On 7/27/2017 I posted Health and Self Actualization 1 which was addressed to all medical physicians and was in part centered on Ivan Illich’s book Toward a History of Needs, which addresses Abraham Maslow’s Self-Actualization Need Theory – pointing out the central role ‘health’ plays in our lives. Without ‘health’ we cannot Self-Actualize, become all that we possibly can become. I pointed this out in the blog post Health and Self-Actualization 1 that if we have a Constitutional right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness it has to be a healthy life, health is the central need in Maslow’s theory – unless we are healthy, all of the higher-level needs, love, esteem, and self-actualization, which make up liberty and happiness are inaccessible! Who wants to fuck when one is sick? We have to be healthy in order to self-actualize our lives into liberty and happiness. This is not an easy task – let’s see if more ‘light’ can be shed on the processes of obtaining a quality life.
So, the issue before us is to examine the processes involved in self-actualization. If the medical profession is not addressing this human need with every patient, it is failing us! Stephen, can you say you are filling this requirement with every patient? Yes, we explore this dimension of life during our meetings, however, this is at my initiative and I suspect you and your colleagues do not go into this with any of your patients. Illich, however, addresses this issue for us and offers us a protocol to apply this medical procedure.
As I mentioned, Illich addresses all ‘professions’ but in particular the ‘medical profession’ as the source of our current dysfunctional healthcare culture. Stephen, I listened carefully to your description of the conflict you experienced in working overtime to cover patients and the push-back you received from hospital administrators concerned with the costs of having to staff those additional hours. As you put it, “hospital administers are money motivated, the profit motive controls the health care industry”. Later in the day, I re-opened Illiches’ book on a history of needs and re-read the paragraph that I had read last, it was in my mind when Stephen was describing his experience and now I re-read it realizing this is what you were describing.
Ivan Illich gives this lecture on 09.12.1974 to mark the launch of his book Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health in which he continues his critique of the medical profession and the ‘delusions’ of importance that exist in Western culture regarding the medical profession. Illich contrasts personal responsibility with individual impotence and questions the corporate indoctrination that reorganizes society within such excesses of professionalization.
Ivan Illich on the Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health
I know this was a deep dive into our ‘medical nemesis’ and here is Life is a Test: Ivan Illich’s Medical Nemesis and the ‘Age of the Show’ presented by Babette Babich member of Fordham University. This is a detailed presentation which was published on Nov 22, 2016 at the International Philosophy of Nursing Society; Keynote address 20th Annual Meeting in Quebec City, Quebec. This is Chapter 1 and other chapters can be viewed following this presentation.
[comment on these videos]
The source of our lack of a self-actualizing life is a failure of Capitalism. This failure has been addressed in these three posts Kapitalism On The Couch November 20, 2010; Kapitalism: Its Nature April 12, 2011; and Kapitalism’s Concept of the Self December 14, 2012. Slavoj Zizek below in “under capitalism 80% of population” suggests a new twist on the 80/20 rule, the Pareto Principle, which asserts that 80% of outcomes result from 20% of all causes stating that for any given event Zizek suggests that 80% of the population is or is becoming disposable, 20% is the real productive force in civilizations. In fact, the Covid-19 virus is fulfilling the Malthusian mandate that the green-revolution put a halt to – reducing useless people from the global economic system.
Yes, this seems harsh, however, the survival of the fittest has not been put to rest? (The Mathematical Challenge to Darwin and Wallace May 30, 2020 address this.
The Love of Money 1 of 3 is about the bank that busted the World and is still busting our balls. The love of money should now be treated yet as a sickness, a pandemic. Let’s see if we might develop a vaccination. I am suggesting that there is a ‘silent pulse’ waiting for us to realize as George Leonard suggests “At the heart of each of us, whatever our imperfections there exists a silent pulse of perfect rhythm, a complex of wave forms and resonances, which connects us to everything in the universe. The act of getting in touch with this pulse can transform our personal experience and in some way alter the world around us” (Leonard, The silent pulse, p.xi, 1978). We are hunting for this pulse!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-0UhmUI-WbQ&t=147s
I have been following Terence McKenna’s work for several years and to a lesser extent that of Ram Dass. In this interesting conversation, the central issue is sensing the ‘pulse of life around us’. The waiter serving these guys is unique – before watching this fix yourself an espresso coffee!
This blog has been unfolding for some time since 2017 and i am still writing to my physician Stephen in 20017. Good morning Stephen, seems I am having issues with health care. At least the Senate HC Bill was defeated. How could anyone expect John McCain who had just had state-of-the-art surgery to fly into Washington and vote for this Bill, jerking health care from millions of Americans? It was dramatic – his walking to the center of the chamber, arm extended and turning thumb down. However, it was two women in the majority rejecting this bill.
Ram Dass – Part 1 Complete: Compassion in Action – Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove
Let me continue with what I have identified as synchronistic experiences beginning with my physical visit to you last week. I did not address this in my email to you but this phenomenon will appear in a blog entry that is being prepared and will be sent to you. However, life keeps unfolding and one has to keep up – this I now realize is the source of psychic energy addressing my feelings of anxiety that every now and then catch up with us.
Yesterday, 8.7.2017, I received the new issue of Time with the cover story ‘The Anti Antidepressant: Depression afflicts 16 million Americans‘. One-third of recipients do not respond to treatment. I am sure you have read many of the original journal studies that were used to compile this story but thought you might be interested in my reading and for sure I am interested in your observation of my observation – here we have the “I see you see me seeing you” Johari exercise. Of course, the central interest is why are so many Americans depressed? We already have Ivan Illich’s thesis to consider but what attracted my interest is the issue of ‘big data research’ going on at Perlis’ lab at the Massachusetts General Hospital. What is going on here is “a team of scientists is trying to use big data to uncover whether any other exiting FDA-approved medications – including drugs for completely different issues, like high cholesterol, pain and even acne – could have any mood-lifting side effects” (44).
What stuck me is that since March 6, I stopped taking my cholesterol drug and my “down moods” it seems have vanished. Of course, I have also stop drinking a few beers most afternoons, while mowing or working on the lawn. So, there is some contamination, however, this does open up the question of my cholesterol drug actually having a depressing effect. What are its findings in this regard?
I was disappointed not to see Stanislav Grof’s work cited in the Time article. His initial work was with psychedelic drugs and then moved into drug-free treatments that the article briefly outlines in a separate supplement. The one mentioned that is another variable confounding me as a research subject is “behavioral-activation therapy” a “treatment that involves helping people identify activities that add meaning to their life, like reading, volunteering, hanging out with friends,…” Here my Scherling Ancestors Project, Life Coaching Service, and writing projects add additional contaminating factors, however, these have been ongoing for some time.
Thinking Allowed – Stanislav Grof
Synchronicity; A meaningful Coincidence (from Day Journal 2017.07a p.30)
Thinking Allowed – Stanislav Grof published on Apr 6, 2014 Interview in “Thinking Allowed” with Jeffrey Mishlove and Stanislav Grof. Part of DVD “The Roots of Consciousness” http://www.thinkingallowed.com/q154.html A New Paradigm of the Unconscious (#S040) In extraordinary circumstances, the human mind is capable of accessing information from anywhere in time or space, according to evidence provided by Stanislav Grof, M.D.. Author of Realms of the Human Unconscious, Dr. Grof is an innovative psychotherapist who has attempted to integrate the divergent schools of Freud, Jung and Reich with insights from the leading edge of contemporary physics and biology.
Finally, I am sending this note to my psychiatrist friend, whom has discussed these idea with me before. The article reports that “since ketamine is FDA approved as an anesthetic, physicians can legally prescribe it off-label for any condition they believe it may help, including depression” (43). Some in USA are legally setting up private clinics and raking in money. We fantasied about setting up clinics using Ayahuasca brew and attending a ayahuasca clinic in Peru. No, I was not and am not sipping that brew, never have – yet. I now seem to be on another path.
I wait your report on my medicine. For sure, beginning to re-start the medicine and feeling anxiety will be telling. But then it still may all be psychological. In the meantime, I die of a heart attack – better hurry – ya! Have a productive day.
PS Toward the end of Grof’s interview, the issue you related about a past Roman Emperor is addressed. Do send me his name.
8/1/2017 8:28 AM
I went for my yearly physical check-up last week and am in the process of writing up the experience going on for several days now. I expect to put this on my blog in more detail than I have already shared with my Doc, however, this morning’s “morning page” contained this clip now at the center of what I am writing. Again, it applies to me, us, and especially to Trump’s misunderstanding of globalization. Grof is an interesting fellow. Oh, the check-up was okay, but I have an issue with certain medications that the latest Time cover story on “The Anti Antidepressant” addresses. Big data analysis is now looking into side effects for already approved drugs for other ailments like high cholesterol to see if they work for depression. My observation and question this morning to my Doc is that they may cause anxiety depression. I want to see the research on this. Still, this does not address the interesting question of why are so many Americans are depressed? But Stanislav has some ideas. Enjoy!
Stanislav Grof – The Cosmic Game 1
Christina and Stan Grof – Holotropic Breathwork
Stanislav Grof – The Cosmic Game 2
Timothy Leary and Ram Dass Debate
Ram Dass – Part 1 Complete: Compassion in Action – Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_skjT_uOzyo
8/1/2017 2:33 PM
Hello again Stephen, Thank you for the Roman Emperor’s name. The issue that I was asking you about was the Time article reporting on big-data search regarding the possible “positive effects” of cholesterol drugs on depressions. My experience this past month is in stopping my cholesterol drug, my “down moods” seemed to have ceased. So, is there research finding on any side-effects on the drug that I have been taking? Is my choice between putting up with a mild low mood or suffering heart attack? This may seem at first glance not important but I have not yet factored into this experience the synchronicities that are unfolding. What do we know about this drug and possibly what is going on? Steven
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=thLgkQBFTPw
BBC Documentary 2017 – To The Brink of Eternity – New Adam Curtis Documentary 2017
A Tarot I Ching Journey – Introduction 2
Terence McKenna – Time and the I-Ching
Then I was this in my feed and am wondering if this ought to next be posted. Let’s take big brother out of the sky!
The Bourne Legacy (2/8) Movie CLIP – Drone Attack
But more pressing is to get to the last chapter of Maria’s book that addresses the idea of Time now under discussion. And from the table of contents I see it is somewhere in you Lennie. Okay will find Her.
Conscious Evolution and the Integration of Science and Spirituality
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/barbara-marx-hubbard/conscious-evolution-a-con_b_680446.html
Terence McKenna – Timewave Zero
Stone Age Economics
Click to access Sahlins%20-%20Stone%20Age%20Economics.pdf
The Psychology of Self-Deception
The Third Pill-Slavoj Zizek
Slavoj Zizek: The paradox of freedom – True Freedom isn’t the freedom of choice
Chapter 19: Conclusion: I do not address myself to nations but to those few people amongst home it is taken for granted that our civilization does not drop from heaven but it is, in the end, produced by individuals. If the great cause fails it is because the individuals fail, because I failed. So I must first put myself right. And as authority has lost its spell I need for this purpose knowledge and experience of the most intimate and intrinsic foundations of my subject of being so as to build my based upon the internal factors of the human soul. (quoted by H. Westmann in “the old testament and analytical psychology,” Guild lecture No. 10, the guild a pastoral psychology, London, England).
Jung’s remarks, above up might have been directed to those individuals concerned with widening the range of their consciousness by learning to interpret the information contained in their dreams, so aptly put are the essentials. To “put yourself right” with “knowledge and experience of the most intimate and intrinsic foundations of your subjective being” is precisely the aim of the venture. The work really amounts to research which, as the contents of this book will have disclosed, is extremely varied. During its course, you are sustained encouraged to discern with increasing clarity the personality emerging out of your dreams, of which you previously had been more-or-less unconscious. In short, you have been individuating. (240)
While the work is necessarily solitary, you are not alone. Rather, as you go deeper with your research the more plainly do you see the connections linking you to specialists in other studies. You recognize that you have taken your place in the avant garde of that evolutionary stream surging powerfully through our present era, as exhibited in the fantastic conver¬gence of mental, psychological and physical achievements already here: the release of nuclear energy, the manipulation of genes and chromosomes for the control of heredity and sex, the libera¬tion of the human spirit from psychic bondage through the knowledge of psychoanalysis and understanding of depth psychol¬ogy, the recognition that words-in-use are symbols and its concomitant, that we have not yet learned to use our minds properly, all these achievements amount to breakthroughs to new plateaus in human history from which the future advances will be launched.
The aggregate of these accomplishments has created a new climate in which is emerging a new genus, called Homo progressivus by the late distinguished paleontologist, Pierre Tielhard de Chardin, the scientist whose acquaintance with man has extended all the way back to Sinanthropus, which he helped to identify. De Chardin has struck perhaps the most hopeful note of any scientist of an eminence as to the future prospects of mankind… He singled out in particular as one distinguishing mark of the new breed, and that is, a mysterious sense of the future.
…More accurately, you perceive a curiously immediate participation in it, possibly the more intensified when it is deliberate, con¬scious choice that impels you to take on the task of lessening the collective unconsciousness by as much as on individual’s quanta, your very own portion, in your lifetime. Such action be¬comes, as Jung remarks of the psyche, “intervention in the exist¬ing natural order [and] no one can say with certainty where this intervention will finally end.” But your own heightened con¬sciousness will detect that such intervention is on a cosmic or¬der, capable of effecting an alteration of principle, through transmutation, in precisely the manner of the observer in physics, the science complementary to depth psychology, as described by the Nobel physicist, Wolfgang Pauli:
Every observation (by the observer, i.e., an individual) interferes on an indeterminable scale both with the in¬struments of observation and with the system observed interrupts the causal connection of the phenomena preceding it with those following it… [The resulting selective observation] may be compared to a creation in the microcosm or even to a transmutation, the results of which are, however, unpredictable and beyond human con-trol.4 (242)
Profoundly, the individual counts; though the full meaning of your individual efforts to bring to consciousness what is in your own unconscious may not be revealed to you, you can know that you are going in the only progressive direction of the future evolu¬tion of man on this earth. But that is not all. Something far more personal, intimate and immediate will come about. As Jung says: “Whoever nurtures this contact between the conscious and unconscious will, in time, experience a great spiritual and moral release of tension, his inner oppositions will be lessened; he will take root in his instincts and gain that sense of security and support in him an undreamed-of fullness of life that expands rather than shrinks with age because the instincts and values are being truly lived.” (Spring, 1960) From Mahoney 1966:242)
(3, Jung C.G., & Pauli, W.,1955, The influence of archetypal ideas on the scientific theories of Kepler, The interpretation of nature and the psyche. New York: Pantheon Books, 1955, pp. 151-153.
(4Pauli further elaborates his thesis by pointing to the fact that the emotional aspect of the observer’s ex¬perience (in experimental physics) stands in vital relationship not only to contemporary knowledge but also to the actual process of cognition.)
8.2.2017 Stephen good morning, I do not mean to belabor this, but it seems I have sunk into a sinkhole and as Jung once remarked about a patient reaching for help out of the hole she was in, chuckled and pushed her under saying “it is not out but through you must go”.
In this regard, my most immediate question is to ask you if you can remember in my last visit, you told me a story, I think, of another patient you had that was meaningfully related to our usually psychological discussions. Can you remember this story? I tried and so far, cannot.
I wikied “brain fog” and do not think this is my feeling of past anxiety. I suspect other aspects of my life, previously mentioned, are overriding any possible effects from not taking my current medication. I read some on the “blood/brain barrier” and what would be the advantage of having this in Pravastatin? I need to finish writing up recent reading and experiences and then will begin re-taking something. Appreciate your indulgence on this. Steven A.
Dialectic Analytical Man 