributing factor of western ascendency, and a model for idea-harnessing, habitat-engagement and wealth management.
unfortunately, competitive cut and thrust has also been used as an excuse for exploitative and unjust practices, the squandering and mismanaging of both tangible and intellectual resources, and on an on-going basis, serves to lower the threshold of what people and organizations are willing to establish and accept as base benchmarks of human rights and respect for the planet.
what's more, now that the grand race for space and property acquisitions is nearing saturation point, the competitive dynamic itself, old hat and coming-of-age-banal, can only lead to ultimate and disastrous implosions. as necessary and inevitable a technological development as competition was, and notwithstanding the plateau of conveniences and infrastructure it's delivered us unto, as the song goes, it's just a phase we're going thru... and from here on out, there are better ways to get to rome.
we're on the cusp of a new era of commerce models that will look to constructive tactics for mutual betterment, harmonious use of the commons, and equitable treatment of manpower and units of production. such postures of business and interpersonal relations will not only bring enlightened-self-interest and compassionate stewardship to center stage, they will exponentially build benefit into a system that currently creates more social carnage and blood cost than it does substantive progress.
the problem with science
an epistemological dogma that brought with it a host of transitional advantages, but its basic tenets have been lost in its latter day translations and efforts to dominate power complexes, society at large and the life of the individual.
like organized religion, its counterpartner, science has become a denatured version of an original posture of investigation and is now responsible for enough madness, and obstruction of real inquiry, truth and progress as to shame its founding visionaries.
in future we can look forward to a deconstruction of science's central nexus, both philosophically, as flawed and limiting principles and precepts are exposed for truth, and politically, in terms of its beyond-reproach-or-question investiture with government, universities, and the agri-pharma complex, and the sour fruit such marriages of convenience have produced.
in its place, expect the emergence of a post-scientific approach, one which coalesces a more dynamically comprehensive platform of innovative investigations into the harnessing of matter and energy and ideas, incorporating what hitherto has been dismissed as irrational, unscientific, or 'supernatural hocus pocus' in nature.
the problem with property
the problem isn't with property ownership per se, but the impedances in place which prevent the majority from entering this equity stream. still, property ownership has more to do with serving the anxieties of colonialist expansionism, frontiersmanship, and personal and group security issues, than it does serving the interests of human infrastructure, transmission of assets, or prosperity wishes.
the problem with medicine
advances in infectious controls came in spite of the medical system, as the case of Semmelweis ably demonstrates, and as we harvest the just desserts of our misapprehension and misguided engagement of viruses and bacteria on the one hand, and the whole notion of hygiene, immunity and vaccination on the other, we can set to one side any notion that the history of medicine is purely heroic and a clear win-win for the books.
further, our record in disease management and drug intervention is only now coming to be known in its full and dastardly complexion. if one thing is certain, people have overcome illnesses more often in spite of conventional medical treatment than because of it.
the medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth and the disempowerment of women and children; the subordination of the intelligence of the body to white coat conjecture and objectification; the huge cost to society of the physician-endorsed disconnect around food habits and lifestyles, these are just a few of the liabilities of the current model. added to this, as a practical seat of operations, hospitals, diagnostic clinics, and rehabilitation centers are among the most inflationary institutions going, rapidly out-pricing themselves from the reach of either governments or individuals.
look to a future of true integrative medicine and a culture of prevention that brings to the fore all the rapidly-emerging holistic sciences while systemically re-introducing individualized, self-responsible care that sees people taking responsibility for their health under the guidance, not direction, of wellness advocates.
the problem with consumption
as a catalyst for economic growth, need-creation and consumption-chic are ultimately unstable and mostly lead to a host of toxic attitudes and unintentionally humanity-retarding side-effects.
expect a horizon event where manufacturers at last intuit that true innovation and progress, and therefore profitability, come when genuine human interests and delights are served. those who persist in making junk, units of planned obsolescence and/or insisting on the fossil forms of old will learn the hard way. no one ever factors into their economic forecasts seismic events at the level of collective affect that can suddenly shift our spending habits away from bullshit towards value, freedom, and longevity.
Monday, February 14, 2011
“However, potent brains are not strengthened by milk, but by alkaloids. An organ of such small size and great vulnerability, which not only approached the pyramids and gamma-rays, lions and icebergs, but created and invented them, cannot be watered like a forget-me-not, it will discover its own supplies….The brain is the mutative revolutionary organ par excellence. Its nature was always form, not content; its means expansion, its needs — stimuli.”
[Gottfried Benn, Provoziertes Leben (1941)]
[Gottfried Benn, Provoziertes Leben (1941)]
Sunday, February 13, 2011
loyalty is a false premise
that which must perforce be demanded or expected of us as moral concept or social/romantic ideal is often artificial to life and deconstructive of desired longterm outcome. that which emerges indirectly from a deep commitment to keeping love and wisdom vital, to authenticity of means and engagement, embracing the variegated textures of the life-journey, seems more often to support happiness-expansion and produce the sustainable complexities important to species.
.
.
.
.
loyalty itself should perhaps be viewed as a happy, blessed coincident but irregular guest, instead of the dogmatic social contract and intrigue-engine of daytime television that its sadly morphosed into. this continuity experience, of traveling unitedly with certain ideals, habits, and people, is not one we ought pursue for its own sake, nor should we draw credit on it as evidence of some shining quality of character on our parts. instead we could perhaps honour its spontaneous appearance as a mere secondary byproduct of the more important value of being true to the shifting needs of the life arc, working as best we can with impelling forces we resist at our peril, those which rather insist we follow the unique situational and inbred directives tending toward continuous evolution and flow of our only-once-on-earth snowflake matrices.
.
.
.
.
loyalty itself should perhaps be viewed as a happy, blessed coincident but irregular guest, instead of the dogmatic social contract and intrigue-engine of daytime television that its sadly morphosed into. this continuity experience, of traveling unitedly with certain ideals, habits, and people, is not one we ought pursue for its own sake, nor should we draw credit on it as evidence of some shining quality of character on our parts. instead we could perhaps honour its spontaneous appearance as a mere secondary byproduct of the more important value of being true to the shifting needs of the life arc, working as best we can with impelling forces we resist at our peril, those which rather insist we follow the unique situational and inbred directives tending toward continuous evolution and flow of our only-once-on-earth snowflake matrices.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
on synthetic drugs
Drugs work principally to mimic the restoration of health by suppressing symptomatic signals, or by artificially inducing desired-for effects at the level of organic chemistry, thereby handicapping the body from resuming normal functions. In this respect drugs impair vital reaction, curtail the intelligent response-ability of the immune and lymphatic systems, 'chaotisize' microinformational exchanges in the blood, and induce a host of unwanted side-effects more dangerous than the original ailment.
on incurable diseases
There's a saying among holistic practitioners, "If you think you have a curable disease, you are right. If you think you have an incurable disease, you are right."
This is a complex question to answer in a sound byte so I'll skirt much nuance by saying simply that we are most certainly the products of our inner attitudes and expectations. One of my principle teachers, the esteemed homeopath and founder of the CG Jung Institute of New York, E.C. Whitmont, MD., wrote a very important book on the role of disease called 'The Alchemy of Healing.' He makes the uncommon point that very frequently illness serves other compensatory functions in individual life sagas and that not every case is fated for the resolutions hoped for in the new age. Very often illnesses can outmatch the physiologic and psychological capacities of people, enmeshed as we are in a dramaturgy which conditions us entirely but which we rarely see for truth.
In cases such as these, on deeper inquiry we see evidence that the experience of suffering through the illness and reconciling to a perhaps earlier than necessary death serves a purpose in the life not readily reducible to the linear hopes of our hero- and success-fixated age. We tend to view illness as a misfortune, rather than a constructive adaptive mechanism of cellular intelligence and soul entelechy. When we're able to work _with_ our illness, in gratitude for the imbalances it brings to light and to our attention, we're immeasurably gifted with an advantage in healing. It goes without saying, there are sufficient reports of so-called hopeless cases which have transitioned to complete cure for us to reject much of the prognosis technology of causalistic modern medicine and its drastic chemical and mechanical interventions.
Working holistically with well-chosen interventions, resisting the temptation to suppress the natural vectors of the illness, but instead harnessing innate powers to return the disease to quiessence is a complex art involving, for both patient and healer, all levels of the human person: physical, psychological, emotional, and spiritual. Attitude, in the end, is not only an a priori determinant, it conditions and constrains the range of therapies and treatments available to us but either shutting down or opening up the possible.
This is a complex question to answer in a sound byte so I'll skirt much nuance by saying simply that we are most certainly the products of our inner attitudes and expectations. One of my principle teachers, the esteemed homeopath and founder of the CG Jung Institute of New York, E.C. Whitmont, MD., wrote a very important book on the role of disease called 'The Alchemy of Healing.' He makes the uncommon point that very frequently illness serves other compensatory functions in individual life sagas and that not every case is fated for the resolutions hoped for in the new age. Very often illnesses can outmatch the physiologic and psychological capacities of people, enmeshed as we are in a dramaturgy which conditions us entirely but which we rarely see for truth.
In cases such as these, on deeper inquiry we see evidence that the experience of suffering through the illness and reconciling to a perhaps earlier than necessary death serves a purpose in the life not readily reducible to the linear hopes of our hero- and success-fixated age. We tend to view illness as a misfortune, rather than a constructive adaptive mechanism of cellular intelligence and soul entelechy. When we're able to work _with_ our illness, in gratitude for the imbalances it brings to light and to our attention, we're immeasurably gifted with an advantage in healing. It goes without saying, there are sufficient reports of so-called hopeless cases which have transitioned to complete cure for us to reject much of the prognosis technology of causalistic modern medicine and its drastic chemical and mechanical interventions.
Working holistically with well-chosen interventions, resisting the temptation to suppress the natural vectors of the illness, but instead harnessing innate powers to return the disease to quiessence is a complex art involving, for both patient and healer, all levels of the human person: physical, psychological, emotional, and spiritual. Attitude, in the end, is not only an a priori determinant, it conditions and constrains the range of therapies and treatments available to us but either shutting down or opening up the possible.
on weight loss
A common misconception views problem weight as a mere product of excess caloric inputs when compared to energy used and calories burned in the course of our daily activities and physiologic processes. The truth is a little more complex. Our bodies actually use adipose tissue, or subcutaneous fat, for the storage of interstitial wastes and environmental toxins. Structurally, we tend to pad and protect the organism according to the quality of fats we ingest, with denatured diets tending to higher-risk-factor stomach girth, and healthier fats tending to put down in the gluteal and thigh areas where its better supported.
We also lay down extra mass according to self-image and shame patterns, deeply ingrained psychological affects which take root following trauma or as a result of incompletely resolved stress. Lifestyle factors and inherited dispositions also combine to tend us toward practices that can adversely affect metabolism, compromise hepatic and renal functions, and impair blood glucose regulation, causing the body to lay in precautionary fat stores.
As we move toward a more whole foods-based diet, rich in alkalizing plant sources, long-chain fats, complete mineral sources and proper hydration, we naturally become more disposed to the zest of physical activity, and more open to recognizing emotional habits of eating. As the inner organs heal and resolve their imbalances, particularly the liver, pancreas, and colon, we become more able to release negative self-concepts, and feel more comfortably drawn to embark on the lifelong path of deep personal inquiry and self-acceptance work so important to general health and healing.
Diets as a method of weight-loss are proven tools of suffering and failure and should be carefully avoided. They prey on our weakness for wanting quick solutions, dispose us to unreasonable expectations and harsh attitudes towards the body. In their place, simply and slowly improving the basic quality of natural health will tend us towards gradual and sustainable weight-loss and glorious, beneficent patience.
We also lay down extra mass according to self-image and shame patterns, deeply ingrained psychological affects which take root following trauma or as a result of incompletely resolved stress. Lifestyle factors and inherited dispositions also combine to tend us toward practices that can adversely affect metabolism, compromise hepatic and renal functions, and impair blood glucose regulation, causing the body to lay in precautionary fat stores.
As we move toward a more whole foods-based diet, rich in alkalizing plant sources, long-chain fats, complete mineral sources and proper hydration, we naturally become more disposed to the zest of physical activity, and more open to recognizing emotional habits of eating. As the inner organs heal and resolve their imbalances, particularly the liver, pancreas, and colon, we become more able to release negative self-concepts, and feel more comfortably drawn to embark on the lifelong path of deep personal inquiry and self-acceptance work so important to general health and healing.
Diets as a method of weight-loss are proven tools of suffering and failure and should be carefully avoided. They prey on our weakness for wanting quick solutions, dispose us to unreasonable expectations and harsh attitudes towards the body. In their place, simply and slowly improving the basic quality of natural health will tend us towards gradual and sustainable weight-loss and glorious, beneficent patience.
on GMOs
GMOs are a technological mechanism designed purely for the furtherance and convenience of the monocultural production schemes of corporate agriculture. These genetic modifications are dressed to impress by positing a host of bionic-type improvements in food 'products' but in truth they intrude on the organisms' inherent logic of developed form, functionality, and habitat-responsiveness.
Instead of working biodynamically to restore the soil mantles and reverse the systemic effects of monocultures, and the polluting tools of large scale chemical farming, these GMO intrusions only serve to further entrench the dissonance of our practices with natural laws, and will certainly have the disastrous result of supplanting unmodified wild organisms.
Equally troubling, the effects on human health have been insufficiently and irresponsibly examined. The quick-tracking by governments of these modifications reflect a macabre dislocation around an uncommon-sense truth: all life forms are direct end-products of the food sources they consume. A moratorium on this technology must be campaigned for while sustainable practices for farming and agriculture promoted in the form of public and producer education.
Instead of working biodynamically to restore the soil mantles and reverse the systemic effects of monocultures, and the polluting tools of large scale chemical farming, these GMO intrusions only serve to further entrench the dissonance of our practices with natural laws, and will certainly have the disastrous result of supplanting unmodified wild organisms.
Equally troubling, the effects on human health have been insufficiently and irresponsibly examined. The quick-tracking by governments of these modifications reflect a macabre dislocation around an uncommon-sense truth: all life forms are direct end-products of the food sources they consume. A moratorium on this technology must be campaigned for while sustainable practices for farming and agriculture promoted in the form of public and producer education.
Thursday, February 3, 2011
the abstract for pauling's unified theory of CVD
A Unified Theory of Human Cardiovascular Disease
Leading the Way to the Abolition of this Disease as a Cause for Human Mortality
"An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out and that the growing generation is familiar with the idea from the beginning."
[Max Plank]
Until now therapeutic concepts for human cardiovascular disease (CVD) were targeting individual pathomechanisms or specific risk factor. On the basis of genetic, metabolic, evolutionary, and clinical evidence we present here a unified pathogenetic and therapeutic approach. Ascorbate deficiency is the precondition and common denominator of human CVD. Ascorbate deficiency is the result of the inability of man to synthesize ascorbate endogenously in combination with insufficient dietary intake.
The invariable morphological consequences of chronic ascorbate deficiency in the vascular wall are the loosening of the connective tissue and the loss of the endothelial barrier function. Thus human CVD is a form of pre-scurvy. The multitude of pathomechanisms that lead to the clinical manifestation of CVD are primarily defense mechanisms aiming at the stabilization of the vascular wall. After the loss of endogenous ascorbate production during the evolution of man these defense mechanisms became life-saving. They counteracted the fatal consequences of scurvy and particularly of blood loss through the scorbutic vascular wall. These countermeasures constitute a genetic and a metabolic level. The genetic level is characterized by the evolutionary advantage of inherited features that lead to a thickening of the vascular wall, including a multitude of inherited diseases.
The metabolic level is characterized by the close connection of ascorbate with metabolic regulatory systems that determine the risk profile for CVD in clinical cardiology today. The most frequent mechanism is the deposition of lipoproteins, particularly lipoprotein (a) [Lp(a)], in the vascular wall. With sustained ascorbate deficiency, the result of insufficient ascorbate uptake, these defense mechanisms overshoot and lead to the development of CVD. Premature CVD is essentially unknown in all animal species that produce high amounts of ascorbate endogenously. In humans, unable to produce endogenous ascorbate, CVD became one of the most frequent diseases.
The genetic mutation that rendered all human beings today dependent on dietary ascorbate is the universal underlying cause of CVD. Optimum dietary ascorbate intake will correct this common genetic defect and prevent its deleterious consequences. Clinical confirmation of this theory should largely abolish CVD as a cause for mortality in this generation and future generations of mankind.
Leading the Way to the Abolition of this Disease as a Cause for Human Mortality
"An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out and that the growing generation is familiar with the idea from the beginning."
[Max Plank]
Until now therapeutic concepts for human cardiovascular disease (CVD) were targeting individual pathomechanisms or specific risk factor. On the basis of genetic, metabolic, evolutionary, and clinical evidence we present here a unified pathogenetic and therapeutic approach. Ascorbate deficiency is the precondition and common denominator of human CVD. Ascorbate deficiency is the result of the inability of man to synthesize ascorbate endogenously in combination with insufficient dietary intake.
The invariable morphological consequences of chronic ascorbate deficiency in the vascular wall are the loosening of the connective tissue and the loss of the endothelial barrier function. Thus human CVD is a form of pre-scurvy. The multitude of pathomechanisms that lead to the clinical manifestation of CVD are primarily defense mechanisms aiming at the stabilization of the vascular wall. After the loss of endogenous ascorbate production during the evolution of man these defense mechanisms became life-saving. They counteracted the fatal consequences of scurvy and particularly of blood loss through the scorbutic vascular wall. These countermeasures constitute a genetic and a metabolic level. The genetic level is characterized by the evolutionary advantage of inherited features that lead to a thickening of the vascular wall, including a multitude of inherited diseases.
The metabolic level is characterized by the close connection of ascorbate with metabolic regulatory systems that determine the risk profile for CVD in clinical cardiology today. The most frequent mechanism is the deposition of lipoproteins, particularly lipoprotein (a) [Lp(a)], in the vascular wall. With sustained ascorbate deficiency, the result of insufficient ascorbate uptake, these defense mechanisms overshoot and lead to the development of CVD. Premature CVD is essentially unknown in all animal species that produce high amounts of ascorbate endogenously. In humans, unable to produce endogenous ascorbate, CVD became one of the most frequent diseases.
The genetic mutation that rendered all human beings today dependent on dietary ascorbate is the universal underlying cause of CVD. Optimum dietary ascorbate intake will correct this common genetic defect and prevent its deleterious consequences. Clinical confirmation of this theory should largely abolish CVD as a cause for mortality in this generation and future generations of mankind.
rapture vs ecstasy
from diane ackerman's an alchemy of mind in the 'notes, addenda, and afterthoughts' section...
>> Difference between rapture and ecstasy: Rapture means, literally, being "seized by force," as if one were a prey animal who is carried away. Caught in the talons of a transcendent rapture, one is gripped, elevated, and trapped at a fearsome height. To the ancient Greeks, this feeling often foretold malevolence and danger - other words that drink from the same rapturous source are rapacious, rabid, ravenous, ravage, rape, usurp, surreptitious. Bird of prey that plunge from the skies to gore their victims are known as raptors. Seized by a jagged and violent force, the enraptured are carried aloft to their ultimate doom.
Ecstasy also means to be gripped by passion, but from a slightly different perspective: rapture is vertical, ecstasy is horizontal. Rapture is high flying, ecstasy occurs on the ground. For some reason, the ancient Greeks were obsessed with the symbols of standing and relied on that one image for countless ideas, feelings, and objects. As a result, a great many of our words today simply reflect where or how things stand: stanchion, status, stare, staunch, steadfast, statute, and constant. But there are also hundreds of unexpected ones, such as stank (standing water), stallion (standing in a stall), star (standing in the sky), restaurant (standing place for the wanderer), prostate (standing in front of the bladder), and so on. To the Greeks, ecstasy meant to stand outside oneself. How is that possible? Through existential engineering. "Give me a place to stand," Archimedes proclaimed in the third century B.C., "and I will move the earth." Levered by ecstasy, one springs out of one's mind. Thrown free of one's normal self, one stands in another place, at the limits of body, society, and reason, watching the known world dwindle in the distance (a spot standing far away)...<<
[note: it would be interesting to explore the centrality of this 'standing' metaphor in terms of the earth's EMF and what recent investigations of the last decade have revealed in terms of our abiding need for connection between our naked soles and the earth. -MB]
>> Difference between rapture and ecstasy: Rapture means, literally, being "seized by force," as if one were a prey animal who is carried away. Caught in the talons of a transcendent rapture, one is gripped, elevated, and trapped at a fearsome height. To the ancient Greeks, this feeling often foretold malevolence and danger - other words that drink from the same rapturous source are rapacious, rabid, ravenous, ravage, rape, usurp, surreptitious. Bird of prey that plunge from the skies to gore their victims are known as raptors. Seized by a jagged and violent force, the enraptured are carried aloft to their ultimate doom.
Ecstasy also means to be gripped by passion, but from a slightly different perspective: rapture is vertical, ecstasy is horizontal. Rapture is high flying, ecstasy occurs on the ground. For some reason, the ancient Greeks were obsessed with the symbols of standing and relied on that one image for countless ideas, feelings, and objects. As a result, a great many of our words today simply reflect where or how things stand: stanchion, status, stare, staunch, steadfast, statute, and constant. But there are also hundreds of unexpected ones, such as stank (standing water), stallion (standing in a stall), star (standing in the sky), restaurant (standing place for the wanderer), prostate (standing in front of the bladder), and so on. To the Greeks, ecstasy meant to stand outside oneself. How is that possible? Through existential engineering. "Give me a place to stand," Archimedes proclaimed in the third century B.C., "and I will move the earth." Levered by ecstasy, one springs out of one's mind. Thrown free of one's normal self, one stands in another place, at the limits of body, society, and reason, watching the known world dwindle in the distance (a spot standing far away)...<<
[note: it would be interesting to explore the centrality of this 'standing' metaphor in terms of the earth's EMF and what recent investigations of the last decade have revealed in terms of our abiding need for connection between our naked soles and the earth. -MB]
"We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on my body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography - to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience. All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps."
[Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient]
[Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient]
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