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In May of this year Australians were outraged by the news that Australian cattle exported to Indonesia for slaughter had been brutally tortured in Indonesian abattoirs. But while the scandal was attributed to the poor training of Indonesian workers, a close inspection of slaughterhouse methods reveals that cruelty is an inescapable byproduct of animal slaughter no matter where it takes place and regardless of how well-trained animal handlers are.

In slaughterhouses in the United States, for example, where animal welfare standards are enforced by no less than the United States Department of Agriculture, cruelty still dominates the industry.

There, cows are forced into kill boxes at the rate of 400 per hour. Each cow is supposed to be killed by stunning, but at the speed at which these animals are dispatched, it is inevitable that many are not killed or even rendered unconscious. At the end of the line those unfortunate enough to still be alive are hung upside down from hooks like all the rest where their throats are slit, their hides are ripped from their bodies, and their hoofs are cut off though they are fully alive and conscious. In this position they struggle with whatever strength is left to them as they bleed to death.

The inferences to be drawn are obvious. Whether in Australia, the United States or any other place in the world where animals are slaughtered for food, so long as cruelty is a part of the modus operandi, the animal foods that people eat can only be derived through the suffering of animals.

If we want to put a stop to that suffering only two choices are available. Either we eliminate the suffering in the slaughter process or we eliminate animal products from our diet.

As to the first, the question becomes, is it even possible to eradicate animal suffering from the animal slaughter process? And as to the second, the power to remove animal products from the diet as a means of eliminating suffering to farm animals lies exclusively with every individual and is a choice that is open to everyone.

Let us take a look at some of the chief players involved in slaughtering animals. First are the animals slaughtered for food. Next comes the public that consumes the slaughtered animals but wants animals to be treated humanely. Third are the farmers and those engaged in food production who are responsible for the manner in which animals raised for slaughter are treated. Fourth, we have the government which is responsible for supervising animal slaughter. The government is always tied to business interests which demand that commerce continues at all costs even if the most reprehensible kinds of cruelty to animals are uncovered. This renders the government incapable of doing the morally right thing – that is, if we believe that cruelty to animals is morally wrong. Fifth come those citizens who refuse to participate in the cruel treatment of animals under any circumstances and who work to eliminate the suffering of animals.

The players above can serve as a model from which we can determine that if we believe that animals should not suffer by human hands, then it is impossible to do the right thing unless we eliminate the suffering caused by humans one way or the other. This is especially important for the public because the members of the public know intuitively that if they approve of actions that in any way cause animals to suffer – including those committed by their own government and the corporate sector – they then condone and become participants in causing the suffering. Moreover, if they approve of it continuously then cruelty toward animals becomes a way of life, and their lives are then cruelty-based.

An important factor also to be considered is that what happens in slaughterhouses represents only one part of the suffering which animals destined for slaughter endure. In order to reach the abattoirs, animals have to be transported there. And the transportation of animals invariably involves considerable suffering to the animals.

Cows are crammed into 18-wheelers for journeys of hundreds of miles without food or water under the most deplorable conditions. Neither air conditioning on the hottest days of summer or heat on the coldest days of winter are provided. Many of these animals suffer heart attacks along the journey.

Pigs experience similar conditions. Though they normally live 10 to 15 years, they are transported to slaughter after living only six months. In the winter, the pigs are packed so tightly in the unheated trucks that their skin freezes against the sides of the trucks. Handlers have to enter the trucks and cut the skin loose with knives.

Chickens also suffer a gruesome fate. More than 40 billion chickens are transported every year. After only 45 days of life, boiler chickens are loaded into crates for transport. Throwers grab several chickens by their legs and throw them to catchers who stuff them tightly into crates with other chickens at a rate of 1000 to 1500 per hour. These chickens suffer dislocated and broken hips, legs, and wings. An estimated 95% of the birds sustain broken bones with three or four different breakages. En route, they are given no food, water, or shelter during extreme temperatures. They cannot even spread their wings in the tightly packed crates and many die and lie underfoot of the other chickens in their crates. Chickens are extremely sensitive to pain and suffer considerably.

Animals transported by ship also are subject to dangerous conditions and put at high risk for injury and death. Several ships have sunk, caught fire, or have had equipment failures at sea that have cost the lives of many thousands of animals.

At every step of the process that turns animals into food, we encounter the fact that it is a cruel endeavour that causes much suffering to animals. Suffering is built into the system.

Farmers, unfortunately, have become so habituated to farming techniques that include such methods that they have become indifferent to the suffering farming imposes upon the animals.

Small wonder that they see nothing amiss in putting baby calves into dark crates where they cannot turn around and where they are lonely and fearful without their mothers. The mothers bellow for days at the loss of their infants which have been taken from them. The farmers feed the young calves an iron deficient formula designed to keep their flesh white for humans to eat. The calves suffer from anemia, diarrhea, and pneumonia. After a few months the calves are killed.

And what of the fathers of these calves? They are kept in huge feed lots containing hundreds of pens filled with cows numbering into the tens of thousands where they stand in excrement-filled lots and are fed a diet of coarse grains in order to fatten them for market. In their pens they are injected with antibiotics to offset the chemicals and disease resistant bacteria in their feed.

Cows are intended by nature to graze on grassy plains, eat shrubbery, and feel the warmth of the sun on their backs. Only humans with an eye on profit could so subvert nature’s intentions as to confine cows in small pens in filthy, manure-filled environments in which the air is thick with bacteria and particulate matter and feed them an unhealthy diet of grains and antibiotics just so humans can eat them.

The above descriptions barely scratch the surface of the all-pervasive suffering to which animals used in the food chain are forced to submit.

Unfortunately, the suffering of farm animals described in this article is built into our food. Without it, these foods could not be produced. If we are concerned about eliminating the suffering of animals, it is our responsibility to acknowledge the extent to which the suffering of animals permeates the entire food production process.

Wherever animals are slaughtered larger forces are also at work. For example, around 56 billion animals are slaughtered for human consumption every year. The carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide gasses and the waste they produce pollute the air we breathe and the water we drink. Livestock produces as much in greenhouse gases as the entire transportation sector.

And to get rid of the excrement, enormous quantities of manure are stacked into mountains of waste or loaded into lagoons, the sludge from which is spread way too thickly over crops where, like the mountains of manure, it seeps into the earth and contaminates the ground water that finds its way into our rivers and streams.

A United Nations report indicates that already 38% of the entire ice-free land surface goes to livestock production. With the world population expected to rise from nearly 6.7 billion to 9 billion in the next thirty-five years, how much of the ice-free land surface will then be required for livestock? And what about the next thirty-five years after that? Shall we then put our livestock on the moon just so human beings can continue to satisfy their appetite for animal flesh?

Besides the suffering of animals in our food production system and the pollution of our rivers and streams, the list of the issues associated with the widespread, systemic exploitation of animals as it relates to the quality of human life has become a serious matter to which more and more thoughtful people are turning their attention.

These problems include the increase in poverty in the developing countries caused by growing grain to feed animals for human consumptions on land that should be used to grow crops to feed impoverished people.

It involves the fraudulent taking of billions of tax dollars by our universities for needless animal research that could be going to address important societal matters.

It concerns the creation of unnecessary drugs for the treatment of conditions such as heart disease and excessive weight caused by eating animals.

And it includes the epidemic of childhood obesity that is ruining the health of many of our children so that already one-third of boys and even more girls (39%) born in the year 2000 are now at lifetime risk of developing Type 2 diabetes.

If we want to eliminate the suffering of animals, one of the best ways we can do this is to simply stop eating them. Unfortunately, this idea seems to fill us with dread that we will die from a lack of protein and that our poor taste buds will never forgive us if we do.

But contrary to the propaganda put out by the meat, seafood, poultry, and dairy industries, the facts are that if we simply satisfy our daily caloric needs, a feat easily accomplished by consuming a diet of vegetables, fruits, legumes, and grains, we will meet our protein needs (small amounts of vitamin B12 should supplement a vegan diet).

Concurrently, we might want to begin to investigate the claim that animal protein in our diet is a leading cause of the killer diseases, a scientific fact being ignored by our healthcare organisations and certainly not one that the meat, seafood, poultry, and dairy industries are anxious to discuss.

As for our taste buds, abandoning an animal-based diet opens up all kinds of fresh tastes and flavours. For those who like to cook, it is a whole new culinary adventure. Going without animal foods can only lead to enormous benefits for our personal health, the betterment of the earth, and the welfare of innocent animals.

If we want to feel the clearness in our hearts and minds that results from right living, if we want to feel that we are good people and that our compassion is limitless, if we want the peace of mind that comes from living in a way that is not tied to the suffering of animals, and if we hope to make an imprint on the world that will leave it a better place than we found it, then we can do no better than to live in a way that expresses concern and caring for the welfare and well being of the other species that cohabit our planet. There can be no better place to begin than to stop eating animals. When we do, we will eliminate much of their suffering.

David Irving is the author of The Protein Myth: Significantly Reducing the Risk of Cancer, Heart Disease, Stroke, and Diabetes While Saving the Animals and the Planet (O-Books, 2011). This new book illustrates how we can avoid the major killer diseases by eliminating animal products from our diet. The Protein Myth makes a compelling case that the way to a healthier life and a better world is ending the exploitation of animals. The book is available from all good bookstores or visit www.newdawnreviews.com.

DAVID IRVING’s writing on animals rights issues have appeared in many blogs and journals. He has been a vegan for the past 25 years. Currently, he is finishing up a book about vivisection. An accomplished musician and composer, he graduated Magna Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa from Columbia University. His compositions are performed in the United States and Europe. David makes his home in the upper Catskill Mountain Region of New York where he attends to and is attended by his four cats, Looney, Goldie Boy, Lewie-Lew, and Spats.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 129 (November-December 2011).

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One, two, buckle my shoe
Three, four, knock at the door
Five, six, pick up sticks …And so the nursery rhyme goes. Preschool kids learn to count in many fun ways to give them a head start in arithmetic. Once they enter the formalised school system, the subject matter eventually takes on a more serious “measure.” As the grades advance, the material progresses into more complex and diverse subjects, such as geometry, trigonometry, algebra and calculus.The focus of formalised mathematical education is all about quantity, for numeracy is as important as literacy in our Western world of clocks, commerce and computers. This type of calculation, although very pragmatic, is really only half the equation. The educational system is usually devoid of any reference to the quality of numbers. The ancient traditions of “sacred number” and “sacred geometry” have been largely snuffed out over time. The deeper spiritual aspect – studying the repeating shapes, forms, symbols and patterns in nature – is all but lost in our work-a-day world. We need to bring these esoteric traditions back into view, and what better way to begin than with vision itself.Number OneOne touch of nature makes the whole world kin.
– Shakespeare

The spiritual side of the computational equation starts at the same point – literally. The ancient Greek mathematical philosophers viewed the number one as unity, a wholeness that provides a divine order to the cosmos. The circle, which is constructed from a central point, is the sacred geometric representation of this wholeness, the One that forms the Many. There exists one unique pattern of the circle, of which all circles share the same principles. But no two circles that arise from the One are identical.

Circular shapes abound in nature. Of particular significance is the circular shape of the human eyeball, the organ of our most valuable sense of sight. Ralph Waldo Emmerson recognised the first sacred shape in the human form when he wrote, “The eye is the first circle, the horizon which it forms is the second.” Other circles immediately apparent in the eye are the iris, the coloured portion, and the pupil, the black area which dilates and contracts in response to changing light stimuli.

Deep within the eye, unbeknownst to an observer, the point and the circle play an important role in how we visually perceive the outside world. The inside back portion of the eye (the “retina”) contains numerous light receptors called “cones.” The cones are distributed in such a way that the highest concentration is packed in a very small centre area called the “fovea centralis.” The cones gradually diminish in density as the distance increases from the fovea centralis. The cones are virtually non-existent at the outer periphery, or circumference, of the retina.

Contrary to what some may believe, we do not see equally clearly within the entire circle of our visual field. The focus is different than that captured on photographic film by a camera. The distribution of cones in the eye means that we see the clearest in the central point of our sight. Objects in the periphery are less clear. Because the cone distribution in the retina follows a geometric pattern similar to the energy distribution in a concentric wave, I call it “concentric focus.”

Also within the retina are receptors called “rods.” It is believed that the rods sense movement in our peripheral field. The distribution of the rods is essentially the opposite of the cones. The rods are non-existent in the centre and gradually increase in density towards the periphery. That’s why something moving in your peripheral field of vision can abruptly grab your attention.

Another principle of the circle is the continuous rotary motion of cycles and rhythms. With eyesight, oscillating rhythms are manifest in several ways. One of the most obvious is the continuous blink reflex. Our eyes also respond in cycles by closing at night and opening in the day. During sleep, the eyes have an alternating motion called rapid eye movement (REM), and when awake, they have numerous subconscious micro-movements – some vibrating at the frequency of a strummed guitar string – to key in on objects and maintain focus. The motion is contrary to that of a still camera, for without the continuous rhythmic activity, objects would quickly fade into blur.

Dr. William Bates was a New York ophthalmologist who pioneered the concept of natural vision improvement almost a century ago. He discovered that the most common types of blurred eyesight, for which glasses are usually prescribed, are actually responses to stress in our environment. The habitual pattern of strained looking causes the eyeball’s natural circular shape to go out of round. By removing strained vision habits, a person can gradually improve one’s eyesight and return to the purity of the One.

The ancient philosophers considered a true mathematical point within the circle as symbolic. It emerges from the immaterial realm and has no dimensions. Dr. Bates related this concept when he said, “The part seen best when the sight is normal is extremely small… the nearer the point of maximum vision approaches a mathematical point, which has no area, the better the sight.” The idea of concentric focus is a fundamental fact that must be truly appreciated when improving eyesight naturally.

Number Two

Tao gives birth to one,
One gives birth to two
– Lao Tzu

If the number one represents unity and wholeness, how does a second separate number emerge? The root word for “nature” means “to be born,” and the number two emerges through a birth-like process. Symbolically speaking, this process begins as the circle divides and replicates itself – just as a living cell does. The geometric representation of this replication is two circles of the same diameter each having their centre points touching the circumference of the other. The One projects forth as a reflection of itself and a “true” mathematical line is created from point to point.

The sacred principle of number two is polarity, whereby the line forms a tensile link between opposite poles. Paradoxically, there is both a separation and an attraction that binds the two, yearning once again for wholeness. It’s the yin/yang principle of Taoist thought, the perpetual rhythmic alternation of all life and the universe. The human body has a left side and a right side, a feminine side and a masculine side, an intuitive side and intellectual side, and so on. The modern left brain/right brain theory suggests the eyes are extensions of the brain’s two hemispheres. Although each eye sees things from a slightly different angle, they must work together seamlessly.

The concept of “two” in eyesight has further spiritual significance beyond the apparent. In Plato’s Timaeus, eyesight is described as a two-way process; the eye mediates between the inner realm and the external world of objects. The fire of the soul was said to emit a gentle light from within, flow through the eye and meet the outer daylight. Like falls upon like, coalesces and forms the perception of sight. In this philosophical view, the eye acts as a portal, the proverbial “window of the soul.”

The portal is actually a symbol that arises geometrically from one circle beginning to replicate into two. The fish-shaped vesica piscis is the area of overlap between the linked circles. It has been venerated throughout history by various cultures and nations and dates back to pagan and mystical religions. The early Christians considered it the link between heaven and earth, a bridge between spirit and form. Consequently, much medieval art symbolically depicts Christ within the fish-shaped area. In ancient architecture, particularly in cathedrals and holy temples, the vesica piscis was used extensively in the design of doorways. They were portals which permitted entry from the mundane world of reality into spiritual space.

Applying the metaphor of a portal to the eyes, one is immediately drawn to the distinct vesica piscis shape which the upper and lower eyelids produce. Within the eye itself, the same pointed oval shape is found when studying the anatomy of the lens from a side view. The lens is the part of the eye where light rays emitted from an external object refract in such a way to form an image on the retina.

Dr. Bates discovered that visual perception is more than simply a biomechanical process of camera-like parts in the body. The inner and outer aspects of eyesight are linked, as the mind and emotions have a great impact on how well we see external objects. During thirty years of clinical observation, he studied various ways in which people strained to see. He concluded that imagination, memory and sight coincide, and that when one is imperfect, all are imperfect. He encouraged visualisation as a healing technique long before it became in vogue. Perhaps a good mental image is to imagine the gentle light of your soul meeting the external light in the vesica piscis of your eyes.

The Western, scientific mindset artificially separates objective reality and subjective reality. This creates a tendency to overemphasise the external world of objects, freezing them into a supposed condition of permanence. Greek philosopher Heraclitus apparently equated such an unbalanced view as being stung by a scorpion. This “scorpion vision” paralyses us from seeing the eternal rhythm.

In a related vein, Dr. Bates cautioned against the forced concentration of staring, claiming it is an attempt to imagine things as stationary. The forced attention of staring immobilises the natural, healthy movements of the eye, and this straining actually has a boomerang effect. Instead of objects coming in more clearly, the objects become more blurred. An essential habit of healthy vision, therefore, is to maintain relaxed seeing by continuously shifting.

Number Three

But every tension of opposites culminates in a release, out of which comes the “third,” In the third, the tension is resolved and lost unity is restored.
– Carl Jung

When our two eyes work together in harmony to fuse a single image, our visual perception restores the “lost unity.” An outcome of this reunion is the emergence of a new number; three dimensional (3D) vision is born. The technical term for 3D vision is “stereopsis,” which is derived from stere, New Latin for “solid,” and opsis, Greek for “vision.” A stereoscopic image is, thus, solid sight that gives us a sense of volume. 3D vision provides depth to our world view, a level of understanding that goes beyond a two dimensional (2D) flat surface.

The sacred geometrical representation of number three is the triangle, which takes shape from the vesica piscis. An object in our sight is the third point midway between the eyes, the vertex that balances the opposing views of each eye’s unique perspective. The ancient philosophers valued the triad, assigning it qualities such as piety, friendship, harmony, peace, justice, temperance and virtue. It is the symbol of wisdom, for living prudently in the present requires learning from the past and planning for the future.

In addition to the physical concept of 3D vision, there is another principle of the triad in vision, but in a metaphysical sense. Mystics throughout the ages have spoken of a “third eye” between the brows that is the seat of the spirit. Renowned spiritual scientist and philosopher Rudolf Steiner described humans as a three-fold constitution – body, soul and spirit. Seers have supposedly awakened the eye of the spirit, the highest of the three levels, resulting in clairvoyant vision. The third eye, which remains dormant for the majority of people, may also be responsible for triggering hallucinations and out-of-body experiences. The pinecone shaped pineal gland, about the size of a pea and located between the brain’s two hemispheres, is claimed by some to be the location of the mysterious third eye.

Awakening the third eye may be highly elusive, but re-awakening a diminished sense of 3D vision is more easily attainable. Lenses prescribed to compensate for blurred vision are a compromise solution. Dr. Bates noted that glasses do provide immediate artificial clarity, but they don’t restore eyesight to a normal state. The lenses, although curved to help light rays converge properly inside the eye for better acuity, act as a barrier. Colours are less intense through the glass and objects are distorted in size. For people wearing glasses for distant viewing, the lenses diminish 3D perception, flattening it almost to the point of 2D vision for those with high strength prescriptions. The condition is reversible, for people who improve their eyesight by natural means invariably notice a marked improvement in their ability to see 3D again.

Mathematics and geometry are applied with efficient precision in our technological era. A prime example is the science of optics, where good vision is reduced to purely a numerical term, 20/20. Ironically, as the vision industry has grown and prospered, we’re collectively seeing worse, not better. The incidence of vision difficulties in North America signifies the imbalance. Fewer than three percent of children are born with visual defects yet, as they reach adulthood, nearly two thirds will become dependent on prescription eyewear. Non-industrialised nations are virtually free of such widespread vision problems. To help restore a quality outcome, perhaps it’s time we return to the spiritual teachings of sacred number and sacred geometry to understand what really “counts.”

.

DOUG MARSH, a professional engineer and vision education advocate, has extensively studied natural vision improvement and the mind/body interface as it relates to eyesight. He is the author of Restoring Your Eyesight: A Taoist Approach. The natural Taoist approach has greatly reduced his nearsightedness while also relieving the symptoms of a TMJ/inner-ear disorder. Most days he experiences brief, spontaneous “flashes” of near 20/20 eyesight, an encouraging sign that his vision continues to heal. He lives in Canada and his website is www.taosight.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 111 (Nov-Dec 2008).

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Figure 1 – The sense of colour in vision. The spectrum in the rainbow.

By DOUG MARSH

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Much of medical science deals strictly with the body, while denying – or at least largely relegating to the background – our inner soul essence. This view is particularly prevalent in conventional vision treatment where eyesight is considered to be a camera-like process which creates an image that’s either in or out of focus. Such a one-tiered approach results in a lopsided notion of what is normal. Eyeglasses are so commonplace in our culture, they’re considered virtually natural extensions of the human anatomy. People seeing clearly with their own eyes are becoming a rare breed.

In more recent years, the quest for a novel approach to vision treatment took a technological leap with the advent of refractive eye surgery, also known as laser eye surgery, or by the acronym of LASIK, a popular procedure. In a way, this technology is turning full circle back to Mother Nature’s design, touting 20/20 vision (or very close to it) with a natural appearance and no fuss. According to the industry, these purported outcomes involve minimal risk and have high patient satisfaction rates.

However, more cases of patients with negative outcomes – ranging in scale from continual annoying symptoms to disabling complications and worsening eyesight – are coming to the forefront in the media and on the Internet. Tragically, a few cases have ended in suicides.The furore prompted the US Federal Drug Administration (FDA) last year to publicly hear statements from affected patients. The FDA panel reiterated that refractive eye surgery, like any surgery, has its risks but has an excellent overall track record. Nevertheless, to bolster the safeguards, they recommended enhanced patient screening methods and further post-operative studies by the industry. (Interestingly, the eye doctor who chaired the FDA panel wears glasses. Although she regularly performs refractive eye surgery, she chooses not to undergo the procedure herself, citing one of the reasons as an aversion to any level of risk.)

Lost amid the allure and debates over technological treatments is an obscure alternative called natural vision improvement (NVI). As the name implies, it’s a more nature-centred approach, a holistic mind-body method that seeks to reverse an imbalance induced by a response to stress. It introduces a psychological component, counter to most prevailing notions that the physical eyes somehow just “go bad” with no hope of improving. For those attuned to esoteric traditions – or the “Perennial Philosophy” as writer Aldous Huxley put it – the psyche is simply a secular name for the soul.

To understand how NVI succeeds on the personal soul level, the work of spiritual scientist Rudolf Steiner offers some insights. While embodied within a physical form, our soul is said to be a link between the “lower” physical world and the “higher” world of the spirit in which we simultaneously participate. Steiner further suggested that a portion called the sentient soul is responsible for our experience of sensation. He also distinguished between the terms perception and sensation; perception comes first and is fleeting, but the sensation which follows lasts.

When external light reaches us, the eyes initially register myriad perceptions from our environment. Then something lights up in the sentient soul when certain perceptions are filtered and sensations come alive with personal vividness and quality. For example, when you behold a red object with your eyes, you initially perceive the colour. However, this colour perception ceases once you look away, but the sensation that it makes upon you continues to linger in your soul. It’s a lasting impression that may be later recalled, whether to ponder its meaning and significance or to rekindle nostalgic sentiments and feelings.

Because our sensations illuminate internally in a unique and private way, Steiner contended that this soul activity is not a mere brain process. Science can describe the various light, chemical and nerve stimuli along the chain from the eye retina to the brain, but he noted that nowhere can our actual sensations be found in this chain. The sentient soul is said to also partake in the intrinsically private activities of feelings, emotions, drives and instincts, as well as willing, where our soul flows outward through actions.

Such a perspective of soul activity aligns with other researchers’ distinctions of mind and brain. Neurophysiologist Wilder Penfield once determined that no amount of electronic probing in the various areas of the brain would elicit a person to believe or decide. He concluded that the mind seems to work independently of the brain, analogous to a computer programmer acting independently of the firings within the computer. Penfield suggested that the mind has its own energy that is different from the neurons that travel the pathways within the brain.

Michael Polanyi, philosopher of science and social science, arrived at the same conclusion when he stated that thoughts and neural processes are two completely different things.

Religious author Huston Smith concurs, suggesting “the brain breathes mind like the lungs breathe air.”

We typically think of having five senses – sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch – with sight generally considered to be the most important in its ability to perceive shades of lightness and different colours. However, Steiner recognised that we have at least seven more than these basic senses. By the term sense, he meant a perception which provides us with immediate information without the involvement of a thought process. One of the additional senses he noted was what he called movement, what is nowadays termed proprioception. Movement is that special sense which indicates whether we’re still or moving, providing direct feedback where our joints, tendons and muscles are in space.

Steiner also recognised how the various senses work together, not in isolation. Although each sense may be categorised for the sake of definitions, our soul reunites the separate perceptions into a unified whole that provides coherent inner meaning. Of particular note, he was well aware that vision encompasses more than the sense of sight. In 1919, he knew the important role that the sense of movement plays in visual sensation:

We nearly always see things so that when they give the colours to us, they also show us the boundaries of colours, namely, lines and forms. We are not normally aware of how we perceive when we perceive colour and form at the same time…. At first you see only the colour through the specific activity of the eye [sense of sight]. You see the circular form when you subconsciously use the sense of movement and unconsciously make a circular movement… When the circle you have apprehended through your sense of movement rises to cognition, it is then joined with the perceived colour. You take the form out of your entire body when you appeal to the sense of movement spread out over your entire body…. Today, official science is not at all interested in such a refined way of observation, so it does not distinguish between seeing colour and perceiving form with the help of the sense of movement… In the future, however, we will not be able to educate with such confusion. How will it be possible to educate human seeing if we do not know that the whole human being participates in seeing through the sense of movement?

Decades later, Steiner’s comments appear to have been validated by Alfred Yarbus, a psychologist who studied the eye movements of people looking at natural objects and scenes. In the 1950s and 1960s, he recorded the rapid saccadic eye movements that occur within milliseconds and demonstrated with remarkable images how the eyes subconsciously scan forms and outlines with incredible speed. Figure 2 has examples from Yarbus’ work.

Figure 2 – The sense of movement in vision. Rapid eye tracing movements corresponding to images viewed (Yarbus, 1967).

Steiner’s observations are also quite extraordinary when related to NVI fundamentals of proper vision. William Bates was an eye doctor who broke from the mold of orthodox teachings and single-handedly established the field of NVI back in the early 1900s. Two of Bates’ guiding fundamentals are what he called shifting and apparent movement (also called the swing), both which involve our sense of movement.

The eyes, which move by different sets of surrounding muscles, must continually shift from point to point to prevent the strain of fixation. Otherwise, the subconscious saccadic movements become sluggish and vision begins to blur within seconds. It’s analogous to grasping a heavy object in your hand and holding it tightly in an extended arm position. The muscle strain cannot be held long before you lose your hold and drop the object. If we fixate for too long in an attempt to “hold” a point in our sight with intense concentration, the effort backfires and we lose the clarity of sight.

As for oppositional movement, stationary objects in our peripheral field of vision must have the appearance of moving in an opposing direction. This swing is a natural consequence of the first fundamental, the shift.

Bates explains the illusion of the swing: “Your head and eyes are moving all day long. Imagine that stationary objects are moving in the direction opposite to the movement of your head and eyes. When you walk about the room or on the street, notice that the floor or pavement seems to come toward you, while objects on either side appear to move in the direction opposite to the movement of your body.”

If one attempts to stop this illusion of oppositional movement, Bates claimed it caused vertigo or dizziness. That’s because our sense of balance also comes into play for effective vision. Coordinated body movements and eye movements depend on good balance, controlled by the organs in the inner ears.

In more recent years, the role of movement and balance in visual perception has been recognised in a speciality field called developmental or behavioural optometry. They have made the connection between visual difficulties, mental development, and emotional behaviour, with such problems as dyslexia, slow reading and poor comprehension, ADHD and juvenile delinquency. Some children have difficulty reuniting the individual senses as a unified whole, causing a jumbled imbalance of sensations, thoughts and emotions.

The importance of training which integrates the senses with whole-body movements is a hallmark of this specialised field of optometry. The training typically incorporates bouncing on the trampoline with rhythmic arm and hand movements and visual interaction with special wall charts. Or the child could be instructed to call out answers to rapid-fire mental tasks – like mathematics or spelling – while jumping on the trampoline. Balance beams are also used in combination with sensory, physical and mental tasks.

In a separate field of study, psychiatrist Harold Levinson treated thousands of cases of learning disabilities and phobias and discovered a common physical correlation. Over 90 percent of his patients who were dyslexic or phobic had a malfunction of the inner-ear system. These more recent findings validate what Steiner suggested back in his day: mental disorders are linked to physiological disorders.

“But one will find over and again,” he wrote, “that especially in so-called mental illness – which actually has been, as such, incorrectly named – physical processes of illness are present in a hidden way somewhere. Before one wants to meddle. . . with mental illness, one ought actually, with the proper diagnosis, to determine which physical organ is involved in the illness.” Thinking, feeling, and willing – soul activities which follow from our senses – are all interrelated and interdependent.

Figure 3 – The sense of balance in vision. The inner ear regulates balanced eye movements.

In our highly technological era, we are intently centred on the physical realm, bombarded with sense data from the external environment. Such sensory overload may induce responses in an individual’s soul, such as fear and anxiety, while causing overconcentration and staring. The net result can lead to a habitual strain pattern that restricts movement and negatively impacts the healthy functioning of the eye-focusing muscles. School age children are especially prone to such problems and begin to develop vision problems early as a result.

One of the most fascinating aspects of improving eyesight naturally is a “flash” of near perfect vision that spontaneously occurs from time to time. I experienced flashes several times prior to having any knowledge of the phenomenon. They appear very early in the vision improvement process for many people, even for those with a high degree of initial blur. I liken the experience to a flash of inspiration or intuition from the spiritual realm, a Divine Perfection pouring into the soul, reminding the eyes how to see clearly again without strain. It’s also a reminder to step back from the stressful demands of a society fixated on material ends and become more in touch with our higher spiritual nature.

Quantum physicist Arthur Zajonc chronicled the scientific study of light and visual optics from the time of the early Greek philosophers to our current age and laments at the gradual demise of artistic and spiritual insights in the endeavour. Throughout the centuries, Plato’s light of the soul in visual perception was eventually excised by science to the point we are today – a pure neurophysical model – even though the nature of light is as enigmatic as ever.

We’ve become so steeped in material pursuits that we’ve “lost sight” of the spiritual side. If physical light is the counterpart of spiritual light, perhaps the visual blur that’s endemic to modern culture is a manifestation of spiritual myopia?

Observe the symmetry in the word “eye” itself. I view it as a symbol of our threefold nature. One “e” represents the exoteric, or physical realm, while the other “e” represents the esoteric, or spiritual realm. The “y” in between is the soul with three branches, two linking body and spirit, while the third points to the “I” (pronounced the same as “eye”) that is the centre of our soul. Window of the soul, indeed!

Bibliography

William H. Bates, The Cure of Imperfect Sight by Treatment Without Glasses, New York: Central Fixation Publishing, 1920. Reprint, Pomeroy, Wash.: Health Research Books, n.d.

William H. Bates, “Perfect Sight,” Better Eyesight, September 1927

Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, New York: Harper and Brothers, 1945

LASIK Complications website, www.lasikcomplications.com

Harold N. Levinson, Phobia Free, with Stephen Carter, New York: M. Evans and Company, 1986

Wilder Penfield, The Mystery of the Mind: A Critical Study of Consciousness and the Human Brain, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975. Quoted in Huston Smith, Forgotten Truth: The Common Vision of the World’s Religions (New York: Harper Collins, 1992), 64-65

Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958. Quoted in Huston Smith, Forgotten Truth: The Common Vision of the World’s Religions (New York: Harper Collins, 1992), 63

Huston Smith, Forgotten Truth: The Common Vision of the World’s Religions, New York: Harper Collins, 1992

Rudolf Steiner, A Psychology of Body, Soul, and Spirit: Anthroposophy, Psychosophy, & Pneumatosophy, Translated by Marjorie Spock, Herndon, Va.: Anthroposophic Press, 1999

Rudolf Steiner, Polarities in Health, Illness and Therapy, Lecture, Pennmenmawr, N. Wales, August 28, 1923. Spring Valley, NY: Mercury Press, 1987. Rudolf Steiner Archive. wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/Polart_index.html

Rudolf Steiner, The Foundations of Human Experience, Translated by Robert F. Lathe and Nancy Parsons Whittaker, Herndon, Va.: Anthroposophic Press, 1996

Rudolf Steiner, Theosophy: An Introduction to the Spiritual Processes in Human Life and in the Cosmos, Translated by Catherine E. Creeger. Herndon, Va.: Anthroposophic Press, 1994

Alfred Yarbus, Eye Movements and Vision, New York: Plenum Press, 1967

Arthur Zajonc, Catching the Light: The Entwined History of Light and Mind, New York: Bantam Books, 1993

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DOUG MARSH, a professional engineer and vision education advocate, has extensively studied natural vision improvement and the mind/body interface as it relates to eyesight. He is the author of Restoring Your Eyesight: A Taoist Approach. The natural Taoist approach has greatly reduced his nearsightedness while also relieving the symptoms of a TMJ/inner-ear disorder. Most days he experiences brief, spontaneous “flashes” of near 20/20 eyesight, an encouraging sign that his vision continues to heal. He lives in Canada and his website is www.taosight.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 114 (May-June 2009).

Read this article with its illustrations by downloading
your copy of New Dawn 114 (PDF version) for only US$2.95

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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Daniel Reid

Daniel Reid Discusses The Natural Way To Prevent And Treat The Toxic Assault On Our Bodies…

By HUW GRIFFITHS

—

Daniel Reid is a leading expert on Eastern philosophy and medicine and is the author of several best selling books on various aspects of Chinese health, healing and traditional practices. His unparalleled ability to explain traditional oriental healing methods to the modern reader in ways that are both practical and easily applicable has earned him an international reputation that puts him in a class of his own.

In this recent interview with naturopath Huw Griffiths, Daniel Reid discusses his latest book The Tao of Detox.

Huw Griffiths: In The Tao of Detox you combine two extremely potent areas of interest that are current in contemporary society – the gradual, but seemingly inexorable integration of oriental philosophy and practices into Western lifestyle and culture together with the growing Western fixation with ‘Detox’. Until reading your book I wasn’t aware these two concepts were all that closely associated, yet your book presents them almost as two sides of the same coin. Is this just a clever and convenient way of presenting your ideas, or have the two concepts always gone hand in hand?

Daniel Reid: They’ve always gone hand in hand, but in my book, as in all my books, I do try to present any aspect of Asian culture in ways that are not only acceptable, but understandable to the Western reader.

Detox today is considered a very modern, a very new thing, and has developed almost to the point of becoming a fixation here in the West. You see the word literally everywhere and presented almost as if it’s a new discovery. Toxicity is the basic cause of disease, but this is ancient knowledge. Even in the West they knew this two hundred years ago.

A good example of current medical practice can be seen in Russia. If you go to a hospital in Russia for anything, whether it’s an in-growing toenail or a heart attack, the first thing they will give you is a colonic. The first priority is to start to get rid of all the built up, blocked rubbish in your colon, so that the body can start to function normally again.

I think I quote a sixteenth century TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) practitioner in my book: “If you want to be healthy, first clean the bowels.”

There are various ways of doing it, some systems use purging herbs, some like Ayurveda have elaborate detox methods using salt water that you drink, but the whole point is that tissue toxicity is the base root cause of discomfort and disease in the world today and has been known about for thousands of years.

Conventional Western medicine denies this direct link for the simple reason that when you detoxify yourself you essentially cure yourself and this would mean that there would no longer be any business for the pharmaceutical or medical industries.

What is happening to us today is ironic because we are doing it to ourselves. We’re being poisoned! The West’s food is full of additives, preservatives, pesticides, MSG, aspartame, you name it. There a hundreds of things that are allowed into people’s food and water. It’s disgraceful!

Everything that modern people put inside their mouths these days makes us ever more toxic. We consequently develop symptoms, discomforts and then eventually disease, for which they give us drugs then more drugs until it finally all gets too much and they pack us off to the surgeon for some sort of final solution.

Another example is what they do to our babies! Whether a baby is born in Australia or the US, within a week of birth they begin to receive a series of vaccines, some of which contain mercury or aluminium adjuvants. Now anyone who injects a new born baby with anything that has got mercury, or anything with heavy metal in it, is either a mad scientist or being unethical. At least when I was a child we got the shots when we were five years old. Now they get it within a week of being born.

Not surprising then that we have now got a pandemic of autism and brain damage in the US. I’ve known people who have had their babies die in their arms only eight hours after having had a vaccine shot, and the doctors just shrug and say ‘It’s just crib disease’, and turn away. They’ve just killed them!

It’s incredible that even the doctors are doing it to us. What I’m saying is that it’s really important Westerners pick up on these things and become aware. These foods and medicines are toxic and we should be switching to a more naturopathic, more Asian way of doing things.

HG: When the word ‘detox’ gets mentioned these days most people think in more physical terms, that is we tend to think more of purifying the body and not much else. Yet the ideas put forward in The Tao of Detox go much further than that. You talk of detoxifying the body, mind and spirit as if they are one inseparable whole. For many Western readers, accepting this concept must surely be a major challenge and for that matter a potential barrier to the adoption of some of the practices that you teach. Do you see these more esoteric aspects to detoxification as absolute needs or could they be treated as optional by the average Westerner?

DR: They can be treated as optional so long as the person who does it is prepared for the inevitability of the body needing to be detoxified again and again. But a major issue is an individual’s attitude to themselves, to their consciousness and the impact that this can have on their lifestyle habits. A person who eats so much that they weigh say, 750 pounds, is clearly destroying themselves. They have a mental problem, otherwise why would you do that to yourself?

The issue of addiction is an obvious example: alcoholics, drug addicts, smoking, people who get hooked on diet coke full of aspartame until they end up in a wheelchair. People in this predicament are clearly not enlightened, they have a problem of some kind, whether it’s an unresolved issue from their childhood or whatever.

Now people in this type of situation, and we’ve had plenty of people like this on our own programs, they tend to come back again and again. We clean them up, and then they come back toxic later on. We tell them, “Hey, you’ve got to get out of this habit, this relationship, this job, you’ve got to stop eating this food,” but very often they just don’t want to. So they go over the same steps again and again.

Now, with regard to this mind/body thing there is a very definite connection, but it’s very difficult to see the borderline between a person’s energy system and their physical body. But there is a tangible link between the two and it’s ‘Breathing’!

Take, for example, what happens when you sense fear. Your breathing takes on a certain pattern, then if you are really frightened it will make you pee your pants. Now, for fear, which is most definitely a mental figment, to suddenly make you evacuate your bladder clearly shows a connection between the mind and the body.

Similarly, when you get angry you get hot (usually under the collar) because blood is rushing up to your face from your liver and makes your face go bright red. These two examples are basic demonstrations of the effects of stress. Stress (which is mental) has become the bane of modern life and everybody who is under stress, without going into heavy detail, is essentially going to experience the fight or flight response. The reality is that the first thing that happens when anyone experiences a stress response is their immune system shuts down.

Therefore, people who put themselves under stress 24 hours a day, which is easily done, are basically running on no immune system and the ease with which people can escalate from say fear, to a stress response and then on to a heart attack is a major problem.

Mind and spirit ultimately hold the root causes of all our physical problems. Sure, you can keep fixing the physical problems if you can catch them in time by detoxing or whatever, but if you don’t do something about the root source, you are going to go right back to it all the time. It’s not going to go away.

HG: Is the need for detoxification reaching some sort of crisis point in the world today? In your book you mention many sources from which toxins emanate and eventually enter our bodies and you present rapid re-toxification as some kind of inevitability. Is the situation really that much worse than it was say ten years ago or are we just becoming more aware of the issues these days?

DR: OK! As to the answer to the first question about the crisis point… Yes! It really is that serious!

The main reason is that when you get toxic you effectively destroy your immune response, yet this is exactly what you need most when you get toxic. With your immune response down you are open to all these other diseases, the super germs and all the other things that are happening around the world.

Detoxification is absolutely essential to restore normal immune response and once you have done that your body has a chance to recover. But when people remain toxic, and today people really are toxic, there is no magic that can help them. They’re shut down.

As far as today versus ten years ago is concerned, ‘Yes, it’s much worse’. We’re at saturation level and it’s a matter of the amount of chemicals that are being used in the production of food and especially in pharmaceutical drugs, which is much more than was being used ten years ago.

We also have to now face another major threatening factor: electro-magnetic fields. These artificial fields, and even worse the microwave thing, cell phones themselves, the relay towers that are everywhere (in Australia by the way they are hidden in plastic palm trees so that you can’t see them). All these are far more serious and significant than anyone actually imagines. Just because people don’t see it, they don’t worry about it. The point is, and I have studied this carefully, microwave pollution and artificial electro-magnetic fields, which are all around us in computers, appliances, high tension wires, etc, are doing far worse damage to us than the damage being done by chemicals.

The radiation from these sources is there all the time, 24 hours a day, and all during that time your body is going through a stress response. You can’t see it, but it is there and causing a stress response in your body. What happens then is that your immune system shuts down, you have cortisone coming out of your adrenal glands and your whole system is in fight or flight response. This isn’t just once in a while, it’s all the time.

So people who don’t do things like Chi-Gung, or meditation or who don’t know how to calm down and switch themselves back into healing mode, are really falling apart fast.

So ‘Yes’, the situation really is much worse than before.

HG: There is a major and looming threat to global human health in general with the imminent ratification of Codex Alimentarius in 2009. Despite the fact that most people have never heard of Codex, let alone understand the impact that it is about to have on all our lives, it occurs to me that several of the detoxing nutrients, herbs and agents that you describe in The Tao of Detox may well be harder to obtain once it has passed into law. Or am I jumping at shadows here?

DR: If Codex is permitted to go into effect as it stands, most of the nutritional and detoxification supplements that I mention in my book will be either strictly prohibited or will become as illegal as heroin. Of the eighteen that will remain out of the three or four hundred that will be banned, these will only be available by prescription and in such ridiculously low doses that they will be therapeutically useless. They will also be made from synthetic sources and will almost certainly cost about twenty times what they cost today.

You won’t be able to get the things that really work and the few things that will be allowed will be next to useless. Everything that I write about in my books, the vitamins, minerals and other supplements, you won’t be able to get them. It all means that you won’t be able to take care of yourself basically. That is the whole point of Codex. It’s a shocker!

HG: The potential grip that Codex will impose on global society has accelerated and expanded at an alarming rate over the last decade or so. However, the main area of the ‘treaty’ that is most likely to impact us from a naturopathic standpoint is the drafting of the ‘Vitamin and Mineral Guidelines’ that was introduced in draft form in July 2006. In your opinion what exactly is it that represents such a large threat to our health freedoms as far as Codex is concerned, and who is likely to be most affected?

DR: Well, let’s get down to basics. If you look at the ‘Vitamin and Mineral Guidelines’, they have reclassified vitamins. Right now vitamins and minerals are considered to be food. That is why they are there in the regulations. Codex started the whole thing by reclassifying all pure nutritional supplements, the extracted ones, the B group vitamins, A, D and C, as well as herbal extracts for example, and have now defined them as toxins. Get that? Toxins!? I mean this is incredible, just incredible!

The rationale they use as a pretext for controlling them in this way is that they take the minimum daily requirement you currently have for any given supplement (which supposedly has a therapeutic effect) and they divide that amount by one hundred. So one hundredth of the current recommended daily amount now becomes the new level that is acceptable.

Therefore, if the accepted daily recommended amount of Vitamin C is considered to be say 100 mgs, they will be cutting it down to 1 mg and justify it on the basis that they are preventing the public from getting toxic poisoning from an overdose of vitamin C. They say that they must do this!

The next thing will be (and they’ve already started to do this) is to start brainwashing the public to accept this false impression by planting all these reports in the news media. You’ve seen it yourself, the headlines a short while ago that vitamins are bad for you, that they’re dangerous, that they cause heart disease, that they interfere with medicines, that they cause this or cause that. Of course they are all based on phoney studies and use vitamins that are synthetically produced instead of the real thing.

All this so that by the time the Codex axe falls on 31 December 2009, they’ll be hoping they have the public mainstream thinking that the governments are doing the public a big favour.

Protecting the public though, this is not the real issue at all. The real issue is that so many people are now fixing themselves with vitamins, minerals and herbs that it is cutting into the profits of the pharmaceutical industry, not to mention incomes of the medical fraternity and hospitals. People are demonstrating that they are sick and tired of taking pills that kill them.

The whole intention of Codex is to eliminate public access to natural health care so that the pharmaceutical and hospital industries can survive. From a commercial point of view vitamins, minerals and herbs cannot be patented, therefore they cannot be monopolised nor therefore controlled nor sold at highly inflated prices.

If they could be patented then they’d be legal and they wouldn’t have been included in Codex.

HG: Do you actually think that Codex will be eventually allowed to pass into law?

DR: It will be passed into law unless there is a public outcry. I’m 50:50 on it. The public everywhere, they don’t lift their heads from the feeding trough and they don’t see that they’re getting screwed.

It could very simply be stopped by people simply calling or emailing the people that they vote for and saying, ‘if you don’t get rid of this I’m not going to vote for you again’. Any politician normally has one priority, which is to get re-elected. Most politicians by the way, I’ll guarantee this, at least nine out of ten, have never heard the word Codex and it’ll be the same in the US Congress. Never mind the public, the politicians don’t even know what is going on. They have to be informed, the public and the politicians.

Magazines like New Dawn are doing a big service that way. If enough people find out what is happening in the mainstream public domain then they could change things. As things are in the process of being changed things could definitely be stopped, but once it becomes law it becomes an issue of trade organisation and that means if a nation decides to ignore one of the conditions of Codex, then global trading organisations will effectively be able to impose trading sanctions.

So, if it comes in we’re really going to be screwed, but it’s very easy to stop, simply by raising public awareness and a call to action.

One thing that I do know though is that if it’s allowed to happen, then you will be walking into your favourite health food store on 1 Jan 2010 and there will be nothing of any nutritional value left on the shelves.

What food there is will be irradiated with gamma rays and genetically modified food will no longer be required to be clearly identified and labelled. It really will be hitting food in a major way. Meat, for example, will be regulated so that it will have to have the requisite dosages of antibiotics and steroids in it. This is genuinely a serious matter and once it’s in place we are not going to be able to get what we really need in order to be able to take care of ourselves.

Codex, which has been under development since 1962, has never been intended for the good of mankind!

The entire concept was developed by a German industrialist by the name of Farben (who was also the guy who developed mass fluoridation programs on the basis that if you dumped fluoride into the public water supply system you could pacify large numbers of people). Farben who had headed up one of Nazi Germany’s major chemical companies, following his acquittal at the post-war Nazi trials, got together with a bunch of other industrialists and came up with this idea that if you could control public access to food and medicine you could control the world. This is the thing about Codex: it was always meant to be for the benefit of the corporations and was never intended to protect the public. Never!

So that was the way it was started, except it wasn’t publicised that way. It’s been a bit like the way the war in Iraq was publicised as good for us, all part of the bullshit!

HG: And how would the so-called Third World be affected by Codex, because the implications of what you are saying is that the lives of millions of people living there might be about to be seriously threatened? Or am I letting my imagination run riot here?

DR: The real agenda here, apart from ensuring that the Western public is forced to use products produced by the industrial pharmaceutical and food interests, is best answered by quoting Henry Kissinger in a speech to the Bilderberger Group about ten years ago. He referred to people in the Third World as ‘useless eaters’! These words have now become quite commonly quoted, but it was Kissinger who first came up with them. You can only assume that what he meant was that they were consuming a lot of the world’s food and that they are useless. Useless to whom? To the white West, to the Anglo-Saxon empire, I have no idea, but the expression was absolutely indefensible!

In the Third World, in Africa, India and the Middle East, the people there are already on the very edge as far as immune response is concerned. They’re very toxic and they’re getting dumped on with pharmaceutical drugs that can’t be sold in the US, and for which no prescription is required.

So there are millions of people who are on the edge in the Third World. If you eliminate all sorts of nutritional supplementation, not only as stand alone supplements, but as nutritionally buffered food such as flour and rice that is fortified and then sent to famine stricken regions, then you effectively eliminate these people’s access to nutrients. So who is going to be affected the most? The people who are already on the edge.

Millions, even billions of people, will die as a result of Codex due to nutritional starvation and toxicity because there will be no more basic nutrition in what is left of the world’s food supply. So yes, it will affect the Third World a lot and when you look at who started it, the head of Farben, and you look at who has further pursued it, the likes of Kissinger, it makes you wonder what their real agenda must be!

You will still see food being sent to trouble spots around the world, but the food supplies will be as much good as plastic or sawdust after the introduction of Codex. The world’s media will still be showing pictures of food relief going to help all those people, but it will be useless and they’re going to die anyway. Enough on that!

HG: Daniel, I’ve really enjoyed our chat and I didn’t mean to distract our discussion away from your book, which I found to be not only an excellent read, but a highly practical manual for survival in today’s toxic world, but I know that you have a strong and dedicated interest in what is going on with Codex and didn’t want to miss the opportunity to get your views on it.

Daniel Reid’s website is www.danreid.org.

.

HUW GRIFFITHS is a British-born naturopath who came to Australia in the early ‘90’s. His interest and passion for natural and traditional health therapies was developed and nurtured alongside an international career in marketing and communications. He lives in Sydney’s Northern Beaches and can be contacted via New Dawn magazine.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 102 (May-June 2007).

Read this article with its illustrations by downloading
your copy of New Dawn 102 (PDF version) for only US$2.95

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John Fitzsimons

BY JOHN FITZSIMONS

—

Have you ever entered an empty room, or office, and felt “uncomfortable”? Feeling perhaps quite happy to get out of that room, or office, as soon as possible? Maybe you have found somewhere that feels “bad” at one time yet feels “okay” at another time? This could be where we work, live, or somewhere we are visiting or passing through.

What about people? Do you know anyone who seems to have a “negative” aura? When­ever you are near them you feel more depressed, angry or fearful, than you normally do? How about the opposite? Do you know anyone who seems to make you feel better just by being around you, not even needing to say anything to you to improve things?

Apart from feeling worse around certain people and/or in certain places, do you find that you sometimes lose a lot of energy (psychic draining) in these circumstances? Do you have a problem with such things as insomnia, poor sleep, nightmares or low energy levels? Perhaps you are constantly lacking in energy? Maybe being diagnosed as having chronic fatigue? Or maybe you always seem to be getting colds, illnesses or other problems?

If the answer is “yes” then chances are you may be under intentional, or unintentional, negative psychic influence. What some people call being under psychic attack. Can anything be done about such situations? Yes, psychic protection is what one can learn to counter such things. Before talking about psychic protection however, we may wonder what it is and how it works.

To better understand this we need to understand these negative influences. Put simply they are usually categorised into two types. Thought energies (or if they have a shape – thoughtforms) and negative spirit influence. Now, you may instantly think I am talking about dead people. I am not. We are all “spirits”. Some of us are physically alive and some of us aren’t. We do notbecome a spirit when we physically die. We are already one.

One may also say, “But I cannot see/hear spirits. This is proof they don’t exist”. Well, I cannot see radio, or television waves in this room. Does that mean they aren’t here? I wouldn’t think so. Much the same as hearing. I cannot hear a dog whistle. But dogs can! It would be rather foolish for me to conclude such a whistle made no noise simply on the grounds that “I didn’t hear it.”

Negative thought energies are created by someone (dead or alive) thinking negative thoughts, e.g. anger, hatred, fear etc. If the person is thinking these thoughts about us then they are automatically projected in our direction. In addition, as negative spirits are attracted to negative energy these people will often accompany the energies. Particularly if this is done “formally”, i.e., a spell.

Fortunately there is defence against these things. Positive energies will dissolve negative ones and we can arrange for positive spirits to help protect us against negative ones. There is nothing particularly profound about it. To cancel out a fire, water is a good response. The principle of using the opposite response to a spell is along the same lines.

The negative thought content of a spell, or any other form of psychic attack, can be “cancelled out” by directing a positive thoughtform of the same, or greater, strength at it. When they meet, the negative thoughtform will dissolve. This can be achieved by such things as prayer, visualisation, etc. A common example of the latter is to imagine you are surrounded by a “protective” bubble of light. One can also imagine oneself being a hot ball of light. Like the sun. Radiating a hot, bright, light outwards.

The effect of negative entities can be “can­celled out” by positive entities of the same, or greater, strength. If the positive spirits predominate then many of the negative entities can be “cleared” (permanently) to spirit worlds.

Getting help from positive spirits is arranged by requesting it. Prayer in other words. It should be remembered we can do more than arrange “protection” this way. A good wording for such a prayer, and a list of recommended approaches is at http://home.vicnet.net.au/~johnf/aprayer.htm For those without internet access here is a way of arranging this, say/think:

“I ask the Divine Light Forces (Forces of God) for…

(1) Protection against all that is not of the light (alive and dead).

(2) Healing on all levels

(3) Guidance with my life. Especially in the area of ____________________ e.g. knowing what I should be doing spiritually, help with becoming a channel for love, light, healing, guidance and inspiration. Preparing for meetings and/or seminars etc.

(4) Divine love, light and healing en­ergies to go to __________________ (people we live/work with) as well as all who are working against our spiritual progression.

Other points worth noting :

(1) There are some interesting books that can be purchased on this topic in­cluding a booklet I have written. The authors range from psychics to medical doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, etc. There is a list of some of the books primarily related to the topic of psychic protection on my web site. Those with internet access might find http://home.vicnet.net.au/~johnf/bookprot.htm a help.

(2) Light coloured clothes tend to en­courage light coloured energies. For best health never wear dark colours.

(3) If someone is currently sending you negative effects, as in a spell, then you need to direct light, etc. to them constantly until you feel they have stopped. If you “clear” yourself today then there is no reason why they cannot dump you with new discordant energies tomorrow!

(4) Negative thinking/emotions such as anger, fear, etc. weakens our aura and reduces our “protection”. Positive thinking/emotions such as love, etc. strengthen our aura and improves our “protection”.

(5) Keep in mind that things take time. Some people think praying for one night and imagining white light around them for five minutes will solve all their problems. This is unlikely. Suppose discordant effect had built up around you and/or your house for ten years. Do you think it reasonable to expect it to go in five minutes? Think of it this way. If you had a blow torch could you melt an ice­berg? The answer is, of course, yes, but it would take more than five minutes!

JOHN FITZSIMONS has been teaching in the areas of past lives, healing, mediumship, psychic protection, etc. since the 1970s. He does individual healing as well as counselling and conducts classes, meetings and seminars. He can be con­tacted via Aspects Pty Ltd, PO Box 5171, Clayton, Victoria 3168 or via his web page at: http://home.vicnet.net.au/~johnf/welcome.htm.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 80 (Sept-Oct 2003).

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.

For our reproduction notice, click here.

—

Because the dominant western world view is based on materialism, people who reject that perspective sometimes indiscriminately reject anything having to do with material values, even though such values may be appropriate for certain situations. The attitude toward western medicine of some members of the New Age movement demonstrates this.

Although the movement’s critique of western medicine is desirable, its rush to embrace nonwestern medicine and alternative modes of healing nevertheless needs checks and balances to prevent malpractice by untrained people and to screen out misinformation and pseudoscience. (An example would be the claims for crystal healing, most of which, in my judgment, are founded on magical thinking and haven’t a shred of evidence to support them. Any results are due solely to placebo effect – a subject much more deserving of study than crystals.)

All too often, naive advocates of holistic healing simply reject western medicine altogether, embracing unproven methods and approaches while failing to appreciate the true value of western medicine, which is considerable. Such people make their own version of the mistake they intend to correct. While the western materialistic perspective tends to explain all mental phenomena in physical terms – i.e., it reduces all mind to matter – indiscriminate advocates of holistic health try to explain all matter as mind. Neither perspective is wholly wrong. They are simply incomplete and therefore unbalanced.

This incompleteness and imbalance needs to be corrected; everyone can grow from it. Most of all, a philosophy of holistic medicine for the total human being needs to be articulated for guidance in all situations between physicians and patients, healers and clients, diagnosticians and the ill. It must recognize that conventional medicine knows a lot about the physical domain and that it deserves credit for what it has done with that knowledge to eliminate disease and pain.

Polio, smallpox, yellow fever, bubonic plague, diphtheria, scurvy, rickets, and so forth – the medical establishment merits great respect for ridding the West, if not the world, of these scourges. Likewise, conventional medicine deserves credit for advances such as open heart surgery, prosthetic devices and artificial parts, CAT-scan and magnetic resonance imaging, pharmaceuticals and a host of other inventions and procedures which help restore and maintain health. Finally, a valid philosophy of holistic medicine must also recognize the unfairness of presuming conventional medicine – materia medica – to be accountable for things which simply are not part of its function. Toward that end I offer the following as a contribution to developing an enlightened philosophy of health.

Healing is not always cure. Nor does cure always involve healing. Healing pertains to the spirit, cure pertains to the body-mind. Healing is awakening to God and the Transcendental Domain as Love. That is what the true healer does – and is.

Healing is not a panacea for every human illness and malady. Those conditions might be cured, but that is not the same as healing. Healing removes the state of consciousness which regards illness and malady as problematic – as the basis for suffering and self-contracted emotion and behavior.

Healing may or may not actually cure the physical condition in question; we simply don’t know enough about the human body-mind complex to say with certainty what the outcome of Love/healing will be. On one hand, there have been miraculous cures as a consequence of a person awakening to, and as, Love. For example, when the Dutch psychic-spiritual teacher Jack Schwarz was in a Nazi concentration camp, he lost consciousness during a whipping. At that moment, he had a vision of Christ and felt his radiant love. Upon awakening, Jack said to the guard, “Ich liebe dich,” I love you. The guard was shocked – and even more shocked when he saw the wounds of Jack’s body begin to heal immediately. Jack describes that event as a “re-birthday” for him. He claims he left the camp whole and healthy.

Remarkable as that is, there have been far more instances where awakening to Love hasn’t had noticeable effect upon physical illness. St. Bernadette of Lourdes – she of the healing grotto – had a painful, lingering and fatal case of consumption. Ramana Maharshi, a great yogi-mystic of India, died of cancer; so did another, Ramakrishna. Both yogis were reputed to show such a high degree of divine love that on occasion they literally caused others to swoon in ecstasy. That did not prevent their terminal illness in middle age.

Why hasn’t Love been all-protecting in these instances? Sri Aurobindo, yet another great Indian yogi-mystic, provides the answer. He once broke his knee after a fall. The physician who attended him asked, “How is it that you, a mahatma, could not foresee and prevent this accident?” Aurobindo replied, “I still have to carry this human body about me and it is subject to ordinary human limitations and physical laws.”

On the other hand, there have been miraculous cures due to the operation of Love through a healer which nevertheless left the “cured” person unchanged in consciousness. The story in Luke 17:12ff illustrates this:

And as [Jesus] entered a village, he was met by ten lepers, who stood at a distance and lifted up their voices and said, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.” When he saw them he said to them, “Go and show yourselves to the priests.” And as they went they were cleansed. Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice; and he fell on his face at Jesus’ feet, giving him thanks. Now he was a Samaritan. Then said Jesus, “Were not ten cleansed? Where are the nine? Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?” And he said to him, “Rise and go your way; your faith has made you well.”

Ten lepers were cured, but only one was healed. That is, only one took the treatment to heart; only one responded to the healer with gratitude and changed behavior. The other nine went their way physically cleansed but still in the self-centered state of awareness which blocks mental and spiritual development and which sullies relationships. Insofar as leprosy is a manifestation of a spiritual condition – for such as Jesus’s and the biblical view – the nine would probably develop other kinds of disease because their spiritual malaise still festered.

All too often the practice of medicine is, as was taught in many medical schools, to “aggressively treat the body in the bed.” That is fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough. It is not so much wrong as incomplete, and that incompleteness is based on a view of the human being as simply a body. Mind and spirit are unrecognized or ignored, to the detriment of patient and medical practitioner alike, and to society at large.

In simplest terms: cure removes illness; healing promotes health. “Heal” comes from the Old English hal, meaning “whole.” From it also comes “hale” (as in “hale and hearty”) and “health.” (Incidentally, it’s a delightful irony that the name of the crazy computer in 2001 is Hal.)

But wholeness is not to be found in the physical realm by itself. Humans are compound individuals, as transpersonal psychologist Ken Wilber phrases it – compounded from the mental and spiritual realms as well. All realms are aspects or manifestations of the One which is Ultimate Wholeness. The One transcends all creation and is prior to all creation, yet paradoxically also is all creation. Transcendence does not merely negate. Rather, it includes that which is transcended in a larger context, correcting imbalances and bringing completeness to it. Thus, healing practice which focuses simply on one realm or another and ignores the rest is incomplete practice.

To state the situation generally, each of the three great realms of manifest existence has its lawful operations which we must learn and adapt to as we ascend in consciousness to the Transcendental Domain. The mental realm is “higher” than the physical and the spiritual realm is “higher” than the mental. Although there is interchange between and among them, it is clear that physical medications are inherently incapable of curing mental and/or spiritual maladies because the latter are senior to the physical realm. The higher contains the lower but cannot be reduced to the lower.

Healing, rooted in the Transcendental Domain which enfolds all creation, must be understood, first, to recognize the reality of the lower realms which it embraces and, second, to include the curative principles and practices which are inherent to them.

Some materialists may object to this perspective on grounds of the evidence of psychosomatic medicine, claiming that it shows an equivalence of body and mind. So I hasten to clarify: symptoms can indeed be treated through physical means, usually quite effectively, but causes are another condition altogether. It is clear, of course, that physical malfunctions can have physical causes and thus should be treated physically. A broken leg doesn’t require psychotherapy; poisoning calls for a stomach pump, not meditation; and kwashiakor indicates the need for proper nutrition, not laying-on of hands. Some chemical compounds (psychoactive drugs) are useful for restoring the mentally disturbed to relatively normal psychophysical functioning by relieving or suppressing symptoms, but only effective therapy can uncover the life-situations which stressfully generated the biochemical imbalance in the first place. On the other hand, no amount of vitamin B12, trace elements or special diets will make such a person more compassionate or even more rational. They may bring that person’s nervous system to finer functioning and boost his energy level, but they are not capable of opening the mental “eye of reason,” let alone the spiritual “eye of contemplation,” which are founded in domains beyond the reach of nutrition, medication and any other physical, electrochemical or “energy medicine” means of treatment.

At present, we in the West have health specialists to whom society conventionally assigns the research and development functions for the three great realms of existence. The specialists are called physicians (for the physical realm), psychiatrists/psychotherapists (for the mental) and clerics/religious (for the spiritual). Now, there is nothing wrong with being a specialist, so long as there is recognition that, first, the human being is multidimensional or compound and, second, there is a hierarchical ordering of those realms or elements from which the person is compounded, with each requiring its own mode of treatment. Advocates of holistic health who criticize conventional medical education and practice because it doesn’t accomplish the things which psychology/psychiatry and religion do, make an irrelevant criticism. If your car needs repairs, you have a garage mechanic work on it; you don’t go to a psychotherapist, shaman or preacher.

Conversely, you don’t go to a mechanic for spiritual counseling or midlife crisis guidance. By and large, conventional medical practice is not wrong; it is merely incomplete – and that is a great difference. There’s no need for holistic health advocates to throw out the baby with the bath water.

The life of the twelfth century Tibetan saint Milarepa offers an instructive example of the hierarchical nature of the compound individual and of the strengths inherent in each realm which are to be cultivated in the name of wholeness. Milarepa spent years meditating alone in a cave. He had forsaken all worldly contact and possessions. He lived as a naked yogi almost without any food except nettles, which he subsisted on for years. In fact, his skin had turned green from the unvarying diet. Yet he remained steadfast and determined to attain the jewel in the lotus – enlightenment. A song he composed to describe the situation says:

Even though my bones have pierced my flesh on this cold stone floor,
I have persevered.
My body, inside and outside, has become like a nettle;
It will never lose its greenness.
In the solitary cave, in the wilderness,
The recluse knows much loneliness.
But my faithful heart never separates
From the Lama-Buddha of the Three Ages.
By the force of meditation arising from my efforts,
Without doubt I will achieve self-realization.1

From whence comes such force of will? Not from even the most healthy diet and exercise program, nor from scholarly study of philosophy and sacred texts. It comes from “awakening at the heart” to the possibility of enlightenment. Of course, Milarepa later learned moderation from such austerity, just as the Buddha had 1,600 years earlier. After all, wholeness is wholeness – not just supreme cultivation of the spiritual realm alone.

Proper care should be given to the requirements of body and mind also; the properties and limitations of each should be recognized and respected, without mistaking any of them – including the spiritual – as ultimate. Wholeness, ultimate wholeness, consists of the manifest and the unmanifest. As Ramana Maharshi put it paradoxically: “The world is illusion; Brahman alone is real; Brahman is the world.” Thus, healing – as distinguished from cure – must properly diagnose the cause of an illness or disturbance and address it, as well as the symptoms.

It is commonly said that the body is the temple of the spirit. True – but again, incomplete. A Course in Miracles adds another dimension to the concept of temple by declaring that relationships are the temple of the spirit. That declaration brings balance and completeness to the body-as-temple concept because all too often, the body is wrongly worshipped by narcissists and spiritual materialists who leap aboard the latest food fad or health product craze as the key to salvation. But neither spirulina nor snake gall bladder, wheat grass juice nor ayurvedic herbal compounds, flower essences nor crystals can restore health to bad relationships.

As Swami Sivananda Radha of Canada puts it succinctly, pure food does not produce a pure mind. The body of relationships is the mystical body of Christ. Only open, honest and loving relationships based on freedom and equality can bring health to that body.

The final obstacle to health is death – or so the materialist believes (whether he is a genuine materialist or a spiritual materialist). But this view is not necessarily true. In fact, it is totally challenged in various quarters ranging from ancient spiritual traditions to contemporary trends in health care, as I show in A Practical Guide to Death and Dying.

The fact that many medical practitioners have such a hard time dealing with is this: death is inevitable. So much of the medical community’s sense of purpose and identity is bound up in a struggle to overcome death. If one’s self-image and self-esteem as a health practitioner are based on staving off death for patients or clients, it is a losing game because death cannot be cured. That is not to deny the value of biomedical research into life extension; I am strongly in favor of it and the immortalist movement. But, as a growing number of medical care providers are coming to recognize, death need not be viewed as The Enemy. In fact, that view leads, ironically, to poorer medical care than a view which acknowledges death’s place in the scheme of things and the need to honestly and caringly help terminal patients deal with their impending demise.

This is precisely the thrust of the hospice movement and certain lines of thantological work. Death may end a life, but it doesn’t end a relationship. From a psychological point of view, that relationship continues among the living, for better or for worse. (Think of how many people still carry a deceased Mommy or Daddy around inside themselves as a heavy load of nagging guilt or scolding self-defeat.) From a parapsychological point of view, it continues between the living and the dead, for better or for worse. (Crisis apparitions are examples of it continuing for the better; emergency aid is extended to the living by the departed.)

Beyond the hospice movement’s perspective is that offered by people such as Ram Dass and Steven Levine, who declare that dying is an opportunity for spiritual practice and that death can be a vehicle of awakening. (To be fair, it should be recognized that many hospice staff members share this perspective and have worked extensively with it.)

The changes of consciousness which the dying go through can lead to tremendous healing of relationships. Instances of deathbed reconciliation among fallen-out family members and friends are not infrequent and they can lead to positively changed lives for those who are left behind. When such transformations of consciousness are deliberately cultivated during the dying process (by oneself or through trained practitioners), dying can indeed be a healing. Furthermore, it can have some degree of healing – through inspiration – on others who simply hear about such experiences.

The most inspiring examples of “dying the good death” come from the final moments of saints and holy people. I recount some of them in A Practical Guide to Death and Dying. Perhaps the ultimate healing-through-death was that offered compassionately by Jesus. As he died on the cross, he said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” – and the world has never been the same. At that moment, the wall of the temple was rent in twain; symbolically speaking, the true nature of the human being and of relationships was revealed through the redemptive act of Jesus, which tore the “veil of maya” or delusion from our eyes to let Reality shine through.

Body, mind and spirit: any practice of healing must recognize that there are three great realms in creation and that ultimately the three are one – that is, manifestations of the One. Insofar as healing treats disease (dis-ease), it must be understood that there is no ease, no rest, until we rest in God. The leper who turned back to thank Jesus understood this. The lesson of that biblical passage, then, is this: patients/clients must be dealt with in the context of ultimate wholeness and healing practitioners should seek to be whole themselves. “Physician, heal thyself.” (That applies to psychiatrists/psychotherapists and clerics/religious as well.) In the context of ultimate wholeness, conventional healing is not always cure, nor does cure always involve conventional healing.

So long as there is embodied existence, there will be some degree of illness and malady, even for enlightened sages. But the Awakened Heart frees us of the egoic tendency to identify that illness or malady as problematic; it allows us to experience it as Grace or the Play of Consciousness. When someone accidentally bumped into Ramana Maharshi, who was terminally ill with cancer, everyone near him saw a look of great agony flash across his face. His ravaged flesh was extremely sensitive; the pain from the contact was obviously enormous. Yet he made no comment until someone, thinking he was using yogic control, said to him, “Perhaps you don’t feel the pain?” Maharshi replied, “There is pain, but there is no suffering.” His biological functioning was “doing its thing” by producing pain; so was his consciousness’ transcendental perspective on existence, including his own fleshly life, by eliminating the egoic response to pain.

Paul Brunton puts it wisely in his Notebooks series (Perspectives, p. 131): “To pray for a bodily cure and nothing more is a limited and limiting procedure. Pray also to be enlightened as to why this sickness fell upon you. Ask also what you can do to remove its cause. And above all, ask for the Water of Life, as Jesus bade the woman at the well to ask.”

Footnotes:

1. The Life of Milarepa, Lobsang P. Lhalungpa, E.P. Dutton: New York, 1977, p. 124

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John White is an author in the fields of consciousness research and higher human development. He has published 15 books, including The Meeting of Science and Spirit, What Is Enlightenment?, A Practical Guide to Death and Dying and for children, The Christmas Mice. His books have been translated into nine languages. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Saturday Review, Reader’s Digest, Science of Mind, Esquire, Omni, Woman’s Day and various other newspapers and magazines. He lives in Cheshire, Connecticut. This article was drawn from his book The Meeting of Science and Spirit.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 44, (September-October 1997).

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