Sudha Hamilton

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

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

Tagged anthropology, archaeology, architecture, author, ego, furnishings, homes, house therapy, houses, identity, insights, interior design, new book, personality, psychology, secrets revealed, self, self examination, self-help book, sociology, sudha hamilton, Taoism, therapeutic tool, therapy, who are you, wisdom

Aug 13 2011

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

Tagged da Vinci, history, jack of all trades, Leonardo, Leonardo do Vinci, polymath, polymathic person, renaissance man, vegetarian

May 29 2011

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

Tagged Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, antidepressants, beliefs, capitalism, chronic illnesses, classical life, common sense, consciousness, David Finkelstein, depression, drugs, Einstein, energy, existence, family, free markets, God, healing, humanity, inner life, Julian Jaynes, Latin, love, mass, meaning of life, metaphors, mob rule, Newtonian science, Nils Bohr, noos, parents, pharmaceuticals, physics, psychology, quantum physics, reality, religion, science, Servan-Schreiber, statistical medicine, subatomic, thumos, truth, uncertainty, universe, Werner Heisenberg, Western medicine

May 04 2011

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.

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

Tagged antidepressants, Australia, banking, belief, Bob Hawke, Buddhism, Cathars, Christianity, Church, Constantine, doctors, economics, financial freedom, genocide, GP's, Hinduism, history, home ownership, investment, Islam, Jesus Christ, jobs, Judaism, Krishna, materialism, money, Mormons, Moses, Muchukunda, one god, Paul Keating, persecution, pogroms, prejudice, Reformation, religion, Roamn catholic Church, science, spirituality, Vishnu, women, womens liberation, work

Apr 20 2011

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Cultural Issues, Health, Meaning, New Ideas, parenting, Reality, Reviews, Science, Uncategorized

What is being human?

Our Posthuman Future – Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution

By Francis Fukuyama

Profile Books, 2003.

Book Review

A disturbing orange cover, with a picture of what looks like a conveyer belt full of robotic looking babies stretching into infinity, possibly delayed my reading of this brilliant book. Its publication date accidentally synchronised with the birth of my own children and perhaps I was too involved in the real thing to have the time to read about biotechnology and its impact on humanity; well I am glad I finally have. Francis Fukuyama likes to invoke the heavy hitters of philosophy right off and Nietzsche’s ominous quotes are littered throughout at chapter beginnings, I suppose it is called getting your attention. Fukuyama weaves around all over the place a bit at first, delineating things by way of reference to George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, before settling down and finding his stride. These two books were the two poles of possible fears for Fukuyama’s American baby boomer generation, representing the futuristic totalitarian IT nightmare in the former and the more creepy biotechnological nirvana in the latter. We have of course now arrived into a world where, both the technologies featured in these two books are part of our reality, and the author goes on throughout his book to show, that it is the biotechnological possibilities of which we have most to fear.

He classifies biotechnology into three major parts: Neuropharmacology; Genetic Engineering; and Lifespan Extension. Beginning with Neuropharmacology Fukuyama paints a vivid picture of now, in our Western urban worlds, with facts about the prevalence of antidepressant drug use through Prozac and its many SSRI cousins, and even more disturbingly the massive use of Ritalin being prescribed for our children. We are deeply involved in mind and behaviour control on a societal level through our complacent acceptance of these drugs. Doctors are prescribing antidepressants and amphetamines to men, women and children at an alarming rate. Why is this happening? Why has something like ADHD suddenly gone from not existing at all to enormous levels within our communities? Fukuyama does not take a moralistic tone in his discussion about this but brings the facts and their ramifications into sharp focus. There are various forces at work within these situations: our expectations regarding happiness are very different now to twenty or thirty years ago and our reliance on medical science has been consistently encouraged by governments and the pharmaceutical industry during the last few decades. Economically we are all expected to provide maximum levels of productivity, whether you are a mother or a teacher, we do not have the same amount of time to devote to the care of our children in many cases and we therefore expect our children to be more cooperative at school and at home. When they are not we now classify them as deficient in attention and drug them.

At the same time, as we are officially giving happy pills to a substantial percentage of our population, we are condemning and prosecuting another large section as illegal drug users. You can see the strange hypocrisy in this fact, as Fukuyama points out the similarities, chemically speaking, between many of these drugs, like Ecstasy and the SSRI’s, and that Speed is an amphetamine like Ritalin. It is these fine lines of demarcation within our societies, defining what neuropharmacology is really for, that this book explores. Drugs are OK if we are sick but are bad if merely for pleasure and that certain levels of unhappiness then become sickness (depression), as do certain levels of not paying enough attention (ADHD). Who is deciding the points on the scale? Doctors and the medical industry? Don’t they have a vested interest in all these matters and indeed a trillion dollar interest in pharmacology? A lot of what this book is about, is asking who in our Western civilised worlds should be making these decisions for society and is it really OK to let the market decide? Being an American, Francis Fukuyama is living in the nation, which has the most avaristic culture in the world, especially around technological developments; as we have seen in the IT industry. He postulates that we as a world need to think about the consequences of these biotechnological developments and legislate for them; for our own protection.

Moving on to Genetic Engineering, and the myriad of biotechnological challenges we now and in the very near future face, Fukuyama shepherds in Dolly the Sheep and its obvious pointer to human cloning. Human cloning is currently banned in most countries and faces a huge amount of legal discussion, as to the rights of a clone within our societies. The whole genetic question raises the unholy spectre of Eugenics and the Nazis experiments on the weak and their racially judged inferiors. It was not only in Germany and Japan, where these ghastly experiments went on, scientists in the US in a Jewish hospital infected the chronically ill with cancer cells, in another case it was mentally retarded children with hepatitis and the more famous case (they made a movie about it) of 400 black men, many of whom were purposely not treated for syphilis with available medication to record the diseases progression. Fukuyama’s book indicates that this whole racial genetic argument is still very much alive in the US and that the nurture versus nature questions splits the sciences down the middle on political grounds. He states that the Left have always come down on the side of environmental factors affecting intelligence levels within races – not enough to eat so the brain doesn’t develop – where the Right have been firmly on the side of white people being genetically superior in terms of intelligence. Reading all this myself I wondered about the tests being utilised in all this so called intelligence testing, the criteria for intelligence and how it is judged? Scientists, politicians and bureaucrats all testing on the basis of their own preconceived ideas about what it is to be intelligent in a predominantly white Anglo Saxon culture. And even beyond questions of race what is intelligence anyway, is it IQ or Emotional Intelligence or Spiritual Intelligence?

The horrors of rational fascistic science have lodged in the cultural consciousness and so there is a justifiable amount of fear around Genetic Engineering. In contrast to this are the things we now can do about diseases and conditions like cystic fibrosis and Down’s syndrome, which are now being screened for with preimplantation genetic diagnosis. The extension of this will be designer babies, where technology again offers the graduation from avoidance of sickness to ideas of perfection. Introducing questions of who will be able to afford it and will this become the province of the rich, thus increasing the gulf between the haves and have nots? The author emphasises again that governments must play their part in making sure that genetic engineering does not disadvantage the already disadvantaged within our communities; and goes further to suggest that it could indeed be a technology used to improve things for these sections of the community. Fukuyama recommends international bodies for the guidance of biotechnology and offers the examples in the nuclear industry as proof of possible efficacy in this regard. The dangers of the nuclear industry (as seen by the crisis currently in Japan) are, I think he is inferring, on par with the dangers inherent in the biotechnology sphere.

Francis Fukuyama talks a lot about what it means to be human and the essential qualities of humanness. He invokes Aristotle and a whole pantheon of philosophers and moral judges in answering this question. In the end I think he comes down on the side of feeling, that it is our human feelings which define us as human. So we have the harsh and hostile world of Darwinian evolution and the men in white lab coats on one hand and the subjective consciousness of the feeling world on the other, his book may be an informed cry for help. An Achtung before it is too late and we have sold our humanness for bigger boobs, and smarter and taller, better looking kids. Stem cell therapy and the use of research involving embryos are or have been hot topics recently, with governments voting on legislation, and often doing so as votes of conscience rather than on party policy grounds. The ability to grow new cells and possibly limbs and other organs for the sick versus the rights of the unborn. This takes us back to abortion and how that is still used in many Eastern countries as a genetic engineering tool in favour of males over females in the human species. Abortion is a very volatile topic in the US especially, and anything to do with it opens up that great religious divide and debate. The genetic engineering argument embraces the scientist’s pragmatic view that if we are terminating unwanted pregnancies, and also if there are extra embryos left over from IVF, then we should be using these for embryonic stem cell research. Against this we have the Right To Life religious organisations and also non-religious anti-biotechnology groups, who see this work as a corruption of the rights of the individual, which opens the question – at what age do we become human?

The third part of this whole dilemma, according to Fukuyama, is science’s work in prolonging our life expectancies. The twentieth century has seen the life expectancies raised in women from 46.3 and men from 48.3, in the US in 1900, to that of 79.9 for women and 74.2 for men in the year 2000. The author points out, when you combine this with falling birth rates in most Western countries we are now facing a rapidly changing age demographic, meaning that fewer young people will be supporting many more older and infirm people in our communities and economies. In addition to the well publicised affect this will have on social security systems, there will be further ramifications with a growing divide internationally, with developing nations with higher birth rates having younger population demographics; more angry young men. Fukuyama posits that the US will have a decidedly older and more feminine population, as women live longer, and that this will contrast politically with their dealings with these young countries (I think it more likely to be a good thing as grandma is less likely to bomb people). Our Posthuman Future goes onto list many of the possible scenarios related to these population and demographic shifts related to life span extension, and in particular talks about our attitudes to the elderly, facing challenges; when we are forced to care for them on mass and they are taking our jobs – (which the baby boomers have been doing for years in Australia LOL). Fukuyama spells out the medical facts about prolonging life spans and that quality of life experience will not necessarily accompany this extension; and that our cultural worshipping of youth is very much about sexual reproductivity. Lives lived for the majority of years as aged, and non-reproductively, will present clear cultural and psychological challenges for the participants and for all those around them. Medical science is taking us all down this path because nobody really wants to die and wants to see their parents die, and euthanasia is feared by many within our societies. We do and will need to have these discussions about death and what it means to have a life, beyond the ‘hands off’ and keep everything alive for as long as possible, which is the current position of governments and medical science. I think we as a community will have to grow up and religions will need to pull their heads out of the sands of two millennia ago – which is when their religious texts were written.

Francis Fukuyama, being an American and working in the US education system, as the Professor of International Political Economy at John Hopkins University, in my opinion shies away from stressing the very large part that the free market in our capitalist economy plays in this. Despite the fact that the overall message of his book is that we need impartial democratic government bodies policing biotechnology, I still think the author misses out on emphasising the fact, that we as a society leave a great deal of medical science in the hands of a market intent on making as much money as possible out of whatever situation they find or create. Our democratically elected representatives in government are too dependent on popular decisions and election campaign dollars from the pharmaceutical industry. Our scientists are equally dependent on private enterprise funded research grants and even the scientific journals, which publish the reports, are dependent on big pharma advertising dollars. If we value the dollar over everything else how will we ever get any impartiality in any decision making body and if every government department is only potentially lasting four or five years how can we carry out any far reaching legislation?

This is a really worthwhile and enjoyable book to read, drawing on our great Western philosophical canon to pose many of the questions, we as a society face in regard to the biotechnological revolution.

©Sudha Hamilton

Sacred Chef cooking school on the sunshine coast for nutritious and delicious food – fun learning and intelligent living!

Tagged abortion, biotechnology, cloning, control, designer babies, DNA, embryonic stem cells, embryos, eugenics, Francis Fukuyama, genetic engineering, genetics, Government, human cloning, life extension, medical science, nazi, neuropharmacological, nietzsche, pharmaceutical industry, philosophy, politics, posthuman, race, racial equality, religion, right to life, science

Mar 18 2011

Cultural Issues, Meaning, Reality, Sex, Uncategorized

Is sex a mystical gateway?

Is sex a mystical gateway, to a boundless place of untold pleasures and exquisite pains, in your life?

Sex, I think, is different things at different times of our lives. It reflects what we are seeking, at that juncture, and therefore, who, we are attracting into our life. For it is a union of energies after all, and as they say in the song, “it takes two to tango, baby.” Occasionally that saying has some negative connotations, and similarly our sexual experiences can at times be defined by our partner’s energies, for good or bad.

Making love, having sex, it is a moment when we return to our interior universe and tune into our sensory responses. It is an intensely personal experience, which is also shared, in an intimate revelation of our essentially animal natures. We roar and groan, grunt and gasp, in a symphony of respiratory action, for our ride to pleasure is carried on each breath. It is that breath, which makes sexual activity a possible doorway to the divine. Reading Tim Winton’s novel, Breath, you can sense the parallels between experiences of the ocean and sexual experiences. Metaphorical language used to describe the tumbling; submerged qualities inherent inside a wave are similar to the ocean of bliss, inside us, which can well up during sex. At times we are letting go to the inextricable force of the sea, as we must’ let go’ to the surging currents within our sexuality. We ride upon, and inside, our wave of ecstasy and our breathing triggers the biochemical reactions, which can awaken orgasmic brain activity.

Sex is most often heightened at the beginning of a relationship, when two individuals come together as strangers and begin a process of removing outer signs of independent identity. Clothing, which like a uniform represents each individuals place and possibly role in society, is stripped away and they stand naked before one another. Clothing can hide essential truths, about who we are, and allow us to pretend to be someone we are not. Sex asks of us, right at the start, to play the hand we have been dealt by nature ( I suppose cosmetic surgery has interjected here). Sex asks us to bring the bare truth to this union, as the key to opening a doorway to bliss. Our feelings, at the beginning, can be on a knife edge, as we show parts of ourselves, normally well hidden, and vacillate between hopes and fears, regarding our acceptance by the beloved. We are not only showing our arse in public but celebrating its function and uses with another. It is a merging process, as we share and discover our erogenous nooks and crannies with another. Our normally vigilant guard comes down and our pupils dilate, as we hold the gaze of our lover and drink in the cause of this new delight. There is the magic of the unknown in the air and it is charged with the frisson of the archetypal merging moment. There is glory and boldness, and there is surrender and humbleness, there is the charging of the stag with antlers aquiver, and the dissolving into an endless ocean of energy. There are intense moments of you and equally intense moments beyond you. There is the ride and there is the fall.

Once committed to the fruitful sexual act, and thus rewarded with acceptance by our new sexual partner, we bring a sense of hope and with it the possibility of a clean slate, in regard to an ongoing mutually rewarding physical and emotional relationship. For ‘gateway’ sex, as I call it, is a magical, sacred space and we can only access it when we have hope in our heart. The sexual realm, can ask all of us to embody archetypal energies, no longer displayed by our genders in the modern age. It can create a dichotomy or unresolvable dynamic tension, where what we play out sexually can never quite fit into the rest of our lives. It has a special place and demands distinct rules around it, for it to survive and prosper in the twenty first century. So many relationships break down here, as the magic fades in the harsh light of the day and countless tiny grievances mount up to close his or her heart away. Once that heart and hope are locked away then sex becomes a macabre shadow dance, where the bodies go through the motions but with no soul at play. It can be like someone has switched off all the nerve endings, and more importantly all the meaning, from the activity. It is like making love whilst encased in a thick glove of suspended despair. The individual has returned to that individual space and no merging is possible anymore. When love dies it is a very sad day and our consciousness’s run endless reruns of sepia tinted memories to drive all joy away. Grieving the loss of love is probably the most traumatic experience we all will experience in our lifetimes. Like the bush after a fire, everything is black and burnt away. There are skeletons of trees, which mark how high our joy once reached. The echo of love’s laughter keeps the birds at bay. For a time nothing new will grow here and the skies are always grey.

Many of us have put away the magic of sex into the bottom drawer of an old cupboard, which we never use anymore. Somewhere inside of us we have sworn off this disrupting force and condemned that last great hurt to be the final one. We may masturbate our selves, often or not, but without the emotional commitment of another’s fumbling touch. Sex is a momentary relief to help us get to sleep or a frustrated release that doesn’t stain the sheets. Layers of emotional scar tissue have built up hard upon our souls and the smile we may offer another is firmly closed indoors. When, and if, love returns to these shores it faces a long thaw and the messianic job of raising Lazarus from the dead. I know from my own personal experience that there can be a physical delay in being able to respond sexually after a long lay-off. It is like those layers of calcified hurt must be given time to melt away before my penis will trust enough to fill with blood and stretch out to meet the new day.

Returning now to that time, when we have just established honest sexual union with our new partner and that sense of being ‘in love’ is reciprocated. Can you remember what it is like? When every part of their body is simply amazing and emanating some intangible quality. To touch their skin is the greatest pleasure you have ever known and it is all holistically connected with some cosmic secret that you just had no idea about before it happened. When you wake up in the morning and glance over at this beatific being, lying next to you and the realisation hits that you and, he or she, are ‘together’. This is the magic realm and it is often bitter sweet for our cynical selves to recall this state of ‘in loveness’. We have developed the habit of ‘putting down’ such heightened states labelling them as ‘the honeymoon period’ and quickly assuring the occupants that it will be over before you know it. You cannot stay too long in fairy land and Peter Pan must grow up to face the grim realities of a real relationship. Yet today, even in the age of ‘fast food’ marriages and divorces, we still clamour to be ‘in love’ and now the Internet has brought the supermarket experience to shopping for love and relationships. In aisle one, we have forty five year old, divorced Capricorns with a penchant for reading the newspaper on the loo; in aisle two……..

How do we integrate magic into our hum drum lives? How do we honour the gods in our lovers and in ourselves? Can we maintain a sense of reality? Can we go to work; support the family; clean the bathroom; listen to the gripers and whingers in the average world; and still delve into the delicious, dripping divinity of another realm?

Is sex a mystical gateway, to a boundless place of untold pleasures and exquisite pains, in your life?

©Sudha Hamilton

Tagged archetypes, bliss, breath, divinity, ecstatic love, hurts, intimacy, language, love, love making, magic, making love, merging, metaphor, pains, partners, relationships, sex, sexual activity, sexual union, Tim Winton

Mar 10 2011

Uncategorized

When someone you love judges you.

What are the salves for the wound that festers beneath the skin? When it is someone, whom you have let in, spitting acid upon your sense of self. Judging, condemning and rejecting who you are. Where does the matter truly lie?

What do they say,’ hold your loved ones near but your enemies even closer, ‘or something like that anyway. It is a painful fact, that when someone who has shared love with you turns on you, there is no escape and no buffer from the hurt. When it happens suddenly it is even more disturbing and if from out of the blue comes a banshee bearing your heart bad news – well you lose a little confidence in life’s essentially benign nature.

Intellectualising about it really doesn’t heal the canker but sometimes getting it down in front of you can enlighten one a little to the facts as they stand before you.

Feb 02 2011

Reality, Uncategorized

Denial the pathway of No

What is your pathway to truth and enlightenment? Is it one of self-denial and sacrifice? There are so many spiritual traditions based on the righteous denial of the flesh. Jesus dying on the cross, symbolising the death of the flesh as sacrifice to a metaphysical truth. Christianity has its genesis in this and condemns human flesh as sinful by its very nature. Gautama the Buddha leaves behind his palace, wife and kingdom to sit beneath the bodhi tree. These are big actions and they speak to the many who have come after these spiritual icons. Indeed many now worship these sacrifices and mimic them in their own choices to deny the flesh and to focus on the spirit.

What is the symbol of Christianity? The cross and doesn’t that suggest that the focus is on the crucifixion of Christ? Why doesn’t Christianity have a symbol that emphasises the love in Jesus’ message? Why focus on death and martyrdom? The Judaic Christian tradition loves to play the victim card – saying our saviour and our people have suffered – because there is powerful PR in shocking the masses. Dying on the cross is dramatic and being the chosen ones and all the suffering that entails was far more effective in days gone by. In the past when the masses were suffering they could empathise with that reality but now things are a bit different in the west, people are suffering more from ennui than anything else. Traditional religions play to a bigger crowd in less developed regions where people are starving and killing each other – where the suffering is fresh on every one’s lips. There, priests and missionaries can say, ” yes Jesus died on the cross for you,” and it emanates deep inside the listener.

Now in the west the Church has to work hard on its marketing. That is why just about every church now has a billboard with a clever slogan, which is reaching out to an indifferent populace. The basic message no longer appeals – a suffering messiah who shares your suffering. Science has pushed back much of our suffering, at least to a later time in life, which is why we have aging populations in our churches. Governments now care and look after their weak and poor, no longer leaving it all up to the charity of the Church – thus removing much of the Church’s market. With organised religion out of state schools, where are the future Christians coming from? There own schools of course, but still the rapid decline in numbers and influence will continue.

Especially in the face of continuing bad press all over the world, due to the exposure of the deviate pedophile behaviour of a substantial number of priests, ministers and religious teachers. When a crime is so bad and is perpetrated against the innocent – the resultant publicity is game breaking and you do not as an organisation ever come back from this level of public condemnation.Would I send my child to a school run by organisations that have attracted and protected people who sexually prey on children? No.

Why do people admire and wish to emulate those who experience pain? Are these people able to experience joy? Is the worship of suffering a healthy inclination for humanity? Show me the joy I say. Share the joy. Teach our children joy. Accept sadness yes and allow yourself to go deep into sadness but do not put it and suffering on a pedestal to aspire to.

Deepak Chopra speaks of following your desires to God and this strikes me as sensible. Why do we have desires otherwise, what are they for and where do they come from? He says that they come from God. The Bible would say they come from the devil. This illustrates the differing viewpoints of those who see the world as one and those who see it as a duality. Is all life a manifestation of God or is it split into good and evil? When we separate the self from the other we are creating partitions within our universe.

We have created so many partitions and sub-partitions through our obsession with science. What is science? It is simply an attempt to measure everything. We created time, because it did not exist before we measured it. There is now and in a moment it will still be now. It won’t be the same now but it will still be now. Focusing our attention away from the present removed our consciousness from the shared heartbeat of existence. It moved us into imagining what we now call the past and the future, neither of these states truly exist outside our individual imaginations. Is there an objective space called the past? No it belongs to our subjective memories on the matter and like all good autobiographies it is part of the Art of lying to ourselves.

Why do we deny ourselves things? As children we are taught to delay gratification in the expectation that it will result in something greater. We were taught to save our pennies so that we could later buy something that we really wanted. Sacrifice the lolly and later you can buy a bike. Live poorly now, save your dollars and later you can buy your house. What happens to us however as we follow this learned behaviour day after day? We switch off to the pleasures and experiences of the moment, as we discipline ourselves to deny now for tomorrow. We lose the ability to respond to the here and now. These days we borrow the money from the bank, so that we can have our house now, but we still owe the bank the money and bottom line is they really own the house. We in the west live on credit, extended to us by banks who are happy to take the risk of a few debt defaulters when they can enslave the majority of the population. We no longer work in the hope of future pay, now we work to repay our borrowings from yesterday.

Ask yourself, “am I living in this moment? Do I have the freedom to truly respond to the opportunities of the moment?” Or are you bound to the promises of an elusive future and the fears of a rapacious past? Misery begets misery and a joy neglected is a joy missed. Denial is saying no to yourself. Who knows you best? You do!

Tagged banks, Buddha, Christ, Christianity, denial, God, joy, misery, reality, religion, science, spirituality, time, Western society

Jan 20 2011

Reviews, Uncategorized

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.

Tagged ABC, Gandhi, great soul, Hindu, India, Indian history, Islam, Jainism, Muslim, non-violence, osho, partition, rajneesh, satyagraha, spiritual leaders, television, TV

Jan 15 2011

Uncategorized

Gay Marriage in Australia

Nothing annoys me more in the newspaper, than News Corp’s paid opinion piece writers ( I can’t call them journalists because they don’t do any journalism) commenting on what suburban Australian’s think and feel. How would they know? How long has it been since they have been out in the field actually asking people? There continues to be a reliance on impressions made by listening to talk back radio, which is not a true indication of ordinary Australian’s view points – talk back radio attracts extremists from both sides of the political spectrum. Likewise surveys taken from microscopic samples do not show a really accurate representation of public opinion on issues. In my own experience as a market researcher many people simply refuse to take part in surveys and so you often end up with a sample of the opinions of the type of people who likes to participate in polls, which ignores the sizeable section of the population who don’t.

Gay marriage is the new hobby-horse of the Murdoch press and in particular in relation to how the ALP minority Government is going to handle it. The conservative media is continually attempting to beat up tension between the Greens and the ALP over policy differences and gay marriage is a favourite at the moment. I think that out in the real world Australian’s really couldn’t give a stuff about this, as we have lived with homosexuality being out in the open for over 30+ years. We all know someone who is gay, or have had a gay family member and have definitely watched it on TV ad nauseam. The gay reality is entrenched and most Australians expect a fair go for everyone – poofta or not. The Government needs to embrace the future and move ahead into the twenty-first century – people have rights whatever their sexual persuasion.

The sanctity of marriage should not be defined by what sort of genitals you have and it is not an exclusively Christian institution either. Australia is a secular nation and we allow marriages of a wide variety to take place – obviously it is time to sanction gay marriages. A civil marriage between consenting adults of the same-sex should be legalised as a matter of course. We should be encouraging homosexuals to commit to deep and profound relationships, despite the fact that heterosexual Australians have made a complete mess of marriage in over 50% of instances, according to recent census figures.

So come on Julia Gillard show some leadership and don’t get sucked into the media traps being set by the Murdoch press. Why did Australia vote for you? If you are not going to accelerate our national social evolution, especially after a decade of the recalcitrant Howard years. Moving forward to a fairer more just society, which accepts all equally, whether black or white, male or female, able or disabled, hetero or gay. What is the point of creating great wealth by selling our mineral deposits if we do not improve society for all and improve our cultural wealth as a nation? We have had an openly gay high court judge, who was in a long term relationship with his homosexual partner for decades, so why are we stalling on these much needed reforms?

Come on Australia let us lead the way in making the world a fairer place for all.

Jan 09 2011

Reviews, Uncategorized

Immigration Nation

I was very impressed with the first episode of Immigration Nation on SBS. It really brought home to me the deep-seated roots of racism in Australia and put it in an international context, showing it’s effect upon the world around us. To not realise, or not care, how this appalling attitude would impact on our Asian nation neighbours, and in particular Japan, conveys an incredible contempt and naivety for and about the non-white world at the time. Perhaps it puts the reported ferocity of the Japanese soldiers during WWII into some sort of context, as there is no action without a reaction – treated as less than human they became so in battle – fueled by vengeance.

It also made me think about John Howard and his decade of denial as PM of Australia. He attracted around him all those who would sweep the past under some sort of carpet. Historians reinventing a milder, less guilty history and spinning a new truth for those who just wanted to get on with things and bugger what happened in the past. Of course it has been shown time and again, that those who ignore the lessons of the past are condemned to repeat them. If we choose to see the past as an innocent time of white picket fences and lawn tennis clubs, and turn away from those we embittered by our prejudices, then nothing and nobody evolves.

The men who made up the parliament of Australia, were white, anglo-celtic in the main and determined to create a paradise for those who reflected their own identity and colour of skin. This urge to make something exclusive – where does it come from? I see it still today in the attitudes of recent Australian immigrants, who are vociferous in their condemnation of refugees and the next wave of immigrants coming to this country. I also see it in the ‘sea changers’ – those who move to places like Byron Bay – once they have found their niche in paradise, they actively deter others who come after them as spoilers of their exclusive environment.

The great egalitarian Aussie digger, who fought the good fight and was a shining example of the sanctity of mateship – as long as you were white of course – seems to be a lot less innocent in the expanded light of what White Australia was really about. The democracy we forged at Federation seems less in the shadow of all those we left out, the so-called servile races. No wonder bitterness lingers, towards Australia, in the hearts of recent leaders of countries, like Malaysia and Indonesia. Policy based on fear usually creates the very things that are feared – treat people badly and they will act badly.

Australians really need to come to terms with our racist past and this program can contribute to that process. In our heart of hearts white Australia is not out of the woods yet in relation to our feelings for those racially different from ourselves. Political correctness is still only a very thin layer in the consciousness of those who live in the cities and if you travel out into more ‘white bread’ regional areas you still find the same nasty, intolerant, fear based attitudes to non-whites commonly expressed.

I look forward to the next episode of Immigration Nation. Sunday night at 7.30pm

Dec 07 2010

Uncategorized

Bank Trading Hours

Why do we have a banking system, which makes multi-billion dollar profits and still operates for the consumer on a Mon-Frid 9am to 4pm or 5pm basis? In this digital age of Internet banking, is it not absurd that we as consumers, are still forced to wait for funds to be cleared as per when banks are open and tellers are working, when in reality money is flowing back and forth via computers without any human interference?

Let’s demand digital banking for consumers, it is nothing to do with unions, it is banks using these human excuses to make more money out of their consumers. Come on lets get real, come on Government let us make these changes!

Oct 26 2010

Uncategorized

The ALP and the Demise of the Two Party System

Australian Politics in Flux

by Sudha Hamilton

Discussion by political scribes, about the demise of the two party system in Australia, and in particular the waning of the Labor Party, is all the rage right now. Talk about the failure of the ALP to be a truly representative worker’s party, and its apparent hijacking by professional politburocrats, seems to be commentary long overdue. For the ALP began this transmutation way back with Whitlam in the late sixties and was the only means for them to be elected after 23 years of conservative government. They needed to expand out of an identity, locked into the union movement, and move toward one more representative of the rapidly expanding Australian middle class.

The Liberal Party has always had a less rigidly defined identity in Australia, and this is in part because it formed out of a merging of several political parties during the 1940’s. The United Australia Party, the Young Nationalists and the Australian Women’s National League all merged to form the Liberal Party of Australia. Under Robert Menzies it became the main conservative party, most often in coalition with its junior partner, the Country Party/National Party, and represented both big and small business, professionals, and all those aligned against socialism; who did not vote for those parties on the more extreme right. The Liberal Party was like the Holden car of politics, broadly Australian in its form and function.

The ALP carried some baggage from the past, through its union connections, which was perceived by many, in the Australian electorate, to be on the extreme side – communists on the parties executive – reds under the bed stuff, and, whether this was true or not, it was widely exploited by those on the conservative side of politics. The ALP needed to move further to the centre of the political spectrum and they successfully did this during the Hawke/Keating years in government. To represent a majority of Australians, it was important to be seen as a party, which was in tune with a better educated nation and a population involved in vocations outside that of factory and farm workers, miners and the like.

There has been a balancing act going on ever since, with the union movement on one hand and the emerging middle class intelligentsia on the other. The affluent inner city residents who have been tertiary educated and maintain a strongly held concern for those in the community who are worse off – Indigenous Australians, the unemployed, the poor and the sick – have traditionally supported Labor but are now looking for keener representation. They are moving to the Greens, who voice their concerns for the environment, for empowering disenfranchised sections of society like homosexuals, and a variety of other issues close to their heart. The Greens do not need to compromise their principles and are finding appeal as a party of greater integrity.

Australia and the ALP, in the first half of the twentieth century, has a pretty rum record of racial intolerance. The White Australia policy was broadly supported by both sides of politics during its time as a key immigration policy. Workers here in Australia have feared, and still do, fear losing their jobs and livelihoods to cheaper labour brought in from overseas through migration. These fears have also been easy to exploit by both sides of politics when it has suited them. I have always found it interesting that often the most virulent exponent of racial intolerance and anti-immigration views in this country is the most recent immigrant himself. Just try jumping in a cab in Sydney or Melbourne and listening to the banter coming from the taxi driver and what radio station he is often tuned into. I wonder if Alan Jones knows that some of his most ardent listeners are members of the same racial groups he is slagging off?

So what do you do when you find you have voters within your family, who hold opposite views on key issues, like immigration policy and the treatment of refugees? You compromise and make everyone a little unhappy! After three decades of this compromise I think the ALP as home for these disparate groups is wearing a bit thin. The two party parliamentary system itself, is I think, an outmoded one and leads to so much back room maneuvering, in its desperate need to appear to be presenting a united front on often highly complex policy debates. Why not have these debates in the parliament itself by a collection of multi-party delegates or representatives? This occurs in European nations like Germany and France, and would we say that these nations are hamstrung by their parliamentary situations? No more than in Australia I would say, it is just their debates are more upfront and in the public eye.

Will the ALP return to its roots and become once again the worker’s party? I seriously doubt it, as I cannot see a future for any party based on policy designed to favour the protectionist view point subscribed to by those wishing to maintain the status quo. Like Pauline Hanson’s One Nation and the Tea Party in the USA, these anti-change parties, are destined to be short lived, loud and often spiteful in nature. With union membership in Australia down to around 17% of workers, a harder line by the ALP on issues like immigration, environment policy impact on industry, and maintaining government ownership of public utilities, would only hasten the narrowing of its representation.

With a woman now leading the ALP minority government and a highly intelligent, excellent communicator as well, the tricky job of compromise has never been in better hands. Despite this I think many Australians are sick of being represented by parties of compromise and long to hear some unadulterated rhetoric, declaring what they passionately stand for. They want an end to the ‘double speak’ of professional politics. How can you stand up and proudly say ‘I am for this,’ when you know that half of your voters are not for it but against it? The answer is you can’t ever!

I see a gradual move away from the two party system in this country and the continuing rise of the Greens and more single issue parties. If and when we get the National Broadband Network delivering faster Internet access to more Australians, all over the country, we may see an increase in the sophistication of voters. The Internet is rapidly becoming a much more effective way to deliver a more complex political message to voters and one in which they can exchange their own view point with political parties. The greater the exchange of information in the political process, the lessening of the power of fear based campaigns based on misinformation. Campaigns of this nature have flourished in Australia, feeding on our political disinterest and stupidity. Although predicting a rise in intelligent behaviour is always a risky proposition I really do think that greater access to information from a variety of sources can lead to a better political outcome.

We must remember that Australian political and parliamentary history began with world leading reform – with votes for non-land owners and then the vote for women – long before it happened in Britain and other so called democracies!

Tagged ALP, Australian, Australian Labor Party, Greens, Liberal Party, Menzies, politics, Two Party System, Whitlam

Oct 24 2010

Uncategorized

National Broadband Network

Murdoch’s News Corporation’s Campaign to Derail NBN

by Sudha Hamilton

We have a government attempting to build a real Australian wide national broadband network – this in an island continent like Australia is not an easy or cheap thing to do. Despite all the difficulties involved in doing this, and especially so with a minority government, it looks like progress is happening, albeit slowly. Why then do we have The Australian newspaper, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, engaging in a blatant smear and destroy campaign? Why do we condone this tearing down, negative style shit perpetrated by one of the world’s richest men in our market place? Is Rupert offering to make it cheaper and or more effective? No.

We in Australia, apparently one of the richest and best performing economies in the world, have appallingly underachieving levels of broadband speeds, even in our major capital cities. Has the market done anything about this over the last 5 years? No despite the fact that Australia, a secure and wealthy Western place in which to do business, would seem to fulfill most free market model expectations. The market and its forces seem to have so far failed us. So our government steps in to do the business and what do we get – a protracted campaign to derail this initiative by a newspaper owned by a mogul who lives in the US, where broadband speeds for the rich are way beyond what is available in this country.

The negative coverage of the NBN roll out is quite unlike anything we have seen before, with multiple reports criticizing the take up and speculating upon its long term economic failure, this is a concerted campaign to shaft something bigger, than we as a nation have ever embarked upon before. Doing something of this size and scope, which looks to improve the speed and access of the Internet for all Australians, is not going to be perfect right off and will need readjustments after it is up and running. Why are we listening to the harping and nay saying of journalists, employed by News Corp to pull apart and wreck something this substantial and way beyond what the market will ever do for those unviable regional areas of our country?

The Internet has potentials unrealized for all Australians – many of us, including myself, do not really know the full extent of what we can use the Internet for – we all need training to understand how amazing this online resource actually is. Education: everything is there – more knowledge than you can poke a stick at – the Internet is not just EBay, porn and gross celebrity soap – but we all need guidance in its utilization. The market is not going to offer this because they do not see an easy dollar in it – the fact is a great deal of human knowledge is already available online – but the market is not interested in peddling this to our children. Access to the Internet is just the beginning, we need educators to advise on its use and the whole idea of schooling to be expanded beyond the physical realms of their current geographic locations.

Rupert Murdoch is not, to my understanding, currently involved in the the education industry but rather he in the entertainment industry, why is he directing our debate on access to information? Lets create something wonderful for all Australians and roll out the NBN, we can adjust and improve things as we go. There is a reason why these private enterprise moguls don’t want governments to make these things possible for all of us -they want only the rich to be able to pay for it!

Feb 17 2009

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

Tagged attachment parenting, babies, breast feeding, children, fatherhood, fathers, growing up, man, men, motherhood, mothers, natural parenting, parenting, psychology of parenting, sex, sibling jealousy, sleep, sleep deprivation, transformative life cycles, woman, women, work/home balance

Jan 19 2009

Blog Posts, New Ideas, Uncategorized

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!

Eco Living Magazine

Tagged aged care, child care, eco, eco living magazine, health aware, living, solutions, synergy

Dec 18 2008

Poems & Songs, Uncategorized

Man Tu Par Utar Kanh Jaiho

To what shore would you cross, o my heart?

There is no traveller before you,

There is no road:

Where is the movement, where is the rest,

On that shore?

There is no water; no boat, no boatman is there:

There is not so much as a rope to tow the boat,

Nor a man to draw it.

No earth, no sky, no time, no thing, is there:

No shore, no ford!

There, there is neither body nor mind

And where is the place

That shall still the thirst of the soul?

You shall find naught in that emptiness.

Be strong, and enter into your own body:

For there your foothold is firm.

Consider it well, O my heart! Go not elsewhere.

And stand fast in that which you are.”

Tagged be who you are eart, boat, emptiness, imagination, Kabir, poetry, road, soul, traveller

Dec 18 2008

Uncategorized

You have to accept sadness.

You have to accept sadness. It will disappear only through acceptance. If you fight it, it will remain with you forever – it will become chronic.

Sadness is perfectly natural. Sometimes it is cloudy, sometimes it is sunny. Exactly like that, sometimes it is sadness, sometimes it is joy. We have to love all the moods of life and all the shades of being.

If you are continuously joyous for twenty four hours, you will become tired of joy. You will commit suicide. You will be bored to death. Sadness is good for a change.

Start accepting it and then see what happens…….

©Osho

Tagged acceptance, chronic, depression, sadness, suicide

Dec 17 2008

Blog Posts, Uncategorized

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.

Eco Living Emag

Tagged ABC, ADHD, Alan Jones, Channel Nine, Christmas, corporate media, entertainment, football, free to air TV, George W Bush, John Howard, journalism, Julia Bishop, Matt Price, media, movies, pay TV, PR, Rupert Murdoch, sport, television, television ratings, TV

Dec 15 2008

Uncategorized

Kevin Rudd’s Merry Christmas Aussie Battler’s Package

The recent ten billion dollar, Rudd Government, economic stimulus package is a wonderful Christmas present for many Australians who have been doing it tough. With credit tightening around the globe, for both big and small borrowers, it comes at a much needed time. Despite the boo hoos of the usual nay sayers, insert leader of the opposition’s name and News Ltd conservative commentators, it will be a short term fillup for retailers; and more importantly allow the battlers to have a decent Christmas – before they face the economic onslaught in 2009.

Pensioners, carers and people with children, who are financially struggling, will all find this bit of extra lolly, if not a Godsend then at least a Ruddsend. I hope they all toast Kevin on Chrissie day and remember to stay positive into the future – as it will be the media fanned, fear mongering, which will hasten and intensify this coming recession. People are already losing their jobs and with the commodities boom busting, it is sure to get worse.

Many of the really small businesses, I deal with in my work, have already pulled their heads in and as the doors close it can be tough to remember to stay positive. As a father of two small children, four and under, I really appreciated the support just before Christmas and despite the gloom I take heart from the actions of the government. I also hope that we can all do our bit for each other when the time comes, me included – so hip hip hooray for Mr Kevin Rudd.

Tagged Aussie battlers, carers, economic stimulus, Government, Kevin Rudd, parents, pensioners, ten billion dollars

Dec 10 2008

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.

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

Eco Living Emag

www.foodmatters.tv

Tagged AMA, Andrew Saul, Andrew W Saul, cancer, canola, capitalism, Charlotte Gerson, chronic disease, corporations, David Wolfe, disease, doctors, Dr Dan Rogers, drug companies, drugs, DVD, eating, fat, food, food chain, fresh food, genetically modified, GM, healing, health, health policy, heart and soul, heart disease, hospitals, humanity, illness, Jerome Burne, medical community, medicines, modern medicine, money, mortality, natural health industry, natural health supplement, nutrition, organic, organic veggies, Pan Vitamin Crisis, pharmaceutical, Phillip Day, pills, poisons, prescription drugs, processed foods, Prof Ian Brighthope, research, salt, scientific studies, sugar, TGA, toxic, US, vitamins, wonder drug

Dec 08 2008