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Archive for the ‘books’ Category

Fear of dying or passion for living?

Posted in books, from the consulting room, from the living room, health, life on May 27, 2012| 1 Comment »

I’m always struck by comments from researchers about how many lives may be “saved” if only we would take their recommended drugs. Trouble is, you see, the total number of lives “saved” will always be zero. Drugs might alter your experience of life, but they won’t make you immortal.

As the Onion once famously proclaimed  “WHO announce – Human mortality remains stubbornly at 100%!”

We are creatures. Like other creatures on this planet. But we have evolved something special. Consciousness. With this consciousness comes both self-awareness and imagination, both of which allow us to know that we are mortal. We know we are going to die. We can imagine it. Our problem is…..how do we live with that?

I’ve just finished reading Ernest Becker’s “Denial of Death“. It’s probably one of the most challenging books I’ve ever read. He argues powerfully and convincingly that human beings have both qualities of “creatureliness” (by dint of having a body), and of “godliness” (by dint of our ability to handle symbols and to be able to imagine not just the here and now, but other times, other places and the lives of other people. In essence, we are both biological and symbolic organisms. He lays out the case that the fear of dying is at the heart of what it is to be human, that unlike other creatures which are driven by instinct, we are, instead, driven by this fear. I won’t go into detail in this post, but if you check out the link at the start of the paragraph you can read an excellent wikipedia summary of the book.

Every Saturday it seems there are people in the High Street collecting money for a charity for some disease or other – fight cervical cancer, fight breast cancer, fight diabetes, fight heart disease, fight some other disease. And what if we could for a moment conceive of a world where each, and all, of these diseases were eliminated? Would we still die?

I don’t think a fear of dying is a good basis for a life. I don’t like all the scaremongering of the “Well of Light Brotherhood” types who know with such certainty how the rest of us should be living our lives to reduce our chances of dying.

What do I believe instead?

That we should have a passion for living.

We all die. That’s a fact. It can’t be avoided but it shouldn’t be the one fact which determines how we are to live. Let’s accept our reality and do what we are here to do – live.

How passionate are you about living? What will you do TODAY to live fully and passionately?

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Who decides what’s best for you?

Posted in books, from the consulting room, from the reading room, health on May 21, 2012| 2 Comments »

Just read Leonora Carrington’s novel, The Hearing Trumpet and was stopped in my tracks by the following passage –

What is the Well of Light Brotherhood? That sounds more terrifying than death itself, a Brotherhood with the grim knowledge of what is better for other people and the iron determination to better them whether they like it or not.

The novel tells the story of an elderly woman put away in a “home” by her son and his wife when her behaviour becomes difficult for them. The home is run by the “Well of Light Brotherhood”.

You know, it seems to me that health care these days is probably run by the same people!!

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A miraculous life

Posted in books, from the living room, from the reading room, life, philosophy on April 19, 2012| 3 Comments »

When I read this passage from Marilynne Robinson’s new book, I immediately recalled Robert Solomon’s “Joy of Philosophy” (which I reviewed and reflected on here)

There is a tendency, considered highly rational, to reason from a narrow set of interests, say survival and procreation, which are supposed to govern our lives, and then to treat everything that does not fit this model as anomalous clutter, extraneous to what we are and probably best done without. But all we really know about what we are is what we do. There is a tendency to fit a tight and awkward carapace of definition over humankind, and to try to trim the living creature to fit the dead shell. The advice I give my students is the same advice I give myself—forget definition, forget assumption, watch. We inhabit, we are part of, a reality for which explanation is much too poor and small. No physicist would dispute this, though he or she might be less ready than I am to have recourse to the old language and call reality miraculous

I do think reducing a human being, in whatever way, takes us into acting at a subhuman level. It’s this reduction of the miraculous, amazing, special individual to a data set of measurable parameters which lies at the core of a lot of our problems these days. (This is why I argue for a SEA CHANGE in our values).

Robert Solomon’s book is subtitled “Thinking Thin versus the Passionate Life” and in that, he nails it.

A data led, reduced, materialism is a poor, thin, inadequate way to live. What I argue for is a rich, passionate life of wonder and amazement – a miraculous life.

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To know someone

Posted in books, from the consulting room, from the living room, from the reading room, health, life on April 13, 2012| 2 Comments »

Stumbled across a fabulous extract from Marilynne Robinson’s new book. Here’s just one of the paragraphs which hooked me –

There is a great difference, in fiction and in life, between knowing someone and knowing aboutsomeone. When a writer knows about his character, he is writing for plot. When he knows his character, he is writing to explore, to feel reality on a set of nerves somehow not quite his own. Words like “sympathy,” “empathy,” and “compassion” are overworked and overcharged—there is no word for the experience of seeing an embrace at a subway stop or hearing an argument at the next table in a restaurant. Every such instant has its own emotional coloration, which memory retains or heightens, and so the most sidelong, unintended moment becomes a part of what we have seen of the world. Then, I suppose, these moments, as they have seemed to us, constellate themselves into something a little like a spirit, a little like a human presence in its mystery and distinctiveness.

She’s writing about writing fiction of course, but the insight is applicable to life too, don’t you think? I recall Dan Siegel’s great line about the importance of “feeling felt”. I think that, as a doctor, it’s these little moments which are all around us every day, if we can only be sufficiently present and aware to notice them, which embed their constellations of human emotion into our psyches. I do believe, it’s these, and all the others I encounter in the everyday clinic, which create the conditions for understanding – for my understanding of those who come to me to be heard and to be felt.

This is the essence of “healing”.

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Stop stealing dreams

Posted in books, education, from the reading room on March 29, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Seth Godin is sharing his thoughts about education and they are very stimulating thoughts! His ebook (which is free) is entitled “Stop Stealing Dreams“.

The basic thesis is that our education system is designed to produce compliant producers and consumers. Compliant producers/workers tend to end up in hourly paid jobs and with the globalisation of large corporations, there’s been a race to the bottom. If you work for an hourly rate, you are disposable. In fact, increasingly it’s likely your employer will seek to replace you with someone who will work for less – either in your country, or in another one.

There’s not much of a future for any of us down that road, so what we need instead are unique, autonomous, creative individuals – artists (he says) and scientists (of the ideal type – the ones who are truly constantly skeptical, not the ones who think they are the new guardians of THE TRUTH!)

Schools need to change to meet the changing times. In particular we need to move from FEAR – which is used to induce compliance – to PASSION – to encourage self-starters, innovators and life-long committed learners.

Part of that process is to encourage our children to dream (hey, we need to encourage our ADULTS to dream too!) – to dream BIG, but to dream REALISTIC. In other words, not to accept the status quo, but not to opt out by dreaming the dreams sold by those in control – dreams of celebrity for example.  No, the kind of dreams we need to encourage are the dreams which motivate people to engage with working towards making them happen.

Here’s a quote or two –

 19. The dreams we need are self-reliant dreams. We need dreams based not on what is but on what might be. We need students who can learn how to learn, who can discover how to push themselves and are generous enough and honest enough to engage with the outside world to make those dreams happen. I think we’re doing a great job of destroying dreams at the very same time the dreams we do hold onto aren’t nearly bold enough

11. School’s industrial, scaled-up, measurable structure means that fear must be used to keep the masses in line. There’s no other way to get hundreds or thousands of kids to comply, to process that many bodies, en masse, without simultaneous coordination. And the flip side of this fear and conformity must be that passion will be destroyed. There’s no room for someone who wants to go faster, or someone who wants to do something else, or someone who cares about a particular issue. Move on. Write it in your notes; there will be a test later. A multiple choice test. Do we need more fear? Less passion?

29. There really are only two tools available to the educator. The easy one is fear. Fear is easy to awake, easy to maintain, but ultimately toxic. The other tool is passion. A kid in love with dinosaurs or baseball or earth science is going to learn it on her own. She’s going to push hard for ever more information, and better still, master the thinking behind it. Passion can overcome fear – the fear of losing, of failing, of being ridiculed.

Seth highlights a problem I see in health care, even though he is focused on education in this ebook. He describes Taylorism and Scientific Management –

“measure often. Figure out which inputs are likely to create testable outputs. If an output isn’t easily testable, ignore it.” It would be a mistake to say that scientific education doesn’t work. It creates what we test.

That really is the trouble with health care – see my recent post about finding the person in the patient,  and the earlier one about people not processes.

Here’s his definition of an artist by the way –

“An artist is someone who brings new thinking and generosity to his work, who does human work that changes another for the better.”

He uses the same definition in his We are All Weird.

And, just to finish with here, he highlights the issue of getting people to give a damn –

“Can we teach people to care? Can we teach kids to care enough about their dreams that they’ll care enough to develop the judgement, skill, and attitude to make them come true?”

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The benefits of aging

Posted in books, from the consulting room, from the reading room, health, life, tagged on March 21, 2012| 3 Comments »

More of us are living more years than our ancestors did. That’s often presented as a problem. How will we afford all the pensions? How will we afford to pay for the extra care these millions of additional frail people will need? How will we afford to pay for the extra years of drugs they’ll be prescribed?

And what about respect for the elderly? Do we see this increase in the numbers of older people as providing us with unique resources of knowledge, wisdom, care, love, support?

How refreshing to read the words of Herman Hesse on this subject –

Aging is far from being only a process of reducing, wilting and fading. Old age, like every other stage of life has its own merits, its own magic, its own wisdom, its own sorrow.
Whoever becomes old consciously, can observe that in spite of diminishing powers and potencies, every ear brings an increase and an enhancement in the infinite web of relations and connections.

Oh, I so understand that last point in particular. With my now five grandchildren my web of relations and connections has been enhanced amazingly. And over the last few years, with teaching in different countries, and writing this blog, I’ve made many, many new friends and connections, meeting such different people who so often shift my perspectives and make my world a bigger, yet smaller place!

Here’s more from Hesse on the benefits of aging –

…increased independence from the judgement of others, less vulnerability to compulsion and more undisturbed reverence before the eternal

You should have been with me this morning when one of my very sprightly, beautifully dressed, 86 year old patients told me as I asked her if she was ok to climb the staircase with me to my consulting room, “that’s a beautiful, straight bannister on this staircase. Maybe I’ll slide down it on my way out!” ……made my day!

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Seasons of the Soul

Posted in books, from the reading room, tagged , on March 21, 2012| 3 Comments »

The Seasons of the Soul: The Poetic Guidance and Spiritual Wisdom of Herman Hesse [ISBN 978-1583943137] – one of the most pleasurable, delightful, stimulating and enjoyable books I’ve ever read. It’s years, no decades, since I read Herman Hesse’s books, but this beautiful collection of poems, with enlightening and inspiring introductions by the translator, Ludwig Max Fischer has reignited my passion for his writing.

Here’s what Ludwig Max Fischer says about Hesse’s work

His gentle voice, full of truth, reminds us of the greater dimensions, the larger forces acting in our lives, beyond the immediate dramas of fear and desire. The soul, love, inspiration, the mysteries of nature, the unknowable divine, time and the stages of life are the major agents in Hesse’s world and are as relevant today as when he distilled them from his life experience.

and in Hesse’s own words –

My only goal in life is to be able to love this world, to se it and myself and all beings with the eyes of love and admiration and reverence….

and

It is a mysterious and yet simple secret known to the sages of all ages: the most minute act of selfless devotion, every act of compassion given in love makes us richer, whereas every effort towards possession and power weakens our strength and makes us poorer.

There’s a lot more like that in this book, and many inspiring poems too. I’ll give you one extract which strikes me as very relevant this Spring day. This is from his poem, Bursting With Blossoms –

Ideas too break open like buds of blossoms
at least a hundred every day
Let them unfold and roam as they wish!
Don’t ask for rewards!
There must be time for play and innocence in life
and room for boundless blossom.

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There, there, where’s the matter?

Posted in books, from the living room, science, tagged on March 19, 2012| 1 Comment »

I don’t get the obsession with the physical which underpins materialism. The idea that “truth” is only found in what can be measured, weighed, or touched, seems, inherently to deny the reality of our irreducible subjectivity. Can love be measured? Can passion, beauty, joy?

I think it’s some desire for certainty, coupled with a drive for power. Materialistic, physicalist scientism places a high value on certainty and a need for prediction to deliver power over “outcomes”.

I do understand that. But, I don’t sign up to it.

This pre-eminence of matter is being undermined by our exploration of sub-atomic reality. As Lynne McTaggart describes in “The Bond”

matter is nothing but a relationship; x + y, in a sense, stands for an impenetrable bond between two indeterminate things that do not exist on their own

Think about that for a moment….what we perceive as matter does not in fact exist as other than a relationship between things which don’t exist on their own…..

The universe contains an indeterminate number of vibrating packets of energy that constantly pass energy back and forth as if in an endless game of basketball with a quantum sea of light. Indeed they aren’t even there all the time, but are constantly popping in and out of existence, making a brief appearance before disappearing back into the underlying energy field.

Beautiful.

The surface of the sea is rarely still. In fact, it is never still at the edges. Have you ever been to a beach where there are no waves breaking on the shore, where there is no tide?Some days, however, as you cast your eyes out further to sea, the surface may appear flat and calm, but it rarely stays that way for long. The wind blows, the currents flow, and the surface breaks into a myriad of waves. Every one of us is like one of these waves. We appear, as if we are separate and distinct entities, but only for a brief time, then we are gone again. This is no illusion. Like the waves, we do indeed appear as distinct, discernible entities. But only for a short period of time. Just as the waves emerge out of the ocean, without breaking away from the ocean, so we emerge from the universe, from Life, from the non-dual nature of reality. And just as the waves dissolve back into the great sea again, so do we, after a brief life, return to the universe, to whatever it is that we emerge from.  [Bob Leckridge. Be The Flow]

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The Bond

Posted in books, from the reading room, life, science, tagged on March 7, 2012| 15 Comments »

Lynne Mctaggart’s “The Bond” makes a strong case for a reinterpretation of our commonly held view of life. She begins by summarising the current “scientific” story of the universe thus…

a story that describes isolated beings competing for survival on a lonely planet in an indifferent universe. Life as defined by modern science is essentially predatory, self-serving, and solitary.

Although that is the dominant mythology, it’s not one which attracts me in the slightest. I just don’t buy the miserable nihilistic theories of a pointless, meaningless universe and the belief that only what can be measured should be valued.

From Mary Midgely‘s clear demolition of atomism, to Rupert Sheldrake‘s skepticism about materialistic science, from Thomas Berry’s The Great Work, to Ian McCallum’s Ecological Intelligence, there is a more appealing story emerging. According to Lynne, The new story is…

An entirely new scientific story is emerging that challenges many of our Newtonian and Darwinian assumptions, including our most basic premise: the sense of things as separate entities in competition for survival. The latest evidence from quantum physics offers the extraordinary possibility that all of life exists in a dynamic relationship of co-operation.

All matter exists in a vast quantum web of connection, and a living thing at its most elemental is an energy system involved in a constant transfer of information with its environment.

The world essentially operates, not through the activity of individual things, but in the connection between them – in a sense, in the space between things.

This shift in emphasis from “things” to “relationships” produces a different set of views – a shift from solitariness and competition to connectedness and wholeness….

Nature’s most basic impulse is not a struggle for dominion but a constant and irrepressible drive for wholeness.

 

 

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Healing occurs naturally

Posted in books, from the consulting room, from the reading room, health, science on February 29, 2012| 3 Comments »

I often say to patients that there is no healing other than natural healing. What I mean by that is that all the drugs, and all the surgical techniques used in modern medicine, act directly against pathology. None of them actually stimulate or directly support self-healing. Yet that’s the only kind of true healing to exist. An antibiotic might kill a bug, but its the natural self-healing which repairs the tissue damaged by the infection. A broken bone can be held in place, but it’s the natural self-healing which knits the bone back together. I think it was Benjamin Franklin who said “God heals and the doctor takes the fees” – a rather cynical view of the same concept!

Then I came across this passage in Rupert Sheldrake’s The Science Delusion

…it is important to remember that animals and plants have been regenerating after damage, healing themselves and defending themselves against infections throughout the entire history of life on earth. All of us are descended from animal and human forebears that survived and reproduced for hundreds of millions of years before the advent of doctors. We would not be here if it were not for our ancestors’ innate capacities to heal and resist diseases. Medicine can help and enhance these capacities, but it builds on foundations that have evolved over vast aeons of time, continually subject to natural selection.

Actually he’s being quite generous about Medicine here – it can help and enhance – but only in complementary ways. I don’t know of any treatments marketed by drug companies which directly stimulate healing. Rather, they, at best, reduce pathology whilst we hope that the body will get on with healing itself.

Amazing thought though, huh? Every single one of your direct ancestors survived to an age where they could procreate – or you wouldn’t be here today!

Isn’t it time we made available, researched and developed the ways of directly supporting and stimulating self-healing?

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