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Jan 24 2012
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Blog Posts, Cooking, Cultural Issues, parenting, Reality, Uncategorized

Why We Eat What We Eat

As a cooking teacher, who regularly meets people through my cooking classes, here on the sunshine coast, I get to see what a cross-section of society likes to eat and feels comfortable with on their plate. It is interesting to observe shared traits amongst the groups of people, who pass through my cooking school, and it gets me thinking about the whys and why nots. I wonder why most of us tend to eat from a similarly small selection of meals, despite the fact that we now have available in our supermarkets a far greater choice of ingredients than ever before. I think about what food represents, in terms of its psychological ramifications within our lives, and whether these settings can be adjusted.

It seems to me that many of us retain attitudes towards foods, which were garnered in the family home when we were children; and that the apple generally falls close to the tree. If mum and dad liked certain foods and cooked these foods more often, then for many people these influences remain strong throughout their adult lives. A bit like the children, who upon leaving the nest, build their own homes in the same street, suburb or town as mum and dad, keeping extended family close. Food like shelter is a primal need and is intimately tied up with our notion of emotional security.

As we expand the concept of family outwards and it becomes our cultural heritage, food choices again are inextricably linked to our regional and national identities. Here in Australia we can celebrate the rich diversity of our many multicultural strands and this happens most often through experiencing the foods and culinary dishes of these transplanted cultures, like Italian, Thai and Chinese foods – made available by the restaurants and takeaways, which have been created by the sons and daughters of foreign shores.

We are enriched by experience when we allow ourselves to move beyond the close confines of who and what we think we are. Just as our human species is strengthened biologically when we mate and breed outside of those whom we call our own. The cross fertilisation of genes, ideas and even recipes can make us all healthier, smarter and our lives definitely tastier. Our predominantly Anglo-Saxon backgrounds, have unfortunately, cursed many of us somewhat with limited culinary antecedents and if we do not break out of these restrictive walls, then we are condemned to eat poorly and to miss out on the more sublime flavours that life has to offer.

What and how we cook is often a bit like how we make love, we learn from experience a few things and then tend to groove these moves; somewhat unchangingly. Primal activities are a bit like that, not something that we muck about with too much, and what and how we eat falls into this category. We eat to refuel, to derive energy and sustenance from food, but eating is also a profoundly sensual activity. The nerve endings and taste buds inside our mouths feel every morsel as it slides about, and we experience our food in full technicolour, sensorama – if we are lucky enough to be in touch with our full five senses of taste, smell, sound, sight and feel.

So eating is a very personal activity, it is close to who we are, and yet we often eat in public, unlike other intimate activities like sex and going to the toilet. This sharing of the eating experience in communal structures, like cafes, restaurants and workplaces is a ritualised cultural activity. We bring our own mores, likes and dislikes, to this public performance of consumption. I am always reminded of the recounted experience of migrant children in the Australian school yard at lunchtime, as the contents of their lunch boxes were reviled by the Anglo kids because of their peculiar differences. As children we often fear what is not customary and uniform, and unfortunately many of us remain in this childish state, particularly around our foods and what we consider acceptable.

When people form intimate relationships, like marriage and close friendships, they are often confronted with the need to move beyond their culinary comfort zone in a bid to cement the stability of their relationship. The desire to share tastes and flavours is sometimes paramount to couples and their ongoing sense of emotional security. I regularly hear about the compromises being made by one partner or the other, and the effect that the changes to their diets has upon them, both positively and negatively. In fact this can be a major motivating impetus in getting people to come along to my cooking classes. A bit like going into relationship counselling I suppose, with both parties hoping that the inspirational influence of a neutral teacher may magically impart some shift in the culinary status quo of their relationship; and it sometimes does.

Seafood is a commonly held culinary ‘no go zone’, among many of the people who attend my classes. I hear again and again the refrain, “Oh I didn’t know that seafood could taste this way!” Whether they had an unfortunate early experience with a bad cook or perhaps have actually never tried the said example of fish or shellfish, due to the fact that mum or dad likewise had avoided the experience and did not cook these critters at home, the fear based result was the same. We often work out who we are by declaring the things we know that we dislike, “Oh I don’t eat fish, or oysters, or mussels.” I may have made this decision when I was 6 years old but I unquestioningly stand by it today. The walls around this individual are close and in yours and their face, perhaps it makes them feel safe. Eventually however there comes a time when the individual feels somewhat cramped by their stated dislikes, and this is when they often find themselves in one of my cooking classes, either alone or with their partner.

I speculate that the adolescent or young adult who has consciously rebelled against the tastes and predilections of his or her parents, usually has developed a wider and more far-reaching culinary diet – they still may not be able to cook but they may consume more different foods. This individual has broken away from the invisible ties that bind the obedient child to the emotional strings surrounding mummy and daddy. We are all on variable time lines regarding this necessary rebellion, some do it early and some very late, but eventually we all need to break the moorings and swim free; and perhaps then taste the sea.

Sacred Chef Cooking School on the sunshine coast.

©Sacred Chef

House Therapy – Discovering Who You Really Are at Home.

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Aug 18 2011
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Blog Posts, Cultural Issues, Health, Meaning, New Ideas, Reality, Reviews, Therapy, Uncategorized

Secrets about you revealed within your home

Our own house may be a building containing many rooms or it may be a smaller space with fewer rooms, whatever the size, its lay-out and furnishings reflect who we are. Our home, the physical structure in which we reside is our castle and as such tells a story about our lives. You are the princess or prince, king or queen, inside your castle and there is a myth or fairytale taking place right now. Like all good fairytales there is a message, or archetypal quest, happening beneath the daily hum drum; and it is in the rooms within your palace where we can discover it. Each room has a story to tell, and if we can stop for a moment, and cast an appraising eye around we will see it for ourselves.

I call this House Therapy but it could also be called Secrets about You- within Your Home. The seemingly unspeaking rooms, within your home, do in fact have a voice, as it is in their furnishings, face paint and aspect which tell a story. A compelling story about you, and your relationship to the world. It is in how, you have or have not, influenced the look and feel of every room in your house or apartment. It is in the very Isness of your home’s appearance that the secret knowledge of who you are and how you relate is revealed. Like in so many things it is based on how we are all connected to everything in our lives, and it is in this holistically connected web, that we all survive, and occasionally thrive.

Our lives leave an impression upon everything we touch, but what greater material impression is left than the one imposed upon our home. Every room we walk into, sit in, eat in, and sleep in, is affected by our presence; and tell tale clues are left to piece together. Like a form of anthropology or archaeology, House Therapy, reveals our story. We are all familiar with those TV programs detailing the lives of Pharaohs, who lived thousands of years ago; well our own lives can be assessed in the same way. This information is in fact far more valuable to us, as once it is properly analysed it can change the quality and enjoyment of our living experience. The hieroglyphics on your walls and floors, represented by arrangement of the furnishings and interior design of your home, have as much to say about life in the twenty first century, and in particular your life, as any statistical study by a sociologist or behavioural psychologist.

The great advantage that House Therapy has, as a research tool, over questionnaires or surveys we may fill in, as part of a psychological profile, is that it avoids a reliance on our conscious mind putting down what it thinks we should put down. Our house or home is the way it is, whether you are a truthful person or not, whether you are a pessimist or an optimist, whether you are happy or sad, and it is the undeniable nature of the imprint, that we leave in our surroundings, which can deliver the most truthful and insightful self examination you have ever received. I guarantee that you will discover things about yourself that you never knew before and if you take the journey with these insights, well a richer and more enlightening future awaits you.

©Sudha Hamilton

Excerpt from Sudha’s new book House Therapy – Discovering who you really are at home!

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Aug 13 2011
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Blog Posts, Cultural Issues, History, Meaning, New Ideas, Reality, Science, Sudha's Art, Uncategorized

Polymath

Having multiple talents and pursuing them in the marketplace, is it a blessing or a curse? I have a number of interests and have invested time in each of them and have achieved a level of proficiency in several of these pursuits. Does this entitle me to express these in the marketplace as vocations or does one have to limit oneself to a single professional calling?

My experience in the marketplace, with this quandary, is that most people wish to associate you with one thing (whether this is  a reflection of their own simplicity in this matter is another question). I find that there can be an initial dropping off of respect, from potential clients, when they are informed of my multiplicity in this regard. So in many circumstances I remain mum, when discussing their needs and requirements, so as not to disrupt their professional equanimity when doing business with them. This can be frustrating when watching them make mistakes that could be avoided, but I suppose this is often the case anyway, as we all want to do things our own way and learn most from our own mistakes.

We are all familiar with the term, ‘Jack of all trades,’  I would posit, and that this is often used in the pejorative sense, as it is followed by the rejoinder, ‘Master of none.’ Is this saying a result of the sour grapes felt by the the majority of people, who have no second string to their bow, or is it based on some verifiable truth in the matter? Of course the world has greatly changed since the first coining of this, ‘so called,’ kernel of wisdom, and singular professional vocations have gone, to a substantial extent, the way of the dodo. A vast percentage of people are now forced by economic circumstances to pursue a second or third means of employment; but these are most often jobs not vocations.

When I was reading about the renaissance in sixteenth century Europe, I suddenly thought, ‘I am a renaissance man!” As at this time a multitude of Arts and Sciences were explored through the rediscovery of classical texts from ancient Greece and Rome, which had been suppressed by the Church for the previous ten centuries( ie the dark ages). Leonardo da Vinci, the greatest polymath of this fervently fertile time, homosexual? bisexual? vegetarian and blessed with an insatiable curiosity and creativity; along with great talent and technical expertise in drawing and painting. Still, I imagine during his own lifetime, that he was confronted with clients and friends who questioned his proficiency in some of his expressions of interest. Being dead and famous always makes things appear easier, I find.

The fact is, that we are not all suited to the narrowly focused exploration of a single pursuit, we are not all made that way, and indeed, some are born with a degree of interest in a variety of directions. However, our education institutions are not designed to encourage this polymath approach to learning and life, our education institutions are still firmly rooted in the nineteenth century, in the way they educate. We are encouraged to sample a selection of pursuits at the beginning of our educations, which are then quickly removed to narrow the focus to a single vocational study as we progress through to tertiary levels of education. That this approach probably fails the majority of students has never been of particular concern to the proponents of this system, as they merely squeeze the round peg to fit through the square hole. Education, over the last hundred years, has been stripped of its classically well rounded approach to learning and our universities denuded to provide functional, technical college, style educations aimed at producing specialists with limited broad spectrum appeal. Giving us technicians,’ masters of the molecule’ who are unable to know the whole, unfamiliar with their own history and language, and easily manipulated by their political masters.

Tradition sits on our backs like a fat arsed Cardinal from the middle ages, holding back humanity and condemning it to repeat its mistakes, again and again. As a new grandmother generally wants her daughter to ‘mother’ just as she did, and is usually offended by any initiatives in this regard, our schools and colleges are just as miserly with their openness to real change. Schools, as we know them today, began in the eighteenth century, as places to mind the children of the newly wealthy middle classes and to provide them with a basic education; and it was not until the nineteenth century that a national system to include the children of the lower classes was instigated in England. Which is why schools are run along the lines of prisons or army barracks, their concern has been as much with the security of the children as possessions as it has been about education. By which I mean there has been very little innovative thought going into how and what is the best means of enlightening and ‘drawing out’ (which is the meaning of edukate from the Greek) – ‘know thyself’ was a motto of the Hellenistic times – the best for and from children and young adults in these institutions. Cramming as many as can be fitted into a room, seated at uncomfortable desks, and ordered to listen to the droning of an often less than inspired teacher, is the model followed still today by most schools. Perhaps having laptop computers and the Internet may change things for the better, but I doubt the core principles underpinning how the children are instructed to learn will alter that much.

We live in an age, where we are all conversant with a mega multitude of data, superficially acquainted with a surfeit of knowledge, and this is only increasing through our exposure to technology. Perhaps it is time to open up to the possibility that we can be good at more than one thing and that when we go to a party, and someone says, as they usually do, “what do you do for a living?” The answer may be more than the listener quite expected.

©Sudha Hamilton

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Aug 12 2011
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Blog Posts, Cooking, Cultural Issues, History, Meaning, Published Articles, Religion

Kitchen gods and the sacrifice

Excerpt from – House Therapy – Discovering who you really are at home!

By Sudha Hamilton

House Therapy is Sudha’s soon to be published new book.

 

The Kitchen

The Ancient Greeks, who gave us many of the founding principles upon which we base our modern societies – democracy; logic; philosophy; literature and poetry to name but a few salient examples, had  a rich collection of gods and goddesses. Hestia was the goddess of hearth and home, older sister to Zeus and first born of the titans Kronos and Rhea – perhaps not as well known today as her siblings Demeter, Hera, Haides and Poseidon.  This may have been due to the fact that she was swallowed first by her titan father Kronos, who in  a bid to avoid being overthrown by one of his children, as prophesied, ate all his children, she was thus the last to be regurgitated, once Zeus had forced his father to do so.

The Romans also worshipped her in their homes and knew her as Vesta. The areas of responsibility for which Hestia was worshipped and sacrificed to, were most aspects of domestic life and in particular what we now call the kitchen. For it is around the cooking hearth or kitchen that a home or house builds up or out. Hestia was always toasted at the beginning of a meal in thanks for the hospitality proffered. She was probably where the early Christians appropriated their ‘saying of grace’ before dinner from.

Homeric Hymn 24 to Hestia (trans. Evelyn-White) (Greek epic C7th – 4th B.C.) :
“Hestia, in the high dwellings of all, both deathless gods and men who walk on earth, you have gained an everlasting abode and highest honour: glorious is your portion and your right. For without you mortals hold no banquet,–where one does not duly pour sweet wine in offering to Hestia both first and last. And you, Argeiphontes [Hermes], son of Zeus and Maia, . . . be favourable and help us, you and Hestia, the worshipful and dear. Come and dwell in this glorious house in friendship together; for you two, well knowing the noble actions of men, aid on their wisdom and their strength. Hail, Daughter of Kronos, and you also, Hermes.”

Interestingly Hestia was a virginal goddess and refused the suits of both Apollo and Poseidon. Perhaps this is where we get the separation of the sexual roles of the wife and mother in the home and the focus on providing nurture and hospitality instead. Hestia was seen as the giver of all domestic happiness and good fortune in the home and she was believed to dwell in the inner parts of every home. She was also the first god mentioned at every sacrifice, as she represented the hearth where sacrifices took place – this is the direct link to our kitchens today and the genesis of the sacred chef. There are very few temples of Hestia extant and this is thought to be because every home was her temple in the Hellenistic world. I think we can draw some intuition from this in our view of our homes being places of divine inspiration.

The kitchen has of late become a popular focus of interest, with TV chefs and groovy restaurants grabbing the public’s imagination. For House Therapy the kitchen represents our centre, our practical and instinctual selves. This is where we prepare food for family and ourselves. It is also often where food is stored in the refrigerator and pantry cupboards. Food is about survival and security. There is no bullshit about these things and the kitchen is a place where the elements of nature still regularly intervene. Fire on the stove and in your oven; water at the sink, earth in the bench tops and structure; and air in the extractor, fan forced oven and all around. You can be hurt in the kitchen if you do not pay attention to what you are about. Unlike the faux furies vented in the kitchens on TV, you can experience some real passions in these hot and pressurised places at home. You might be burning fingers and dishes, dropping scoldingly hot plates and crying bitter tears over chopped onions. The kitchen is where we show our real reactions to strong emotions, pressure in our lives and our appetites and jealousies.

Have a look around now at your kitchen, the colour of the walls and general lay-out of things. What is your first impression? What does it say to you about your instinctive self? Are you clinical or passionate? Are the walls white/neutral or vivid/strong colours? Is it large or small? Is the instinctual, raw and pragmatic you an important part of your life? Or is it hidden away or missing? The trend in studio apartment architecture now, to build them without kitchens and have neutered mini servery’s instead, is a reflection of a missing essential in sections of our culture. Stripping away the practical ability to fend for yourself by cooking your own food and becoming dependent on pre-prepared meals is symptomatic of us having lost our way along the journey. Is your kitchen well equipped? Can you cook? Do you enjoy cooking for friends, family and yourself?

Returning to the rich historical connection our modern day kitchen has with Hestia’s hearth, as mentioned earlier it was the place where the highly necessary ritualised sacrifices took place. These sacrifices usually involved a calf or some other domesticated animal and those involved with the sacrifice would share in eating the meat of the roasted animal. So the power of the sacrifice would be in the ritualised slaughtering of the animal in dedication to the goddess for a particular purpose – to bring good fortune upon whatever was so desired for example. Today the cook or cooks go into the kitchen, risking cuts, perspiration and burns, to prepare a celebratory meal for our friends and or family – Christmas, birthdays and other days of ritualised festivities. We may not consciously invoke Hestia or any other gods but the overall intention is the same, we wish to share good cheer with those we love and bring good fortune upon us all.

It is interesting to ask oneself what is true sacrifice and what does it mean in our lives today? When we think of sacrificing something, we tend to see it as foregoing or missing out on something so as to have something else. “You cannot have your cake and eat it too.” Which I have always thought was an incredibly stupid saying, because what is the point of possessing uneaten cake? A sacrifice I hear you say, perhaps a slice for the gods. Interestingly the Greeks and Romans would eat the cooked flesh of their sacrifice, offering the bones and fat to the gods and goddesses, but it was the life itself, that was the real sacrifice in my view. The word sacrifice means to make sacred, so whatever we offer up in dedication to the gods becomes sacred. Actually the word anathema, was the Greek word for laying-up or suspending something in wait for the gods, and it is has now taken on the meaning of something that is accursed, through its contact, down through the ages, with the jealous Hebrew  god, Yahweh; the Christian god. Our language, and lexicon of words, have taken an interesting journey over the last four millennia, and it is no wonder we are all a little confused at times. So we could make  a correlation between sacrificing something in our life and that thing, which  has been sacrificed becomes anathema to us or accursed. How do you feel about the things you have sacrificed in your life? A person’s love; a relationship; a career; types of food; alcohol; drugs; sex; lifestyle; freedom?  We do not live in a particularly sacrificial age, more of a ‘you can have it all’ age, but can you really enjoy it all and be present for entirely disparate things in your life? Do we appreciate things more when we make room for them in our lives? Perhaps sacrifice still has a part to play in our lives today, better sharpen those knives.

The kitchen is also a place of transformation, where base elements are turned into the gold of love and nourishment. Is your kitchen a space where magic like this happens, regularly or just on special occasions? Domestic kitchens have a great tradition throughout the West of being incredibly impractical, lacking preparation space and adequate and functional cupboards. This is now being addressed in more modern homes, as the passion is returning to the kitchen. I think that we suffered for a few decades from the ‘American wonder of white goods’ syndrome, where no home was complete without these wonderful space and time saving machines and that a mentality of faster was better grew up around them. Fast foods, sliced white bread, whipped cream in a can, all these travesties were accorded the haloed status of modernity and progress. When in actual fact they were soulless short cuts that ripped the heart out of good cooking. Yes we still do have a lot of gadgets in the kitchen but we also now understand that good food still needs dedication and application. Bread makers are great, but bread cooked in a wood fired oven tastes better and if it is naturally fermented sour dough even better. Espresso coffee from your home machine tastes a lot better than instant coffee.

Your kitchen is a place where you can practically respond to the basic needs of living. Is your kitchen letting you do this? Is your kitchen supporting you in feeling centred and secure in dealing with the vicissitudes that life often throws up? Are your knives sharp and well balanced? Do you have enough bench space when preparing meals? Does your stove cook the way you want it to cook?  If not then you are letting yourself down and going around with a bloody great hole where your centre should be. As a member of the human tribe you need to be able to fend for yourself, and the kitchen can empower you to be grounded in the here and now. Not wafting around on the ceiling hoping for the crumbs of human kindness to drop your way.

Things we can do to transform our kitchen

As a chef, who has owned and managed a number of restaurants and cafes, I know all about kitchens and their design downfalls. First and foremost it is about space and in particular bench top space where most kitchens, especially older kitchens, are lacking. Storage space comes a close second and it is in these areas that a solid beginning can be made in transforming your kitchen from a frustration trap into a pragmatic pleasure dome. Cooking is never completely easy, if it is, it isn’t real cooking, in my opinion, there must be some blood, sweat and tears in every great dish but not too much. Unnecessary suffering is not on anyone’s menu by choice.

Buy an island bench if you lack bench top space and cannot easily create more, they are great and I have several of them, and you can take them with you when you move.

Sharp knives, that are also well weighted in the overall heft of the knife, can bring a smile to any good cook and I always say, “happiness is a sharp knife.”

Obviously kitchens need to be clean and cleaned regularly for all sorts of reasons, hygiene, health and happiness. Clutter in the kitchen causes chaos and calamity, food takes longer to prepare and the energy around it is bad.

Trapped dead energy, in the form of rotting and old produce in fridges and cupboards, does not augur well for happy kitchen gods and thus producing yummy healthy and nutritious food; so clean out and clean up.

 

©Sudha Hamilton

Cooking school on the sunshine coast, the Sacred Chef cooking classes, where you will prepare delicious food, discover new recipes, eat, drink and meet new friends.

For more articles www.sudhahamilton.com or www.sacredchef.com

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May 29 2011
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Blog Posts, Cultural Issues, History, Meaning, Reality, Religion, Science, Uncategorized

Imagine If You Will…

Imagine if you will, that you lived in a world where every day you were told that you had no influence on the really important things in your life. Imagine that you were born to parents, who likewise, believed that they, and you, had no power to affect the way life was; and that they also had been born to parents, who were very sure, that they too, were powerless in this manner. Generations of firm belief and concomitant proof, through life experience, that this was true. That reality was operating outside of you and that you had no noticeable effect upon it, it would go on doing what it would do, whether you were there or not. The sun would come up in the morning and set in the evening; the rain would fall from the sky when there were precipitating circumstances; people around you would live and die – and all of these things would happen, pretty much without your direct input making a world of difference. Imagine what effect this would have upon your sense of self worth and attitude towards your existence.

Well, welcome to the real world, and to the psychological basis of your life and the lives of the majority of the six billion people living on this planet we call Earth. Newtonian science has for the last four hundred years firmly placed us outside of reality, as spectators in our own life, able to measure things but not much else. We have been taught and told, as were our parents, that life and matter happens independently of us. We can of course engage in transmutation of substances, if we follow strict rules for doing so, in a laboratory under controlled conditions and with the appropriate levels of technological education. Our subjective consciousness, our sense of who we are and how we process the sensory experience of our lives,  however, cannot directly interface with existence. It can bear witness and it can measure, and oh what pleasure can it be to measure, everything. Science has measured and identified and named much of the fabric of our known universe, we know a hundred different names each for a billion different things we have never experienced; and most likely never will. I suppose it is a bit like that old Islamic idea of there being 999 names for God. Our Western scientific heritage has set us up as the ultimate arbiters of measurement and not so much good taste.

For the taste of powerlessness is one reason why, I think, that we have massive levels of depression in our modern cities and why we are medicating, or sedating, vast numbers of their inhabitants. Now smarties can put up their hand and say well Newtonian physics is dead, it died in 1904 with the discovery of Quantum Mechanics, but I would reply, that this fact is a well kept secret, culturally speaking, and that the greater majority of human beings are untouched by its revelations. Even Einstein struggled with accepting Quantum physics basic premise and resisted its outcomes for decades. The uncertain nature of The Uncertainty Principle does not lend itself to the delusional controlling proclivities of generations of white coated lab assistants and the population at large. We are all in love with the idea that we can benignly go about life, if we stick to the rules as Science has laid out for us, derived from all that measuring, and, like a good anti-depressant, avoid the lows by sacrificing the highs.

So the good news is, that on the most basic level we can perceive matter, the sub-atomic level, we actually do effect whatever we attempt to observe or measure, our consciousness of it changes it; and so the deadening spectator sport, that was Newtonian physics, is now obsolete. The bad news is, that the reality of this over the last hundred years has failed to bite, or be taken up by us, the masses, and that our lives continue to be mired in the complacency of our previous understanding of the workings of reality. Which means, that while we live in a truly wondrous world of modern scientific genius, the greater majority of us only get to experience it, as consumers, as if we are watching it on TV- and I reckon, that discovering ground breaking shifts in human evolution, via the Discovery Channel, years after they happen, is not an individually deeply rewarding experience. As populations in our cities, have grown and grown, we have replaced concern with the direct experience of the individual with statistical concern for the majority percentage of the many. Which is why so many people can still be unhappy or depressed,  despite the fact that their lives contain less death, hunger, poverty, disease, and numerous other positively indicated quality of life evaluation measurements.  Western medicine is a statistical science in practise and theory and concerns itself ultimately with the individual only as a unit of population. The pharmaceutical industry, which funds the medical behemoth in part and provides it with its tools for healing, is predicated on the double blind testing of its drugs and their ability to work on the greatest statistical percentage of people with as few side effects as can be managed.

“Over the last 30 years, rates of depression have been steadily increasing in Western societies. In the last ten years, consumption of antidepressants has doubled in the most advanced Western countries. Today, more than 11 million Americans are taking antidepressants. The estimated number of people in Britain taking antidepressants is two million. In Australia, 66 percent of those seeing a GP for the first time about depression have a chance of being medicated – in most cases with antidepressants. These data are so stark that most of us and our institutions prefer not to think about them.”

Dr David Servan-Schreiber, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Pittsburgh University School of Medicine

Author of Healing Without Freud or Prozac, 2004, Rodale.

So we live in a world, where care and concern, is officially monitored in terms of our per unit participation in demographic data for various population studies. We read in the newspaper, or online, about rates of unemployment, rates of breast cancer, rates of life expectancy, and rates of mortgage defaulting etc. We learn that if something affects the many then it must be powerful and have substance – it must be real. An example of this is the many chronic health conditions, which began under clouds of suspicion, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome began as this shady condition affecting bludgers and other weak and lazy people; Bulimia and Anorexia were likewise considered examples of neurotic women’s problems; ADHD is still doubtful in many people’s minds – but once weight of numbers builds up, then democracy grants acceptance for these diseased manifestations into the canon of medical reality. Pharmaceutical companies then go into overdrive to come up with a drug to cure them – often recycling ones that did not work out for other diseases, like Ritalin, now the drug of choice for ADHD and ADD.

Common sense is most people’s strongest definer of reality, meaning if the largest number of fellow citizens consider something to be so, then it must be so. The term common sense also has many subtle strands of meaning: its common sense! Can be exclaimed to mean that something is so manifestly obvious, that its truth cannot really be questioned. For something to be of common sense, it must appeal to a primary indicator of what is true, which is shared by the greater majority. We school our children in institutions made up of hundreds and sometimes thousands of pupils, we encourage socialisation and the herd mentality that goes with it. Common sense must survive the sometimes brutal testing of the mob and therefore have the appeal of being  the lowest common denominator.  Common sense is very often paraded as a decidedly uncommon virtue by those wielding it in argument.

I question whether common sense is the most apt indicator for the understanding of truth and also whether capitalism – the so called ‘free market’ and selling things – is the best distributor of truth. How will we, the masses, discover the changing nature of humanities perception of physical reality? Through our consumption of product, which has been created in light of the technological changes made possible by subatomic particle physics, and through the consumption of media informed by it. It has been over a hundred years since the first experiments baffled and perplexed physicists like Nils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, before ultimately turning them 360 degrees around in  a new direction. Yet most people have no idea about this reality shaking, new awareness and the consequences to our culturally accepted perception of what existence is made up of and our consciousness of it.

“I think it would be misleading to call particles, the entities involved in the most primitive events of the theory (quantum topology) because they don’t move in space, they don’t carry mass, they don’t have charge, they don’t have energy in the usual sense of the word.

Q – So what is it that makes events at that level?

A-  Who are the dancers and who the dance? They have no attributes other than the dance.

Q-  What is they?

A- The things that dance, the dancers. My God! We’re back to the title of the book.”

 Physicist David Finkelstein & author Gary Zukav

The Dancing Wu Li Masters, 1979, Hutchinson & Co.

So the nature of matter, at the most fundamental level known to humanity, is a dance of energy and barely understood as matter. We have gone on, since the publication of this book, to comprehend that much of our known universe is in fact empty space and that we could fit all the actual particles or dancing energy, which make up the six billion people who inhabit the Earth, into a small suitcase. So perhaps  Mother Earth is travelling light after all and cataclysmic disasters, like that which wiped out the Dinosaurs are not such a big deal, sub-atomically speaking anyway.

The most important aspect of this to understand, is that how the universe is perceived by those who make it their business to care, has had a filtering down effect upon humanity since the beginning of time. It may seem so much irrelevant bumph to those firmly rooted in the here and now of survival and making money, but once those, who wish to lead and control the rest of us, get hold of this information; they then utilise it for their own ends. In the West we are still greatly influenced by the thinkers and early scientists of the classical world, from ancient Greece and then Rome.

“Every domain of post-classical life and thought has been profoundly influenced by ancient models. True, these models have not always been interpreted in ways that a sober modern scholarship would consider correct. On the contrary: it has often been creative misunderstandings that have preserved the ancient heritage and made it useful.”

 

Edited by Anthony Grafton, Glen W Most & Salvatore Settis

The Classical Tradition, 2011, Belknap Press

Our very language, the meaning of our words, comes from those who thought in Ancient Greek and Latin.  Homer the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, who was alive anywhere from 1200BC to 850BC, is a great example of where we can see the changes in consciousness, in the development of the words used to describe these states. Terms like thumos, phrenes, noos and psyche, which are the first recorded words referring to places within an individual where inner life is happening. There were no words for ‘mind’ or such as we would understand, and in the Iliad everything happens outside of the hero, through the directions of the gods.  Achilles is directed by the goddess Athene in his actions against Hector, during the Trojan War, and the Iliad relates similar control over the other players into the hands of the gods. Thumos originally is used as a term in the poem to indicate spirit of life, as in it ceases to exist when a warrior is slain, it then evolves to incorporate the aroused pre-battle state experienced by a warrior; and then if it is not a god urging a man into battle it is his thumos. Julian Jaynes goes on to say:

“All these metaphors are extremely important. Saying that the internal sensations of large circulatory and muscular changes are a thing into which strength can be put is to generate an imagined ‘space’, here located always in the chest, which is the forerunner of the mind-space of contemporary consciousness. And to compare the function of that sensation to that of another person or even to the less-frequent gods is to begin those metaphor processes that will later become the analog ‘I’.”

Julian Jaynes

The Origin of Consciousness In the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976, First Mariner Books, pp 263.

Noos of course becomes nous, and this term is still used as a slang colloquialism in English to mean intelligence or smarts. It began in the Iliad as a term referring to perception or seeing, or a sight or show, as in for a warrior there is no better noos than hand to hand combat. Noos was then located in the chest and began to mean heart or spirit. Words in all languages evolve and often come to mean different things over time, but in these early recorded examples it can show us the development of how these people were thinking. These are the first recorded examples of the internalisation of consciousness in human beings.

This process obviously continued over time and grew and grew until we had such a strong sense of an inner subjective consciousness, and this was reflected and emphasised in our languages, that we separated mind from body; mind from matter. Dualism was born and came to flourish into Aristotelian physics, which really lasted from Aristotle’s time 384BC-322BC right up until Isaac Newton in the seventeenth century. It continues today as commonly held belief  – that our minds are separate from our bodies. And most of us live inside our heads, within those 20cm from chin to the top of our skull. Well that is where we perceive ourselves to reside – to be floating somewhere inside our craniums; as we sit slumped on our couches at night staring at flickering screens and wondering why we are depressed. So our imagined space, where we consider our consciousness to reside,  has moved from chest to head over the last couple of millennia.

Where do we reside inside ourselves? Do you know where your consciousness, spatially, has its abode? When you speak of your self, and your awareness of your self, where is that self inside you located? Where does the watcher live? What do you imagine when you refer to these things? How do you calibrate your own levels of self? Do you have a soul and is your mind separate from it?

Religion has made great use of this split between body and soul, and flourished in the crack like a healthy weed. For once you remove the necessity of having a corporeal presence, then you are unfettered by any physical limitations like material reality, you can bend truth any which way you like. God, in my opinion,  is an invention based on our own inner reflections of mind space, and, seemingly, can float like a butterfly and sting like a bee (apologies to Muhammad Ali). Has there ever been a bigger fib than the one about there being a god? An all seeing, omnipresent , omnipotent and omnificent being, who, just like Santa, knows when you are good and definitely knows when you are bad. The thought police were invented by the Church and still exist in many people’s minds today, because if you are brought up with these fairy tales about good and evil, God and Satan, Jesus dying for your sins etc – then you have been brainwashed at an early and very vulnerable age to believe in fantasy. If your mummy and daddy believed in these things and their mummies and daddies also believed in all of this, then it becomes solidly fixed as a reality; a traditional lore established over generations. People stop questioning things like this and act out of deference to the past. It takes much greater strength to question and overcome tradition, to break away from the beliefs of your tribe. Because once you believe in things that have no verifiable relationship to reality, and are simply asked to have faith, then you are lost in Maya – an illusion of ancient parentage designed to control you within the flock.

“One facet of the many faces of religion is intense love focused on one supernatural person, i.e. God, plus reverence for icons of that person. Human life is driven largely by our selfish genes and by the processes of reinforcement. Much positive reinforcement derives from religion: warm and comforting feelings of being loved and protected in a dangerous world, loss of fear of death, help from the hills in response to prayer in difficult times, etc. Likewise, romantic love for another real person (usually of the other sex) exhibits the same intense concentration on the other and related positive reinforcements. These feelings can be triggered by icons of the other, such as letters, photographs, and even, as in Victorian times, locks of hair. The state of being in love has many physiological accompaniments, such as sighing like a furnace.”

John Smythies, Neuropsychiatrist, 2006 - http://wn.com/John_Raymond_Smythies

Ask yourself how many assumptions, about reality and existence, you hold among your most valued truths? How many untested beliefs live inside your consciousness? Is there a god? Is there good and evil? Do you believe in sin? What about love, what is love? What is the purpose of your existence?

Do you have any proof, any discernable evidence that would stand up in a court of law for your answers to the above questions? Why do you believe the things you do? Where did these beliefs come from? Who was involved in their transference to you?

The reality is, that just because something has been passed down to you by family, does not make it true. And just because something has been written in a book, and published, similarly does not make it true, even if it is a really old book, which has been accepted as the gospel truth over hundreds of years. Truth is something we all need to seek out ourselves, in our own lifetime, and see it put to the test by experience. At some point in time, we all need to put aside, the desire to be liked and to belong, and use our time on earth to find out what is really what. Don’t take my word for it – find out yourself!

Who are you? What are you? Beyond the roles you may play of wife, husband, partner, mother, father, daughter, son, and far beyond the work you may perform. Who are you really? Deep inside your consciousness, what are you? Go beyond the pat answers you may have read in some book and answer the question from your own true knowledge and experience. Nobody knows you as well as you know yourself! So who are you?

Are you an accident of nature? A dribble of sperm and some egg, that has grown into a human being and been given your name? If you don’t know who you are, then why are you here? What is your real purpose? Why are you alive this day? Why do you have consciousness?

©Sudha Hamilton

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May 24 2011
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Blog Posts, Meaning

Send Me Your Dreams

“Send me your dreams,”  said the Devil, “and I will make them come true.”

“And all I want in return is a piddling little thing.

Your soul!”

But seriously folks I am writing  a book at the moment and I require some data about dreaming in the 21C.

So send me a brief synopsis or summary about what you have been dreaming about recently.

Anonymity  guaranteed for those who wish it – if you would like an acknowledgement please include details.

Send me your dreams!

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May 04 2011
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Blog Posts, Cultural Issues, History, Meaning, Reality, Religion, Science, Uncategorized

One God

Today in the harsh daylight of our overcrowded cities, in developed nations around the globe, we are encouraged to worship only one god, the holy dollar. People are rushing about in their cars, and on public transport, to reach their destinations, their places of work and of investment, where labour and lead may be turned into gold. Sitting at terminals, tapping keys, in the hope that interest rates will rise or fall, that the market will strengthen their position; and that bears will turn into bulls. If you can imagine an animated city scene, with hundreds of besuited pedestrians crossing the pavements, all with a cartoon circle above their heads, showing their thoughts as a dollar sign. This is the charge of the light brigade, where horses have become mobile phones and helmets and swords, iPods and sunglasses.

Newspapers, and online sources, today are filled with economic imperatives, and this obsession, which began in the late nineteen seventies, has become the overriding concern for dad and mum; and their kids. Money is on everyone’s lips and in everyone’s mind, how to get it, how to make it, how to keep it; and how to hide it. Everyone’s become  a banker and governments are complicit in this – the tax department has driven these changes , as your tax return became more and more complex, you had to think like an accountant to make sense of it. Paul Keating, as rock star Treasurer, had a hand in it, as he, and PM Hawke, deregulated the banks and made public announcements about “banana state economies.” Suddenly everyone had to get up to speed on the balance of payments and interest rate figures daily made the front page. It was like a crash course in economics, skewed with the dramatics and sensationalism that sells papers.

There are and were positives, about this new found economic literacy amongst the hoi polloi, as people are always empowered by knowledge. In this new era of freedom, individuals and groups, were able to break down decades and centuries of banking obfuscation, to achieve their wants; even women, who had been particularly disadvantaged by the prejudices of this male dominated industry. Economic growth came spurting out, after years of lazy conservative rule, people got money and invested it in new businesses and real estate – the housing market exploded. Of course we got some excessive behaviour, Alan Bond, Christopher Skase etc but generally it was much more for the good, as a greater number and spread of people were enabled to become productive.

However, and I will use a controversial analogy here to illustrate my point, the economic awareness grew and has now become such an overweening thing that it has strangled all other gods. I liken it to the historical journey of Western women, from their hair covered and protected imprisonment in wifely roles, through the suffragettes and then the women’s liberation movement, up until now in their emancipated state from legislated prejudice; but still with the biological necessities to be women. This potentially challenging, dichotomous position is most dramatically seen in the form of the traditionally attired Islamic woman, as she represents the other extreme pole, as if she has just stepped out of the pages of history into the twenty first century. I respect the fiercely won freedoms of today’s Western woman, but also see the conflicting impact that the demands of the world have made upon the inner life of some women. In a similar vein, today’s awareness of the economic imperative has damaged the inner life of us all, removing perceived value from other pursuits not so closely held to the material bosom.

As Science, in the service of money, has slain the Christian religion, condemning it to the irrelevancy of a surfeit of poorly attended suburban churches clamouring for ageing attendees, the great god avarice has filled the breach. Materialism, what you can buy with money, has taken hold of head and heart inside the majority of us all. What is the holiest, most sacred, thing that you can purchase? It is of course the home, a house or flat, villa or apartment, but  a home by any other name just the same. This haloed quest, the often life time journey devoted to owning your own home, is, in Australia anyway, a culturally approved goal that lies beneath the day to day activity of millions. It gives meaning to life to many of these people, and I imagine the banks must really love it. It reminds me of the association between diamond rings and marriage; doctors, pharmaceutical drugs and illness; and other firmly entrenched cultural beliefs. How do you get people to work all the time and do it more or less willingly? By making what they want so expensive that they have to. If the average home is priced around nine times the average annual income, and you have to borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars from the banks at substantial and fluctuating interest rates, then you are going to be tied into working for a very long time. Mentally, by the time you have paid off your house and loan, you are often so brain washed into that behaviour that you go on working anyway. Homes bought as investment properties, charge rentals at a market value so determined,  that they can pay off housing loans and or profit accordingly – thus making shelter/housing expensive for everyone.  The goal for many in owning their own home is financial freedom, which often really means, once achieved, becoming a landlord and profiting from others, for money as they say does not stand still and you will be advised by those who work with money to invest your new found freedom in more real estate; and the cycle continues.

Going to work every week day, and often doing something that you dislike in some way, treating another human being in  a less than  human way by focusing on the money at the expense of everything else, damages the soul some say. You might go to your doctor and complain that you are not feeling, dare I say it, happy, and he most probably will tell you that you are depressed and prescribe an antidepressant.

“Over the last 30 years, rates of depression have been steadily increasing in Western societies. In the last ten years, consumption of antidepressants has doubled in the most advanced Western countries. Today, more than 11 million Americans are taking antidepressants. The estimated number of people in Britain taking antidepressants is two million. In Australia, 66 percent of those seeing a GP for the first time about depression have a chance of being medicated – in most cases with antidepressants. These data are so stark that most of us and our institutions prefer not to think about them.”

Dr David Servan-Schreiber, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Pittsburgh University School of Medicine

Author of Healing Without Freud or Prozac, 2004, Rodale.

Then, in a tra la la drugged state, not caring so much about a lot of things, unable to achieve an orgasm, you will keep on doing what you were doing, working in much the same way and edging hopefully closer to that nirvana, called financial freedom. When you set out on the journey as a youngish adult, I imagine that the many things you associate with financial freedom will change over the years and that when you get there, often decades later, you will be a completely different person. It is like any long journey, in that it is better to make the experience of your journey your succour than the goal itself. Otherwise you are training yourself, every day, to switch off subtly and desensitise yourself to life, killing yourself a little bit each day in the hope that when you get to the end you will be able to turn yourself back on; and enjoy that wonderful financial freedom you see in the scenes depicted in those TV ads for the banks.

If you read a little history and have a good look at the Christian religion, you will see that belief in god, for much of their sixteen hundred years in power, was not optional. From the time of Constantine, the Roman emperor in the fourth century AD when Christianity became the state religion – the Holy Roman Catholic Church,  if you did not believe in a Christian god, and their version of that Christian god, you were very likely to be put to death. This heavy handed approach began to soften after the Renaissance in the sixteenth century, but life remained very hard for those who did not acquiesce and worship in the prescribed manner. Jews of course were murdered, exiled, banned and generally hated since the time of Christ. The crusades slaughtered millions of Muslims over centuries and religious pogroms have continued the genocide of both Jews and Muslims by Christians. I always smile when I remember Sunday School, and the things I was told about the poor Christians being thrown to the lions by the Romans, of course this was true for the three centuries it happened,  but nobody was teaching the children about the next twelve centuries of Christian atrocities committed against the rest of the world; and also within their own communities in the prosecution of heresies. History always favours the victors.

Within, and despite all this bloodshed, many people had an experience of god being present within their lives. It seems in a lot of instances to have provided these individuals with a sense of belonging to something divine, which was beyond the reach of those with the swords. I would posit that the very threat to some people’s belief in god, through perceived heretical accusations, as in the time of the Cathars in France in the thirteenth century, and in the very bloody later schism between Catholics and the Reformation Church in the sixteenth century, to name but a few, intensified their experience of their religion and god. Nobody loves quite so much as when that love is threatened and or about to go away. Religion, and or belief in god, is always like that enormous elephant in the room, which will not go away.

“Superstition requires credulity, just as true religion requires faith. Deep-rooted credulity is so powerful that it may even, in false beliefs, be thought to perform miracles. For if anyone believes most firmly that his religion is true, even if it is in fact false, he raises his spirit by reason of that very credulity until it becomes like the spirits who are the leaders and princes of that religion and seems to perform things which are not perceived by those in a normal and rational state.”

Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535)

De Occulta Philosophia

I ask myself, a lot, what belief in god really is. Rationally there is no evidence for  the existence of a god, and in my historical search so far, there never has been any evidence. In Christianity’s case, we now clearly know that the gospels in the Bible, which were written between seventy and up to two hundred years after the time of Jesus, are not reliable historical accounts and indeed are more like PR releases or overly favourable biographical sketches, designed to sell Christianity to the Roman power elite and others. The account of Pilate for instance, is completely fictitious and reworked by the writers of the gospels to exonerate the Romans from the execution of Jesus and to put that blame squarely upon the Jews; which has had onerous historical consequences to put it mildly. Christianity is not alone in creating fictions to make it divine and more than merely human, in PR and sales there is a great and long lasting tradition, which is about making your product uniquely special and divinity ticks all those boxes. The tablet which held the ten commandments, where is it and who else but Moses really saw it and if it was placed in the Ark of the Covenant, where is it also? The Mormons then, through their prophet, Joseph Smith Junior, and I imagine from his impression of the historical precedent set by Moses as reported in Exodus, had a solid gold tablet from the Angel Moroni containing their scriptures, which conveniently only Joseph actually saw. Now Christians, who believe in Jesus rising bodily from the dead, often chuckle softly at the unrealistic beliefs of other religions, whilst having no problem with the outlandish collection of miracle stories and the like contained in their Bible. When we inherit beliefs from our parents, these loving and respected beings, and they likewise inherited their beliefs from their parents and so on, it is easy to understand why these often ridiculous beliefs have lasted so long. It is hard to shoot down the firmly held beliefs of your elders and those whom you love; many people choose to turn away from confronting the elephant in the room.

Buddhism, both the Theravada and Mahayana schools of Buddhism, are also a collection of stories tinged with the magical properties of the divine. Siddhartha Gautama, the Nepalese prince  did exist historically and most probably did venture out on a spiritual quest, but then the story tellers take over and we are regaled with unearthly feats designed to impress the uneducated masses. Hinduism is a fantastic collection of wildly colourful stories, creation myths involving gods and demons, many of them extraordinarily beautiful.

“An ancient Hindu warrior-king named Muchukunda was born from his father’s left side, the father having swallowed by mistake a fertility potion that the Brahmins had prepared for his wife; and in keeping with the promising symbolism of this miracle, the motherless marvel, fruit of the male womb, grew to be such a king among kings that when the gods, at one period, were suffering defeat in their perpetual contest with the demons, they called upon him for help. He assisted them to a mighty victory, and they, in their divine pleasure, granted him the realisation of his highest wish. But what should such a king, himself almost omnipotent, desire? What greatest boon of boons could be conceived of by such a master among men? King Muchukunda, so runs the story, was very tired after his battle: all he asked was that he might be granted a sleep without end, and that any person chancing to arouse him should be burned to a crisp by the first glance of his eye.

The boon was bestowed. In a cavern chamber, deep within the womb of a mountain, King Muchukunda retired to sleep, and there slumbered through the revolving eons. Individuals, peoples, civilisations, world ages, came into being out of the void and dropped back into it again, while the old king, in his state of subconscious bliss, endured. Timeless as the Freudian unconscious beneath the dramatic time world of our fluctuating ego-experience, that old mountain man, the drinker of deep sleep, lived on and on.

His awakening came- but with a surprising turn that throws into new perspective the whole problem of the hero-circuit, as well as the mystery of a  mighty king’s request for sleep as the highest conceivable boon.

Vishnu, the Lord of the World, had become incarnate in the person of a beautiful youth named Krishna, who, having saved the land of India from a  tyrannical race of demons, had assumed the throne. And he had been ruling in Utopian peace, when a horde of barbarians suddenly invaded from the northwest. Krishna the king went against them, but, in keeping with his divine nature, won the victory playfully, by a simple ruse. Unarmed and garlanded with lotuses, he came out of his stronghold and tempted the enemy king to pursue and catch him, then dodged into a cave. When the barbarian followed, he discovered someone lying there in the chamber, asleep.

“Oh!” thought he. “So he has lured me here and now feigns to be a harmless sleeper.”

He kicked the figure lying on the ground before him, and it stirred. It was King Muchukunda. The figure rose, and the eyes that had been closed for unnumbered cycles of creation, world history, and dissolution, opened slowly to the light. The first glance that went forth struck the enemy king, who burst into a torch of flame and was reduced immediately to a smoking heap of ash. Muchukunda turned, and the second glance struck the garlanded, beautiful youth, whom the awakened old king straightaway recognised by his radiance as an incarnation of God. And Muchukunda bowed before his Saviour with the following prayer:

“ My Lord God! When I lived and wrought as a man, I lived and wrought – straying restlessly; through many lives, birth after birth, I sought and suffered, nowhere knowing cease or rest. Distress I mistook for joy. Mirages appearing over the desert I mistook for refreshing waters. Delights I grasped, and what I obtained was misery. Kingly power and earthly possession, riches and might, friends and sons, wife and followers, everything that lures the senses: I wanted them all, because I believed that these would bring me beatitude. But the moment anything was mine it changed its nature, and became as  a burning fire.

Then I found my way into the company of the gods, and they welcomed me as a companion. But where, still, surcease? Where rest? The creatures of this world, gods included, all are tricked, my Lord God, by your playful ruses; that is why they continue in their futile round of birth, life agony, old age, and death. Between lives, they confront the lord of the dead and are forced to endure hells of every degree of pitiless pain. And it all comes from you!

“My Lord God, deluded by your playful ruses, I too was a prey of the world, wandering in a labyrinth of error, netted in the meshes of ego-consciousness. Now, therefore, I take refuge in your Presence – the boundless, the adorable – desiring only freedom from it all.”

When Muchukunda stepped from his cave, he saw that men, since his departure, had become reduced in stature. He was as a giant among them. And so he departed from them again, retreated to the highest mountains, and there dedicated himself to the ascetic practices that should finally release him from his last attachment to the forms of being.

Muchukunda, in other words, instead of returning, decided to retreat one degree still further from the world. And who shall say that his decision was altogether without reason?”

Joseph Campbell

The Hero With A Thousand Faces, 1993, Fontana Press, pp 194-196.

I would say that the original author of this story was probably a new parent, indicated by the hero wishing for eternal sleep over all other riches LOL. What it also tells us, is that the successful religions, which have been taken up by kings and therefore the state, all have messages at their heart which assure the listener that the rewards and sufferings of life are nothing in comparison with the promises of divinity. These are not their only messages, but clearly that message would resonate with the suffering masses – to hear that all life, good and bad, is an illusion, would be a panacea to the many who were decidedly short changed by the distribution of commonwealth. It is kings who have driven religions and enforced participation in their rituals, and kings who have controlled and censored the scriptural content of these religion’s holy books. Kings have had much more need of religion and its ability to control the behaviour of adherents, than have subjects had need of religious beliefs.

The belief in  a god, who will upon the death of the believer, even things up in terms of getting a fair share of the goodies, in heaven or some paradisiacal garden in the afterlife, has had broad appeal among the disadvantaged. I think we see that now in the fervent take up of extremist Islamic beliefs, many of these adherents are poor and have been racially slighted in the countries they reside in, and they believe that their actions and belief in a vengeful Allah will deliver them to paradise. The African American slaves took the Christian message of the meek inheriting the Earth to heart; women, who have been down trodden and abused by men, have found succour in religion, and it is often a belief which burns brightest in the hearts of mothers within a family; perhaps as salve to the tragedies that historically affected women through the deaths of their children. To believe in something better than avarice, competition and bloodshed is an understandable wish, if Darwinian evolution can only provide that the strong/intelligent will prevail, then it is perfectly understandable that humanity would invent a god that possibly offers the mercy of something else with a kinder face. Although the original incarnations of the old testament Judo-Christian religions were decidedly brutal.

“The great unmentionable evil at the centre of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal – god is the Omnipotent Father – hence the loathing of women for 2000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates.”

Gore Vidal

The belief in god has been used by the strong to justify their rule and control over others, the divine right of kings to rule, and the same belief has been employed by the weak to salve their hurts and pains in the hope for  a better deal in the afterlife; it is a flexible beast this elephant. All religions seem to make a heap of promises, which require your extinction before they pay out on them, and as nobody has as yet returned from the dead (Jesus excepting but then he works for them) we are none the wiser when it comes to knowing their truth and efficacy. The poor and down trodden masses, who were forced to subscribe to the state religion – the Holy Roman Catholic Church – would have taken what message of hope they could from their time in church. The church collected taxes from these same people and controlled their lives as much as the king, for hundreds of years people were expected to go on a religious pilgrimage during their lives and if they did not they were expected to pay the church the equivalent amount of money they would have spent on their holy journey. Representatives of the church would sell common folk religious relics, purporting to be splinters of the cross that crucified Jesus and the like, and absolutions; so you could buy a piece of heaven, a bit like you can buy financial freedom through home ownership today.

I would say that in our relationship with the new religion, materialism, we have done away with a good deal of hypocrisy about money and its importance in our lives. When I was growing up it was considered rude to ask direct questions about money, which set me back somewhat for many years when it came to negotiating transactions. It was bad form to ask how much something was worth – shopping could be a struggle – bad manners to ask how much someone earnt for a living – life was a bit less exacting I suppose – I imagine as it was before the advent of the electric light, when the edges of existence were not so pronounced in gaslight and candle light. Not a bad thing sometimes to have a bit more mystery. There was however a great deal of downplaying falsely of the importance of money and this was simple dishonesty in many instances. A bit like not being able to talk about ‘fucking’ and always having to say ‘making love’ when referring to sex, which was also the case when I was growing up, at least in polite society or with a lady. But sometimes ‘fucking’ is a more correct description for the activity and incorporates more of our animal natures, whereas ‘making love’ is a far more ethereal term, non-corporeal in fact; and “fucking” is after all only a small part of making love. There always needs to be black and white in the equation, otherwise if we are forced to pretend to only live in the light, we will get corruption, as we do with celibate priests and all those who deny the darkness and their shadow side.

Similarly we need the balance of spirit, inchoate things inside of us, anti-matter if you like, especially now in the time of money. When the zeitgeist is the passion for money and the things that money can buy and people are marching to the consumerist beat, for technological toys like IPhone’s and other gadgets, then the opposite pole becomes so very important. Familiarity breeds contempt and that is what is happening, and will happen even more, with materialism, its strident voice drowns out the sensitive and the mysterious. Science like a Krispy Kreme doughnut has deliciously explained the how but has nothing at its centre to explain the why – consciousness continues to elude neuroscience and all other branches of material knowledge. We need to realise that just because we have named a street on a map and given a moment in time a precise number, that it does not truly define the reality of that particular space and moment. We have killed the mystery, the unexpected nature of existence, by naming and measuring everything and then agreeing amongst ourselves that this is its only reality – we have turned symbols into things and references into realities. No wonder so many people are depressed, having lost contact with the earth beneath their feet, because they are walking on a line on a map inside their head.

I wonder if you or I were to go and lie in a dark cave for a year, a space with no light whatsoever, but with enough warmth, food and comfort to sustain us, and we had no contact with the outside world for that entire year – how we would be on our emergence from the cave after the year? Would our consciousnesses be changed, affected, transformed in any meaningful way? What would we encounter within our own psyches and would the zeitgeist of the times slip away? I imagine that our thoughts would continue to go around and around, as they do, chasing their own tails and tales. But after awhile, with no points of external reference, with which to reinforce their existence, these thoughts would, I suspect, evolve or devolve. Perhaps as in a spiral motion returning to their points of origin, regressing to where they came from – things someone said that we appropriated; wisdom from mum and dad; teachers and mentors; books that we have read; Sunday School scriptures; and finally back even further as we lie there in the pure blackness. We would, I suspect, begin to break down all thoughts and all the things we live by, our moral compass so to speak, our very own philosophy of life, and things would be reduced to essentialities and much of the guff would simply fall away. Close your eyes now and drift away into that eternal night of King Muchukunda.

©Sudha Hamilton

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Apr 14 2011
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Blog Posts, History, Reviews

Who Murdered Chaucer?

Who Murdered Chaucer?

Book Review

Who Murdered Chaucer? – A Medieval Mystery

By Terry Jones, Robert Yeager, Terry Dolan, Alan Fletcher, Juliette Dor

Methuen, 2004.

 

Geoffrey Chaucer, poet and most importantly one of the earliest literary stars of the English language, was the author of The Canterbury Tales – a celebrated collection of verse pieces which have provided an incredibly rich source of historical information about the types of people inhabiting the Middle Ages. Many of us studied Chaucer at school, and I am afraid, that by dint of either my own shallowness or via unenthusiastic teaching, I was not a big fan at the time– the early English language was quite challenging I seem to remember – he remains however a major influence upon our Western canon. Like much of the history taught at school, a great deal of important information and context was omitted, thus denuding what could have been a powerful lesson about real life. You see, Chaucer seems to have been disappeared, in the same way, that more recently, people in South American countries have been disappeared by forces within their governments.

I don’t know if it is merely that the majority of people who study history and literature are averse to making waves, or that it is something else entirely, but we seem to get a dry, unquestioning version of history being passed down in our educational institutions. I know here in Australia, teaching was always the profession of choice for the less academically gifted and the ones who didn’t really know what they wanted to do at university. Perhaps the title of this essay should really be, Who Murdered History? As one of the primary integral qualities for teaching must be passion, if a teacher’s communication is not imbued with enthusiasm and real care for the topic, then who is going to listen to him or her?

Geoffrey Chaucer was a poet and scholar in the court of the English king, Richard the second, at the close of the fourteenth century. Now if you are at all familiar with medieval history, or Shakespeare, you will know that Richard II has a seriously sullied reputation as the fey, spoilt, generally unloved king, who was usurped by a far more deserving Henry IV. Here however, is a great example of the fact that history is written by the victor, and the disappointing thing in this circumstance is that in this case, it has been unquestionably accepted by historians down the centuries. I personally came across Richard II as an acting student, when I was doing my NIDA audition – I studied Shakespeare’s play of the same name and chose an audition piece, of Richard expressing his outrage and righteous indignation at being deposed. The whole experience made a lasting impression upon me and I found it very interesting to revisit this piece of history. Terry Jones and his co-authors make it abundantly clear, that Richard was not the despot history and Shakespeare made him out to be, citing chronicled evidence to the contrary. More importantly they show that these chronicles, kept by the religious orders within their abbeys (Westminster, Kirkstall), had been doctored and amended once Henry IV had taken the throne.

Richard II had ascended the throne at the age of ten, and so you can imagine the difficulties he had in establishing his authority as he grew into the role, with overweening advisors and power hungry barons all around him. Terry Jones posits, that far from being a weak and corrupt king, Richard was in fact a king who was at the forefront of new royal practises. He suggests that Richard was creating a uniquely English court, and that Chaucer, with his wonderful wielding of the newly flourishing English language(in contrast to Latin and French), was a big part of that. Richard resisted supporting the maintenance of  the military campaigns in France, that his father, the Black Prince, and grandfather Edward III and his forebears had campaigned so vigorously at. Indeed he wished for a peaceful reign and copped a great deal of flak from the more warlord like dukes around him. Similarly today in the United States, great chunks of their industrial wealth is based on armaments and technologies of war, and Presidents are lobbied to support these activities to maintain the economy (Donald Rumsfeld and George W Bush in Iraq). Likewise, several of the barons around Richard, depended upon constant military actions for their upkeep and any threat to this was viewed with great resistance, especially by Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, Richard’s uncle and the youngest son of Edward III. Often this military action was portrayed, especially to the poor, as courageous and brave behaviour to be admired in a man and a leader; manipulations utilising cultural assumptions that still exist today. So Richard reigned during a precarious time and his behaviour actually challenged the status quo, in ways, which we would now admire in our modern more peaceful world.

Terry Jones and co-authors make clear that Richard II, once he had taken personal control over the realm in 1389, made the pursuit of peace with France a priority. They cite the influence of Giles of Rome, the Italian theologian and philosopher, in Richard’s education, as a setter of kingly aspirations in the direction of peace. They also suggest that Richard may have been a more intellectual king than his predecessors, and one who fostered and encouraged men of letters; like Chaucer and his contemporaries. Jones makes a good argument for Richard’s court being one of new ideas and creativity; and in a cultural ferment with the recently flourishing English language at its centre.

‘Namoore of this, for Goddes dignitee,’

Quod oure Hooste, ‘for thou makest me

So wery of they verray lewednesse

That, also wisly God my soule blesse,

Myne eres aken of thy drasty speche.

Now swich a rym the devel I biteche!

This may wel be rym doggerel,’ quod he.

The Canterbury Tales, VII, II. 919-25

‘No more of this, for God’s dignity,’

Swore our Host, ‘for you make me

So weary of your total unlearnedness

That, just as God will bless my soul,

My ears are aching with your dreadful speech.

Now such a rhyme I’ll teach the devil!

This may well be doggerel rhyme, ‘ said he.

 

It is interesting to read the early English employed by Chaucer and in particular the spellings of the words – I found it threw new light and understanding about certain words and their origins. The piece above by Chaucer, is in the persona of the character Harry Bailey, and highlights the author’s opinions of the travelling minstrels, who were the traditional courtly entertainers before the advent of the poet/authors. A modern parallel for this evolution in courtly tastes would be the difference between the singer/songwriters of the sixties (Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell) and the vocalists or cover bands of the previous decade , who did popular renditions of standards. So Richard II was a new type of ruler and under him there flowered a new language, new expressions and new ideas.

In the book Who Murdered Chaucer? the authors describe the effect this change had on those with vested interests in how things were, and the Roman Catholic Church was one organisation who had deeply rooted and very valuable vested interests in medieval England. The powerful leaders of the Church were busy protecting their own authority against forces for change, like John Wyclif, an Oxford theologian who translated the Bible into English and was against many of the commercial aspects of the Church. Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Arundel, eventually aligned the Church establishment in its reactionary crushing of all dissent and introduced the practise of burning heretics at the stake into England. Terry Jones and co-authors produce evidence, that it was the recently exiled Archbishop Arundel who joined forced with Henry Bolingbroke, Earl of Derby, another recently exiled by Richard II, to topple the young king and place Henry on the throne. Together they travelled from Europe back to England illegally, and became irresistible forces of conservatism, appealing to the barons and bishops who had been dismayed and offended by Richard’s new methods and associations. Richard II had been surrounding himself with men of ideas and letters, who were not necessarily from the aristocratic classes, and promoting these men of middle class into positions of power. This is suggested as one reason for the relatively quick and successful usurpation by Henry, as he and Arundel were able to unite the anti-Richard forces together and bring down the king.

Chaucer,  and his literary cohorts, had under Richard II been able to express a number of quite radical ideas in their work, ideas about the role of the Church and State. There are many Wyclifian concepts within Chaucer’s work, and in particular in the mouths of certain characters,  who inhabit The Canterbury Tales. The Poor Parson truly embodies Christ like behaviours in his holy thoughts and good works, and these sit in direct contrast to the avaristic exemplars of what Jones calls the ‘Church Commercial.’ Chaucer parodies other Church representatives,  like Friar Huberd in The General Prologue and the character of the Summoner in The Summoner’s Tale, conveying the well known corruption within the Church, being practised by these ecclesiastical officers. The selling of relics to the general public, pieces of the holy cross which crucified Jesus and a myriad of other bogus bits of rubbish, was rife throughout Christendom. In addition to this, people were encouraged to purchase prayers, and if they did not go on a pilgrimage they were expected to donate the dollar value of the journey to the Church in compensation. The Church collected taxes from everyone in the form of tithes, which could be 10% of their income or more. Basically the Church was  a vehicle for the systematic abuse and exploitation of the population. It was run by the disinherited children of the aristocracy, the sons who were not first born, and became their private fiefdoms – many bishops were ordained at the ages of twelve and fifteen. You had the irony of the Church being run by completely irreligious people, who were more akin to our corporate CEO’s today.

Archbishop Thomas Arundel, was like a Rupert Murdoch of the Church Commercial, conspiring to prevent the radical forces of change from interrupting the control exerted by the Church and the flow of revenue coming to it. Chaucer could be seen as a literary lion, who expounded with humour and style the lie of the land, and told those who would listen, what was really going on. During Richard’s reign this was permissible and Terry Jones would say perhaps even encouraged, but upon Henry IV taking over, it was now an entirely different universe. The rules had changed and it was unfortunate for Chaucer that he had a written body of work out there, which could act as evidence of his heretical beliefs. Like many usurpers Henry IV was insecure, especially just after murdering an anointed king in Richard II, and he looked to secure his newly stolen throne by  a policy of containment and suppression. Apart from the evidence of his sending out a directive to all chroniclers, that he wished to witness what they had written, an unspoken message that said you better write nice things about me and my new rulership of the realm or else, there was also a spate of mob executions of most of Richard’s friends and allies. Henry IV, with the help of the master strategist Arundel, was able to eradicate much of his opposition without directly bloodying his hands. The last known record of Chaucer, was that he had in the year 1400, just taken out a 53 year lease on  a house in the garden of Lady Chapel, in Westminster Abbey.  Westminster was a sanctuary of the Church, which meant that theoretically it was  a place you could go and not be touched by forces of the State, but in practise it did not stop determined agents riding in and dispatching whoever they were really after. Westminster became known as a place where people who were still loyal to Richard II gathered, and indeed the Abbey itself, was implicated in a plot to overthrow the new king and this was discovered by Henry IV not long after the usurpation; and there were deadly ramifications for some of those involved. So it was  a time of secrets and suspicions, a bit like East Berlin during the cold war, and those writers and liberals who had flourished in Richard’s court were under the microscope of Archbishop Arundel and Henry IV.

John Gower, a Chaucer contemporary, managed to rewrite sections of his Confessio Amantis, swapping praise of Richard II to Henry of Lancaster, and this rewriting of history to support Henry IV’s new regime was so successful that it was used by later historians to justify the Lancastrian view of English history. This was one example among many of the exorcising of Richard II from histories warm embrace and his consignment into no-speak and ignominy. Thus we have had six centuries of misinformation and unfounded slander upon Richard II and his reign. This book and its detailed referencing of available records and evidence, really showed me how easily history can be re-edited by those who control the information and records. If we do not ask the question and are not prepared to dig  a bit deeper then we will never know the truth.

There is no clear and incontrovertible evidence that Chaucer was murdered by agents on behalf of Arundel or Henry IV, but there is a long list of unexplainable facts.

  • Why did Chaucer the literary star of his day just disappear?
  • Why did he leave no Will, when he was a meticulous public servant?
  • Why was no monument built to him?
  • Why do none of his own copies of his work survive today?
  • Why is his death eulogised as a tragedy by other poets?

 

It seems as if Geoffrey Chaucer, England’s most esteemed poet and public servant, just dropped off the face of the Earth. It is the very lack of recorded information about his death, which points to something decidedly suspicious having occurred and the likelihood that he may have died in Archbishop Arundel’s prison; like many other perceived heretics of the time. Arundel used the uncertainty of the times to eradicate enemies of the Church at home and managed through the threat of burning heretics at the stake to get many dissenting voices within the Church to recant and retract their statements. William Sawtre was the first man burnt at the stake in this new England, this religious police state. Sir Lewis Clifford, one of Chaucer’s oldest friends and one of the Church’s most outspoken critics , was persuaded to recant under the new regime and to bow before the unholy spectre of an agonising death amid the flames. Chaucer’s fellow poet John Montagu, the Earl of Salisbury, was ripped to pieces by the mob at Cirencester in the wake of an abortive revolt in 1400. This was a very scary time to be alive, if you held to an alternative view about Henry IV’s right to be on the throne and the nature of Church and State.

Nobody knows exactly when Chaucer died, whether it was the year 1400 or 1402, various biographers down the ages have drawn on misinformation and then compounded that by using that as mistaken sources for factual information. Like a few journalists today, I suppose these biographers thought why spoil a good story just because there are no concrete facts about the ending. Most commonly Chaucer is depicted as gently dying of old age, in a state of contentment at his own home, of course there is no evidence for this and a whole lot of holes in the story – what happened to his substantial library (books were very rare and valuable in 1400) and his own copies of his body of work? Why didn’t an old man, well versed in the law as a respected public servant in the employ of a king, leave a Will? Very strange indeed and highly unlikely. Who murdered Chaucer? The most likely candidates, Archbishop Arundel and Henry IV, have swept clean histories trail and left little trace, but the book concludes, that the glaring omissions of any recorded evidence regarding Chaucer’s final days and demise are highly suspicious, and considering that they quietly despatched Richard II with similarly no official announcement- it is, in detective speak, their MO modus operandi.

©Sudha Hamilton

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Mar 11 2011
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Blog Posts, Cultural Issues, Meaning, Reality, Reviews

Gandhi

I enjoyed the opening installment of the program on Gandhi, currently showing on the ABC Monday’s at 7.30pm. It traced his roots to his birth town in India and looked at the early influences on his life. There is a tendency in us all, I think, to see great historical figures as ready-made and cardboard cut-outs, rather than the deeply complex individuals they were. In fact, I posit, the same is true of us all – we are all far more complex than we are seen and considered by our friends and networks of acquaintances to be.

I wonder if this tendency is due to the design of our brains and how we think. The fact that we can only hold about a six or seven thoughts in our conscious brain at any one time, before needing to delve into memories stored in another part of the brain. Perhaps we hold a single over-riding impression of someone, like a main categorisation, and below this lesser details are listed in other thoughts and memories. If that person was an intimate – a partner, parent or child – then we would readily augment our basic definition with subtler complexities. If, however,  they were someone outside of our inner circle we would generally not bother with such shades and colouring of character.

Gandhi’s early life was influenced by Jainism, a religious sect predating Buddhism by 500 years. In particular the seeds of non-violence were sown through his exposure to his mother’s Jain proclivities. Osho or Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh was also raised in the Jain tradition. The program stressed that Gandhi was initially resistant to the strict religious expectations within his family home life and that he rebelled by eating meat, drinking wine and having sex. So the great soul was not born already formed but developed slowly from his unfolding life experiences. There is a lesson here for all of us and in particular our expectations upon our children.

Indeed Gandhi’s commitment to vegetarianism came to fruition, during his time in England, where he was studying law. He was exposed to a rich vein of social and spiritual practices in the great city of London, where he met many influential people. Gandhi became acquainted with Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophists and greatly admired their appreciation of the rich diversity of religions and spiritual approaches. He was very young, and I would imagine impressionable, as we all are in our youth, during his time in the capital of the British Empire.

Upon his return, as a newly qualified barrister, to India and his home town of Porbandar,  Mohandas Gandhi received a number of powerful blows to his self-esteem. Firstly the news of his mother’s death was deeply effecting, and then an attempt to establish a legal practice in what was then Bombay failed. This was then compounded, when whilst defending one of his brothers, he was officially stymied by a British officer and refused any legal status in the matter. His career in a becalmed state in India, Gandhi then accepted a post in South Africa.

It is here that most of us are more familiar with his story, from the Richard Attenborough movie of Gandhi’s life. The ABC program points out a seminal moment in Gandhi’s time in South Africa, when he has been ejected from a train after purchasing a first class ticket – after refusing to move into the third class carriage. Sitting in the station where he was put off, he spends a cold night in serious contemplation about his life’s purpose and comes to a powerful decision to combat racism. Over the next twenty years Gandhi develops his core ideas that become Satyagraha (devotion to truth) through non-violent means and the program points out that this was also influenced by his reading and contact with Islam – in that it was his Jihad or divine struggle.

The next installment will focus on Gandhi’s return to India and promises to enlighten us further to the reality of his experience, in contrast to the Hollywood movie version – which portrays his almost immediate elevation to the leadership of the Indian resistance movement. It is always wonderful to be reminded of the complexities of reality and to remember the light and shade in every bodies lives. Groups and influential individuals are always appropriating segments from the lives of people like Gandhi and then promoting these aspects alone to help their own causes, conveniently leaving out any conflicting realities. For example the Hindu’s, who cast Gandhi out for leaving India for England, then later claim him as their Mahatma. Gandhi was a man – a human being – as we are all human beings.

 

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Mar 10 2011
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Blog Posts, Cultural Issues, Meaning

Suicide Rates in Australia

I read with interest a recent report into suicide, published in The Australian newspaper, where it was declared that the rate of annual suicide in Australia is now well over that of road deaths. It was, I think, a feature written with the intent to ring a few alarm bells in this country, amongst leaders and the general population. It seems to me, that despite the wonders of a hundred and one different kinds of mobile phones and the fabulous Internet, the lives of Australians, and in particular our youth, are not all they are cracked up to be. Not as they are portrayed in the countless advertisements for all these apparently necessary, technological accoutrements, which are inferred to guarantee a fulfilling life. The ability to communicate in a nanosecond, eighteen different ways does not come with an automatic application to develop content worth communicating it seems.

Gizmo’s and gadgets are not going to provide meaning to anyone’s life. Waiting for the new IPhone or tablet reader is no anteroom experience on the way to transformation. As a society it seems that we are always helpless to effect any real change in the face of the markets relentless desire to satisfy the inconsequential. The article in The Australian did not address why people and in particular young people are killing themselves, it was all about what could have been done in the period immediately prior to the suicide to prevent such a tragedy.  I always ask myself why are people killing themselves, obviously there are unique situations in each case but I also feel that there are shared cultural reasons why suicide rates are so high. Where is the deep meaning in these people’s lives and where is it rooted in your own life? Ask yourself honestly what you are living for?

  • to live a good life
  • for friends and family
  • to amass a fortune
  • so I can have sex with ______
  • to help others
  • for the love of some god
  • because I love ________
  • I don’t know I have never thought about it

These are some of the answers I have received in answer to this question. We emerge from our mother’s womb and make our way through childhood, having reasons to ‘be’ indoctrinated into us, by everything from the messages inherent within our children’s stories to the modern version of fireside chats with our parents. Early life comes with a moral behind every lesson, in the hope that it will train us to becomes good little boys or girls. But what are we training or being trained for? What is the real core meaning in our lives? What is the bottom line, when everything is stripped away and you are bare of all the palaver? Is it merely a choiceless choice! This is it, you have been born and there is no meaning to it, beyond the obvious experience itself, so just get on and make the best of it.

It seems we in the wealthy West, where we are not generally scrabbling for our very survival, are caught in this intensely materialistic society. A society which celebrates the invention and endless modification of communication devices and holds the purchase of your own home, as the most sacrosanct of all things that can be achieved in a lifetime. So our kids grow up as consumers not creators, coveting sleek, technological gadgets. Believing that liberty and freedom are achieved in the possession of these talismans of ‘cool‘, just like in the ads. Perhaps when things don’t quite pan out the way the advertising  has been assuring them they will  and they are subject to a concerted digital hate campaign via Facebook by their ‘so called’ friends, then these individuals are missing a reason to live for.

The cultural changes and evolution, which are endlessly unfolding, finds us at a time when the meaning of life, seemingly apparent in our parents and grandparents lives, have become a flicker on a screen – an entry in Wikipedia on a Google page ranking list. Belief in god has been subject to the erosion of a full twentieth century’s worth of scientific derision. So many sub-splinters of meaning came from this one awesome god delusion. Millions of people down the ages have been slaughtered in this belief and it emanates in our DNA like a blood disease. So we are left now at the altar of our lives looking around for the next suitor to give our lives something worth living for. Belief in ourselves perhaps?

Well we have become so functional in everything we do and say. Language has become so functional, losing all it’s flowery intrigues of earlier times. Education is so god damned functional, all about jobs and continuous assessments. Love has become pretty functional too, try before you buy living together and fast food divorce. Can functionality alone give deep and true meaning to life? My function in life is to ______________________ insert your own function in the space provided. Will that function give you the meaning you need to cope with tragedy and grief in your life?

If we really want to reduce the number of people killing themselves within our communities, I think we need to ask ourselves about the meaning of our lives. Digging bloody great big holes in the ground and selling ore to the Chinese is not going to provide us all with a meaningful reason to celebrate being alive. Having a new mobile phone is not going to change your life where it matters. How we educate our children and ourselves is going to get a bit closer in that search for meaning. We need to really have a look at our whole education system and see what it provides, beyond the ability to get a job. We need to move the ancient education set-up we have out of the nineteenth century, remove the god botherers from their positions of influence, and ask ourselves some real honest to _____? questions about ourselves and the meaning of life. We can do this we just need to care enough to do something.

 

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Nov 06 2009
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Quick and Easy!

Quick and Easy – Transformation Guaranteed!

We have all seen these words splashed across advertisements, books, and websites; and heard them coming out of the mouths of sales people everywhere. There are doctors, naturopaths, therapists, and other ‘so called’ health professionals, extracting dollars through the promotion of pills, courses and products – all claiming to do the hard work for you. Well it’s not true! There are no quick fixes in health, weight loss, and just about anywhere else in life. Ask yourself honestly, have you ever really taken a pill and instantly achieved whatever it claimed to do for you? Of course not, occasionally they have been an accessory and encouragement on the road to your goals – a bit like gym clothes really.

If you want a few guidelines in life that really stack up, this is point one – there are no quick fixes. Now immediately you have one structure in your life to guide you away from delusional situations, involving those who claim to be able to facilitate change in your life, instantly and without some sacrifice. This is not a case of mere exploitation with you and me as the victims; no we are actively involved in the whole fraud, because we want a quick fix too- as we do not want to do the necessary hard work to achieve change. We want to have our cake and eat it too – and we want to be thin and attractive at the same time, as we want to stuff our faces with cake. This is the modern dilemma of humankind in the consumerist age.

Quick and easy meals! Just 4 ingredients! Dinner in 5 minutes! Cookbooks around the globe are emblazoned with these headlines. What is the mass appeal of this message saying about us? Well maybe that we don’t enjoy cooking and that we would rather be doing something else. There are a number of issues here of course – mothers who are traditionally coerced into cooking meals for an often unappreciative family audience; singles who would rather work or play elsewhere and do not enjoy cooking for one; and those who do not know their tastebuds from their haemorrhoids, to name a few. However health is derived from a good nutritional diet and if we continue to take the easy option, popping a few multi-vitamin pills to prop up our neglected nutritional selves, we are heading for a state of disease. Quick and easy cancer in just a few years!

Become a Reiki master in 3 days! Learn to heal your emotional self in one weekend! Re-birthing in a single session! Wow when I flick through the pages of the monthly, throwaway, holistic journals I can see how easy it all really is. World hunger, victims of the devastation of war and suffering watch out – there is a Reiki master waving his hands right now. Refugees from the war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq, where our Australian soldiers are fighting now, are however not benefitting from these ads for instant transformation – in fact they cannot even get into our country.

Horny goat weed; fat blaster; tiger penis; snake oil – products packaged and sold in pharmacies, multi-level marketing pyramids, and TCM shops around the globe – all promising transformation in exchange for money. The health industry! We have doctors and pharmaceutical companies (who now own all the vitamin producers) on one side, ready to chop you up and medicate you with anti-depressants, and on the other side we have a mish-mash, containing a few good hearted healers interspersed with the providores of the all natural, quick fix, in various forms. The former bunch do not respect you at all and see you as meat, muscle and bone and the latter are predominantly ineffectual and unrealistic in their claims for you and for themselves – because in many cases their training has been as inadequate as the one they are now selling to you.

All however is not lost. Put down the newspaper, magazine, and mouse. Close your eyes and ask yourself – really ask yourself, where do I go next? What is the next step for me? How can I heal myself? Keep asking the questions – this is no quick and easy solution. Meditate upon them and follow your fears into the unknown.  It may take a lifetime but the journey is worth taking, and really you don’t have a choice anyway. It’s your life after all!

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Mar 12 2009
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A Taxing Time

They say that only two things in life are certain, death and taxes, well I am yet to experience the former but have been hard at work at the latter once again. Yes the annual tax marathon has been in full swing for the last two weeks and at times it does feel like a long slow death, drowning in screwed up little pieces of paper, which were once receipts. Hey guys how about making it law that receipts are printed with indelible ink on indestructible paper – its only fair if you want me to keep this evidence for all these years.

Some people I know hand all this stuff over to accountants – people who are apparently paid to do this kind of work all year round – wow special people! I have experienced tax this way but I prefer to immerse myself in the process and do it myself. Tax time is a time of accounting, a personal period of facing up to what you have been doing for the last year or multiple years in my case a few times. It can be highly enlightening as to where all your money has gone to, particularly when you add up all the bank fees and credit card interest charges – those guys in the bank sure know how to fleece you good and proper.

Sitting down and going through all those scraps of paper and all those bills and bank statements – is like a review of your life. Where you get to remember all the good times, bad times and completely forgotten times – “was I really there and did I really spend that much money?”

Tax is also a time where you get to measure your life according to just one criteria – money! Like the game of Monopoly – everything you have done is tallied up and valued by the dollars and cents. It gives a simplistic glow or gloom to your life, without the multi-dimensional complexities of real life. There are no hard questions like, “should I have slept with my best friend’s girlfriend?” No, it is refreshingly clear in its reframing of life -”how much was that experience worth or how much did it cost me to sleep with my best friend’s girlfriend?” “Well we had dinner at Zacs and that was $200 and the taxi back to her place was $43 – so the value of this experience was $243.”

Tax is also a time where you really get to test your integrity, to find out whether you keep to the spirit of the law in your tax return. Do you stretch the truth? Well that receipt could refer to a business expense but deep down you know that it was really that time you took your best friend’s girlfriend out to dinner. Tax is a bit like applying the rules of golf during a game, when your ball moves at address and you are way over in the bushes and nobody can see you, let alone your golf ball. Are you going to write down that extra stroke and call that penalty shot upon yourself? Tax is all about self regulation and understanding what it is to be really honest.

Of course the tax return documents themselves are hideously complex and difficult to understand. How certain questions are phrased can render you completely flummoxed and staring blindly into those piles of statements and scribbled bits of paper, which make up your life according to the tax department. Do I put the total amount of deferred losses here, including previous years or just this year’s loss? I dont know, I just dont know! Then you get to the best question in the whole thing – how many hours did it take you to complete your tax return?

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Feb 17 2009
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Blog Posts, parenting, Uncategorized

Fatherhood Part Two – the journey continues.

Having one child changed my world forever, having two in quick succession broke the camel’s back. There was nowhere left to hide, no time for a quick puff on a cigar on the porch, always a baby or toddler to get to sleep. I was working more and more from home to be on hand as a parent, and as much as I embraced the role it never quite measures up to the expansive fit of the mother. Biologically speaking, I don’t think it will ever be thus, men will always be caught between worlds – brought up to be out in the world providing for the family and yet wanted on the home front to share the load. It is often an inner dichotomy as well, wanting to stay home with these new innocent beings and often having to leave the nest to bring home some bacon.

My wife embraced parenting and motherhood like a tsunami does an archipelago, it was fantastic to behold. No book unread, no Internet forum unbreached and a passion for it that made me smile inside. Natural parenting was the buzz word; Attachment Parenting the correct moniker and the forum interaction ran thick and fast. Any break from physical parenting was enjoined by the virtual parenting discussions – I thought it was great, that the shared wisdom of parents everywhere was now accessible on the web. Of course after awhile the sheer brutal demands of parenting tests every part of you. The broken sleep, with two little ones going off, is grindingly tough – one feeding on the breast all night and the other waking up exceedingly unhappy, because of the very existence of the other having supplanted its position with the mother. We tried many things to reduce the trauma of this situation but it is such a primal state of affairs, with a one year old’s blood curdling screams at 3am not conducive to much cognitive therapy.

Those cries and screams at the midnight hour can unhinge feelings inside, that have not seen the light of day for many a year. Sometimes for a brief moment you are not sure if you are awake or asleep and many times I began to discover my screaming child was in fact asleep or sleep screaming, as in sleep walking, and no amount of desperate  soothing or reasoning could reach our poor child. It was like a Blitz, not of bombing but of blighted shadows emerging uninvited out of our baby girl.

Getting up and getting to work got later and later, and I suppose I was lucky that I had a job that did not watch the clock. Sometimes after a night like this I would drive hundreds of kilometres to meet a client and attempt to sell them something. My sales erected smile got limper by the day and often people would buy more out of empathy than any other motivating force. My drive for results was ebbing away and no amount of pep talking was bringing it back. It was like I had descended into another world, where things were more real than ever before, more raw and far more demanding than my day light reality had ever been.

Now when I hear that my favourite footballer has just had a baby I know what is in store for him and how it will affect his performance on the field. I know that he and his wife will experience the wonders and the challenges of parenthood, and that they have embarked on a journey both long and arduous. The simple fact is that parenthood gives life profound meaning and meaning can only come through a process, which tests us to the core. Having a baby is not about cute little booties and pink rattles – it is about complete care – wiping faeces and vomit off a multitude of surfaces; holding your baby skin to skin; worrying about unseen things like fevers and viruses; and loving that child until your end. It is the most life changing event on this planet and has been thus since the beginning.

It marks the changes from girl to woman and from boy to man. It heralds the transformation from caring about yourself to the nth degree to caring about another even more. I think that women make this move much more rapidly, propelled as they are through the physical stages of pregnancy and birth, and us men watch these unfolding events like some blood and guts spectacular in the theatres of our homes.

Slowly we are called upon to do more and more, and the sacrifice of selfish desires becomes the norm. Within this process we are transformed to care for another before we consider our selves – and yes this inclination can get out of hand and your sense of self and mojo can be crushed. You may join a dazed procession of zombie parents wandering and wondering who they actually are. You can see them in the supermarket aisles pondering the unit prices of disposable nappies and pushing prams in parks like disheveled gypsies, with endless pockets and pouches issuing streams of material and plastic containers. All of them asking themselves is this what it is really all about?

It seems to involve a lot of words beginning with the letter ‘S’– like survival and surrender; sacrifice and sleep – please go to sleep darling! God I need some sleep! Sex is of course what got us here in the first place and it is the consequences of this act, which has changed our lives forever. Fatherhood is so much more than a seminal deposit.

So we continue on everyday and they change so much, so noticeably, growing and developing like nothing else on earth. There is nothing as fascinating as your own children. I have often though that evolution has made the children of all life’s species as appealing as possible, because with the amount of work involved well……… I always remind myself at the darkest times that this too will pass. The sun does invariably rise again and things are never as bad as you think or feel at the time. Life is not the fantasy that either my wife or I may have pictured but there is something else there in front of you and inside you. A shining light in the eyes of my children that illuminates even the darkest corner of my life.

To be continued……

©Sudha Hamilton.

Eco Living Magazine

Midas Word

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Jan 31 2009
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Blog Posts, Published Articles

Barack Obama the West’s new white knight

Barack Obama: The West’s new white knight

By Sudha Hamilton

Barack Obama’s Presidency has come to represent, to many people around the globe, the hope for a new future based on fairer principles – after a dark time of ignorance and fear induced US international policy. With the US still seen as the world’s pre-eminent economic and military superpower, it was a frightening time for many, to witness the US under George W Bush, invading Iraq and operating a ‘tooth for a tooth’style anti-terrorism policy. There has been too much death, flying under the banner of a ‘good old boys’quasi religious war against Islam.

With the election of the US’s first African American President, it is seen as an almost symbolic shift in consciousness toward disadvantaged minorities and away from the entrenched ruling elite. The hyperbole and fanfare that has accompanied Obama’s rise to the oval office has been quite incredible, and not since the assassination of John F Kennedy has sentiment reached this level of fervor in the US. Of course, for a country founded in part on the slavery of African Americans, it is quite a journey for one stained with that skin to reach the highest office in the land.

Obama enters the office of the Presidency at a time of real crisis, with the US leading the world financial markets down a spiral of unprecedented severity. There will be nowhere to hide, and states of emergency are the making or breaking of leaders. Will the huge expectations be rewarded or will they crush the life out of such a left field candidate running the biggest game in town? President Obama has assembled a quality team to execute government policy and it will be interesting to see what type of CEO he is – consensual or lone ranger? The call to action right now is loud; and it is for decisive and far reaching policy to end the panic, stimulate demand and stop the freefall of markets.

Will the West’s new white knight come to the rescue of a jaded and cynical world? Will Obama be able to restore belief in the US’s democratic quest to bring freedom and enlightenment to parts of the globe ruled by despots? Where are we right now on capitalism’s life cycle, and will the market welcome legislature to rein in its unfettered desire for ever more? Barack Obama comes to town at a time when there are a lot of burnt fingers and I think Wall St will keep its mouth shut for a while anyway. It is a great opportunity to start again – to rebuild a US economy and world economy factoring in things like climate change at the outset. To get carbon credit schemes functioning around the globe and for governments to guide development based on principles of sustainability.

If global capitalism is widely believed to have seen off socialism, then the ‘champ’has all of a sudden fallen in a big hole of his own making. Where have all the ‘free-marketeers’gone? We are not hearing so much about how perfect the market is and all that self correcting claptrap. No it is big business with its hand out for government assistance and packages in the trillions of dollars. The US carmakers, which have studiously ignored non-oil dependent technologies for so long, are at the front of the queue demanding bail outs for their failing billion dollar businesses. Perhaps it is time to let go of the status quo and allow real change to take its course. President Obama and his team will be faced with questions like this, and how much damage control will be good for the US in the long run?

I think there is a collective hope for some personified goodness in America’s new leader, and that he will heal some old wounds in the country and in the greater world. Whether this can transmute beyond mere words and sentiment into empowering action will have to be seen. In a similar way to our own PM Kevin Rudd, who came after a decade of self interest under Howard, and had the opportunity to ‘say sorry’and ratify Kyoto, will they both talk the talk…and walk the walk?

2009 is going to be a fascinating and challenging year to be alive. I wish President Barack Obama all the very best!

©Sudha Hamilton.

Eco Living Magazine

Midas Word

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Jan 29 2009
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Blog Posts

Retrenched After Two Days

The global economic crisis just bit me on the bum. I was recently employed on contract as a senior journalist for the local newspaper in my town. My wife had just started as their editor three days before me and we were both over the moon to be working in the field we loved and locally. Every night we would sit up planning editorial content and creating new Google docs for the pagination. Meetings in the day at the office had that stimulating high, which only comes from a very new job – where you feel that you can do anything no matter how long the hours.

The owners were a small team of people, formerly employed by the town’s original local paper before it was bought up by a conglomerate and lost it’s soul. They had already brought out a dozen issues and we were replacing an earlier editorial team. We asked them at the interview if they had the money to run this business (as we have been running our own publications and know how tough it can be) and they assured us they had local bank funding. They loved us and kept telling both of us they were so happy that we were now on board.

Well I was out on the street doing vox pop interviews when I got the call from my wife and editor, that something weird was going on and that no one at the office was answering her calls. We are the parents of a two and four year old and the work/family life balance is always a challenge. Writing and publishing is one of the jobs we find that we can combine effectively. So we both soon discovered to our complete dismay that these same people who had interviewed and briefed both of us with confidence, were pulling the pin and going into voluntary insolvency.

I was gobsmacked, I was seriously pissed off, I could not believe it – my wife was crushed – she had worked tirelessly to pull their shambles of an editorial system into the twenty first century and now it was over. It was like a desert mirage or a bad acid halucination – we both felt bad. Yes we still have not been paid and I don’t like to say out loud what part of me already knows but it is more than just being ripped off.

That a group of people can question your committment over a series of interviews and ask for your full blooded service as an employee. You know the usual jumping over hoops that the interview process involves and then to have them be so naive that they were unaware of their very imminent demise. Talk about a one night stand.

Of course none of them bothered to let the dozens of editorial contributors know about the paper’s demise and it was left to us to tell everyone. We are in the invidious position of having to go on doing their work to maintain our own professional reputations. Still no pay. Of course we were promised that they would fix us up and that is why they were pulling the pin now so that they could leave gracefully without unpaid creditors.

Probably what stung the most in retrospect was the gutlessness of this group of people – you know running a small business challenges and changes you if you if you really run the course. My wife and I both know – it toughens you and demands that you put it all on the line – if you want to make your passion work in the real world.

We attempted to revive this group and in several meetings by phone, email and then in the flesh said we would join them and have a go at making this work. But their leader, the ad sales guy was happy to go gently into the night, rather than ruffle the feathers of all the advertisers who still had not paid their bills – because of course this was the root cause of the problem – a cash flow crisis born out of the fact that nobody paid on time and nobody signed a contract. It was all done on a handshake – well my hands been shaken but my pocket is still empty.

©Sudha Hamilton

Jan 19 2009
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Blog Posts, New Ideas, Uncategorized

Child Care Solutions

Child Care Solutions

Aged care and child care synergies for a better world.

By Sudha Hamilton.

An idea that I have been carrying around for sometime is to do with two similar needs from two disparate subsections of our communities – the old and the very young both require care and company. What if we combined these two institutions – the retirement village and the child care facility – or at least placed them next door to each other with connecting access? We would have two groups of cared for people who could, under qualified supervision, provide well meaning contact with each other.

How many times have we observed  our older members of the community deriving rejuvenating joy from reaching out to toddlers and other little people who are just beginning their journey. Is this not the DNA plan once fulfilled within our extended families, which have unfortunately fallen away with changes within our modern communities – divorce, broken families and today’s mobility of the workforce creating geographical challenges . Why not have a community or state led program which brings grandparent age people and little ones together at their most vulnerable times of their lives to give to each other.

Older people reaching the concluding stages of their lives are often reviewing their pasts with a wisdom born of experience and an innate understanding of things based on their very real time life clock. Something inside them rejoices at new life in all its innocence and wishes to reach out with love. Little children are developing and theirs is a synergy of timing between the very old and very young – their parents are often rushing around and paying the rent but grandparents are in retirement and moving at the same unhurried pace. Why not bring these two groups together?

Obviously qualified carers servicing both groups would still be required but the numbers of these could be reduced in real time and a more substantial interaction between groups could be achieved. There would also be older individuals who might not wish to interact with little ones and my coexisting facility would respect their wishes. Older patrons of retirement villages would not become involuntary child carers, but rather would have the experience as an optional extra. This idea is all about the exchange of warmth, friendship and care, based on free will.

Our state sponsored facilities and programmes would best serve all of us by bringing sections of our communities and humanity together, rather than separating everybody. This separation continues to be propagated by the arbitrary academic separation  of community groups via the stages of their lives in research and development programs, in areas of sociology and in the vital areas of social policy. It is time for governments to become user friendly rather than forever servicing academic/public service fuelled  specialisation.

If we can bring an appreciation of humanity – a natural sense of our world – to dealing with the challenges we face within our community – child care and aged care in particular – perhaps bring some common sense to a situation – then we can unite shared purposes.

Please feel free to comment and make your contribution regarding this idea!

©Sudha Hamilton.

Eco Living Magazine

Midas Word

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Jan 10 2009
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Blog Posts, Reviews

New Eco Living Magazine

Heading: New Eco Living Magazine

Subheading: Australia’s best holistic eco publication.

Eco Living Health Aware is now in the shops and turning heads. A beautiful magazine full of inspiration and practical information to make our planet a better place. Eco Living Magazine is a font of consciousness, natural health wisdom, green issues and global information. 112 pages of great articles, amazing images and eco adventures.

Eco Living Health Aware features comedienne Anthony Ackroyd; spiritual teacher Bernie Prior; tantric masters Kerry and Diane Riley; eco expert Libe Chacos and green clean mistress Lesley-Ann Trow. Eco Living Magazine investigates the organic skin care industry; colonic hydrotherapy and building a sustainable home.

Eco Living is a portal to a new way of living, eco living in balance with nature, with people, and with spirit. Eco Living Health Aware can inspire you to make a difference! Eco Living is made with love for open hearts and minds everywhere. Check out the best new eco living magazine.

Eco Living Magazine is available in newsagencies around the country every 3 months.

Eco Living Magazine

Emag

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Dec 30 2008
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The Year of the Ox

Heading: The year of the Ox

Subheading: Slow and steady wins the race.

We are, just now, reaching the end of the year of the rat and it has proved true to form with the economic downturn and financial crisis. For the rat, is great, in times of paucity, drought and starvation – a great provider when things are scarce. How have you coped in the year of the rat? Are you feeling bereft of your usual sense of security or have you refocused your sense of values to the simpler things in life? Down sized your expectations and let go of the longer term life view – and perhaps you are finding joy in the company of friends and family. Enjoying a good meal or a good book and making do with a sense of surviving to live another day, until the winds change and you might raise up the energy for another foray forward.
The spectre of 2009 looms before us and the dreaded ‘R’word – recession is whispered around the world, with all its negative implications for continuing prosperity. The year of the ox brings with it no lightning fast resurrection of the markets but more a stolid one foot in front of the other approach to living. This will be an attention to detail kind of year, where progress can be made, slowly and with steady intention. The year of the ox will bring success to those that persevere and tether their camels. Starting again at the beginning, can be initially, a melancholy business but it is what is needed to get back into the game of life. The ox does what is required, works hard and pulls the dray to get those crops in and growing. Patience comes to the fore and the work will pay rewards in the end but is a no get rich quick scheme.
Indeed this year is the year we need to have in response to the ‘greed squeeze’factors, which have put us all where we are – cap in hand- so to speak. Regulation and appreciation of just rewards are on the menu in 2009 – Wall St cowboys and the Howard years are well and truly over. Get used to a return to the values of yesteryear – an honest return for an honest day’s work! Welcome to the year of the ox.
©Sudha Hamilton.

Eco Living Emag

Midas Word

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Dec 17 2008
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Media Waning

Heading: Media Waning

Subheading: The rapidly changing face of today’s media.

Every time I accidentally flick on to the commercial, free to air, TV stations, I am truly amazed and appalled at what is showing. I try to remember if it has always been this bad or whether it appears worse now, because we have a lot more choice – pay TV, the Internet, DVD’s and the like. Of course, it is particularly bad at this time of the year, Christmas and being outside of the ratings period, but the amount of fluff in their programing is astounding. Reality shows, reality dance shows, Gladiators for god sake, quiz shows, piss weak low budget drama, wall to wall American drivel and news, which is reminiscent of FM radio in the nineties, with so much smiling, local yokel branding, you want to be sick. Quality current affair and drama programs have disappeared. As much as those Channel Nine news personalities were smugly annoying, you could at least sense their journalistic commitment – understandable as they all came from the ABC.

If the rating figures are to be believed, and having worked for Advanced Television Ratings, I can tell you – we do not get a real cross section of the community putting their hand up, to have a people metre attached to every TV in their house (it is quite common these days for families to have 6 TV’s). It is a far more attractive option, for those who regularly like to enter supermarket and radio station competitions, as the ratings company, ATVR, cannot pay people to have the metres on their TV’s, they offer them bonus gift items, like microwave ovens and mobile phone covers – to encourage their participation. You just don’t get busy, intelligent people taking part in these kinds of surveys. But if the ratings figures were to be believed, we definitely do not live in the clever country, unless a whole lot of clever people really like to watch complete rubbish.

Media is now purely entertainment – action movies with stunts and special effects, inane talk shows with staged antics, commercialised sport, PR driven news, reality TV everywhere you look, and I wonder what the mirror is reflecting back to us? Are we smarter than the people watching TV in the 1970′s? The 80′s or 90′s?  I don’t think so, not if what we watch is reflecting who we are.

Movies are a hell of a lot worse now, and I think movie making reached a peak in the 70′s, combining strong story lines with characterisation and great dialogue – The Deer Hunter, The Godfather, Sunday Bloody Sunday – where are the likes of these films today? I agree that, Spielberg’s Jaws, introduced us to the teenage led parameters, which have defined movies ever since. We are watching the crap designed for ADHD kiddies, and none of the accountants, who run the industry are complaining – they are, I think,  these same kids grown up or sort of grown up anyway.

My main beef with the Media today, however, is the demise of the strong Media owner, who had some passion about what the Media could achieve. Who grew up in the business and cared about what the media could deliver to the communities it served. But siting Murdoch as some last remaining saviour, come on, this is the guy who began the steep decline – giving us commentators instead of real investigative journalism and tabloid exploitation of the basest community appetites. Now the alternative is faceless share holders, demanding bottom lines and ever increasing profits. Do they really care about what journalists are supposed to care about ? The veracity of the story. Selling newspapers, selling advertising space and keeping the account managers happy, are what the corporate media directors are now concerned with – to the exclusion of the needs of the intelligent reader or watcher.

The dumbing down of things, across the board, our political leaders – George. W. Bush and John Howard for ten years, telling you and the rest of the world that they were capable managers. Plagiarism rife in the media – Alan Jones and many more – and in politics our own, Julia Bishop. I remember watching a dumb ass US movie, about some character played by a comedic actor being sent into the future and everyone in the future had succumbed to the PR plunge – nobody knew anything but ad slogans and were surrounded by sexploitation, like on the Internet today. It was actually a great movie, with something to say, about how bloody stupid we have let ourselves become, in return for a nicer house, car and whatever else. Your house, may be now be worth a million dollars, but it doesn’t mean that you have not blocked out large chunks of your social responsibility in return for a pay off. Perhaps the process and the result are related.

I think for news to work, people have to care about what is being reported, both the new’s journalist and the audience are required to give a shit. We do not have that today – the newsroom is seemingly run by performing monkeys working for accountants. It is now all about about entertainment and money. The visual medium has numbed us, with its indiscriminate coverage of tragedy the world over, and we have meaning fatigue from overload. We see the pictures, but we are not so moved anymore. Too many celebrities on the scene and who really wants to see a dying or dead baby? Dots or pixels on the screen making recognisable shapes for an ever shorter, meaningful moment.

The Media today is all about making money. Some say that the Media has always been about making money. Does the Media have any responsibility outside of its money making entertainment value? Do we harp on about members of the Media being so called role models, as we do with sport’s people? Do we examine these same, self righteous, commentators, with the same conviction, as our weekend ball playing heroes? I don’t think so.

Sport’s journalism is, in my opinion, at its lowest ever ebb, it is hardly ever about the game but always about the star players – their falls and foibles – in stark contrast to the sanitised commercial image of the business of playing football. I always read an undercurrent of journalistic jealousy, in the reports of these modern day Achilles. Sporting endeavour is about the quest for glory, and the schmuck in the pub is still dreaming of his own unrealised potential. He doesn’t really want to read about the bullshit and corruption, which underpin sports in the commercial arena. He knows about that intimately in his own life – why his boss is ripping him off and why everybody hates the boss at work. Tell us about the game and the glorious acts, which were committed in fulfilling the crazy quest to win, we can see the game on countless screens, but sharing the joy with language befitting a writer, is something sadly lacking. Mr sport’s journalist you are a writer, a communicator – why not Matt Price like, tell us your story and let us in. We want to share your appreciation of the unlikely and laugh with you at the courage shown by these tribal warriors while  chasing a ball and never giving in.

If the Media is cynical, if the mirror does not reflect the magic all around; then we will all turn to our own personal media- and maybe that is not a bad thing.

©Sudha Hamilton

Eco Living Emag

Midas Word

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Dec 15 2008
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What is the Wellness Industry?

Heading: What is the Wellness Industry?

Subheading: A look at the health system.

Welcome to the latest installment of Midas Words, where words are designed to change your world, whether it be for the wiser or the wealthier. Midas Words has been created to stimulate thought and to aid you in your journey into greater wellbeing, in business and in life. There has been of late, a great deal of talk about the new – “wellness industry” – and I think it might be useful to establish what some of its defining aspects are.

Looking back historically, humanity has always been interested in its own mortality, how to preserve it, improve it and prolong it. At the same time, these primary urges have also often provoked an economic response, as those with the knowledge and/or skills to heal, have sought to be renumerated for their services. A fare exchange being the bedrock upon which we have based our capitalist system, and which allows those so inclined to practise their specialised craft.

For the last hundred years, or so, the state sponsored health industry in our country has been the exclusive domain of those trained via the allopathic school of medicine (defined as the use of opposites in treating disease* and is commonly referred to as ‘modern medicine”). A consequence of this proliferation of a “one school” specialised approach, has been the disempowerment of the individual in his or her responsibility for their own health. Our failure, to include a greater emphasis on health and wellbeing, when educating our young has further removed the individual’s ability to manage his or her own health.

However, despite some magnificent breakthroughs in the treatment of diseases such as childhood leukaemia, heart disease and many more, there has been a growing general disaffection with modern medicine and its inability to treat chronic illnesses. Perhaps also in part due to its failure to respectfully deal with the mind, as distinct from the body, and science’s continuing inability to understand human consciousness; but also in it’s arrogant dismissal of alternative healing approaches. Modern medicine is after all a big business, and like many big businesses, it prefers a monopoly to competition for those health dollars. Funded by large pharmaceutical corporations it treads a precarious path in its bid to fulfil its Hippocratic oath,** and not be swayed by the often unseen lure of filthy lucre.

It is the general overview of the modern medical/pharmaceutical behemoth, that there will be a pharmacological cure/treatment for every disease/medical condition, if you can find or fabricate the right drug/ingredient. Whether this premise is indeed correct, or not, cannot hide the fact that for many people the current crop of available pharmaceutical drugs is not the panacea that they are searching for right now. Many in the community (a recent Victorian survey confirmed up to two thirds surveyed had consulted an alternative non-allopathic practitioner) have turned away from the local GP, prescribing pain killers and antibiotics, in search of an alternative, that is possibly more inclusive and often gives them more time, care and understanding. In response to this market led shift away from complete dominance of the health industry there has been some small cross fertilisation by doctors learning acupuncture, naturopathy, homeopathy and the like – and the renaming of alternative health as complementary health (proving in business that if you cannot eradicate your competition then the next best thing is to incorporate them into your own business).

This just about puts us where we are, at the beginning of the 21C, and in the midst of a trend or movement toward wellness or preventative medicine, where a growing proportion of the population are self-medicating with vitamins, minerals, supplements and organic food. This is generally, I believe, in the hope that they will avoid many of the diseases, that their parents and grandparents have fallen foul of, and indeed beyond that- to live longer and better lives. Enter the wellness industry with its rapidly growing nutriceutical manufacturers, associated bodies representing natural practitioners, natural health media and a host of astute businesses, recognising a hugely expanding market, that have jumped on the band wagon.

As in many sections within the business community, you can find a mixture of motivating reasons why these people are involved in this particular industry: personal commitments based on health issues that have affected themselves or a close family member; vocational destiny; avarice, pure chance and a combination of the above. However, as more and more existing companies seek to align themselves with this push toward health, the number of people, who will find themselves working in a health related field, will continue to grow exponentially; and these people will need to be educated beyond their current level of knowledge.

The recognition and accreditation, recently achieved by many of the natural health educational institutions, is tantamount to this fact. The establishment of the Complementary Healthcare Council, under the direction of the Therapeutic Goods Administration, and the ever growing legislative requirements of this body- is further testament to the size and recognition of the natural health industry. Recent problems, best illustrated by the Pan Vitamin Crisis, saw the largest recall of vitamins ever seen in this country. Hundreds of lines of vitamin supplements were recalled, in defiance of the fact, that Pan, was also a manufacturer of pharmaceuticals, and that the Travacalm product, which caused the serious complaints, which led to the TGA action, was actually a pharmaceutical item. This disturbing incident has created a certain unease within the general public and I am sure has had long lasting negative implications for the industry.

However it seems regulation is necessary, and for the industry to continue to grow, certain requirements will need to be met. History shows, that pioneers, who establish new industries will often resent government interference at first, but that it is part and parcel of the natural evolution from small to big business. Of course many of the vitamin manufacturers are primarily pharmaceutical companies, who have developed the vitamins as a side line or who recognising the market growth have bought in. It does raise certain questions about their positions on the Complementary Healthcare Council and could be seen to be somewhat compromised. Who are they representing, and what hat are they wearing, when decisions affecting both the highly regulated pharmaceutical industry and the traditionally less regulated natural health supplement industry are being made. It is in my view, always a shame, when the expense of regulation moves an industry out of the financial reach of many of those who wish to take part in it, but the upside of this is the removal of many of the so called “snake oil” salesmen who inhabit it (the future possibility that snake oil is found to actually contain the ingredients of some wonder drug would render this metaphor obsolete). Welcome to the wellness industry.

* whereas homeopathy uses minute doses of substances that create similar effects to the existing symptoms of the condition.

**

HippocratesHippocrates, the father of medicine

Hippocratic Oath — Classical Version

I swear by Apollo Physician and Asclepius and Hygieia and Panaceia and all the gods and goddesses, making them my witnesses, that I will fulfil according to my ability and judgment this oath and this covenant:

To hold him who has taught me this art as equal to my parents and to live my life in partnership with him, and if he is in need of money to give him a share of mine, and to regard his offspring as equal to my brothers in male lineage and to teach them this art – if they desire to learn it – without fee and covenant; to give a share of precepts and oral instruction and all the other learning to my sons and to the sons of him who has instructed me and to pupils who have signed the covenant and have taken an oath according to the medical law, but no one else.

I will apply dietetic measures for the benefit of the sick according to my ability and judgment; I will keep them from harm and injustice.

I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody who asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect. Similarly I will not give to a woman an abortive remedy. In purity and holiness I will guard my life and my art.

I will not use the knife, not even on sufferers from stone, but will withdraw in favor of such men as are engaged in this work.

Whatever houses I may visit, I will come for the benefit of the sick, remaining free of all intentional injustice, of all mischief and in particular of sexual relations with both female and male persons, be they free or slaves.

What I may see or hear in the course of the treatment or even outside of the treatment in regard to the life of men, which on no account one must spread abroad, I will keep to myself, holding such things shameful to be spoken about.

If I fulfil this oath and do not violate it, may it be granted to me to enjoy life and art, being honored with fame among all men for all time to come; if I transgress it and swear falsely, may the opposite of all this be my lot.

Translation from the Greek by Ludwig Edelstein. From The Hippocratic Oath: Text, Translation, and Interpretation, by Ludwig Edelstein. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1943.

©Sudha Hamilton

Eco Living Magazine

Midas Word

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Dec 10 2008
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Blog Posts, Health, Reviews, Uncategorized

Foodmatters DVD Review

Heading: Foodmatters DVD Reviewed.

Subheading: You are what you eat.

I was really impressed with the content of Foodmatters – You are what you eat - strong voices speaking with confidence about nutrition in the face of the institutionalised apathetic attitude of the scientific/medical community.

This subject has been close to my own heart for many years, and it is great to see that these film makers have produced a high quality documentary with something to say, which really matters. Food does matter, and the betrayal of humanity’s needs by capitalism in this regard is a crime – millions of people with cancer and heart disease, dead and dying, while our supermarket shelves are groaning with processed foods full of fat, salt and sugar.

If it is always about the money, if money is the bottom line, then we are all just slaves on a production line heading to the cemetary. Of course it isn’t really about money, it is about living with heart and soul. Stop buying crap – fast food, pre-prepared food and start cooking fresh food.

Start growing your own organic veggies, and if you stop ‘working for the man’– stop lining the pockets of the rich, you will have the time available to do so. It feels a hell of a lot better than telling the lies we all have to tell to make a living.

Foodmatters the DVD – has some very intelligent people, sharing some poorly understood information, about the importance of eating good food. Andrew Saul is particularly impressive in the way he communicates what he knows, and the state of play in the world. It is bloody unbelievable that doctors publicly question the validity of vitamins, and that hospitals feed you white bread and packaged custard. In the US, hundreds of thousands of people die every year from wrongly prescribed, and misadministered pharmaceutical drugs, and the numbers may be lower in Australia but it is still much higher than those killed on our roads.

A point of interest here – it is quite difficult to get this information in Australia, as, suprise suprise, all the focus in studies is on illicit drugs; it seems hospital mortality rates are a closely guarded secret.

Andrew Saul makes the point, that there have been ten suspected deaths in the US involving vitamins over the last twenty three years - only suspected, never proven - while he conservatively figures that over two million people have been conclusively shown to have died from wrongly prescribed medication. Our health system here, as in the US, is in the hands of vested interest groups, pharmaceutical corporations and the associations of doctors who dole out their product to you and me.

Government health policies are controlled by the medical lobby groups and in the US, the re-election of MP’s are funded by pharmaceutical money. In Australia, the AMA is always on the front foot, threatening state and federal governments with action by their doctor members, if their wishes are not met. Hospitals are run by doctors and bureaucrats, who used to be doctors, all trained in the same system, and every road leads back to the drug companies.

The scientific medical journals, which publish discriminately, ‘ so called’medical breakthroughs, and research studies, are funded by the pharmaceutical companies through their advertising spend. The studies themselves are directly funded by the drug companies. The regulatory bodies are funded by the pharmaceutical corporations. The doctors, until recently in Australia, were encouraged to sell more pharma product by being  presented with lavish gifts – holidays, all expenses paid conferences, golfing trinkets and luxury goods, by the companies that made them. It is now illegal in Australia for the pharma giants to do so.

The PR employed by pharma and the medical associations is immense. When you hear about a medical breakthrough or new ‘wonder drug’on the nightly news, this information has been fed to the TV stations and newspapers by PR agencies in the employ of the drug companies. There has usually been very little journalistic scrutiny engaged by the media in these instances. Why? Because the money involved is big and the pharmaceutical corporate influence is so heavily embedded in our western cultures that we hardly are even aware of it anymore.

The widely held assumptions run something like this -

Doctors are like Gods because they heal the sick.

Drugs are the modern saviours of our wonderful health system.

Things were bad before we had all these drugs to fight off disease.

Now there is some truth in these statements but that does not mean that we cannot debate aspects of modern medicine’s approach to healing. It does not mean that we have to accept the way things are currently run. Why does the AMA want to control things so much? And why do they actively disparage any other approach to healing?

Money!

You cannot easily make so much money from encouraging and indeed selling fresh healthy food. You cannot copyright fresh produce to the same extent as an artificially produced pharmaceutical drug – but they are trying with Genetically Modified canola and the like. In Australia, many of the vitamin producers are now owned by pharmaceutical companies, as there are a lot of vitamins being sold, despite the best efforts of the medical fraternity in rubbishing their efficacy.

The Pan Vitamin Crisis may still be fresh in the minds of many Australians – funny that it is referred to by that name, as Pan was a producer of pharmaceautical products and the poisoning, which occurred with Travacalm, was a pharmaceutical not a vitamin supplement. This did not however stop the TGA from stripping from our shelves, Australia wide, every Vitamin supplement ever made by Pan. Damaging the natural health supplement industry on every level and putting many smaller concerns out of business permanently.

Once again this echoes Andrew Saul’s  playfully expressed conundrum – why, if every one is dying from pharmaceutical poisoning and nobody is dying from vitamin overdoses, are the medical fraternity so worried about natural health supplements? Why are they pointing the finger at the wrong suspect and hiding their own gross mortality rates?

Foodmatters is beautifully put together and maintains an inspirational but determined tone throughout its eighty minute duration. It isnt a rant (unlike my blog at times), it is full of intelligent experts like Prof Ian Brighthope, Charlotte Gerson, Phillip Day, Dr Dan Rogers, David Wolfe and Jerome Burne. It points out startling inconsistencies in the way our health system operates, and the way our food chain has been exploited and polluted by capitalism, in search of bigger profits. It illustrates why we are getting sick with chronic illnesses, which modern medicine cannot heal; because it cannot cut them out or prescribe an effective pill.

Nutritionists, turned film makers, James Colquhoun and Laurentine ten Bosch, have created a timely masterpiece, which buzzes with alive energy and contains a poignant message for humanity.  I loved the way they employed archived footage and audio from the fifties and sixties, complete with smug voice over and patronising tone, conveying our ‘ all knowing’western science of the time, now proven to be a toxic disaster.

If you want to watch something, which is hard hitting, vibrant and intelligent, watch this.


©Sudha Hamilton

Sacred Chef cooking school on the sunshine coast for nutritious and delicious food, fun learning and good living

Eco Living Emag

Midas Word

www.foodmatters.tv

 

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Dec 08 2008
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Blog Posts, Earth Hour, Uncategorized

Earth Hour

Earth Hour 2009

Earth Hour 2009

I am writing up the international copy of Earth Hour online for the WWF and it is bringing home to me what an exciting concept Earth Hour is. Researching what is happening in Moldova, Belize, Vietnam, Belgium, Panama, Kenya, Fiji and the list goes on and on, I can sense the amazing unifying energy that things like Earth Hour have. Knowing that people in all these places are actively involved in organising global warming awareness actions in their cities, really gives me the sense that people power on a planetary level is not only possible but is where we are heading as humanity. Utilising the technology of the internet for global good is what I imagine it was actually devised for.

Getting inside the Earth Hour idea, as I have through writing it up for over 30 countries, I can see how powerful it is. Getting people to sit in the dark together with family and friends, sharing special time by the flickering light of a candle. Thinking about what we all can do to reduce our energy consumption and at the same time feeling the bonding intimacy of people coming together as members of the human race, it is a brilliant concept. Go Earth Hour.

It also has its macro moments, with the theatrical drama of large landmarks and office towers extinguishing their lights for one Earth Hour. Buildings and monuments, which never normally dim their lights, suddenly plunged into darkness – symbolising our possibly cataclysmic future if global warming continues unchecked. Thousands of people in public places holding mere candles in the wind amid the pitch black. Earth Hour takes the stage in 1000 cities around the world and in 2009 they hope to have 1 billion people taking part.

I hope that you will join me and millions of other humans on the 28 March, 2009 for one Earth Hour.

Register your support online at earthhour.org

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Dec 01 2008
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Blog Posts

Fatherhood

Heading: Fatherhood

Subheading: All the thrills and spills.

To say having children has changed my life is probably up there with the greatest personal understatement of all time. As a first time father in my forties, I had no idea at the sheer labour intensiveness of raising a child in a loving environment.

Having lived a predominantly self-indulgent, single lifestyle for much of my twenties and thirties, with the focus on spiritual development and personal exploration, I reached a time when my life felt deeply unfulfilled and the desire to start a family began to intensify.

I remember thinking about time line parallels with my late father, whilst I was still single, childless and at that time unemployed he had been married for thirteen years and had four children, built a home and business – the contrasts were acute but I had never aspired to being like my father.

I thought about what my body would like to be doing, in the way that animals have a distinct biological clock that predetermines their phases of life, and felt the lack in my single male existence.I was also very bored by the social scene that I found myself in, the game playing of dating was wearing thin and sex in the city was as about exciting as television…

So, when I finally met the love of my life, I let nature take its course, and we were engaged and with child within about two weeks. All intellectual doubts were blown away like dust in a cyclone, and the excitement about what we had done was amazing – I suppose if you have spent so much time avoiding the fertility cycle then the moment when you surrender to it is pretty powerful. Impending parenthood is a hell of a lot easier than the actual thing, you are tapping into an incredibly well subscribed fantasy that families all over the world have celebrated since time began. Slaps on the back, wide smiles and memories of TV show scenes featuring dads and big cigars.

The births were all harrowing in their own way. My wife was so courageous throughout both labours, and the system probably let us down each time, but we, and the babies, survived. In retrospect, I now consider birth to be the most miraculous real thing that happens in the lives of humans, and I suspect most animals feel the same way.

Forget the virgin birth – it is the old fashioned sperm and egg number – when experienced in your own home, without the nurses and white sheets – that is truly amazing. The stretching of flesh, blood and sheer grit that my wife experienced over countless hours is so far beyond any male sporting achievement it begs belief. Yet, until you actually go through the experience with your partner, it does not really rate on your radar, and according to the male dominated media it is something like state of origin football, which is some sort of benchmark in the courage stakes. Maybe if they were physically pulling the footballs out of their arses before crossing over the line for a try I could agree.

When your partner finally gets that baby out it is a big moment. The build up toward this achievement is huge – nine months of expansion in all areas of both your lives. The focus shifts to the fat one; the one with the belly – and you need to quickly train yourself to become a support act, like a male ballet dancer, whose job is to lift the ballerina when required.

It can be a shock to the system because all balance goes out the door, along with the drinking and smoking – and listening to the litany of what she has to endure as this thing grows inside her is not always easy. The changes are so profound that nobody really speaks of them, and perhaps evolution includes a conspiracy of silence to ensure the survival of the species. When this miracle emerges alive smeared in blood and guts, and you have waited out the months, weeks, days, hours and minutes – it is intense, it is tears, hearts in your eyes and almost fainting stuff.

It has however only just begun for mum and dad. The fatherhood clock has only ticked a minute past midnight.

To be continued………..

©Sudha Hamilton

Eco Living Emag

Midas Word

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