Pure Fiction?

"The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he, who in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who would attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee." [Pulp Fiction]



Just finished watching the movie, the clock struck twelve and the world did not end...

The Mystery of Man

Some say poverty is evil while others praise it to be noble.

Some believe affluence is the solution to all problems 
while others think it is the source of all problems.

There is no doubt economic poverty brings 
hardship to surface and limiting choices to make. 

Still, not all poor people make poor choices and 
not all rich people make good choices, necessarily.

Perhaps, the outer poverty simply reveals 
the inner poverty of man... what is already there.

How to condemn or praise that what is inside all of us? 
Still, it is possible for I to judge nothing,
for i to just observe.

Thru attention without division or center,
 one can see the nature of man,
 a mystery, 
and how it manifests in our world.

What we are vs. What we think we are

Barbara Natterson-Horowitz is a cardiology professor at U.C.L.A. and Kathryn Bowers is a writer. This essay is adapted from their forthcoming book “Zoobiquity: What Animals Can Teach Us About Health and the Science of Healing,” which is told from the doctor’s point of view.

 

AS an attending physician at U.C.L.A., I see a wide variety of maladies. But I also consult occasionally at the Los Angeles Zoo, where the veterinarians’ rounds are strikingly similar to those I conduct with my physician colleagues. Intrigued by the overlap, I began making careful notes of the conditions I came across by day in my human patients. At night, I combed veterinary databases and journals for their correlates, asking myself a simple question: “Do animals get [fill in the disease]?” I started with the big killers. Do animals get breast cancer? Stress-induced heart attacks? Brain tumors? How about shingles and gout? Fainting spells? Night after night, condition after condition, the answer kept coming back “yes.” My research yielded a series of fascinating commonalities. 

Melanoma has been diagnosed in the bodies of animals from penguins to buffalo. Koalas in Australia are in the middle of a rampant epidemic of chlamydia. Yes, that kind — sexually transmitted. I wondered about obesity and diabetes — two of the most pressing health concerns of our time. Do wild animals get medically obese? Do they overeat or binge eat? I learned that yes, they do.

I also discovered that geese, gorillas and sea lions grieve and may become depressed. Shelties, Weimaraners and other dog breeds are prone to anxiety disorders. 

Suddenly, I began to reconsider my approach to mental illness, a field I had studied during the psychiatric residency I completed before turning to cardiology. Perhaps a human patient compulsively burning himself with cigarettes could improve if his therapist consulted a bird specialist experienced in the treatment of parrots with feather-picking disorder. Significantly for substance abusers and addicts, species from birds to elephants are known to seek out psychotropic berries and plants that change their sensory states — that is, get them high. The more I learned, the more a tantalizing question started creeping into my thoughts: Why don’t we human doctors routinely cooperate with animal experts? 

We used to. A century or two ago, in some rural communities, animals and humans were cared for by the same practitioner. And physicians and veterinarians both claim the same 19th-century doctor, William Osler, as a father of their fields. However, animal and human medicine began a decisive split in the late 1800s. Increasing urbanization meant that fewer people relied on animals to make a living. Motorized vehicles began pushing work animals out of daily life. 

Most physicians see animals and their illnesses as somehow “different.” Humans have their diseases. Animals have theirs. The human medical establishment has an undeniable, though unspoken, bias against veterinary medicine. 

While it rankles when M.D.’s condescend, most vets simply take a resigned approach to their more glamorous counterparts on the human side. Several have even confided to me a veterinarians’ inside joke: What do you call a physician? A veterinarian who treats only one species.

My medical education included stern warnings against the tantalizing pull to anthropomorphize. In those days, noticing pain or sadness on the face of an animal was criticized as projection, fantasy, or sloppy sentimentality. But scientific advancements of the past two decades suggest that we should adopt an updated perspective. Seeing too much of ourselves in other animals might not be the problem we think it is. Underappreciating our own animal natures may be the greater limitation. 

Cancer 

PEOPLE who didn’t smoke, drink or tan and who avoided microwaving food in plastic and cooking on Teflon can develop cancer. It strikes yoga practitioners, breast-feeders and organic gardeners; infants, 5-year-olds, 15-year-olds, 55-year-olds and 85-year-olds.

Even the briefest survey of cancer in other animals sheds light on a critical but overlooked truth: Where cells divide, where DNA replicates, and where growth occurs, there will be cancer. Cancer is as natural a part of the animal kingdom as birth, reproduction and death. And it’s as old as the dinosaurs.

Osteosarcoma, the cancer that forced Ted Kennedy’s son, Ted Junior, to undergo an amputation in the early 1970s, attacks the bones of wolves, grizzly bears, camels and polar bears. And the neuroendocrine cancer that claimed the life of Apple’s co-founder, Steve Jobs, while rare in humans, is a fairly common tumor of the domestic ferret and has been diagnosed in German shepherds, cocker spaniels, Irish setters and other dog breeds. 

Breast cancer strikes mammals from cougars, kangaroos and llamas to sea lions, beluga whales and black-footed ferrets. Some breast cancer in women (and the occasional man) is connected to a mutation of a gene called BRCA1. All humans have a BRCA1 gene. But about one in 800 of us are born with a mutated version, which increases the risk for certain cancers. For Jewish women of Ashkenazi descent, it’s as high as one in 50. And BRCA1-related breast cancer occurs in some animals, too: English springer spaniels, and possibly big cats like jaguars.

But some groups of mammals, intriguingly, may be protected from it.

The latte you sipped this morning contained milk from an animal sorority that very rarely gets breast cancer. Professional lactators — the dairy cows and goats that make milk for a living — have rates of mammary cancer that are so low as to be statistically insignificant. That animals which lactate early and long seem to have some protection against breast cancer is not only fascinating, it parallels human epidemiologic data that tie breast-feeding to reduced mammary cancer risk.

Another thing we can learn from animal cancer is the extent to which it’s caused by outside invaders: viruses. Veterinary oncologists see this all the time. Lymphomas and leukemias among cattle and cats are quite frequently viral. Many of the cancers sweeping sea creatures from turtles to dolphins are rooted in papilloma and herpes viruses. Between 15 and 20 percent of cancers worldwide are caused by infections, many of which are viral. 

And noticing where cancer isn’t can be as instructive as noticing where it is. Dogs rarely get colon cancer. Lung cancer is also atypical, although short- and medium-nosed dogs living in homes with smokers are susceptible. Canine breast cancer is rarer in countries that promote spaying but quite common where most female dogs remain reproductively intact. As the veterinary oncologists Melissa Paoloni and Chand Khanna point out, two breeds of dogs seem to get cancer less often than others: beagles and dachshunds. Like the professional lactators who rarely get breast cancer, these extra-healthy dog breeds may point to behaviors or physiology that offer cancer protection. 

Addiction 

ANIMALS don’t have access to liquor stores, pharmacies or corner drug dealers. But the intoxicants in those drugs are found in nature — opium in poppies, alcohol in fermented fruit and berries, stimulants in coca leaves and coffee. Given the opportunity, some animals do indulge ... and get intoxicated.

Addiction researchers have shown that genetics, vulnerable brain chemistry, and environmental triggers play roles in human substance abuse. But ultimately, on the receiving end of the syringe, joint or martini glass is a person making a choice, at least in the initial stages of drug use. This makes addiction uniquely bewildering to physicians, psychiatrists, sufferers and the people who care for them. Why is it so hard for addicts to “just say no”? It turns out that saying “no” is hard for animals too.

Cedar waxwing birds are known to ingest fermented berries, fly while intoxicated and crash into glass walls. In Tasmania, wallabies have broken into fields where medical opium was growing, eaten the sap and got stoned. 

Some animals show chronic drug-seeking behaviors. Bighorn sheep grind their teeth to the gums scraping hallucinogenic lichen off boulders in the Canadian Rockies; some Siberian reindeer seek out magic mushrooms. A friendly cocker spaniel in Texas once sent her owners’ lives into a tailspin when she turned her attention to toad licking. As described in an NPR story, the spaniel, Lady, had been the perfect pet, until one day she got a taste of the hallucinogenic toxin on the skin of a cane toad. Soon she was obsessed with the back door, always begging to get out. She’d beeline to the pond in the backyard and sniff out the toads. Once she found them, she mouthed them so vigorously she sucked the pigment right out of their skin. According to her owners, after these amphibian benders Lady would be “disoriented and withdrawn, soporific and glassy-eyed.” 

In lab settings, rats have been shown to seek out and self-administer doses — sometimes to the point of death — of various drugs, from nicotine and caffeine to cocaine and heroin. Once addicted (researchers say “habituated”) they may forgo food and even water to get their drug of choice. Like us, they also use more when they’re stressed by pain, overcrowding or subordinate social position. Some ignore their offspring.

Taking a species-spanning perspective of drug use reveals something important: The urge to use has stayed in the gene pool for millions of years and for a counterintuitive reason. Although addiction can destroy, its existence may have promoted survival. 

Here’s what I mean: Foraging, stalking prey, hoarding food, searching for and finding a desirable mate, and nest building are all examples of activities that greatly enhance an animal’s chances of survival and reproduction, or what biologists call fitness. Animals are rewarded with pleasurable, positive sensations for these important life-sustaining undertakings. Pleasure rewards behaviors that help us survive.

Conversely, unpleasant feelings like fear and isolation indicate to animals that they are in survival-threatening situations. Anxiety makes them careful. Fear keeps them out of harm’s way.

And one thing creates, controls and shapes these sensations, whether positive or negative: a cacophonous chemical conversation in the brains and nervous systems of animals. Time-melting opioids, reality-revving dopamine, boundary-softening oxytocin, appetite-enhancing cannabinoids and a multitude of other neurohormones reward behavior. 

We humans get drug rewards for life-sustaining activities just as animals do. We simply call those activities by different names: Shopping. Accumulating wealth. Dating. House hunting. Interior decorating. Cooking.

When these behaviors have been studied in humans, they are associated with rises in the release of certain natural chemicals, including dopamine and opiates.

The key point is that behaviors are the triggers. Do something that evolution has favored, and you get a hit. Don’t do it, and you don’t get your fix. 

And this is precisely why drugs can so brutally derail lives. Ingesting, inhaling or injecting intoxicants — in concentrations far higher than our bodies were designed to reward us with — overwhelms a system carefully calibrated over millions of years. These substances hijack our internal mechanisms. They remove the need for the animal to input a behavior, before receiving a chemical dose. In other words, pharmaceuticals and street drugs offer a false fast track to reward — a shortcut to the sensation that we’re doing something beneficial.

This is a critical nuance for understanding addiction. With access to external drugs, the animal isn’t required to “work” first — to forage, flee, socialize or protect. Instead, he goes straight to reward. The chemicals provide a false signal to the animal’s brain that his fitness has improved, although it has not actually changed at all. 

Why go through a half-hour of awkward small talk at an office party when a martini or two can trick your brain into thinking you’ve already done some social bonding? Drugs tell users’ brains that they’ve just done an important, fitness-enhancing task.

Ultimately, however, the powerful urge to use and reuse is provided by brain biology that evolved because it maximized survival. Seen this way, we’re all born addicts. Substance addiction and behavioral addiction are linked. Their common language is in the shared neurocircuitry that rewards fitness-promoting behaviors.

Consider the most common behavioral addictions from an evolutionary perspective. Sex. Binge eating. Exercise. Working. They are exceedingly fitness enhancing.

Connecting brain-rewarding behaviors to increased survival allowed me to rethink technological “addictions” like video gaming, e-mailing and social networking. Our smartphones, Facebook pages and Twitter feeds profoundly combine the things that matter most to animals competing to survive: a social network, access to mates, and information about predatory threats. 

Understanding the comparative biology and evolutionary origins of addiction can improve how we understand this disease and its sufferers. First, individual humans vary greatly in their vulnerability to addiction. So do animals, from mammals to worms. In addition, human and animal data both suggest that the younger the animal is at the first exposure to an external drug, the more likely it is to become addicted and responsive to that drug in the future. This is a very important point.

In the United States, we’ve tried Prohibition and “just say no” campaigns. We’ve set the drinking age at 21 and the illegal drug use age at never. None of these interventions has completely stopped teenagers from going after what they want. 

But the evidence suggests that it’s wise for parents to try harder to delay their children’s first exposures and, perhaps, to teach them natural ways of achieving those chemical rewards: through exercise, physical and mental competitions, or “safe” risk-taking, like performing.

Substance abusers can learn healthy behaviors that provide the same (albeit less potent) good feelings they used to seek from a bottle, a pill or a needle. In fact, that may be what makes some rehab programs so effective for certain addicts. The behaviors these programs encourage — socializing, seeking companionship, anticipating, planning and finding purpose — are all part of an ancient, calibrated system that rewards survival behaviors with drugs from an animal’s inborn pharmacy. 

Fat Planet

 

ALTHOUGH I’m a cardiologist, some days I feel more like a nutritionist. Patients, family members and friends frequently ask me, “What should I be eating?” We all know by now that choosing the wrong foods and carrying extra weight on our bodies can make us sick.

But humans aren’t the only animals on our planet who get fat. In the wild, animals as varied as birds, reptiles, fish and even insects regularly gain — and then take off — weight. Closer to home, nearly half of our pet dogs, cats, even horses and birds are now overweight or obese, despite the low-carb, feline “Catkins” diet, canine liposuction and increased exercise for bird “perch potatoes.” With our pets’ excess pounds has come a familiar suite of obesity- related ailments: diabetes, cardiovascular problems, musculoskeletal disorders, glucose intolerance, some cancers and possibly high blood pressure. They’re familiar because we see nearly identical problems in obese human patients.

I’d long assumed that wild animals stayed effortlessly lean and healthy. I’d always thought that wild animals ate until they were full and then prudently stopped. But in fact, given the chance, many wild fish, reptiles, birds and mammals overindulge. Sometimes spectacularly so. Abundance plus access — the twin downfalls of many a human dieter — can challenge wild animals, too.

Although we may think of food in the wild as hard to come by, at certain times of the year and under certain conditions, the supply may be unlimited. Many gorge, stopping only when their digestive tracts literally cannot take any more. Tamarin monkeys have been seen to eat so many berries in one sitting that their intestines are overwhelmed and they soon excrete the same whole fruits they recently gobbled down.

Mark Edwards, an animal nutrition expert, told me, “We’re all hard-wired to consume resources in excess of daily requirements. I can’t think of a species that doesn’t.” Wild animals can get fat with unfettered access to food. 

Of course, animals also fatten normally — and healthily — in response to seasonal and life cycles. Remarkably, it is the landscape around an animal that determines whether its weight stays steady or rises.

And nature imposes its own “weight-maintenance plan” on wild animals. Cyclical periods of food scarcity are typical. Threats from predators limit access to food. Weight goes up, but it also comes down. If you want to lose weight the wild animal way, decrease the abundance of food around yourself and interrupt your access to it. And expend lots of energy in the daily hunt for food. In other words: change your environment.

Looking across the species divide and seeing weight gain in a broader context forces us to consider factors beyond the “diet and exercise” dogma. Even without an assist from 32-ounce sodas, the yellow-bellied marmots in the Rockies, blue whales off the coast of California and country rats in Maryland have gotten steadily chubbier in recent years. The explanation might lie in the disruption of circadian rhythms. Of the global dynamics controlling our biological clocks — including temperature, eating, sleeping and even socializing — no “zeitgeber” is more influential than light. 

New research suggests that when, and how much, light beams through your eyes may play a quiet and unrecognized role in determining your dress or pants size. And the breaking up of light-dark cycles may be a culprit. Light pollution from suburban sprawl, big-city skyglow, electronic billboards and stadium lights has brightened our planet. A rodent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that mice housed with constant light — whether bright or dim — had higher body mass indexes (B.M.I.’s) and blood sugar levels than mice housed with standard cycles of dark and light.

Another invisible weight driver is housed within our own abdomens: the trillions of microscopic organisms that live in our guts. This world is called the microbiome, and it is colonized by two dominant groups of bacteria: the Firmicutes and the Bacteroidetes. In the mid-2000s, some scientists made an interesting observation. They found that obese humans had a higher proportion of Firmicutes in their intestines. Lean humans had more Bacteroidetes. As the obese humans lost weight over the course of a year, their microbiomes started looking more like those of lean individuals — with Bacteroidetes outnumbering Firmicutes.

When the researchers looked at mice, they found the same thing. Although not all research has replicated those results, if that observation turns out to be true, it means that a booming Firmicute colony might help harvest, say, 100 calories from one person’s apple. That person’s friend may have a dominant Bacteroidete population that would extract only 70 calories from the same apple. This could be one factor in why your co-worker can eat twice as much as everyone else but never seems to gain weight. The power of the microbiome is well known to the veterinarians who oversee the care of animals we make fat on purpose: livestock. Nowadays, it’s common for factory farming operations to administer antibiotics to food animals from 1,500-pound steers to one-ounce baby chicks. The effect of those antibiotics on the living colonies of gut bugs in the animals’ intestines may inform human obesity research. 

Antibiotics don’t kill just the bugs that make animals sick. Simply by giving antibiotics, farmers can fatten their animals using less feed. One hypothesis is that by changing the animals’ gut microflora, antibiotics create an intestine dominated by colonies of microbes that are calorie-extraction experts. Anything that alters gut flora, including but not limited to antibiotics, has implications not only for body weight but for other elements of our metabolism, such as glucose intolerance, insulin resistance and abnormal cholesterol.

Modern, affluent humans have created a continuous eating cycle, a kind of “uniseason.” Our food is stripped of microbes, and we remove more while scrubbing off dirt and pesticides. Because we control it, the temperature is always a perfect 74 degrees. Because we’re in charge, we can safely dine at tables aglow in light long after the sun goes down. All year round, our days are lovely and long; our nights are short.

As animals, we find this single season an extremely comfortable place to be. But unless we want to remain in a state of continual fattening, with accompanying metabolic diseases, we will have to pry ourselves out of this delicious ease. 

Cutting

 

PROBABLY our era’s most iconic form of human self-harm, seemingly tailor-made for suburban-parent hand-wringing and tabloid ogling, is cutting. Its name says it all, but in case you don’t know: it means taking something sharp — maybe a razor blade, scissors, broken glass or a safety pin — and slicing it across your skin to draw blood and create wounds. Psychiatrists call cutters “self-injurers” to include the whole range of inventive ways people dream up to hurt themselves. Some burn themselves on purpose with cigarettes, lighters or teakettles. Others bruise their skin by banging, punching or pinching themselves. Those with trichotillomania rub and rip out hair on their heads, faces, limbs and genitals. Some are swallowers, ingesting objects like pencils, buttons, shoelaces or silverware. We see this particular method a lot in prisons.

You may think self-injury occurs only in edgy subcultures or the seriously mentally ill. But my psychiatrist colleagues say it’s sweeping through the general population. Why? A 22-year-old woman posting on a university blog put it this way: “I began cutting my arms at the age of 12... I think I could best describe the feeling I get as total bliss. It relaxes me.”
 

Bliss? Relaxation? Relief? Even after years of psychiatry training and two decades around a hospital, I still think this sounds incredible. But cutters and their therapists say it’s true. And they confirm that most self-injurers are not suicidal. But as to why they do it, the short answer is that we don’t really know.

I decided to see what insights a zoobiquitous approach could add.

A friend of mine once took her cat to the vet assuming it had a skin affliction that was causing all the hair to fall off its legs, revealing red, oozing sores. After some tests to rule out parasites and systemic diseases, her vet said her pet was a “closet licker.” It’s a common diagnosis for house cats, sometimes called psychogenic alopecia. The cat was injuring itself with no clear physical trigger, in a way that was reminiscent of a human cutter alone in her room.
 

Owners of golden retrievers, Labrador retrievers, German shepherds, Great Danes, and Doberman pinschers will probably recognize a condition that often affects those breeds — in which they obsessively lick and gnaw at their own bodies. The open sores they create can cover the entire surface of a limb or the base of the tail.
 

“Flank biters” are horses that violently nip at their own bodies, drawing blood and reopening wounds.

The owners of these horses, like parents who discover their teenager is cutting, are often confused and heartbroken by the behavior, which can include bursts of violent spinning, kicking, lunging and bucking.

When owners bring in pets who circle furniture for hours, do back flips to the point of physical exhaustion or rub their skin to the point of breakage and bleeding, veterinarians sometimes describe these behaviors as “stereotypies.” Many of the compulsive behaviors seen in horses, reptiles, birds, dogs and humans share core clinical features, including the potential to cause suffering and profoundly disrupt a patient’s life. But many also share an intriguing connection to cleaning activities.

You’ve probably heard about the repetitive hand washing practiced by many sufferers of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Similarly, a stressed cat may go overboard with a feline’s cleaning tool of choice, its raspy tongue. Veterinarians have come up with a colloquial term that cuts right to the heart of what’s going on here. They call it, simply, “overgrooming.”

Grooming is as basic an activity for many creatures as eating, sleeping and breathing. Evolution probably favored nature’s neat freaks because they were the ones with fewer parasites and infections.

Grooming plays a vital role in the social structure of many animal groups, and it feels good. There’s also a more private form of grooming — small behaviors that all but the most virtuous of us engage in all the time and often unconsciously. In general, they’re innocent enough, but given the choice, we definitely wouldn’t want to show them in public or watch other people do them.

Are your cuticles smooth or are there some rough edges begging to be picked or nibbled off? Are you twirling a lock of hair around your finger, twisting your eyebrows, stroking your own cheek, massaging your own scalp? Studies looking at hair pulling, scab picking and nail biting all point to a calm, trancelike state that typically accompanies these small, automatic, self-soothing activities.

Perhaps the fingers playing with your hair sometimes have the urge to pull a strand out. There’s that slight tension as the root clings to the follicle ...you gently tug harder ... and a little harder ...until finally, there’s that short, sharp sting and the hair releases. Humans rely on this release-relief loop throughout the day. We may rub, pull, nibble or squeeze a little more when we’re stressed, but for most of us the behavior never escalates. But for some people the need for that feeling of release and relief is so strong that they seek extreme levels of it. Self-harm is truly grooming gone wild.
 

In a way, self-harmers are actually self-medicators. That’s because, paradoxically, both pain and grooming cause the body to release natural opiates, such as endorphins, the same brain chemicals that give marathoners their runner’s high. 

The typical middle-class teen is a little like the horse alone in its stall, with most of its needs provided in easy-to-digest chunks. He’s left with lots of extra time and few activities as invigorating as a daily struggle for survival. Zookeepers make animals forage to avoid boredom. Should we explore getting teens involved in growing and preparing their own foods, an activity that can produce feelings of profound calm and purpose?

All of us — from full-blown cutters to secret hair pluckers and nail biters — share our grooming compulsions with animals. Grooming represents a hard-wired drive, one that’s evolved over millions of years with the positive benefits of keeping us clean and binding us socially. 

Our essential connection with animals extends from body to behavior, from psychology to society. This calls for physicians and patients to join veterinarians in thinking beyond the human bedside to barnyards, oceans and skies. 

Source: New York Time by BARBARA NATTERSON-HOROWITZ and KATHRYN BOWERS

Published: June 9, 2012

How To Love Unconditionally?

The first step in being fully loving is that you must fully love your Self. And this you cannot do so long as you believe that you were born in sin, and are basically evil. Or you are a by-product of some nasty reincarnation, which is just as questionable.

If you believe that humans are by nature non-trustworthy and evil, you will create a society that supports that view, then enact laws, approve rules, adopt regulations, and impose restraints that are justified by it. Similarly, if you believe that humans are by nature trustworthy and good, you will create an entirely different kind of society, in which laws, rules, regulations, and restraints are rarely required. The first society will be freedom limiting, the second, freedom giving.

Nature is fully loving because it is fully free. To be fully free is to be fully joyful, because full freedom creates the space for every joyful experience. Freedom is the basic nature of existence. It is also the basic nature of the human experience. The degree to which you are not fully free is the degree to which you are not fully joyful and that is the degree to which you are not fully loving.

To be totally loving means to be fully free.

We should allow everyone to be able to do anything they want.
That is how Nature loves. Nature allows everyone to do anything they want.
It is normal for society to punish. It is abnormal for society to simply allow a consequence to assert itself to reveal itself. However, punishments are someone else's decision that one has done wrong where consequences are one's own experience that something does not work. That is, it did not produce an intended result.

In other words, we could not learn quickly from punishments, because we see them as something that someone else is doing to us. We learn more readily from consequences, because we see them as something that we are doing to ourselves. Actually, the biggest punishment that one has devised is the withholding of one's love. You have shown your offspring that if they behave in a certain way, you will withhold your love. It is by the granting and the withholding of your love that you have sought to regulate and modify, to control and to create, your children's behaviors.

This is something that Nature would never do.

True love never withdraws itself. And that is what loving fully means.

I am love. One does not have to practice what one is, one simply is.
I am the love that knows no condition, nor limitation of any kind.
I am totally loving, and to be totally loving means to be willing to give every mature sentient being total freedom to be, do, and have that which they wish.

Even if you know it will be bad for them?  It is not for you to decide that for them.

Not even for our children?  If they are mature beings, no. If they are grown children, no. And if they are not yet mature, the fastest way to lead them to their own maturity is to allow them the freedom to make as many choices as possible as early as practical.

This is what love does. Love lets go. That which you call need, and which you often confuse with love, does the opposite. Need holds on. This is the way you can tell the difference between love and need. Love lets go, need holds on.

A person could not love himself or herself totally when he or she restrict his or her being, when he or she grant his or her being less than total freedom to choose, in any matter.

Yet remember that choices are not restrictions. So do not call the choices you have made restrictions. Simply lovingly provide for your offspring, and all your loved ones, all the information that you feel you may have, to help them make good choices - "good" being defined here as those choices most likely to produce a particular desired result, as well as what you know to be their largest desired result: a fulfilled and content life.

Share what you know about that. Offer what you have come to understand and witness. Yet do not seek to impose your ideas, your rules, your choices upon another and do not withhold your love should another make choices you would not make. Indeed, if you believe their choices to have been poor ones, that is precisely the time to show your love.

That is compassion, and there is no higher or more appropriate expression.

What else does it mean to be totally loving?

It means to be fully present, in every single moment. To be fully aware. To be fully open, honest, transparent. It means to be fully willing, to express the love that is in your being in your nature. To be fully loving means to be fully naked, without hidden agenda or hidden motive, without hidden anything.

So it is possible for human beings, for regular people like me, to experience such love? This is something of which we are all capable?

It is more than that of which you are capable. It is that which you are. This is the nature of who you truly are. Because the most difficult thing you can do would be to deny that. And you are doing this difficult thing every day. That is why for some people, life feels so difficult. Yet when a person do the easy thing, when he or she decide to come from, to be, Who They Really Are - which is pure love, unlimited and unconditioned - then his or her life becomes easy again. All the turmoil disappears, all the struggle goes away.

This peace may be achieved in any given moment. The way to it may be found by asking a simple question:

What would love do now?

This is a marvelous question, because you will always know the answer. It is like magic. It is cleansing, like a soap. It takes the worry out of being close. It washes away all doubt, all fear. It bathes the mind with the wisdom of the soul.

It is true. When you ask this question, you will know instantly what to do. In any circumstance, under any condition, you will know. You will be given the answer. You are the answer, and asking the question brings forth that part of you. Do not second-guess this answer when it instantly comes to you. When you second-guess is when you fool yourself - and can make a fool of yourself. Go into the heart of love, and come from that place in all your choices and decisions, and you will find peace that lasts.

Nature loves without reservation and we are part of  this nature. How wonderful it would be to experience and make this connection? Perhaps, it's the time to re-exam and to re-connect to this love that set us free.

Why Are We Here?

You guess it... 

PLASTICS!

It Happens To Be

Here is a clip where George Carlin talks about the use of language and the hidden values it reflects.
I happen to think it is funny and it happens to be funny as well. 

Cheers!


 

Dave Chappelle On Racism

This video would be a lot funnier if there was no truth in it.

However, it does make me laugh and reflect at the same time. 

Sometimes, it is important to keep the pessimism of the intellect, and optimism of the will.

That is to say...

To see the world as it is, but act as if change is possible in the world.

What am I?

Descartes once declared: "Je pense, donc je suis." (I think, therefore I am) Today, his idea has evolved into "I consume, therefore I am" or more generally, "I am dissatisfied, therefore I am."

Americans are industrious people who work 24/7 nearly 365 days a year — all in the pursuit of happiness and being full-time consumers. We are so proud of our lifestyle that we propagate it to the rest of the world.

However, as cancerous cells to its host, uncontrolled and rabid consumerism can consume the world and its resources. Eventually, cancer consumes its host and then itself.  Besides, there is no evidence that the more stuffs we have, the happier, the more loving or more sane we become.

Perhaps, existentialism is just as simple as: "I am, therefore I am." So, it's possible to realize, then to change the general brainwashed conditioning and declare independence from this one dimensional - consumerist - way of thinking.

Doing Good

"Doing good." and "Doing good in the name of..." are two very different things.

They both bring the sense of wellness, joy and accomplishment. But with certain expectation, the joy is conditioned in the name of... ego.

Some might question what's the big deal since both paths bring wellness from A to D?

If this has became a question, then don't worry about it.

If not, then you know the answer already.

The Nuclear Lottery

Nuclear energy is great until it is not. If and when it is not, it is unmitigatedly disastrous.

The odds is near impossible to win lottery jackpot, but sometimes some people do win.


Weaponized or not, why some people choose to play nuclear lottery is beyond my comprehension?

My only guess is that for these people, there must be forces stronger than survival at play.  To win a nuclear lottery means it's very unlucky to be lucky.  But why gamble to start with?

The 3-week Anti-Allergy Diet

Are hidden food allergies cause uncontrollable weight gain? Follow these 3 “Rs” to remove, repair, and reboot your body.

Study suggests that reoccurring digestive inflammations trigger a body's response for weight gain. The accumulation of fat is a body's way of dealing with the toxin in the diet.  For most people, the dairy products in the US are offensive.  Since toxic corn and soy are used in cow feed for cost saving and higher yield, these GMO crops and their derivatives could be responsible for triggering allergies directly or indirectly.


Here is a 3-week anti-allergy diet to help get the body back on track:

Main Dairy Sources:  Milk, butter, yogurt and cheese. 

Hidden Dairy Sources:
 1. Desserts:  Cakes, muffins, cookies and chocolate may contain basic dairy ingredients along with “hidden” dairy derivatives such as casein or whey, both milk proteins. Be sure to look for these ingredients on labels and avoid them.

2. Deli Meats and Fish:  Processed meats often contain dairy products such as lactose, casein and caseinates that act as emulsifiers or flavor enhancers. Meats labeled “kosher” will be dairy-free. Be aware that some brands of canned tuna contain casein.

3. Bread:  Both white and wheat bread often contain casein, whey or milk powder. Freshly baked yeast breads are sometimes prepared in buttered pans or brushed with butter as they bake. Ask your baker if this is the case.

4. Energy Bars:  Countless brands of protein and energy bars consist primarily of whey protein. As with all of the  above, remember to read these food labels very carefully as well.

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The 3-Week Anti-Allergy Plan

To find out if you could be allergic to dairy, follow this plan based on the 3 “Rs”: Remove all dairy, repair your digestive tract, and reboot your body.

Week 1: Remove All Dairy
Remove all the dairy from your diet for an entire week, which is how long your system needs for internal inflammation to settle down. Replace dairy milk with almond milk, which tastes good and has high quality protein and fat in it. In addition, replace butter with olive oil, a great source of good fat that contains oleic acid and anti-inflammatory properties.

Week 2: Repair Your Digestive Tract
If your gut is damaged by dairy, repair it with healthy bacteria found in probiotics. Choose a probiotic supplement that contains both bifidobacterium and lactobacillus bacteria. Select a product in pill or powder form that has 10-50 billion colony-forming units (CFUs) and take that amount daily. Be wary of liquid-based products, which may not be as active, along with food products with added probiotics.

Week 3: Reboot Your Body
Now that you have a clean digestive slate, it’s time to reboot and see if dairy was causing your weight gain. Start by adding one dairy food back at a time and keep a food log of your body’s reactions. Ask yourself: Am I more tired? Am I bloated? Do I have fluid retention? All of these potential factors could be clues that you have a hidden sensitivity to dairy.

If you think you’re allergic to dairy at the end of three weeks, see your doctor for a blood test, which can help determine if you have elevated levels of a certain antibody that could be causing inflammation. If you are indeed allergic, you can use the above plan stay allergy- and inflammation-free.                                                 


                                                                                              Article Source: Dr. Mark Hyman, MD

Gas Price Theory

 

Gas prices are expected to rise this summer, and oil companies say it’s because of high demand due to warmer weather. And a couple of months ago, oil prices went up because of higher demand for heating oil.

So basically, it's all weather related.

Nay... this price theory is simpler than that.

War or Defense?

Do you know while it is difficult to determine exactly how many Natives lived in North America, before the arrival of Columbus,  there has been estimates range from 7 million to a high of 18 million people?^[6]   However, if you look around today, chances are, a Native American is very hard to find.

In March 11, 1824, the United States Department of War (later renamed Department of Defense in 1949) created the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Some 189 years later, the fate of the native Americans in America is best illustrated by their absence from the map above. 

Once I heard a saying: "when a wrong man uses the right mean, the right mean works the wrong way."
So is it Department of War or Department of Defense?  Euphemism aside, the done deed is the same. 
This got me thinking...  Perhaps, it is just as important to know how to start something as to know how to stop. As history has shown us here in this case, not doing something could be just as virtuous a thing.  

Looking at the state of world today, do we as people learn anything from our history?  I know whatever you do, it's best not to ask an Native American for answer, that is, if you can find one to ask.

What is the condition of a compassionate mind?

What is the condition of a compassionate mind?

There is none.

Because true love is intrinsically effortless and natural. It is less of an act or an action and more of being or a way of being.  Therefore whenever if you need to pause and think about it, then it is a condition, not compassion.

Game Theory

Got game?

This clip shows how ape and human learn differently. For the chimps, the object is the treat and for the children, the object is the game. Kids focus more on how the game is played than what the game produces. In another word, for us, the abstraction of the treat could be more rewarding than the treat itself.

Unfortunately, this also shows that how we learn is more susceptible through conditioning and repetition. Inherently, there is nothing wrong with learn by following, but following blindly can also explain why we tend to repeat mistakes and get lost in the head games.

So, is it possible to enjoy the game and know what the game is about at all times?
I don't see why not.

Fear, Liberal Platitudes And The Depths Of Racism

From the media frenzy of “Linsanity” to the recent "Chink In The Armor" headline retraction, Jeremy Lin has become the source of national attention, willingly or not. ESPN anchor Max Bretos has been placed on a 30-day suspension for making the chink comment. Mr. Bretos responded by stating that his wife is Asian, so he cannot be a racist or be associated with the racist attitude.

What is this fuss is all about? If an asian american cracks the same pun, could he therefore be exempt from being a racist? Personally, I think maybe racism has more to do with a person's mental attitude than the color of the skin.

Perhaps, professor Robert Jensen can shed some light in this subject matter on why it is important to see the depth of this hidden conditioning.

The following is an excerpt from the book "The Heart of Whiteness" by Robert Jensen"

It may seem self-indulgent to talk about the fears of white people in a white-supremacist society. After all, what do white people really have to be afraid of in a world structured on white privilege? It may be self-indulgent, but it's critical to understand because these fears are part of what keeps many white people from confronting ourselves and the system.

The first, and perhaps most crucial, fear is that of facing the fact that some of what we white people have is unearned. It's a truism that we don't really make it on our own; we all have plenty of help to achieve whatever we achieve. That means that some of what we have is the product of the work of others, distributed unevenly across society, over which we may have little or no control individually. No matter how hard we work or how smart we are, we all know — when we are honest with ourselves — that we did not get where we are by merit alone. And many white people are afraid of that fact.

A second fear is crasser: White people's fear of losing what we have — literally the fear of losing things we own if at some point the economic, political, and social systems in which we live become more just and equitable. That fear is not completely irrational; if white privilege — along with the other kinds of privilege many of us have living in the middle class and above in an imperialist country that dominates much of the rest of the world — were to evaporate, the distribution of resources in the United States and in the world would change, and that would be a good thing. We would have less. That redistribution of wealth would be fairer and more just. But in a world in which people have become used to affluence and material comfort, that possibility can be scary.

A third fear involves a slightly different scenario — a world in which non-white people might someday gain the kind of power over whites that whites have long monopolized. One hears this constantly in the conversation about immigration, the lingering fear that somehow "they" (meaning not just Mexican-Americans and Latinos more generally, but any non-white immigrants) are going to keep moving to this country and at some point become the majority demographically. Even though whites likely can maintain a disproportionate share of wealth, those numbers will eventually translate into political, economic, and cultural power. And then what? Many whites fear that the result won't be a system that is more just, but a system in which white people become the minority and could be treated as whites have long treated non-whites. This is perhaps the deepest fear that lives in the heart of whiteness. It is not really a fear of non-white people. It's a fear of the depravity that lives in our own hearts: Are non-white people capable of doing to us the barbaric things we have done to them?

A final fear has probably always haunted white people but has become more powerful since the society has formally rejected overt racism: The fear of being seen, and seen-through, by non-white people. Virtually every white person I know, including white people fighting for racial justice and including myself, carries some level of racism in our minds and hearts and bodies. In our heads, we can pretend to eliminate it, but most of us know it is there. And because we are all supposed to be appropriately anti-racist, we carry that lingering racism with a new kind of fear: What if non-white people look at us and can see it? What if they can see through us? What if they can look past our anti-racist vocabulary and sense that we still don't really know how to treat them as equals? What if they know about us what we don't dare know about ourselves? What if they can see what we can't even voice?

I work in a large university with a stated commitment to racial justice. All of my faculty colleagues, even the most reactionary, have a stated commitment to racial justice. And yet the fear is palpable.

It is a fear I have struggled with, and I remember the first time I ever articulated that fear in public. I was on a panel with several other professors at the University of Texas discussing race and politics in the O.J. Simpson case. Next to me was an African American professor. I was talking about media; he was talking about the culture's treatment of the sexuality of black men. As we talked, I paid attention to what was happening in me as I sat next to him. I felt uneasy. I had no reason to be uncomfortable around him, but I wasn't completely comfortable. During the question-and-answer period — I don't remember what question sparked my comment — I turned to him and said something like, "It's important to talk about what really goes on between black and white people in this country. For instance, why am I feeling afraid of you? I know I have no reason to be afraid, but I am. Why is that?"

My reaction wasn't a crude physical fear, not some remnant of being taught that black men are dangerous (though I have had such reactions to black men on the street in certain circumstances). Instead, I think it was that fear of being seen through by non-white people, especially when we are talking about race. In that particular moment, for a white academic on an O.J. panel, my fear was of being exposed as a fraud or some kind of closet racist. Even if I thought I knew what I was talking about and was being appropriately anti-racist in my analysis, I was afraid that some lingering trace of racism would show through, and that my black colleague would identify it for all in the room to see. After I publicly recognized the fear, I think I started to let go of some of it. Like anything, it's a struggle. I can see ways in which I have made progress. I can see that in many situations I speak more freely and honestly as I let go of the fear. I make mistakes, but as I become less terrified of making mistakes I find that I can trust my instincts more and be more open to critique when my instincts are wrong.


PS. Robert Jensen is a professor of media ethics and journalism at the University of Texas at Austin.
Source link: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5539692

Let's Not Evolve Into Extinction

Remember Fukushima - not too long ago - the world's first triple meltdown?

Well, apparently the story is not over. About 25 million tons of radioactive debris are heading toward the California coast in the next few months. The extend of its impact on the environment and marine wildlife is yet uncertain. Meanwhile, new construction for two more nuclear plants has just broken ground in Waynesboro, Georgia.

Under the prevalent "anything for a buck" mentality of our civilization, I am amazed to see how common sense has became next to worthless. Nuclear energy has small to no margin for error which makes it a poor choice (for energy) under the Murphy's law. If we cannot survive from ourselves, everything else would be just meaningless.

Let's not evolve into extinction, perhaps?!

True Love Has No Opposite

Love is one of those loaded, four-letter words.  Misunderstood, it can bring to a world of hurts and disappointments.  Properly understood, it can also lead to something wonderful.

In the world of duality, love always has an opposite - hate. The outcome of a conditional love is usually predictable.  Sometimes this love is often referred with a motion of falling, as in "falling in love" where the person is caught off guard or even surprised.  Evidently, falling does not conjure an image of very mindful activity.

Understandably we humans all have certain biological imperatives to fulfill.  At some point, chasing and selecting a mate becomes all important. There is no denying in that.  It is very real both physically and mentally. However, the ritual to marry or promise an exclusive love, as tradition dictates, could only result in a world of separation. That is why divorce very seldom ends amicably. Why does love has to be exclusive and if not so, fears arise?  How about agape or the brotherly, sisterly love?  Does this vow of marriage, on top of vows already made, prevents fears and the side effects of all conditional love?

To many, vows are as easily made as broken.  Words and concepts can only carries as far as the conditions they contain.  As we all have known, lying is not wholesome.  But lying to oneself, intentional or not, could only bring a even deeper misalignment from the truth.  In reflection, how much of our values are learned as truth and how much of them are realized through actualization?  Perhaps, we are more than what we are told and capable of that!

If love is the solution to every situations, could there be enough love for everyone?  The answer is a resounding - YES!  If the intent of the love is conditional and exclusive, then within duality, its opposite effect is unavoidable.  However, when a love that has become a way of life which radiates unconditionally without exclusivity, this love has no opposite, therefore is not subject to decay.  It will be lasting and enough.

Living in a world of choices, how to love healthily is not just another choice but a vital one.   Everyday, we are bombarded with messages of importance and appearance of love.  Unfortunately, we are as busy loving as hating or being hated.  Perhaps, it is just as important to know how to love as to love.  Still, I believe it's possible to change when something doesn't work, don't you?

When we engaged in a true love that has no opposite, all fears would subside where a life awaits with endless possibilities. But if we insist to love conditionally,  then let's be honest and accept whatever consequences that love brings.  However, what you want may not always be best for you; I wish everybody the wisdom to see the difference.