michael's blog

Four twenty-something’s sit together pushing their happy meals around the table oblivious to each other and the environment. Each is enchanted by a different view of the same virtual-reality. Not so smart after all. I am suspicious of brands that merge the image of ‘smart’ with ‘technology’. Quick, convenient, multi featured yes, but smart, no.

Joseph Chilton Pearce claims that humanity is growing up in a virtual-reality with a corresponding loss of empathy and care for nature.

We assume that technology and science are highpoints of evolution. But evolution has been involved with the development of greater neural structures of the brain and the subsequent human capacities to move beyond the limitations and constraints of the lower animas… A rocket to the moon does not represent an evolutionary expansion… A discovery of humanitie's immunity to fire or cold or our freedom from having to eat food [awareness of telepathy, development of intuition and insight, not to mention daily doses of empathy and kindness] – these are clear cases of evolutionary expansion. Our move beyond violence, war, and hatred would be a high-water mark of human evolution.

Joseph Chilton Pearce
The Death of Religion and Rebirth of Spirit

At the heart of my caution about virtual-reality technologies is the way they percolate into the lives of children before their bodies and brains have matured, not in a virtual-reality but in an organic one. Cool, quick, convenient and multi-featured is not enough. Discrimination and making appropriate choices are not possible without a strong, steady, living-reality as a reference. And that is, by objective measure, slipping away. Keep in mind that technological induced virtual-reality is dead. What the developing body and brain needs most of all are intimate experiences and relationships with life. The more children relate with dead things the more like them they become.

If there is a single force that generates inequality, violence and war throughout the world, other than the Central Bank, I vote for the self-image we create gazing up for assurance and approval as infants. At this early stage of development what emerges from that glance is not a fixed image, rather feelings: of acceptance, of care, welcoming, understanding, empathy, encouragement or their opposites; rejection, anger, frustration, neglect and the various forms of abuse.

Over time the repetition of these feelings coalesce, merge and form predictable patterns and these in turn create the scaffolding upon which our social identity is formed. Belonging means survival. Rejection could mean death. So we began to judge our worth and value based on the emotional reactions we experience in the mirror of our primary relationship.

Being accepted and maintaining the bond or attachment with mother extends to father, siblings, extended family, tribe and village. Instead of glances our value is based on comparison; our score, grade point average, nationality, race, profession, political party, social status, cast, club, gang, and religion. Our identity and self-worth are sculpted by the selfish needs of these social groups and within each sub-group is a pecking order forged by comparison, allegiance, obedience and conformity. Conflict, greed and war are implicit in this structure and this structure is based on mental-emotional images that forge our identity.

It begins very early, perhaps with the first spark of life; relationship, connection, a drive to resonate with life and especially with forms just like us. We call it family, bonding, attachment. But we get so confused, all that chattering in our head and the obsession that others must hear those voices too. We want to be seen, felt, understood and appreciated. So we tell them, all the time.

That is one side of the communion dynamic, sharing who we are this moment. The other side is observing and listening. One side has a need to be known and the other has a need to know. These two sides of the communication coin are very different.

Of course, we know what it feels like to want to be seen, appreciate and understood. As a baby we look up and smile, hoping that others will smile too. We scribble paint on a slip of paper, hold it up, and say ‘look.’ Most adulterated adults – I call them dults – look at the paper and begin their predictable rant; ‘Oh, isn’t that nice. Look at how big the sky is.’ ‘Is that the sky?’ ‘People don’t have three heads.’ Inside the child sits whispering to him or herself, ‘No Mommy. Look at me. Look at what I did.’

Martin Luther King and his Viet Nam War.

I was pretty young in the early 60s’ when JFK was politically neutralized. The civil rights movement was no less dramatic. I saw one or two sound bites about something happening in the South. My older sister and brother’s friends were being drafted; protests at Kent State; Viet Nam. I was clueless.

I was also clueless about this guy named Martin Luther King, marching in Birmingham for civil rights. Why, did you know that just a few years ago people of color could not sit next to white folk at the neighbor diner? Children of color had to sit at the back of the bus, could not attend white schools. Imagine that? He had a dream and so must we.

It wasn’t until last year that I actually listened to what this man King was saying. Then I understood why he was shot. No, he was not perfect. But he stood up and faced evil, pointed to what it is, in many ways like the Occupy Movement is doing today, the same evil.

I invite you to listen for yourself – carefully - to what Martin Luther King had to say about his Viet Nam War and see how little has really changed, not in terms of the human spirit, but the nature of evil and how it persists. Please, twenty-two minutes about our lives today and the challenges we all face. King chose every word carefully, passionately, brilliantly. Listen with that that same quality of attention.

Michael

Martin Luther King and his Viet Nam War.

One afternoon I asked Physicist David Bohm, what is intelligence? To begin I suggested that intelligence is innate, not learned or accumulated, a spontaneous movement towards wholeness that permeated every cell of the body. David added, and all of nature. Since nature included everything intelligence be - everywhere. David went on to describe how intelligence is beyond description. Being the invisible ground of everything, anything we can describe is abstracted from this. The abstracted fragment cannot contain the whole. Each thought is a fragment. Thought cannot contain the whole. Thought is not intelligence. For thought to consider itself intelligence is a supreme act of misguided hubris. Hubris means extreme pride or arrogance. It often indicates a loss of contact with reality, an overestimation of one's competence or capabilities.

Long ago Howard Gardner proposed there are different forms of intelligence, linguistic, music, emotional, kinesthetic, etc. David Bohm was describing something deeper, something whole, before fragmentation. Joseph Chilton Pearce has devoted the last fifteen years to describing what he calls ‘the intelligence of the heart,’ which is not sweet sentiment but a universal movement towards coherence and wholeness, health and wellbeing in relationship. The universal intelligence of the heart can lead and inspire intellect and imagination to tremendous creative acts of wholeness. When intellect-imagination is cut off from this ground, it has only itself as a reference and quickly sinks into madness.

Schools ban hugging and teachers carry concealed weapons, symptoms of a deep, systemic failure of development. Guns don’t kill, people do. In the same way media and virtual-reality in the hands of predator corporations and predator governments profit from fear and anxiety, the crisis du jour, invented or not.

Joseph Chilton Pearce, in his latest book, expresses concern over the globalization of fear jump started and multiplied by virtual-reality technologies. Chronic anxiety is deadly. Peace, health and wholeness are the absence of dis-ease, something increasingly rare in today’s buzzing, flashing media marinated world. Please, do yourself and your family a favor and view our interview with Gabor Maté, MD, on the early roots of chronic stress – and savor the looking glass my friend Alain shares on heath and wholeness.

To your health in 2013
Michael

Health is our natural condition. It is before disease, as silence is before noise, peace before conflict, freedom before bondage. It is not something that happens after disease. It is always. Disease is something that happens. Health is not something added. It is emptiness. We cannot create or cause it. We create disease. We cannot cure anyone of disease, we can only prevent it. All cure is preventive: it is not added. Disease is stopped when we stop making it. Cure is the return to the condition before the disorder. There is no such thing as regeneration - physical, emotional, mental or spiritual. There is only cessation of degeneration. We cannot become healthy. We can only become sick, and we can stop becoming sick. We do not have to purify the air or the water or the sunlight or the mind. We can merely stop pollution. We do not have to attain goodness or silence or freedom, only stop obscuring them.

Health and goodness are the same. They are not caused by anything other than themselves. They are not entities or states. They have no finite existence, no feeling, no confines or dimensions, no attributes at all. They are absence of discord. Health is freedom, it is the simplest, undisturbed, natural condition of our being. It is what we are, it is what the world is, it is what life is.
We are life and the world.

Alain Naudé

In the same heartbeat, every 26,000 years there is a moment when the sun stops in its alignment with the Milky Way and the current cycle or world ends and the next begins. Solstice 2012.

Every day is precious, each a gift, a privilege. The earth is a speck in the vast cosmic ocean of dust and spinning rock, fire and explosions. Life abounds but is so delicate. The greater life’s complexity the greater its power and its vulnerability. We are very complex.

I grow quiet and stunned each year as the winter solstice comes near. It is difficult not to be touched by the immensity, cycles within cycles, the macro and the micro churning in and around each of us and everything. Every ending is a new beginning and each beginning an ending to be celebrated, death and rebirth, moment by moment.

When Bad is Good or Look What I Found in the Cornflakes

An astounding new study in the British medical journal Human Reproduction this week has revealed that French sperm counts plunged by a third between 1989 and 2005, 32.2 percent or about 1.9 percent annually. The findings of one of the largest sperm quality probes ever. Might there be a link between impaired fertility and Genetically Modified Food and mandatory vaccinations?

Crossing the street, talking to a bright 20 something about kids and population, she said, ‘We should have a test to be sure young people are qualified to have kids.’ ‘What if they don’t pass the test,’ I mused? ‘Well… they shouldn’t be allowed to have children.’ That’s what Hitler thought. It leads to the Holocaust. In his mind a good thing. ‘No way,’ she said.

Caring for children is a tremendous responsibility. Abuse is rampant causing permanent physical, emotional and social damage and none of this is the child’s fault. It feels like a good idea to limit population to those who are qualified. But who’s to decide? Who is going to write the test? Which one of us is smart enough to decide which species are approved of and which don’t make the cut? What skin color will we approve? Which language? Which belief system, national, political or religious beliefs? Some view same sex – sex a crime. We can get rid of them, no problem. And so it goes.

Who shouldn’t be allowed to have children (birth control) and who should be allowed to populate the planet (population control) are two sides of the same coin and often fueled by the same well intended logic as my young friend and Hitler.

In his book Enough, Bill McKibben argues that genetic engineering, robotics, and nanotechnology are taking us past a point of no return. We now stand, in Michael Pollan's words, "on a moral and existential threshold," poised between the human past and a post-human future. Post human future? Is that what is on the table with Genetically Modified Foods? I think so. Why? What is behind the curtain? It is not simply food. Exploring the link between GMOs and declining fertility.

Kaiser Permanente: GMO’s are Devastating Health
From  NaturalSociety

28 November 12
Just days after a leading genetically modified organism (GMO) researcher spoke out against GMOs and how many pro-GMO 'scientists' are in bed with Monsanto or carry their own GMO patents, the largest managed healthcare provider in the United States is now publicly speaking out against GMOs. In a recent newsletter, the Kaiser Permanente company discussed the numerous dangers of GMOs in a recent newsletter and how to avoid them.