Wilberg on Wednesday - The Illness Is The Cure pt 20/46

Illness as an Altered State of Consciousness

From the point of view of Life Medicine there is no need to scientifically find or prove causal links or relations between ‘body and mind ’, ‘body and brain ’. Instead it is a matter of recognising that every bodily state is a ‘mental’ state, but in a much broader sense than usually understood – being a state of consciousness that is experienced just as much in a bodily way as in our ‘minds’.

No ‘subjective’ state or ‘state of consciousness’ is merely something enclosed or encapsulated in our heads, brains or minds. Conversely the body as such is not something we merely perceive or are merely aware of ‘mentally’ – as if it were some object we carry around with us. Instead the body itself is but a particular shape and dimension of subjective experiencing – one that completely transcends the whole body-mind, body-brain division. This is why the notion of the ‘felt body ’, ‘lived body‘ or ‘subjective body‘ is so central to Life Medicine – and to the new understanding of illness it brings. For this new understanding makes it impossible, in principle, to separate our lived experience of illness into two separate categories that we call ‘mental’ and ‘physical’.

A basic principle of Life Medicine is that every bodily state is also a state of consciousness and vice versa. That is why the experience of any bodily state or condition, even a minor ailment such as a flu or cold goes together with a new and different state of consciousness – a state of consciousness that is not limited to one's head or mind but pervades one’s entire body.

Conversely, different types of ‘mental’ or ‘emotional’ states are also states of consciousness not confined to the head or mind – but felt and experienced in a bodily way, for example as a particular sensation arising from a state of muscular tension in one’s chest, stomach or guts.

“Every feeling is… a mood that embodies in this or that way.”

Martin Heidegger

What we call a ‘mood’ however, is nothing we are simply mentally aware of in our heads, but is rather a particular tone and quality of embodied, feeling awareness – one which is always in one way embodied as different degrees and qualities of muscle tone and tension – which is why no state of ‘mental’ stress or tension is not at the same time a state of muscular tension.

“A mood makes manifest how one is…” Martin Heidegger

In other words, a mood is not just something purely mental but is a bodily way of feeling ourselves. This is reflected in the fact that the question 'How do you feel?' is synonymous with the question 'How are you?’ For the way we ‘feel’ is the way we ‘are’ – and vice versa.

For this reason however, any alteration or change in how we feel or are is at the same time a change in our sense of who we are or feel ourselves to be – a change in our identity or sense of self that is felt in an immediate bodily way. For in a most literal sense the ‘you’ that feels sick or tired is not the same ‘you’ that feels healthy, bright and alert.

Thus, not only is every bodily state also a state of consciousness – it could also be described as a ‘self-state’ or ‘body identity’. For the way we feel our bodies cannot be separated from the way we feel ourselves. How we feel in our body affects not just our mind but who we feel ourselves to be – our ‘bodily sense of self’ or ‘body identity ’. That is why, when people begin to feel ill they might speak of ‘not feeling themselves’. This basic ‘dis-ease’ of ‘not feeling ourselves’ is both the essence and first sign of illness – being not only an altered state of consciousness (how we feel) but also an alteration of our bodily sense of self or body identity – of who we feel ourselves to be.

The Immune System and Body Identity

In the framework of biomedicine ‘body identity‘ is reduced to our genetic or biological identity and associated in particular with the immune system – which is seen as ‘defending’ our biological identity against threats and attacks from ‘foreign bodies’ in the form of pathogenic bacteria, viruses or mutant and cancerous cells, or any type of genetic material such as organ transplants that consist of ‘non-self’ cells (a term actually used in immunology).

Today more than ever, much fuss is made about ‘health’ being dependent on maintaining or restoring a strong ‘immune system’ or with strengthening the body’s immune ‘defences’, which is why countless food products and supplements are advertised that claim to do so. On the other hand even biomedicine acknowledges that most discomforting or painful symptoms of illness (such as a runny nose or swelling and painful joints ) arise from the activity of the body’s immune system. Indeed many illnesses are recognised as resulting from an immune system that is too strongly defensive and as a result is overactive – leading to so-called ‘autoimmune’ diseases such as arthritis in which the body’s immune ‘defences’ are used to attack its own cells. Alternatively, the body’s immune system may be at such a high alert and so overactive and ‘strong’ for long periods that it ultimately weakens or collapses. Its very strength and activity therefore may ultimately result in precisely the sort of weakness that makes the body susceptible to infection and other types of illness.

In contrast to biomedicine, Life Medicine understands the strength of our immune system – the degree of immunity of our bodies – as an embodiment of the degree of immunity of our self or identity. Thus a too rigid or strongly defended identity or sense of self – one completely ‘immune’ to natural and healthy processes of change and adaptation to life – may find biological expression through an over-defensive and over-active immune system, which then actively seeks out threats to our biological identity that would otherwise be ignored or are ignored by the immune systems of other people. An over-rigid or immune self – or one that experiences deep identity conflicts – would explain many so-called ‘auto-immune’ disorders. A more healthily and naturally ‘strong’ identity or sense of self on the other hand would also explain what biomedical immunology can’t explain – why some people ‘catch’ diseases which are supposed to be highly infectious whilst others don’t – even from spouses or children they live with or during widespread epidemics. Nor can biomedical immunology explain why most of the bacteria, viruses and even damaged, mutated and ‘cancerous’ cells that biological medicine regards as ‘causes’ of diseases are all in fact constantly present in most healthy bodies.

Biomedicine simply takes it for granted that ‘health’ is the protection of a fixed biological and genetic identity – one ‘immune’ from all change. The problem with this theory is that it prevents biomedicine from coming up with any explanation of why it is that the immune system, though it may launch attacks on transplanted cells and tumours, does not launch attacks on a no less alien or foreign body that can grow within the human body – namely the baby growing in a pregnant mother’s womb? And whilst biomedicine has effectively come to treat pregnancy and birth as something fraught with as many dangers as an illness, therefore requiring hospitalisation and the use of hi-tech medical equipment, the body itself clearly does not regard pregnancy as a disease or the baby as an alien or foreign body growing inside it – despite the differences in its DNA to that of the mother. Life Medicine, on the other hand, understands ‘health’ itself as a capacity to allow our body identity or sense of self to be altered and transformed in response to our life world and life experiences. That is why, instead of treating pregnancy as if it were a type of illness, Life Medicine understands illness itself as a type of pregnancy – the meaning and purpose of which is precisely to allow us to gestate and give birth to a new ‘bodily sense of self’ or ‘body identity’. A key aspect of health, not as a mere state but as an on-going life process is therefore the capacity to pass from a state of ‘not feeling ourselves’ to one of ‘feeling another self’ – and of learning to embody or ‘give birth’ to that self through new and different ways of relating to our lives and life world.

Socialist Quotes for Sunday Reflection pt 37

Douglas on the financial control of "democracy":

“As no government can carry on for a month without money, it is not necessary to labour the point that the visible government of a country is obliged to take its orders and to shape its policy, and particularly its financial policy, in accordance with the dealers in this indispensable implement, so long as they hold a practical monopoly of it.”

C.H. Douglas, Social Credit

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''A decadent material life, a poor mental and cultural life and a reactionary political life—these can be said to be the main characteristics of capitalist society, and they show the anti-popular nature and corruption of modern imperialism.''

Kim Jong Il

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From Tucker Carlson's new book :

"The marriage of market capitalism to progressive social values may be the most destructive combination in American economic history. Someone needs to protect workers from the terrifying power of market forces, which tend to accelerate change to intolerable levels and crush the weak.

For generations, labor unions filled that role. That’s over. Left and right now agree that a corporation’s only real responsibility is to its shareholders. Corporations can openly mistreat their employees (or “contractors”), but for the price of installing transgender bathrooms they buy a pass. Shareholders win, workers lose. Bowing to the diversity agenda is a lot cheaper than raising wages."

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Round up 23:11:18: anti-imperialism, Brexit Betrayal, 100 years since the Great War Armistice, Unity on the Left, Join the forum

Time to ditch the Roman Ruling Class

The Socialist Motherland Party of the British Isles rejects Imperialism as inherently toxic to both the rulers and the ruled.  We have a yearning - 'hiraeth' - for freedom, which transcends the concepts of past, present and future. Our anti-imperialism includes a rejection of the imperialism of Rome which still ripples into the present with matters such as the months of the years.  We stand with our brothers and sisters in Italy as with our brothers and sisters everywhere in the class struggle - our opposition to the left-overs of Roman imperialism are part of the objective of doing away with the power of the ruling class of all periods (Windsor, Stuart, Tudor, Norman, Roman, all of them), not an attack on the decent working class people who have been categorised alongside the despots due to coincidence of geography.

With regards to the present 12 month system which was imposed by Rome, we would restore our traditional system of measuring time, using fortnights rather than weeks, and lunar months rather than the deification of Roman tyrants.  This round up comes at the time of the full moon, and the changing of one natural month into another, to emphasise our rejection of the imperially-ordered calendar we still live under .  Our old ways have been trampled upon, and restoring them will not be easy, but as revolutionaries, we do not limit ourselves into the pursuit of easy tinkering reformism.

100 years since the end of the 'great war' - 100 years of lies

On 11:11:18 at 11am, the hypocrites put on their poppies and spoke about remembering the working class men butchered in the First World War.  The liars clapped happily as the Rothschild 'president', Macron, libelled the dead, infamously stating that:

"Patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism. Nationalism is its betrayal," 

This drivel from the mouth of the bankers' puppet, was spoken at an event to mark the deaths of soldiers killed fighting for their nations.  Macron, like the treacherous Theresa May, is an enemy of the people he was elected by.

The Great War was referred to as 'the war to end all wars'.  The truth as we know all too well, was very different.  The Great War saw the greatest European blood-letting ever.  At no time before, or since, have so many people died due to the machinations of politicians.  Commenced as an exercise in population reduction, the Great war was contrived from the outset.  The politicians of every nation, took the opportunity of the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, to launch a war of unprecedented horror onto European soil.  The Archduke had proposed the reorganisation of the Austro-Hungarian Empire into a federation of 16 equal states, with emphasis on the emancipation of the Slavic peoples.  For this courageous policy of decentralising power and replacing the two-headed regime with an Empire of 16 Flags, the Establishment had him murdered.

The assassination of Franz Ferdinand was a classic 'False Flag' operation, which allowed for the Austro-Hungarian elite to crush the spirit of freedom initiated by the Archduke.  In a now typical act of hypocrisy, the forces which stood to gain from the dismemberment of Austria-Hungary, declared war, under the lie that they were fighting for the freedom of Europe.  They were fighting for financial gain for the armaments industries, and for the crushing of the natural progress to freedom which the Archduke encouraged.

The Great War was a catastrophe for Europe.  The blood of a generation was spilt.  The War gave Turkey the opportunity to commit genocide against the Armenians; murdering 1.5 million European people.  This very real holocaust has been buried in history, which is an insult to the memory of the Armenians slaughtered by the soldiers of the Turkish Establishment.

In 1916, the British Prime Minister, Asquith, was ousted by the enemies of the British people, and replaced by the fanatical Zionist, Lloyd George.  The monster in London betrayed the men fighting in France, by diverting forces to Palestine, to seize that land for the incoming occupiers; this is in spite of opposition from the Jews in the UK, and from the Jews in Palestine who had reacted favourably to the possibility of being relocated to Uganda, and forever leaving the land of the Arabs.  An ardent opponent of the planned seizure of Palestinian, Lord Kitchener was murdered whilst travelling to Russia to bolster the war effort there.

In 1917, the forces of Austria-Hungary and Germany were winning the war.  The winning side proposed to end the war there and then, and return Europe to pre-war conditions.  Had this proposal been accepted, the borders of Europe would have returned to their traditional ones, and there would have been no crippling reparations to pay.  Rather than accept this noble and decent proposal, the London criminals used every means at their disposal to ensure that the war continued.  As a result, the death-toll increased phenomenally, leaving no family untouched by the loss of a loved one.  The reason for this refusal to do what was best for the British people, was an obsession with securing Palestine as a centre for global capitalism, using the mythology of the Zionist Jews as justification.  Interestingly, a lone voice of dissent in the London government came from the (Jewish) Minister, Montagu, who foresaw in the Palestinian campaign, the end of assimilation and the restoration of the tyranny of the fanatical racist supremacist zionist ruling class over the Jewish people.

At the end of the Great War, the London vipers promised to make the UK a 'land fit for heroes'.  The word of politicians in 1918 proved to be as worthy as those of the modern day vermin; the maimed survivors of the slaughter were abandoned once they were no longer useful.  The Armistice of 11.11.18 imposed horrendous conditions on the defeated European nations, including the dismemberment of their nations, and the transfer of entire swathes of territory to the rule of others who had no commonality of culture, language or tradition.  In addition, harsh reparations were imposed, such as would make the parasites of the modern IMF blush.  The London regime ensured that not only an entire generation of European men would be slaughtered, but that the seeds of an inevitable future conflict would be sown.  The policies of London condemned the people of Europe to economic deprivation, to rule by those hostile to our people, and to the loss of everything that we held dear.  The Great War should be called the Great Betrayal, for under the London Establishment, that is what is became.

The hypocrites in government and the 'royal' family have taken great care to appear solemn while laying wreaths and making speeches about sacrifice.  These people are of the same ilk as those who ruined our lands in 1918, again in 1945, and ever since.  They and their predecessors are the ones responsible for the creation of the criminal state of Israel; for the ceaseless wars of financial conquest which have been under way non-stop since 1948; for the end of national sovereignty and personal liberty; for the rise of individualism and ideological extremism; indeed for every woe besetting our troubled planet.

The EU brazenly claims responsibility for peace in our time

The EU has claimed that its existence has stopped wars in Europe!

It hasn't!

• Turkish invasion of Greece (Cyprus)
• EU-sponsored 'revolution' in Ukraine and ongoing war against the Russian part in the east
• Destruction of Yugoslavia, including farce of Bosnia with near-identical flag to EU
• Imposition of criminal state of Kosovo by EU on Serbian land

The foul Macron has spouted the most obscene drivel that Nationalism is Treason to Patriotism - libelling the war dead of France

The EU is gearing up to install an EU military to police Europe and fight dissenters to the EU project (Theresa/Treason May is backing it, so a so-called free UK will be part of the EU Occupation Army

The UK has made the army into a laughing stock.  No-one wants to join a military which acts as a nanny to 'refugees' (surplus labour for the capitalist mill, who have been invited to lower wages, crash working conditions and globalise the population so that the UK ceases to exist in any real terms); which bombs civilians for corporate profits (Syria, Iraq, Libya etc); which does nothing to protect our borders.  The solution from the enemies in Westminster?  To get foreigners to join and make it a truly global army!

Treachery upon treachery.

SMPBI solution is to quit NATO, quit the UN, quit any EU army, and bring our soldiers home. Bring in conscription so every able-bodied man is trained to fight for his country, and every able-bodied woman equally trained (but separately) and of course no trans-reality types allowed anywhere near it, (we'll stop that nonsense straight away). Make the British Army something for all of us to be proud of, and for all of us who are able, to be a part of.  Disabled people can have a role, but not a combat one - we don't do the political correctness rubbish, and certainly won't endanger anyone by putting people into unsuitable roles.


The EU independence betrayal

The despicable Theresa May has boasted that she has a 'deal' for the UK which will make the EU, banks, finance sector and big business happy!  The 17.4 million mostly working class voters who brought about the historic freedom victory, are being stabbed in the back - although in such a way that we are being insulted at the same time.

We voted to regain our fishing grounds - these have been handed over as part of the appeasement deal.

We voted to stop the free movement of goods and surplus labour, so that we could manufacture our own goods, and ensure our own workers were protected from mass unemployment, job insecurity and reduced working conditions.  There was nothing racist about any of this.  The UK regime has made a 'deal' which will make it more difficult on paper for people from the EU to come here, but effectively open the borders to the entire world, permanently destroying any defences against global capitalist exploitation which we of the working class have fought so hard to achieve.  Joining the UN Global Compact for Migration, further erodes any vestiges of sovereignty, further mocking the democratic will of the people, who would never accept this globalising despotism.

May has stated a desire to sign the UK up to the EU Army, further ensnaring us in the globalist trap. This is on top of opening up the British Army to the entire world, to ensure beat us into submission for resisting the despotism in Whitehall.

The CPB-ML statement on the Brexit Betrayal (reposted in full, with 100% agreement)

The Cabinet’s surrender to the European Union has been a betrayal in slow motion. Over the months before and since the infamous Chequers statement the white flag has been dusted down, waved about and replaced with an even larger square of white.

This is a betrayal unprecedented in British history: a government of Britain complicit in an agreement that grants a veto over the country’s future to a third party. Even Irish TV was told before the British people.

Parliament must vote to reject it. And this traitor Cabinet must be ejected and be replaced by one willing to obey the people’s instruction to leave the EU.

The forces for Leave must now deal with the reality of utter, unvarnished betrayal, long suspected but now detailed in more than 500 pages. Too many people thought that a majority in the referendum would be enough. That there was no need to take to the streets, that the job was effectively done.

Now everyone must realise that if we want to leave the EU, we are going to have to work at it, in whatever way we can.

Colony

The deal agreed by May’s Cabinet is not what 17.4 million people voted for when they ticked the box for Leave. Nor is this proposal to relegate Britain to a colony of the EU – subject to its laws but without even a voice in the making of them – what 16 million thought they were voting for when they voted to Remain.

A Cabinet of Remainers, led by one, should never have been trusted to honour the result. “Brexit means Brexit,” Theresa May said when she became leader of the Conservative Party. It is now apparent that for her Brexit means Remain. What she has delivered is not a failure of negotiation: it is the end point of a devious, dishonest strategy designed to keep Britain in the customs union and single market.

EU’s weakness

One of the great ironies about the Cabinet’s cowardly capitulation, their lack of confidence in the country they claim to lead, is that the real weakness is on the EU’s side. One day before their meeting, Italy openly defied the Commission over its budget. One day after, Germany announced its economy had shrunk over the previous quarter.

The deal that the EU has always wanted is a deal that seals us back into the EU, staying in the EU with the certainty of being a subservient state, paying the full amount they want, with no rebate, no say, no control, no chance of ever having a choice to leave in the future.

This deal would give us even less control, even less sovereignty than we had before. And this is what May wants us to accept.

Despite all the panic-mongering, no deal is the only viable option. And the sooner the better. If May’s humiliating surrender is the deal on offer, Britain should simply walk away and start to make our own decisions about the future for our country.

Rare Unity across the pro-freedom, anti-EU parties

SMPBI endorses the CPB-ML, CPGB-ML and SLP responses to the great betrayal by the bourgeois imperialist forces in Westminster of all parties:
https://www.cpgb-ml.org/2018/11/09/news/brexit-or-bust-down-with-the-imperialist-eu-bloc/
http://www.cpbml.org.uk/news/what-next-after-brexit-betrayal
http://www.socialist-labour-party.org.uk/Scargill%20Customs%20Union.pdf

The EU is a capitalist entity which exists to further the aims of big business, and for all its talk of "workers' rights", is an enemy to the working class.  The UK voted to leave, and leave we must.  This is an issue above party politics, and so we stand shoulder to shoulder with other organisations who cherish freedom.

The EU is an empire in the making.  Just like the Roman one before it, we want no part of it, and demand the UK leave it immediately, with the aim to help those trapped inside to fight for its total collapse.

Join the Forum

In the interest of building unity, the new forum has been opened up so anyone can join.  The forum will be policed to keep trouble-makers (so-called trolls) out.  The forum is new, so now is a good time to get on board and build it from within.

https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/smpbiforum/index.php

Wilberg on Wednesday - The Illness Is The Cure pt 19/46

Illness as an Awareness

Every feeling, symptom, mental or physical state, together with our overall sense of self or ‘self-state’ is not just something we are aware of. Its meaning lies in the fact that it is itself an awareness of something. Thus a muscular tension, for example in the form of a tension headache, though we only be aware of it as a bodily tension, may itself embody an awareness of a particular tension in our lives, relationships or place of work.

Just as a person whose family has been made homeless or wiped out in a war has good reasons for feeling ‘sick’ or ‘depressed’, so do all feelings and symptoms have good reasons. They are not just programmed or mechanical physiological reactions to or ‘effects’ of external or internal ‘causes’. Simply to label feelings as ‘positive’ or ‘negative’, to describe ourselves as ‘well’ or ‘unwell’, or to call the way we feel as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, is to deny the inherent meaning of all feelings – as an awareness of something beyond themselves. Symptoms of illness, like dream symbols, are a form of condensed awareness. Their inherently positive value and meaning lies in helping us to become more directly aware of what it is that they themselves are a condensed or embodied awareness of. Thus digestive problems are a condensed embodied awareness of an aspect of our lives or lived experience of the world we find difficult to ‘stomach’ or ‘digest’.

Even though illness is often or mainly experienced through localised bodily symptoms (including ‘mental’ states such as a sense of confusion localised in our heads), every such symptom is also and always accompanied by a state of consciousness or ‘mood’ that pervades our entire body and in this way also affects our entire bodily sense of self. This bodily sense of self or ‘self-state’ is itself an undifferentiated awareness of what may be many different aspects of our overall life world that are difficult or uncomfortable, distressing or disturbing for us – thus giving rise to a general sense of ‘dis-ease ’. That is why, in order to find meaning in the overall bodily sense of ‘unwellness’ or ‘dis-ease’ that accompanies a specific illness, it is necessary first to experience it as a self-state. This means giving awareness to how any state of discomfort or dis-ease, however localised, imparts a specific overall tone, texture and colour to our subjectively felt body or ‘lived body‘ as a whole – in this way lending also a specific tone and colour to our bodily sense of self or ‘body identity‘ and to our experienced or lived world as a whole.

To pass from an experience of illness as ‘not feeling ourselves’ to one of ‘feeling another self’ – a distinct self or ‘self-state’ – means experiencing this distinct bodily sense of self. The ‘other self’ we experience through illness however is, by definition, an experienced self – a self we are aware of. Our self as a whole or ‘soul’ on the other hand, is not essentially any experienced self, symptom, state of consciousness or ‘self-state’, but rather the very awareness of experiencing it. To avoid becoming unconsciously identified with the self-states and symptoms of dis-ease, it is necessary to identify with that ‘whole self’ which is nothing but this awareness – the experiencing self rather than any experienced self. Only within the awareness that is this self – our ‘awareness self’ – can we in turn feel and affirm every particular feeling and self we experience or are aware of. We are as much aware of our self as a whole – our soul – as we are aware of our body as a whole. Yet the ‘body’ of our whole self or soul – our awareness self – is not just our physical body but our entire life world. For it is an awareness that embraces everything and ‘every-body’ in our world, from our immediate present reality and relationships to our past and future – and ultimately the entire universe.

The second step in healing ourselves through awareness is therefore to experience each and every localised bodily sensation or symptom, no matter how subtle, as an awareness of some specific aspect of our larger body – of our life world. Thus by giving more awareness to a localised muscular tension we can experience it as an awareness of a specific tension in our life world. Through a meditational process of giving awareness to each and every localised bodily feeling or sensation of dis-ease – no matter how subtle, and by making sure we attend to each and every region of our body in the process – we can come to experience each of these feelings and sensations as an awareness of some aspect of our larger body or life world. Through this process we are literally putting ourselves together – ‘re-membering’ and making whole that larger body that is our life world as a whole. By simply granting awareness to each region of our bodies and each sensation or feeling of dis-ease or discomfort we experience within it, our overall sense of dis-ease and overall ‘self-state’ will automatically begin to alter. For we will feel ever-more pervaded, lightened and healed by that very self which is the awareness we grant to our overall self-state – our body, self and our life world as a whole.

Case Example 2

Two Ways of Responding to Symptoms

1. A personal secretary finds herself stuck in a job with a bullying and abusive boss. Fearing to express her feelings of irritation, anger and humiliation ‘face to face’ and ‘face up to’ her boss, feeling vulnerable in the face of the unpredictable rage this might unleash in her boss, and afraid with good reason that it might be ‘rash’ to risk her job by doing so, she keeps ‘a straight face’ in the face of all the bullying. Over time her feelings come to the surface in her body itself – in the form of an ‘irritating’ and ‘angry’ red skin rash. Lacking a way to ‘face up to’ her boss, let alone ‘whack him one’ – even though she is itching to do so – the rash appears on her face, arms and hands. Plagued by itching, she scratches and irritates her own skin until it blisters and bleeds – an activity that provides, unaware to herself, some satisfaction in releasing her ‘bad blood’ towards her boss. But her feelings of embarrassment and shame about not being able to face up to her boss become displaced by shame and embarrassment about the rash itself. So she goes to her doctor. Not even thinking that asking her questions about her life world might have any diagnostic significance, the doctor is therefore completely blind to the metaphorical meaning of her ‘angry rash’. Adopting a conventional medical approach, the doctor’s sole interest is in diagnosing the rash as some form of skin disorder and treating it – and prescribes a cortisone cream. The problem is that she then becomes dependent on the cream, which far from helping her to become tougher and more ‘thick-skinned’ emotionally, has the side-effect of thinning her actual skin surface itself, making it more vulnerable to embarrassing sores and bleeding. Eventually she feels forced to either lash out at her boss and risk being fired or else to leave her job voluntarily and seek another boss.

2. The same secretary allows herself to fully feel the emotions of anger, vulnerability, shame and humiliation she experiences. This means allowing herself to feel them fully in her body as a whole, neither repressing them nor being provoked to rashly reacting from them. She allows herself to be angry rather than ‘getting angry’. She also reminds herself that the pure awareness of an emotion, however intense, is not itself an emotion or impulse but something innately emotion- and impulse-free. Letting herself feel and be angry makes her feel less vulnerable to her boss’s bullying. Instead the anger transforms itself into an awareness of the bullying that allows her to see it for what it really is – as the expression of a deep insecurity and vulnerability in her boss himself. At the same time, by bearing her anger and feeling it fully in her body, it transforms into a sense of a different self within her, a self strong enough to face up to her boss – or to anyone – in a calm, non-hostile but nevertheless firm and resolute way. By bodying this new self through her body language and tone of voice she feels ever less vulnerable to her boss and instead becomes aware of the vulnerability behind his bullying. Sensing this, he finds it strangely more difficult to be as bullying towards her as before. For now it is he who is aware of feeling an insecure, vulnerable self behind his anger. Initially fearing this self, he first intensifies his abusive bullying, only to find it met by a calm, resolute and firmly toned response from the secretary. Not being able to provoke her into ‘getting angry’ the secretary is not fired. And being now capable of bodying her anger through a new inner bearing she no longer needs to ‘somatise’ it through an angry red facial rash, or fear being fired.

Socialist Quotes for Sunday Reflection pt 36

'JUCHE VERSUS GLOBALIZATION

by Dermot Hudson JISGE chairman

The other day in the supermarket I came across something that symbolized a lot 
about what is wrong with today's world a range of products entitled 'Global Style' in this case it was an 'American style cheese bagel'.

Globalization is clearly a crazy idea.It really means trying to refashion the whole world after the West. It entails the destruction of local economies and local cultures. Imperialist imposed globalization will cause more unemployment,more hunger , more poverty, lower wages and more cutbacks in social services etc

Young people have taken up the struggle against capitalist and imperialist globalization so intensely.However this movement lacks leadership and a clear perspective on the alternative to 'globalization'.

The obvious solution to 'globalization' is to develop self -reliant, self -sufficient national economies serving national needs. But how is this to be done in todays complex. This is where the Juche idea comes in . The Korean people under the leadership of the WPK and the great leader comrade Kim Il Sung built up a powerful independent national economy according to the Juche idea which emphasises the independent and creative stand. The DPRK economy is able to produce to meet local needs . The Juche based independent socialist national economy of the DPRK shows that "another world is possible".

Below are 2 KCNA articles on the independent economy and self reliance:

Independent economy of Korea:

Pyongyang, March 12 (KCNA) --The independent national economy of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea has steadily developed in spite of the persistent economic sanctions and blockade of the United States and its allies. Korea's is an economy that develops on the basis on its efforts and resources to meet its people's demand and that serves the people for their happy life. It is also a comprehensive economy that produces by itself in the main industrial goods and agricultural products needed for economic construction, defence upbuilding and people's living.
The Korean people built a solid independent national economy in a short period after the Korean War and developed it as a powerful economy equipped with a consolidated economic structure and modern technologies through the fulfillment of several economic plans.
The abolition of taxation in 1974, the manufacture of such up-to-date machines as 10,000-t! on press and large-scale oxygen plant and the successful launch of satellite Kwangmyongsong No. 1 in August 1998 are results of the country's powerful economy.
Thanks to the national economy, the country's defence industry is capable of fully producing by itself sophisticated weapons and technical means and equipment necessary for the defence of the country.
With the independent national economy and a strong self-defence power based on it, the Korean people have defended socialism from the imperialists' military threat and aggressive moves.
The Korean economy has developed, unaffected by the imperialists' economic blockade and the changed situation of world economic markets.
Any kind of their economic sanctions and blockade can never work on Korea with its own solid economic foundations.

Self-reliance, Korea's mode of struggle:

Pyongyang, March 17 (KCNA) -- Self-reliance is the Korean people's traditional mode of struggle. They have advanced victoriously, solving all problems with their own efforts and technology and under the motto of self-reliance in the whole course of the complicated and arduous revolutionary struggle.
Korean revolutionaries defeated the formidable Japanese imperialist aggressors and liberated the country, relying on the nation's revolutionary forces.
Inheriting the brilliant tradition established by them, Korean workers made tractors, lorries, bulldozers and excavators in the late 1950's though they lacked designs, technicians, materials and equipment.
In the early 1960's, they even made an electric locomotive with their own technology.
After the Korean War in the 1950s, the Korean people started the socialist industrialization from scratch and completed the histor! ic cause in a mater of 14 years.
Even in the periods of the "arduous march" and the forced march, they built many gigantic edifices, smashing the imperialists' intensified efforts to isolate and stifle the country.
They launched satellite Kwangmyongsong No. 1 in Juche 87 (1998) with their own efforts and technology, rezoned more than 200,000 hectares of arable land to suit the features of the socialist country and built large and modern salterns, motorways, waterways and factories in recent years.
All these achievements are products of self-reliance displayed by the Korean people in the era of the army-based revolution.
The Korean people, deeply aware through their historical experience that self-reliance is their only choice, will as ever seek to build a powerful and prosperous nation with their own efforts.

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Thus Juche can make a vital theoretical and practical contribution to the anti globalization movement. Let the flag of Juche fly at the head of the anti globalization struggle.'

http://www.uk-songun.com/index.php…

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The organic state is not the reflection of society; it is the agent that transforms and structures this society and which, by assigning it a destiny, makes a real whole elevated to the dignity of the politics from an aggregation without cohesion. - Alain de Benoist

« L’État organique n’est pas le reflet de la société ; il est l’agent qui transforme et structure cette société et qui, en lui assignant un destin, fait d’un agrégat sans cohésion un véritable ensemble élevé à la dignité du politique. »

Alain de Benoist

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The characteristic feature of the Spanish tragedy and the European tragedy is this: man has been disintegrated, uprooted, transformed into a number on the electoral roll and a number in the queue at the factory gate.

What this disintegrated man is crying out for is to feel the ground under his feet again, to be put in harmony once more with a collective destiny, a common destiny, or simply–calling things by their right names–with the destiny of his Patria.

- José Antonio Primo de Rivera

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Alain de Benoist on the depoliticization of the state:

Among the causes of what we habitually call the “malaise” of spirits, one of the most characteristic seems to be the progressive evacuation of the substance of the state. The state is depoliticized. Not in the sense of “everyday petty politics”, more present than ever. But in the sense of the political. The state is becoming purely managerial. Likewise, it puts itself in position to be overthrown by powers forming outside of it - and against it. The state denies it’s own essence, which is the principle of authority and sovereignty, in order to essentially concern itself with social and economic problems. But men don’t live solely for purchasing power. They live for something else entirely. We’ve never lived in such a rich society. Never has the quality of life of the many been so elevated. Never has education been so prevalent. Yet at the same time, malaise has never been greater, protest has never been so strong, unease has never reigned so much. The state has become prisoner of the “pleasure principle”: instead of appeasing demands, any satisfaction given to those who demand it only makes the demand more acute. It’s because the state itself has locked this demand in the social and economic enclosure. In the spiritual domain, the state no longer says anything, proposes anything, issues anything. It doesn’t sketch any destiny. I say that men, once they satisfy their elementary needs, aspire to the authority that justifies a project. As only a project can give meaning to their lives. But the state doesn’t give meaning. It doesn’t furnish reasons to live - just means to exist. (Nothing has value any more, but everything has a price). Since this role is no longer fulfilled by the state, sects, parties, pressure groups, think tanks try to fill it, in disorder and confusion. Expelled from its natural sphere, politics rises everywhere else.

Alain de Benoist, Les idées à l’endroit, 1979

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"Without the protection of a native government we were exposed to the poison of foreign ways. The national character was infected and the life of the nation was endangered. We had armed risings and political agitation. But we were not strong enough to put out the foreign power until the national consciousness was fully re-awakened." 

Michael Collins

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Leisure is not, as many presume, a pause in work, marked off time; but rather according to its concept, limitless and indivisible, and the source of all sensible work. It is the prerequisite of all free thought, all free activity. Consequently, very few are capable of it, and most of those who have saved time do nothing other than kill it. Not everyone is born for a free occupation, otherwise the world would be ordered differently and would show another face. [...] The unemployed worker who doesn’t possess this faculty is not a cynic philosopher jumping for joy in front of his barrel when he learns that he’s no longer forced to work, and that, in addition, he receives an unemployment allowance from the state allowing him to buy his bread and leeks? Instead he languishes, because he doesn’t know what to do with the empty time that assails him. Not only does he not have any means to use it, but this time is also harmful to him. He loses courage and feels degraded because he no longer fulfills his purpose.

Friedrich Georg Jünger, The Perfection of Technology

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Continuation of the notes.
December 31, 1922
In my writings on the national question I have already said that an abstract presentation of the question of nationalism in general is of no use at all. A distinction must necessarily be made between the nationalism of an oppressor nation and that of an oppressed nation, the nationalism of a big nation and that of a small nation.
In respect of the second kind of nationalism we, nationals of a big nation, have nearly always been guilty, in historic practice, of an infinite number of cases of violence; furthermore, we commit violence and insult an infinite number of times without noticing it. It is sufficient to recall my Volga reminiscences of how non-Russians are treated; how the Poles are not called by any other name than Polyachiska, how the Tatar is nicknamed Prince, how the Ukrainians are always Khokhols and the Georgians and other Caucasian nationals always Kapkasians.
That is why internationalism on the part of oppressors or "great" nations, as they are called (though they are great only in their violence, only great as bullies), must consist not only in the observance of the formal equality of nations but even in an inequality of the oppressor nation, the great nation, that must make up for the inequality which obtains in actual practice. Anybody who does not understand this has not grasped the real proletarian attitude to the national question, he is still essentially petty bourgeois in his point of view and is, therefore, sure to descend to the bourgeois point of view.
What is important for the proletarian? For the proletarian it is not only important, it is absolutely essential that he should be assured that the non-Russians place the greatest possible trust in the proletarian class struggle. What is needed to ensure this? Not merely formal equality. In one way or another, by one's attitude or by concessions, it is necessary to compensate the non-Russian for the lack of trust, for the suspicion and the insults to which the government of the "dominant" nation subjected them in the past.
I think it is unnecessary to explain this to Bolsheviks, to Communists, in greater detail. And I think that in the present instance, as far as the Georgian nation is concerned, we have a typical case in which a genuinely proletarian attitude makes profound caution, thoughtfulness and a readiness to compromise a matter of necessity for us. The Georgian [Stalin]who is neglectful of this aspect of the question, or who carelessly flings about accusations of "nationalist-socialism" (whereas he himself is a real and true "nationalist-socialist", and even a vulgar Great-Russian bully), violates, in substance, the interests of proletarian class solidarity, for nothing holds up the development and strengthening of proletarian class solidarity so much as national injustice; "offended" nationals are not sensitive to anything so much as to the feeling of equality and the violation of this equality, if only through negligence or jest- to the violation of that equality by their proletarian comrades. That is why in this case it is better to over-do rather than under-do the concessions and leniency towards the national minorities. That is why, in this case, the fundamental interest of proletarian class struggle, requires that we never adopt a formal attitude to the national question, but always take into account the specific attitude of the proletarian of the oppressed (or small) nation towards the oppressor (or great) nation.
Lenin
Taken down by M.V.
December 31, 1922
His final testament has a lot of hard crit on stalin. It's the single source trotskyites use to discredit him. But....this is not my intent, obviously, stalin proved right on many things, but also, nobody is free from criticism. My interest is to rephrase the national question in regards to smaller, bullied nations, and their proletarian relationship to various forms of nationalism.

https://www.marxists.org/…/works/1922/dec/testamnt/index.htm

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It seems to me that these flourishing sexual theories which are mainly hypothetical, and often quite arbitrary hypotheses, arise from the personal need to justify personal abnormality or hypertrophy in sexual life before bourgeois morality, and to entreat its patience.
Lenin

Wilberg on Wednesday - The Illness Is The Cure pt 18/46

Basic Guides to Self-Healing

1. Meditating Specific Symptoms

• Give yourself time to be aware of your immediate bodily sensations of any state of illness or dis-ease. Ask yourself and become more aware of where and how you feel your dis-ease in your body.
• Remind yourself that the pure awareness of any sensation, emotion or thought – however painful – is not itself a sensation, emotion or thought, and is innately pain free.
• Staying aware of any localised sensation or symptom, remind yourself that it is itself an awareness of some aspect of your life-world and relationships that is a source of unease or ‘dis-ease’.
• Wait until a spontaneous awareness arises of what specific aspect of your life-world it is that the sensation or feeling of dis-ease embodies – and is itself an awareness of.
• Grant awareness to one localised sensation or feeling of dis-ease or discomfort after another, staying with it long enough until it too recalls you to some specific aspect of your life world, present, past or future.
• Take time to follow this process through – making sure you attend to every region of your body in the process – until your overall sense of dis-ease lifts and your overall sense of self and body alters – transformed by the very awareness you are granting it.

2. Cultivating Whole-Body Awareness of Dis-ease

• Remember: only through awareness of your body as a whole can you gain and maintain a sense of your self as a whole – your ‘soul’.
• When you feel ill therefore, do not focus solely on your symptoms – on localised sensations, thoughts or emotions – but instead seek to maintain a sense of your body, self and life as whole.
• If you feel yourself suffering from what you think of as a purely ‘mental’ or emotional state, remember that every such state is always accompanied by a particular bodily sense of yourself.
• Conversely therefore, even if your symptoms seem to be purely bodily, attend also to the thoughts and emotions that tend to accompany them – for these will give you the best clue to the underlying life-problem that they symbol ise.
• Understand too, that any mental, emotional and bodily state that you experience when you feel ill is at the same time a ‘self state’ or ‘body identity‘ – a particular bodily way of feeling yourself – who you are.
• Attend therefore, not only to the way your symptoms ‘make you feel’ but to the way they make you feel – the overall sense of self or ‘body identity’ that accompanies them.
• If you can, choose to fully feel and indeed even amplify any felt sensations of dis-ease or sickness symptoms rather than seeking to suppress them.
• Trust that any mood or feeling, sense of dis-ease or bodily symptom – if it is given enough time to be fully felt, amplified and inwardly followed – will in time automatically transform itself into a new feeling, a new sense of your body and a new bodily sense of self or ‘body identity‘ – one now free of the need to embody or ‘somatise’ itself through symptoms of one sort or another.

Note:

The lack of whole-body awareness as such in our generally mind and head-oriented culture is itself a type of basic social pathology – one that is not resolved through simply placing equal emphasis on the heart and emotions as well as on the head and intellect. For both thoughts and emotions are experienced in localised ways and in localised regions of the body. Authentic whole-body awareness on the other hand, is comparable to the awareness of one’s body as whole – from top to toe, inside and outside – that is experienced in the womb, and that also arises when, for example, one enters and comes to rest in a hot bath. Maintaining whole body awareness means that this sensation of warmth pervading one’s whole body – and maintaining one’s awareness of it – persists unbroken, throughout the day. Put in other words the body as a whole – though having long left the warm and fluid waters of the womb – is itself experienced as a safe, fluid and warmth-filled womb of the self.

Wilberg on Wednesday - The Illness Is The Cure pt 17/46

Healing through Feeling

‘Diagnosis’ in Life Medicine and Life Doctoring does not mean seeking a medical label or ‘cause’ for one’s symptoms. It means getting to know oneself in a new and intimate feeling way (gnosis) through (dia) one’s symptoms.

Illness symptoms not only ‘affect’ one’s life and one’s overall mental, emotional or somatic state. Instead every bodily state or condition in other words, including states of illness – even a minor cold or flu – is not just some ‘physical’ state but is always and at the same time a state of consciousness – and vice versa. It is also a ‘self state’ or ‘body identity‘ – imbuing us with a different sense not just of ‘how’ we feel but of who we are. That is why through giving ourselves time to simply feel our symptoms more intensely rather than less – we can come to experience illness in a new way – not simply as a sign of some possible ‘disease’ but as a way of experiencing ourselves – as a distinct state of consciousness and a distinct self state and sense of self, a different ‘body identity’.

The key to self-healing is to feel and sense the symptoms we experience in a new way – not just as localised physical sensations or mental-emotional states however, but as self-states – as ways of feeling oneself and one’s life. Any symptoms, if fully felt and followed in this way – meditated rather than medicated – will lead inevitably to healing insights into one’s life and to a renewed and transformed sense of self. This is not because we are ‘curing’ ourselves without biomedical treatment, but because it is our very existence – our relation to life – that is what is most essentially calling for healing.

As in the ‘Process-Oriented’ work of Arnold Mindell, ‘healing’ can take the form of actively encouraging the patient to amplify or ‘aggravate’ their felt sensations of pain or discomfort – to feel them more intensely or acutely rather than less. What Mindell found was that this could bring about the release of emotions, mental images and inner comprehensions that expressed the felt meaning of their symptoms. Mindell has applied this method to all types of symptoms, and to all dimensions of the patient’s experience of illness – mental, emotional and somatic.

If a patient fears or wishes for death for example, he might ask them, there and then, to die – thus encouraging them to fearlessly feel and face the ‘death process’. He understood also that for some patients, as in essence it is for all of us, death itself is nothing to be fought against in principle – as biological medicine does – but it is an intrinsic part of life and is invariably a healing in itself i.e. a way of finding life meaning and fulfilment in other dimensions of reality in ways that might be or have become impossible in an individual’s physical life and existence.

Like Life Medicine, Mindell’s work challenges the historic and hitherto unquestioned premise of all forms of medicine – the fundamental belief that its purpose is to treat and if possible ‘cure’ disease and thereby also to prolong physical life and the life of the physical body. Ideas of a ‘life after death‘ are considered to be a mere matter of personal ‘belief’ rather than a scientific question – not surprisingly given that current ‘science’ ignores the fact that the ‘soul’ itself has its own innate bodily form, and that our felt body, as a body of awareness, is indeed also an eternal ‘soul body‘ which, like our dream body, has its source and reality in other dimensions of awareness beyond the ‘physical’. Indeed Mindell speaks of what I term the felt body or ‘lived body‘ – in other words our eternal soul body or body of awareness – as the ‘dreambody‘ or ‘dreaming body’.

This is a significant term for another reason. For it reflects also a deep comprehension that illness and its symptoms emerge in the same way as dreams and their symbols do and that illnesses can in this way be understood as ‘body dreams’ – or ‘body nightmares’. From this point of view it makes no more sense to regard sickness as an ‘unnatural’ deviation from a ‘normal’ state of health than it does to regard dreaming as an unnatural or abnormal disruption of sleep, or to regard nightmares in particular as an ‘unhealthy type’ of dream. The biomedical model of illness on the other hand, based as it is on the premise that illness is a meaningless deviation from health, is as outdated as certain pre-Freudian ‘scientific’ beliefs that dreams are meaningless discharges of neurological energy.

Life Medicine, on the other hand does not see dreams as a mere function or by-product of some organ of the physical body such as the brain. Instead, as we have seen, it understands the so-called ‘physical’ body as but an externally perceived portion of our lived body as a whole – our soul. This is essentially a subjective body or body of feeling awareness – and one whose field of awareness transcends the boundaries of the flesh to embrace our entire life world and everything we experience within it. It is this ‘soul body’ that we also experience directly both in our dreams and after death. It expresses itself in and as our entire waking and dream environment. The terms ‘dream body‘ or ‘dreaming body’ thus points to a fundamental truth – namely that we do not first ‘have’ a physical body – one which we then come to feel and experience subjectively and through which we experience a world – but rather dream our perception of the waking world and body a portion of ourselves within it in the same way that we do in the dream world itself.

Yet in broader terms, neither consciousness nor the body are something ‘in’ the world. Instead both worlds and bodies exist within consciousness, our entire experienced or lived world itself being itself our larger body or ‘lived body’.

This body is composed essentially of patterned tones and qualities of feeling awareness which both body and dream themselves into different worlds and dimensions of our lived experience.

Dreaming on the one hand, and what Heidegger called bodying on the other, are thus intimately connected. In dreaming we body our feeling awareness in non-physical forms. Conversely, in waking life we ‘dream’ that feeling awareness into what then appears from the outside as our human physical form. Yet our ‘felt body‘ – our subjective feeling awareness of this ‘physical’ body is in reality a distinct body of awareness in its own right – a ‘soul body‘ that we both manifest physically and also give manifold form to in our dreams. Hence the type of connections between dream symbols and physical symptoms that Freud was aware of and that revealed themselves in the following example of what Mindell calls ‘healing through feeling’ – a basic and innate capacity of our feeling awareness or ‘soul’ and its body.

Case Example 1

from Working with the Dreaming Body by Arnold Mindell:

“A patient with whom I was working was dying of stomach cancer. He was lying in the hospital bed, groaning and moaning in pain. Have you ever seen someone who is dying? It was really quite sad and terrifying. They flip quickly between trance states, ordinary consciousness and extreme pain. Once, when he was able to speak, he told me that the tumour in his stomach was unbearably painful. I had had an idea that we should focus on his proprioception, that is, his experience of the pain, so I told him that since he’d already been operated on unsuccessfully, we might try something new. He agreed, and so I suggested that he try to make the pain even worse.

He said he knew exactly how he could do that and told me that the pain felt like something in his stomach trying to break out. If he helped it break out, he said, the pain worsened. He lay on his back and started to increase the pressure in his stomach. He pushed his stomach out and kept pushing and pressing and exaggerating the pain until he felt as if he were going to explode. Suddenly, at the height of his pain, he said ‘Oh, Arny, I just want to explode!’ At that point he switched out of his body experience and began to talk to me. He told me that he needed to explode and asked if I would help him to do so. ‘My problem’, he said, ‘is that I’ve never expressed myself sufficiently, and even when I do it’s never enough.’

This problem is an ordinary, psychological problem that appears in many cases, but with him it became somatised and was pressing him now, urgently expressing itself in the form of a tumour. That was the end of our physical work together. He lay back and felt much better. Though he had been given only a short time to live and had been on the verge of death, his condition improved and he was discharged from the hospital. I went to see him afterwards very often, and every time he ‘exploded’ with me. He’d make noises, shout and scream, with absolutely no encouragement on my part.

… It was then also that I discovered the vital link between dreams and body symptoms. Shortly before he had entered the hospital, the patient dreamed that he an incurable disease and that the medicine for it was like a bomb. When I asked him about the bomb he made a very emotional sound and cried like a bomb dropping in the air, ‘it goes up in the air and spins around sshhhss … pfftfff.’ At that moment I knew that the cancer was the bomb in his dream … his body was literally exploding with pent-up expression. In this way his pain became his own medicine …

In a flash I discovered that there must be something like a dreambody, an entity which is both dream and body at once … The way I discovered the concept of the dreambody was through what I called amplification. I amplified my client’s body, or proprioceptive experience and I amplified the exploding process which was mirrored in his dream.”