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Archive for the ‘from the living room’ Category

Evolution

Posted in from the living room, life on July 17, 2012| Leave a Comment »

From the Big Bang, to the first stars; from the stars to galaxies and superclusters; from stars to planets, to Earth; from Hydrogen and Helium to all the elements of the Periodic Table; from single cell life forms to plants, to animals, to human beings……….there are a couple of themes which run through the whole story.

Differentiation and diversity. It’s a story of increasing difference, of more and more unique and different elements.

Integration. Integration is the building of mutually beneficial relationships between differentiated parts.

Complexity. As different elements, or parts, build more and more mutually beneficial links, greater complexity emerges.

And here we are now. Human beings. With the most complex systems known in the Universe – our bodies, our brains, our consciousness.

Wow! It’s really pretty breath-taking.

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The plague of corporatism – drug companies et al

Posted in from the living room, life on July 9, 2012| 1 Comment »

Is anyone in any doubt that we are experiencing a plague of corporatism? From the media sector, the astonishing stories about the behaviour of News International, dwarfed by the scandal after scandal of the financial sector (most recently Barclays coming to the fore), and now, too, a record fine for a drug company.

What’s going on?

I suspect it’s the old “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. Or is it the theory that psychopaths rise to the top?

Look at the GlaxoSmithKline story….

prosecutors found the company had been allotting over half a million dollars a year to its district sales representatives to offer doctors regular golf lessons, fishing trips, and basketball tickets while promoting the use of antidepressant drug Paxil in children. The GSK sales campaign also involved helping to publish an article in a medical journal that misreported evidence from a clinical trial. Meanwhile the company was also being accused of marketing the drug Wellbutrin for sexual dysfunction and weight loss, when it had only received official consent from the FDA to treat depression. Some of its drugs reps were reportedly describing Wellbutrin as “the happy, horny, skinny pill”. In the case of a third treatment, Avandia, the company did not report to the FDA studies it had carried out that showed there were safety concerns about heart risks. Critics had been calling for the drug to be banned four years ago yet it was only in 2010 that restrictions were finally slapped on its use.

A combination of selling drugs for indications for which they didn’t have a license (because they hadn’t sought approval), to the setting aside of millions to entertain prescribers, to the much worse, in my opinion, hiding research evidence of harms, burying evidence of lack of efficacy, and misreporting trials in publications, has led to them being hit with one of the largest fines the industry has suffered – $3 billion (£1.9 billion).

The latter issues about deliberate manipulation of the research reporting seriously undermines the credibility of “evidence based medicine” (an enterprise which stands of falls on the issue of what is published as “evidence”)

The fine, although large, is a fraction of the profits made from the drugs this company markets –

Avandia has made $10.4bn in sales, Paxil took $11.6bn, and Wellbutrin sales were $5.9bn during the years covered by the settlement,

What does the GSK CEO say?

At GSK, we firmly believe that operating in a responsible and ethical way is essential for the success of our business. We have come a long way but recognise that there is much more we can do and we will continue to challenge ourselves.

The fine is split between one third as a criminal fine, and two thirds a civil one. Despite this, the company says

the civil settlement is not an does not admission of any liability or wrongdoing in the selling and marketing

The thing is, this company is not alone. Take a look at this link which itemises six major drug companies’ fines over the last three years.

This stinks. But the drug companies are sure not alone. Whatever your political persuasion, is it not clear that corporatism is failing us (the 99%)?

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The slug who surfs

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, perception, photography on July 4, 2012| 2 Comments »

Goodness! Look what I saw yesterday, 7am, on my way to work….

the surfing slug

A slug skateboarding!
Or was it a slug snowboarding without the snow?
Seriously, this isn’t a set up. Too early in the day for someone to have put this little guy here!
Made me laugh though, which is a good start to a day!

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Unexpected treats

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, photography on June 30, 2012| Leave a Comment »

wild strawberries

These wild strawberries are tiny, but tasty! The various hedgerow berries will soon be ripe. It’s an extra special bonus on a walk when you stumble upon a little tasty treat.
Any unexpected tasty treats turn up in your life recently?

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A community of subjects

Posted in from the living room, life, philosophy on June 27, 2012| 2 Comments »

Thomas Berry (The Great Work) wrote that the Universe is a

community of subjects, not a collection of objects

….a simple little phrase which has the potential to radically alter your perspective.

If the Universe is a collection of objects, and every person, every animal and every plant is just such an object, then we’ll relate to others in a certain way. In fact, if we consider that all of Nature is a collection of objects, we’ll not only treat the other as an object, but we actually objectify ourselves. What does it mean to live as if you are a random, meaningless, occurrence of a machine-like thing?

If the Universe is a community of subjects, then we open ourselves up to becoming aware of the experience of the other, and to our relationship with them.  And we open ourselves up to the phenomena of subjectivity – from love to beauty, to pain and distress, to consciousness itself. What does it mean to live as if you are a unique, purposeful, utterly connected manifestation of the Life Force?

How we view the world profoundly influences our experience of it. We really do create our own lived worlds.

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Changed

Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, photography on June 20, 2012| 2 Comments »

lightning strike

The long marks on this tree were caused by a lightning strike.

Although struck by lightning, this tree didn’t die, it survived. But it survives changed. The marks of the strike become part of the beauty and uniqueness of its bark.

Illness is like that.

Stuff happens. Bacteria are inhaled or swallowed, bones are broken, hearts are broken. Often we blame these external events or stimuli for our illnesses. We say we have an infection when our bodies develop a fever, pain, inflammation in response to bacteria or viruses. In fact we give the infection the name of the bacteria or virus – we say the patient has “E Coli”, or “TB”, or “measles”, despite the fact that most people who inhale or swallow that particular “bug” might not actually develop any fever, pain or inflammation. Thinking this way externalises the illness. It’s something that happens to us and we are the victims.

But it’s more complicated than that. The particulars of our illnesses are the results of our responses, our adaptive responses, to these events, or, more commonly in chronic illnesses, to multiple, often long distant factors/events. Not everyone with the same diagnosis will have the same symptoms, and certainly no two people with the same diagnose will narrate an identical story of their experience of this illness.

Understanding that illness emerges from within our lives changes the power balance. We reject the victim mindset and open up the possibility that this experience of illness presents us with an opportunity to learn something about who we are, what’s important to us, and how we adapt to the changes in our lives.

We are changed as a result of these responses. Kat Duff, in “The Alchemy of Illness”, puts it beautifully –

Our bodies remember it all: our births, the delights and terrors of a lifetime, the journeys of our ancestors, the very evolution of life on earth………in fact, every experience, from the sight of a field of daisies to the sudden shock of cold water, leaves a chemical footprint in the body, shimmering across the folds of the cortex like a wave across water, altering our attitudes, expectations, memories, and moods ever so slightly in a continual process of biological learning.

 

lightning in the forest

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Two hearts

Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, personal growth, photography, psychology on June 16, 2012| Leave a Comment »

I’ve been thinking recently (again!) about two inter-related dimensions of being human – a creatureliness and a symbolic self, as Becker describes it, or as a visible and in invisible self, a body and a soul….an so on. Then yesterday I read in the superb “The Alchemy of Illness” by Kat Duff –

The Nahuatl peoples believed that we are born with a physical heart, but have to create a deified heart by finding a firm and enduring centre within ourselves from which to lead our lives, so that our hearts will shine through our faces, and our features will become reliable reflections of ourselves. Otherwise, they explained, we wander aimlessly through life, giving our hearts to everything and nothing, and so destroy them.

That set off my thought patterns down several roads…Heartmath and the intelligence of the heart – learning the ways to use our heart-thinking (yes, there is a neural network around the heart which we use to do a kind of thinking). Then I got to thinking, reflecting on a conversation my wife and I had on waking this morning, “imagine what it would be like if what was in your soul actually shaped your face so everyone could see it” – how would you appear to others if what was in your heart shaped your appearance?

Then that last line, “Otherwise, they explained, we wander aimlessly through life, giving our hearts to everything and nothing, and so destroy them.” brought me right back to heroes not zombies, and to Kierkegaard’s line about tranquillizing ourselves with the trivial.

Two hearts……..

two hearts

 

So, what’s in your heart right now?

Are you in touch with your soul’s purpose?

How are you responding to what your heart has to tell you?

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Creatureliness and more

Posted in from the living room, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy on June 14, 2012| 3 Comments »

What is it to be human?

We have a tendency to break wholes into parts and then conceive of the parts as entities. This is just a conceptual skill however and often it doesn’t reflect reality terribly accurately. Mind and body, for example, is one such common division of a person. At one point I thought of myself as a “mind body doctor”, or as a doctor who “took a mind body approach”. I don’t do that any more. It’s too falsely dualistic for me. I think the mind and the body are no more separate than the wave and particle forms of light. (You know how light when considered in one way behaves as an energy wave, but in another way, as if it is made of individual particles?)

So from the conceptual perspective of looking at a human being in two ways, we can see that human beings are physical organisms. Becker, in his “The Denial of Death”, uses the term “creatureliness” for this aspect. I rather like that. Our creatureliness is what we share with all other creatures. Our bodies are physical and transient. They will degenerate and expire, like all other creatures. And like all other creatures, part of our behaviour and experience can be understood from an examination of instincts and “basic drives” – hunger, thirst, safety and so on.

However, we have another aspect, not shared with other creatures. It’s that invisible part of us. What shall we call it? Soul? Consciousness? Spirit? Becker calls it “the symbolic self”. I’m not sure I’m that keen on that particular term, but it does capture both our facility of imagination and our ability to give and gain meaning in all sensations and objects. We don’t just see the colour red. The colour red is laden with meaning. And this is true of the whole of our experience in life.

We live both a creaturely life, and a symbolic, invisible life.

Interesting, huh? And a consideration of a person which ignores either of these two perspectives, is a consideration of a person at a less than human level. Let’s always see a human being as fully human.

Heroes not zombies.

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Life’s for living

Posted in from the living room, life on June 5, 2012| Leave a Comment »

If you live as if Life is about trying to avoid death, inevitably, you’re going to lose.

If you live as if Life is about living, you win. Every day.

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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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