Education, Nutrition and A Personal LOVE of mine:

Dave and I went together to T. G. I. Friday's at Keystone at the Crossing on Indianapolis' north side. I saw a beautiful blond woman across the bar near the antique gas pump. It seemed that she had a halo around her head. I saw no other woman and paid no attention to anything except her. Dave and I went to stand near her and her friend. I was wearing my southern climate white suit that women in Miami had thought I looked like a member of the Miami Dolphins in after I had bought it in Coral Gables. Sherry's sister had a friend named Rick Osney who years later said: "So what do you do other than make cheap suits look good?" He was a retail clothing specialist. Sherry was most interested in Dave; she told me for months after, and the truth is Dave looked like a model and did some modeling and writing. I was so enchanted and enthusiastic that if it weren't for the fact that Sherry had just had a partial mastectomy and needed a worshipful admirer she would have blown me off very early, if not instantly.

I nattered on about all the success we were on the verge of achieving and the triplex we owned in Toronto as well as my travels. Sherry saw that her friend was interested in Dave. Her name was Sue Ann Blackwell. Sherry wasn't impressed by money or power but I guess the fact that I thought she was the most beautiful woman I had ever met or close to it, was a deciding factor in her agreeing to see me again. I had a policy about making love within three dates over the previous four years or I thought it wasn't likely to become a real relationship. What stupidity, eh? The limited time available in every city made this a little more justifiable than it sounds however. I remember she went to her parents in Bloomington for Thanksgiving and having her prepare a simple dinner at her place during one of our early dates. She is a Libran and over six years older than me. Libran's have the classic hourglass figure that I love and their sign is a good fit with me. I felt willing to marry her even before we made love. It was a totally ecstatic time and my infatuation was complete. With 60 hours towards her doctorate in education and a very loving family that had enabled a globally conscious person that oozed class, Sherry was my ideal.

There was a lot of conversation and I enjoyed her insights even if she didn't agree with me about whatever it was we were debating. She was open enough to hear my stories of psychic things and question the science behind them and see the possibilities. I told her that I was afraid of doing anything to cause us not to be friends but I still spoke my mind. There was no policy of three dates and I was on cloud nine. She had to make the first sexual moves. Her simple hamburger dinner was a disaster that we later laughed about for years. Yet, despite the fact that she saw I was a sweet person with all the right motivations she also feared the salesman in me. The truth became apparent in a couple of years as Dave developed a relationship with Sue Ann that he was the real 'operator' and Sherry still would keep me at arms length other than sex. I wrote poems and bought roses on may occasions. Before I left Indianapolis for Philadelphia I had made it clear I wanted to marry her.

I lost 20 pounds in 19 days while taking vitamins and eating my 1000 calorie two peanut butter sandwich diet. I was proud of my body and went back to see her. I remember meeting her at Subway Sam's and having lunch. She told me that she couldn't see me anymore if I was going to talk about marriage. Ours was to be an 'open relationship' and I felt the pangs of what other women that I had known must have felt. I adjusted and we soon were sharing talk about our other 'friends'. In a year or so, it seemed we were hurting each other. I was making more money and the business was doing well. I guess you could say I was a prime target for a lot of women who wanted wealth as part of the package. It became increasingly superficial and I trusted fewer people the richer I got.

Sherry had a couple of problems of a medical nature. Her hypoglycemia had been miss-diagnosed and she had been given massive cortisone shots that I believe had contributed to the cancer that resulted in the partial mastectomy. Women are not treated as men are when it comes to medical treatment; as well as every other aspect of misogyny in society. My studies of wholistics and hermetics were becoming quite extensive. I am going to quote authors from quite different sides of the fence.

David Depew and Bruce Weber of MIT wrote 'Darwinism Evolving' in 1995 and it says on pages 492 & 493:

“They also made it harder for the scientific worldview to be received with equanimity by other sources of culture. Indeed, since the reducing impulse undermines fairly huge tracts of experience, people like Wallace, who feel deeply about protecting phenomena they regard as existentially important, frequently conclude that they have no alternative except to embrace spiritualism, and sometimes even to attack the scientific worldview itself, if that is the only way to protect important spheres of experience that have been ejected

In response, scientists and philosophers who feel strongly about the liberating potential of a spare, materialistic worldview began to patrol the borderlands between the high-grade knowledge scientists have of natural systems and the low-grade opinions that in the view of science's most ardent defenders, dominate other spheres of culture and lead back toward the superstitious and authoritarian world of yester-year. 'Demarcating' science from other, less cognitively worthwhile forms of understanding was already a major feature of Darwin's world. A line beyond which the Newtonian paradigm could not apply was drawn at the boundary between physics and biology. We have seen how hesitant Darwin was to cross that line and what happened when he did. Twentieth-century people are sometimes prone to congratulate themselves for being above these quaint Victorian battles. They may have less reason to do so, however, than they think, for the fact is that throughout our own century, the same sort of battles with emotional overtones no less charged, have been waged at the contested line where biology meets psychology, and more generally where the natural sciences confront the human sciences. Dualisms between spirit and matter, and even between the mind and body, may have been pushed to the margins of respectable intellectual discourse. But methodological dualisms between what is covered by laws and what is to be 'hermeneutically appropriated' are still very much at the center of our cultural, or rather 'two cultural', life. Cognitive psychologists and neurophysiologists are even now busy reducing mind-states to brain-states, while interpretive or humanistic psychologists are proclaiming how meaningless the world would be if mind is nothing but brain. Interpretive anthropologists are filled with horror at what would disappear from the world if the rich cultural practices that seem to give meaning to our lives were to be shown to be little more than extremely sophisticated calculations on the part of self-interested genes. Conflicts of this sort would have given Darwin stomachaches almost as bad as the ones he endured over earlier demarcation controversies."

Hermeneuts is a new epithet for alchemists such as myself who OBSERVE and try to fit ALL the facts together and don't eject anything 'from science's confining Eden'.

"The rhetorical pattern of these battles is still depressingly similar, in fact, to Huxley's confrontation with Wilberforce. Hermeneuts ridicule scientists like Hamilton, Dawkins, and Wilson when they suggest that nothing was ever known about social cooperation until biologists discovered kin selection. Reductionists in turn criticize hermeneuts, now transformed largely into 'culturists', for bringing back ghosts and gods, just as their nineteenth-century predecessors were taxed with being 'vitalists' every time they said something about the complexity of development. Humanists identify scientists with an outdated materialistic reductionism. Scientists insist that hermeneutical intentionality is little more than disguised religion.

Perhaps, a way out of this fruitless dialectic between the 'two cultures', can be found if each party could give up at least one of its cherished preconceptions. It would be a good thing, for example, if heirs of the Enlightenment {Credited to Bacon, Shakespeare, Jonson and others with an alchemical background.} would stop thinking that if cultural phenomena are not reduced to some sort of mechanism, religious authoritarianism will immediately flood into the breach. They should also stop assuming that nothing is really known about human beings until the spirit of reductionism gets to work. Students of the human sciences have, after all, been learning things alongside scientists ever since modernity began. Among other things they have learned that humans are individuated as persons within the bonds of cultures and cultural roles, they are bound together with others in ways no less meaningful and valuable than the ways promoted by strongly dualistic religions. By the same token, it would be helpful if advocates of the interpretive disciplines would. abandon a tacit assumption sometimes found among them that nature is so constituted that it can never accommodate the rich and meaningful cultural phenomena humanists are dedicated to protecting, and that therefore cultural 'ought never' to be allowed to slip comfortably into naturalism. Humanists seem to have internalized this belief from their reductionist enemies, whose commitment to materialism is generally inseparable from their resolve to show up large parts of culture, especially religion, as illusions. These opponents, we may safely say, take in each other's laundry."

I wonder if these authors and their reductivist buddies are aware that all humanists are not without the ability to incorporate hard physical science to an even higher factual degree than they do. The quantum physicists like Wigner (Nobel laureate), Schrödinger and Heisenberg think that humanistic richness is robbed by reductionist unspiritual thinking. The global reifying thrust of materialism (Dr. Boddy of U of T, anthropology) is hopefully, in due course, going to return to a global deifying thrust of spiritualism. The only REALITY is NATURE and it assuredly includes ALL observable facts not just the 'Toilet Philosophy'.

If I may be allowed to quote someone who tries to keep an 'open mind' and use WHATEVER WORKS even if it isn't 'modernity'. I choose to quote a wholistic doctor by the name of Zoltan Rona who has his M.D. and M. Sc. He edited the 'Encyclopedia of Natural Healing' in 1997 which says on pages 33 and 34:

“It is misleading to call the natural health movement ‘alternative medicine’ as is often done. Natural Medicine is considered the founder of contemporary Western medicine. What we now call modern medicine is actually an aberration, the result of social change at the dawn of industrialization in the eighteenth century."

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Columnist in The ES Press Magazine
Author of Diverse Druids
Many books available at World-Mysteries.com include one this is an excerpt from called Integrating Soul and Science