Month: February 2013

Love & Laughter

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Stuart Wilde February 25 2013

Laughter is a form of love and a very powerful medicine.

We find reasons to laugh many times a day. Sometimes I tell my friends funny stories and soon the whole room is filled with the warmth of the fire and the shimmer of shared laughter.

Or, I crack a joke with the barman at the local Dog & Duck, we chuckle and make a circle of light with our feelings  which others are drawn into. And lilting laughter brightens the eyes of the curly haired lady in the chemist with the good soul, as I pretend to write myself a prescription for some good stuff with my finger on the counter. We share a jolly moment and she passes the warmth onto the next person that enters with her jovial banter that breathes life force into their being.

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Rebels Stand Alone

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Truthdig February 24 2013

Swiss village of Begnins outside Geneva

I was in the Swiss village of Begnins outside Geneva shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. I spent three days there with Axel von dem Bussche, a former Wehrmacht major, holder of the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross for extreme battlefield bravery, three times wounded in World War II, and the last surviving member of the inner circle of German army officers who attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler.

I was reminded of my visit with von dem Bussche, whom I was interviewing for The Dallas Morning News, by the 70th anniversary of the execution of five Munich University students and their philosophy professor who were members of the White Rose resistance movement in Nazi Germany. The BBC last week interviewed the 99-year-old Liselotte Furst-Ramdohr, who hid leaflets for the group in her closet and helped make stencils used to paint slogans on walls. [Click here to hear the interview or click here to see the BBC’s article based on the interview.] The six White Rose members managed to distribute thousands of anti-Nazi leaflets before they were arrested by the Gestapo and guillotined. The text of their sixth and final set of leaflets was smuggled out of Germany by the resistance leader Helmuth James Graf von Moltke, who was arrested in 1944 and hanged by the Nazis in January 1945. Copies of the leaflets’ language were dropped over Germany by Allied planes in July 1943. Furst-Ramdohr, who was widowed during the war when her first husband was killed on the Russian front, also was arrested by the Gestapo. She was imprisoned but eventually released.

The White Rose has been lionized by postwar Germans—one of its members, Alexander Schmorell, was made a saint by the Russian Orthodox Church last year, and squares and schools in Germany are named for the resisters—but in the BBC interview Furst-Ramdohr curtly dismissed the adulation of the group.

“At the time, they’d have had us all executed,” she said in speaking of most Germans’ hatred of resisters during the war.

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Rediscovering The Truly Extraordinary In Our Lives

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Caroline Myss February 2013

I recently recorded another audio series and as always, I was blessed with having a wonderful group of people who volunteered their time to serve as a live audience for me. Inevitably we end up having the most interesting conversations in between recordings, as studio audiences are small, the space is tight, and a type of co-creative dialogue goes on, as I rely upon their feedback and questions in the creation of the text for these CD series.

This particular series was the audio set based on my recent book, ARCHETYPES: Who Are You? Part of exploring the subject of archetypes includes discussing the nature of the shadow aspects of an archetype. The shadow, just for the sake of bringing everyone on board, is considered the unknown part of your unconscious that acts out from the “shadow” or the darkest part of yourself.

How often, for example, have you said or done something that hurt a person and when asked to explain your behavior, you answered, “I don’t know why I said that.” There are many active shadow aspects in each of us. They provide the fodder for our struggles with right and wrong, good and evil, forgiveness and vengeance. These are the ingredients of human life.

The conversation about the shadow somehow led to the subject of kindness with one person suggesting that, “Really, in spite of all that shadow stuff, aren’t people just basically good and kind?”

I turned to the audience and said, “Well, who wants to respond to that?” I could feel my producer in the control room cringing, as I began turning the break between recordings into the beginning of a mini workshop. It was too late for her to jump in and plead, “Oh please, don’t start anything interesting now, okay?” It was just too late. The ship, as they say, had sailed.

Most of the audience agreed that people were basically kind and this one fact of life was enough to eclipse the reality that each of us has a shadow side that is the root of much of our pain. And it certainly is the source of why we cease to recognize what is truly extraordinary in the world and blind ourselves to what has become extraordinary in the “shadowlands” of our society.

I said that if kindness came so naturally to all of us, why do we require books instructing us on how to be kind? Why are doctors conducting studies to discover if kindness has an influence on health and healing illnesses? Why does a single act of kindness performed by one individual make headlines in the news? Only unusual occurrences make the news.

Why do we need books instructing us on what acts of kindness are and encouraging us to “pass it on?” The truth is that acts of kindness are still extraordinary, but not the right kind of extraordinary. Kindness stands out not because it’s ordinary but because it is not. We should never even have to read a book on kindness, much less admire one act of kindness. These should be as ordinary as breathing. They should each go unnoticed. That we notice them at all speaks about how rare they are and how desperately they are needed.

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Been Down So Long…

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Zen-Haven February 25 2013

It seems to be getting increasingly obvious on a daily basis that the western society is getting divided into:

Those who have and those who don’t.The west is rolling the time back to its feudalistic roots, where the gap between the rich and poor is widening disproportionately, something we are used to observing in developing countries or through the timeline of history.

Those who have what they need: be it work, money in the bank, food on the table, are having discussions in the media with those who are equally affluent, on how to control those less fortunateby cutting social benefits and accusing them of defrauding the social benefits or welfare program.

The politicians are merely the front line rulers, puppets and stooges for the “shadow people”: the ones we cannot see, the ones that control and dictate all the policies implemented. Poverty is very big business and so is surveillance.

9.11 being a matrix construct, and the fallout from this massive hoax has led to gross violation of privacy, mass spying and the masses conditioned into believing it’s for their own good. The state now has permission to sneak behind the trash can, take a photo and slam a single mum for benefit fraud, to surveillance of electronic activities and these are just a few of civil liberties slowly being taken away from people.

A decade or so ago, before 9.11, no able minded citizen would have put up with this.  This mass conditioning and hypnotic state is being promoted daily by the mainstream media that: We´re in a finical crisis and you are a low income fraud suspect burdening the state.

To add insult to injury, the puppets and stooges propose new taxes on those already struggling or threaten to reduce benefits. Ordinary citizens are being conditioned in to paying taxes to curb global warming, which is another matrix hoax and the proceeds collected go who knows where!

And the population in its hypnotic trance just accepts these lies.

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The Secret At The Bottom Of Psychiatry’s Rabbit Hole

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Jon Rappoport’s blog February 24 2013

American Psychiatric AssociationNightmares, out-of-control aggressive behavior, extreme sadness and passivity, confusion, hallucinations, mania, brain damage, suicide, homicide—these are just a few central effects of psychiatric drugs.

Read the staggering statistics reported by Robert Whitaker, the author of Mad in America: “The number of adults, ages 18 to 65, on the federal disability rolls due to mental illness jumped from 1.25 million in 1987 to four million in 2007. Roughly one in every 45 working-age adults is now on government disability due to mental illness.

“This epidemic has now struck our nation’s children, too. The number of children who receive a federal payment because of a severe mental illness rose from 16,200 in 1987 to 561,569 in 2007, a 35-fold increase.”

My exploration started in 1999, as I covered the Columbine school shooting.

I was already familiar with the pioneering work of Dr. Peter Breggin and his classic book, Toxic Psychiatry. I knew the drugs were toxic and that some of them could push people into violence.

It emerged that one of the Columbine shooters, Eric Harris, had been on Luvox, a violence-inducing drug, an SSRI antidepressant.

This, of course, was very troubling, because children and adults all over America were taking these antidepressants. And in Dr. Breggin’s book, I saw a summary of a review-study on Ritalin, done in 1986 by Joseph Scarnati. Ritalin, far from being a “soft” drug, was essentially speed, and it carried with it significant dangers.

It could cause hallucinations, aggressive behavior, and even psychotic breaks. Several million children in America were taking Ritalin.

What I came to call a “Johnny Appleseed specter” loomed over America. If psychiatrists dispensed enough of these drugs, seeding the population, we would be in for random shootings and killings and suicides on into the indefinite future. And psychiatrists were, in fact, handing out these drugs like candy. No one at the FDA or any enforcement government agency was ringing alarm bells.

In the wake of Columbine, I wrote a white paper, “Why Did they Do It: School Shootings Across America,” for The Truth Seeker. It gained wide online attention. The report mentioned other instances where children, on psychiatric drugs, had committed murder and suicide.

In the ensuing years, I became much more aware of the influence of drug companies in this Johnny Appleseed operation. They had, in fact, struck a deal to rescue the sinking profession of psychiatry. The arrangement was simple and potent: Big Pharma would bankroll psychiatric conferences and education, prop up flagging journals with advertising money, and generally promote the repute of psychiatry, in return for a certain kind of research:

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