Archive for June, 2007

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Why Crazy people Always Win a War

Friday, June 8th, 2007
In the New York Review of Books of this month (June 2007) Robert Cottrel reviews the book “A Russian Diary” by Anna Politkovskaya. She was a very famous Russian journalist who was assassinated October 2006 in Moskow. 

Anna had the Guts to oppose Putin. The book is about him and the current situation in Russia. Robert Cottwel is very negative about the way the West is treating Russia. They need the oil and gas and don’t see that a possible world-wide war between Russia and the West is near.

The story about Russia is very frightening. Putin is a brilliant manipulator who is combining all his old skills (KGB), his almost total power and the underlying aggression in Russia to “Take Revenge”. 

I want to focus on one aspect in this article. It is about Kayrov the President of Chechnya. He is appointed by Putin. Anna interviews him. She finds out that he is completely crazy. He loves to kill and torture and he is very open about that.

Later in the article we find a small poem that was published in Russian Newspapers. The poem is about taking over Estonia. This will be easy “Who in NATO cares? .. They are Cowards,… in the end we will strike and make a deal with those greedy pigs. Who will sell their mother for gas”. 

With this in mind I thought about the Ethics of War.

Question 1:  What is Ethics?

The definition of Ethics is simple: Things normal people don’t do in a normal situation. War is not normal so you would say ethics is not possible but soldiers are normal  people that are trained to experience war as normal. Soldiers are tested and trained to behave normal. Crazy people are not hired. A soldier can become crazy because of the war-situation and kill and torture innocent people. We, in The West, are doing are utmost best to prevent this.

Question 2: What is Crazy (Not Normal)?

This question is easy to answer because craziness is like all diseases standardized by psychiatrist. It is just a matter of answering a few questions and the treatment and the pills comes out.  

A theory that explains mental illness is called Interpersonal Theory (See Horowitz.L.M, (2003), Interpersonal Foundations of Psychopathology).

People interact and in the interaction they show expected behavior. If a person shows standardized behavior (he is not flexible) he is “MAD”.

An example of highly standardized not flexible behavior is Paranoid. People always react according to the same rules.

Crazy people are people that are like computers; they are programmed.  They don’t see, feel, or hear the Other. They are alone in the universe. They love to kill and torture because they and not able to be empathic. They look at their victims and have fun. They hate their victims because they look like greedy pigs who will sell their mother for gas and they love their mother. 

Why are  the soldiers of NATO cowards? The answer is simple because they are normal and most of them are empathic. They flip when they realize what the others have done to their friends, their comrades.

Now I know why the story about Russia is frightening. Putin is mad. Perhaps he is even paranoid. He wants to restore the old Russian Empire. Like all his Predecessors.

He knows that the West is totally dependent on energy and he plays with them. He gives the greedy pigs the food they want. He knows they will negociate to keep their wealth.

What he does not realize is that in the West people can become crazy and some of them are in the Army. When they are brutallized till the end they flip and they will use non-normal highly destructive weapons. If this happens we are in Armageddon.

Perhaps we have a chance when we change our selection policy of soldiers and select real crazy people.

This will frighten Putin.

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Catching the Light: About Steiner, Goethe and The Placebo Effect

Wednesday, June 6th, 2007

When I was working at ABN-bank I was doing a project to reorganize the Archives of the bank. One of my colleagues was heavily inspired by the work of Rudolph Steiner. He was very busy to create a new type of bank based on his ideas (now The Triodos-Bank). 

 

At the same time I met people that were practicing his ideas in the process of automation and organizational change processes. I loved what they were doing so I started to read his Books. 

 

Steiner came back in my life when I wanted to know more about Colors. I bought the Color Theory of Goethe and I found out that Goethe was the person that inspired Steiner the most. 

 

Goethe and Steiner became a force of Inspiration for Me and my Wife. She started to do Art-courses and I saw that she loved it. She even considered to become an Art-Therapist. We visited the Goetheaneum in Dornach (Zwitserland). We found an Antroposophic general practitioner. She uses Homeopathic medicine. I practiced Eurhythmics and lately I got a treatment to strengthen my “boundaries” where they use the Essential Oil of Flowers.

 

Arthur Zajonc is a well known Professor of Physics. He is also inspired by Rudolph Steiner and Goethe. Many people think the ideas of Steiner are weird and non-scientific but as you see even a professor of Physics knows that what he is saying to the world is of tremendous value. 

 

Arthur Zajonc wrote a beautifull book called “Catching The Light”. The book tries to explain Light.  It uses two perspectives. The perspective of Physics and the perspective of Steiner.

 

Zajonc shows that Science and Spirituality are basically telling the same story. Mind, Spirit and Soul are seeing the same thing but use different words to describe the same phenomenon.

 

 The most interesting part of the book is about the Imagination. Experiments show that we don’t see with our eyes. We see the world through our Imagination. 

 

Experiments in Physics show also that our Imagination (Our Creative Power) is controlling the Material world. Matter (Photons) is doing what the Imagination wants them it to do. We Get what we See.

 

Many people don’t understand the impact of this. They Think we are controlled by an outside Force (Fate) and they don’t realize that everything they are encountering in Life is created by Themselves. They don’t want to see that the Outside World is reflecting their personal creative process. If things go wrong they don’t realize that they want them to go wrong.

 

How can we make things go right? It’s simple. Imagine they are going right. Think positive.

Do you know why Medicine is working? 

Because we Believe its Working. 

I Love the Placebo effect!

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About the Unconnected Child

Tuesday, June 5th, 2007

cryingchildHumans are the most advanced toolmakers in nature. The main reason is that they are the less specialized organisms. They need tools to survive.

People are also the most complex organisms in nature. This complexity makes it possible to invent new possibilities and to work with specialized tools and animals (horse, cow, hammer, car, computer) and of course other humans.

To create new tools we use the sequence Copy, Experiment and Adjust. We use “What is available”, “Try things out” and and “Improve the Tool”. There is a Limit to the Process of Improvement. At a certain point in time the tool cannot be improved. The next step is that the tool is split up into an infrastructure and features. The featurers are again improved. A good example is the Car. Its Essential infrastructure is finished. All cars are “The Same Inside”.

Humans are great copiers and in childhood we copy the behaviour (the tools) of our parents.

A very sad situation is created when Our parents are not Connected. They are having arguments and conflicts. They are in competion and in competition there are a few Winners and many Losers.

The unconnected child operates from inner turmoil. Down deep this child feels something important is missing in his self and he is angry about it. This feeling may continue into adulthood. This void is likely to reveal itself as anger toward himself and parents, placing everyone at risk for becoming an angry family.

The connected child, growing up with a sense of well- being will get angry, but he learns to handle the anger in such a way that it does not take over his personality.

Connected parents know their children well, so they are less likely to create situations that provoke them and their children to anger. Attached parents know they don’t have to be harsh to be in control. They stimulate Experimentation and are happy when the child Adjusts its Behaviour. They are collaborating and know that the Playing the Infinite Game is much more important than Winning The Game.

When the unconnected child is an adult he will look at every situation out of an Unconnected Perspective. He will do everything to prevent that the people surrounding him will get out of connection. He will be a perfect peacemaker or coach.

But deep within he is unconnected to himself, his Essential Infrastructure. He will do everything to solve this and in the end he becomes a perfectionist demanding almost incomprehensible energies of himself to show that he is doing the right thing.

If this goes on the unconnected child will collapse. The Stress of demanding too much will take the body into a state of disconnection. First his body will generate Signals (Tired, Headache) but he will ignore them because he has to go on. If he ignores the signals the body will start to use its internal Resources to compensate. If these Resource are gone the body will be burnt-out and severe diseases will appear.

How can the unconnected child help himself?

The best way is to reverse in time and start all over again.

First disconnect with the parents that were disconnected.

Give their troubles back to them but with Love.

Then connect to the Child before it was Born and give it the Love it Deserves. After that the process of Copy, Experiment and Adjust can start but now he can Copy the Tools of people that are Playing the Infinite Game.

They know that The State of Perfection is never reached and new features will always be created.

Be your own Father and Mother and Love the Child Within.

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Spirit and Soul: How the Soul was Wiped of the Earth

Sunday, June 3rd, 2007

At the Rommelmarkt in Delft I bought the book Carl Jung and Soul Psychology.

In the book I found an article of James Hillman called Soul and Spirit. The article gave me a lof of insight so I started to look for James Hillman with Google.

I found the following: “Hillman’s 1997 book, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, outlines what he calls the acorn theory of the soul.

This theory states that each individual holds the potential for their unique possibilities inside themselves already, much as an acorn holds the pattern for an oak, invisible within itself.

It argues against the parental fallacy whereby our parents are seen as crucial in determining who we are by supplying us with genetic material and behavioral patterns.

Instead the book suggests for a reconnection with what is invisible within us, our daimon or acorn and its calling to the wider world of nature.

It argues against theories which attempt to map life into phases, suggesting that this is counter-productive and makes people feel like they are failing to live up to what is normal.

This in turn produces a truncated, normalized society of soulless mediocrity where evil is not allowed but injustice is everywhere—a society that cannot tolerate eccentricity or the further reaches of life experiences but sees them as illnesses to be prescriptive and argues against the idea of life-maps by which to try and grow properly.

Instead, Hillman suggests a reappraisal for each individual of their own childhood and present life to try and find their particular calling, the seed of their own acorn.

He replaces the notion of growing up, with the myth of growing down from the womb into a messy, confusing earthy world.

Hillman rejects formal logic in favour of reference to case histories of well known people and considers his arguments to be in line with the puer eternis or eternal youth whose brief burning existence could be seen in the work of romantic poets like Keats and Byron and in recently deceased young rock stars like Kurt Cobain.

Hillman also rejects causality as a defining framework and suggests in its place a shifting form of fate whereby events are not inevitable but bound to be expressed in some way dependent on the character of the soul in question”.

The citations speak for themselves.

What was my insight?

In the article Hillman shows the development of the symbol Soul.

Soul is an ambigouis concept because if it was a well defined concept it could not exist.

He showes that because of the process of definition the soul degenerated in time. The soul was wiped out of the Earth.  

Soul is not a concept but a perspective, a mediator. Soul is a reflection of ourselves in streaming water. It deepens Events into experiences.The Soul is the creator of metaphor, dreams, images and fantasies.

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How to Create a Good Will

Friday, June 1st, 2007

Assagioli was a student of Sigmund Freud. He introduced Freud’s teachings to the medical fraternity in Venice in 1910. Assagioli saw that there was a need for something beyond analysis. This was the need for a person to become whole – to be united in synthesis.

His most famous book is The Act of Will. What follows is a long citation from Chapter 7, pages 85-90.

 “Many attempts are being made to replace Competition with Cooperation, conflict with arbitration and agreement, based on an understanding of right relations between groups, classes, and nations.

All this is basically a question of WILLING.

 The individual has to discipline itself and choose the aims which as are consistent with the welfare of others and the common good of humanity.  

There are two methods of accomplishing this task:

(1): The elimination of Obstacles.

(2): The active development and expression of a Good Will. 

Selfishness constitutes the fundamental obstacle. Selfishness springs from the desire to possess and to dominate, which is an expression of the basic urges of self-preservation and self-assertion.

Self-centeredness. While less obvious and crude than selfishness, it is also a great hindrance because of its tendency to refer everything to the personal self, to consider everything from the angle of one’s own personality, to concentrate solely on one’s own ideas and emotional reactions. 

Lack of understanding. With understanding comes the abandonment of the inclination to criticize, to judge, to condemn. With understanding is born the recognition that an individual “Is As He Is,” and in a certain sense has the right to be what he is.

For he is the product of an enormous number of collective and individual elements rooted in the past and the present, and all kinds of conditioning over which he did not have control.

The individual is not fixed and immutable but is in a continual state of becoming.

Everyone can direct and regulate his own “becoming” process to a certain extent; thus comes into play the Responsibility he bears for the beneficent or harmful influence he has on other people”  

The most important capability to create a Good Will is to become Vulnerable, to allow others to Affect us.

If we do this we will not dominate others and others are incapable of dominating us.

Slave and Master play a simple game, the game of Control and allowing Control.

If we become vulnerable we can play the most satisfying Game of Creation.

LINKS

About Masters and Slaves

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