Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Brain Chemistry, Addiction and Self-Actualization

Valentine's Day deserves two posts! This one is about the excellent article in the politically repulsive rag the Washington Post entitled An Affair Of the Head - They Say Love Is All About Brain Chemistry. Will You Be Dopamine? The author quotes an expert: "Love is a drug," says Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University and author of "Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love." "The ventral tegmental area is a clump of cells that make dopamine, a natural stimulant, and sends it out to many brain regions" when one is in love. "It's the same region affected when you feel the rush of cocaine."
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The (appropriately anonymous) fellow pictured was my drug of choice in 2005, replacing food. And I lost 30 pounds without trying in three months. Of course, after I decided I couldn't deal with all his addictions (including his addiction to my losing even more weight), I let the infatuation go. Deprived of that high, I returned to my primary addiction and during 2006 slowly gained back all 30 pounds.
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I've been going to various 12 step programs trying to overcome addictions to both food and love for almost 30 years. They've worked a little. I'm still alive and not yet homeless in the streets. I hold out hope that some combination of safe drug use (ibogaine??) and proper therapeutic techniques can help individuals break free of their substance or "process" addictions, whatever they may be.
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But societies themselves can be addictive - which is why we need a revolution. A great book on that topic is Ann Wilson Schaef's When Society Becomes an Addict, available, of course, on Amazon. Part of the description there reads: Rather than focusing on addictions to such substances as alcohol, drugs, or food or to processes such as gambling, sex, or work, this interesting and unusual treatise uses the concept of relationship addiction. According to this concept, an individual is seen as always being in a superior (or inferior) position to another, an addictive situation that creates self-centeredness, dishonesty, and greed. The symptons associated with relationship addiction are equated with those associated with the "White Male System" (described in Schaef's Women's Reality , LJ 6/15/81) and provide telling insights into why we have a dysfunctional society many of whose members are addicted to substances and processes.
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Oh, yes, how could I forget.
Women’s Reality: An Emerging Female System is another great Schaef book. Schaef is not quite a feminist decentralist secessionist, but she presents some basic theories useful to that viewpoint.
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Well, readers, time will tell if my food addiction kills me before love or the revolution saves me. Or presents some new level of aggravation!
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Just as a reminder, let me quote the top of my web site CarolMoore.Net to summarize the questions that I keep encouraging us all to answer: Can we move from a world ruled by God and State to a world alive with Consciousness and Community? Can we experience the one consciousness underlying the many faiths? Can we create networks and confederations of autonomous, self-governing communities to replace violently unified, warring nation states?

Happy Valentines vs. Bigotry

Today, when there was yet another brouhaha over alleged bigotry on a list serve, I sent an earlier version of the "Real vs. Imagined Bigotry" piece below. Then I updated it for this blog.
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Let's face it, right now Bush/Olmert and Company are willing to use nuclear weapons and even start a world nuclear war because of their REAL bigotry. They oppose the possibility that Muslims, Arabs, Russians, Chinese -- or anyone besides Judeo-Christians (preferably White Anglo-Saxon and Jewish/Israeli) -- might control the world's resources and political/military institutions. They would rather destroy the world! And, of course, they use false allegations of bigotry to excuse their "war on terrorism" which really is a war on Muslims and Arabs -- and any group that stands up for the individual or group or state rights of those not part of their religious/ethnic clique. (Obviously, my statements will be viewed subjectively by various readers who may stick them into some other category than that which I would, i.e., a statement analyzing real bigotry.)
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Anyway, think about the below and let's hope that there are NOT only a billion of us left on the planet to celebrate a very irradiated Valentine's Day NEXT year. . .
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See my article ever in progress:
BIGOTRY: REAL VERSUS IMAGINED
(updated version here)
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P.S. Why are Bush and company so determined to kill MY VALENTINES?? Their handsome photo below.


Saturday, February 03, 2007

150,000 Peaceniks Lift My Spirits! See Video


I've been depressed the last few dreary winter months. Between the Israel Lobby/neocon push to make Bush bomb Iran, the peace movements and Democrats' half-hearted attempts to stop it, and being constantly broke working more to stop it than support myself, I've been pretty down.
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Nevertheless United for Peace and Justice's star-studded Saturday, January 27th 150,000 plus person rally and march did cheer me! See my last blog entry.
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See my video of what I call the "US Out of Middle East! 01-27-07 Rally. " See hard core chants of "WHEN PEOPLE ARE OCCUPIED RESISTANCE IS JUSTIFIED!" And my photo at the end meant to keep my sweet rump out of Homeland Security's greedy hands. Plus see my photos page here. Buttons and t-shirts as always available, linked at the right hand panel ===>>
Can you guess what famous blogger is smoking the cigar?

Friday, February 02, 2007

Happy Ground Hog Day – Reincarnation Rocks!


Last week I watched Bill Murray's 1993 comedy Groundhog Day (buy movie) for the first time in a couple years. I was reminded it was one of my favorite movies -- and why.
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In the movie, Murray is a selfish, egocentric television reporter named Phil Conners (as in conman?) sent to cover the February 2nd “Groundhog Day” celebration in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. (I watched the actual celebration on television this morning!)
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After an annoying day where snow forces him to sleep over at a local inn, he awakens to the sound of Sonny and Cher’s "I got you, babe!" on the clock radio. He discovers to his horror that once again it is February 2, Groundhog Day - that day, and every day thereafter, over and over again.
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Once Phil realizes what is happening, he uses the strange phenomena to scam his way into women's pants by learning their likes one day, and pretending he knows the women or shares their likes when the day repeats. Phil also learns a host of impressive new skills, from ice sculpting to piano playing. These tactics finally work on his colleague Rita, who he begins to fall for. But the next day, she doesn't remember a thing and he has to start from scratch.
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Phil soon tires of his games - and this repeating life in general - so he tries to commit suicide. He suceeds, over and over again, in dozens of increasingly gruesome ways, always waking up the next morning alive and listening to Sonny and Cher. Bill Murray pulls these many vignettes off with his usual comic brilliance.
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Eventually Phil decides to try being helpful to others and learns to approach Rita with true affection. When finally he learns to love, he wakes up to February 3rd.
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The movie's theme - whether the writers realized it or not - is learning new lessons through reincarnation. Reincarnation is the process by which organized consciousness survives death and eventually passes on into a newly born infant. See my short article on Dr. Wambach & Reincarnation. Wambach did some of the most credible and detailed research using past-life regression to discover evidence of reincarnation.
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As a practitioner of self-hypnosis, I found it easy to access past live memories the first time I tried it in the mid-1970s. Low and behold, I discovered I had been an American soldier killed in World War II and the wife of an American soldier in the Civil War. HMMMM. Wonder if that could have anything to do with my anti-war, pro-peace obsessions??
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When watching Phil trying to kill himself, it occurred to me that this definitely is the stage at which too many males - and the dominant patriarchal culture they have created worldwide - have remained stuck for a couple thousand years. They are more skilled in the arts of conning and killing than the arts of loving. And now they have the nukes to kill all the many people they hate! (Today that means especially Arabs and Muslims, in a great surge of Judeo-Christian hatred and bigotry.)
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If more people realized that “you only live once” is one more bogus concept, if they realized you do in fact live over and over again, they might be more careful of the world they are creating. Because they will be born into it again. So if you are rich, white and male and think, like Phil Conners, you are getting away with something, just wait to see what the odds are you’ll come back in the next life poor, female and a person of color. I’d say 49 out of 50.
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Somebody tell that to Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, who have been accused of running their OWN version of Groundhog Day with the wars they promoted when they held various reins of power during FOUR Republican administrations (Nixon, Reagan, Bush I and Bush II.) WHEN WILL THIS NIGHTMARE END? And how?