.
We	come	by	this	honestly.	The	appearance	of	life	on	Earth	depended	on	the
sudden	ability	of	a	molecule,	DNA,	to	replicate	itself.	No	molecule	before	it
had	ever	done	that.	We	can	explain	the	evolution	of	the	universe	entirely	in
terms	of	such	creative	leaps,	or	“emergent	properties.”	Before	oxygen	and
hydrogen	could	discover	how	to	become	water,	the	cosmos	had	to	create
atoms,	which
weren’t
	present	at	the	Big	Bang,	and	atoms	had	to	turn	into
gases,	solids,	metals,	organic	molecules,	and	so	on.	None	of	these	events	were
simple	combinations	like	pouring	sugar	into	water.	The	sugar	may	disappear,
but	if	you	evaporate	the	water	you	find	that	the	sugar	has	remained	intact.
There’s	no	new	property	in	sugar	water	that	wasn’t	already	present	in	the	two
components	when	they	were	separate.
An	emergent	property,	on	the	other	hand,	is	a	creative	leap	that	produces
something	out	of	nothing.	In	spiritual	terms	the	cycle	of	birth	and	rebirth	is	a
workshop	for	making	creative	leaps	of	the	soul.	The	natural	and	the
supernatural	are	not	doing	different	things	but	are	involved	in	transformation
on	separate	levels.	At	the	moment	of	death	the	ingredients	of	your	old	body
and	old	identity	disappear.	Your	DNA	and	everything	it	created	devolve	back
to	their	simple	component	parts.	Your	memories	dissolve	back	into	raw
information.	None	of	this	raw	material	is	simply	recombined	to	produce	a
slightly	altered	person.	To	produce	a	new	body	capable	of	making	new
memories,	the	person	who	emerges	must	be	new.	You	do	not	acquire	a	new
soul,	because	the	soul	doesn’t	have	content.	It’s	not	“you”	but	the	center
around	which	“you”	coalesces,	time	after	time.	It’s	your	zero	point.
I	was	recently	reminded	of	just	how	uncanny	this	transformation	is.	I
know	a	couple	from	Italy	who	suffered	a	terrible	family	tragedy	two	years	ago
when	their	teenage	son,	Enrico,	killed	himself.	He	had	gotten	drunk	with
some	friends,	one	of	whom	started	playing	with	his	father’s	handgun.	It	went
off	and	Enrico	was	killed.	His	family	was	devastated,	all	the	more	when	it
was	suggested	but	never	proved	that	their	son	had	shot	himself	playing
Russian	roulette.
A	week	after	he	died	his	mother	went	into	his	bedroom.	She	had	the
impulse	to	pray	for	her	son,	and	as	she	knelt	by	his	bed	she	heard	a	noise.	A
remote-control	toy	car	of	Enrico’s	had	fallen	off	the	shelf	for
no
	apparent
reason.	It	began	to	run	around	the	floor,	and	the	mother	removed	its	batteries.
Still	it	continued	to	run.	This	strange	phenomenon	lasted	three	days,	she	toldme.	It	was	witnessed	by	the	entire	family,	and	Enrico’s	older	sister,	the	one	he
was	closest	to,	insisted	that	her	brother	was	operating	the	car.	She	asked	it
questions,	as	one	would	a	Ouija	board,	and	the	car	would	go	left	or	right	to
signal	yes	or	no.
Months	later	Enrico’s	father	happened	to	be	in	India,	and	he	went	to	a
jyotishi
,	or	astrologer.	Certain	jyotishis	do	not	cast	your	chart	but	consult
already	written	charts,	many	dating	back	centuries,	that	apply	to	the	person
who	comes	for	a	reading.	(This	decision	is	made	according	to	the	time	a
person	appears	and	by	matching	certain	personal	data	with	charts	that	the
astrologer	has	on	hand.)	This	was	true	of	my	friend,	who	was	told	the
following	story:	In	his	previous	lifetime	he	had	lived	on	the	west	coast	of
India.	He	was	desperate	to	have	a	son,	but	unfortunately	his	wife	was	barren.
The	couple	adopted	a	baby	boy	when	suddenly	she	became	pregnant	and	in
time	delivered	a	boy	of	their	own.
After	the	biological	son’s	birth,	the	father	began	to	ignore	the	adopted	boy
and	abuse	him.	Tormented	by	this,	the	boy	committed	suicide	at	exactly	the
same	age	as	Enrico.	The	astrologer	told	my	friend	that	there	was	a	connection
here.	The	former	son	was	reborn	as	Enrico,	and	he	committed	suicide	again	to
show	his	father	what	it	was	like	to	lose	a	real	son.	Naturally,	my	friend	was
quite	shaken	to	hear	this,	but	when	he	met	me	some	months	later,	he	said	that
the	final	result	was	a	sense	of	peace.	He	had	come	to	terms	with	Enrico’s
tragic	death	and	understood	the	karma	behind	it.
I	have	no	idea	how	many	readers	will	scoff	at	this	tale	and	how	many	will
consider	it	uncanny	but	possibly	true.	To	me,	it	says	a	great	deal	about	how
mysteriously	life	and	death	are	woven	together.	They	are	two	aspects	of	the
same	creative	act.	Our	brains	are	set	up
to
	operate	in	time	and	space.	We	do
not	witness	the	mechanics	of	creation	outside	that	framework.	But	the	life	you
are	experiencing	now,	the	one	that	preceded	it,	and	the	one	that	will	follow
didn’t	appear	out	of	nowhere.	They	appeared	through	a	continuous,	evolving
consciousness—the	real	you.	There	is	a	gap	between	lifetimes	that	we	cannot
observe,	yet	your	soul	keeps	track	of	you	as	you	enter	the	gap	and	reemerge.
Consciousness	doesn’t	lose	track	of	itself;	the	zero	point	of	the	soul	is	just	as
capable	of	correlating	events	across	time	and	space	as	the	Zero	Point	Field	is.
In	this	story	father	and	son	remained	joined	across	the	gap	between	birth
and	death.	They	unconsciously	recognized	each	other,	they	carried	out	a
common	purpose,	and	they	worked	out	karma	together—all	these	things
defied	death.	At	the	same	time	their	physical	bodies,	their	private	memories,
and	their	sense	of	identity	were	transient—these	didn’t	survive	death.	Nature
is	built	from	the	same	intricate	relationships.	The	oxygen	atoms	locked	in	a
water	molecule	or	in	your	brain	are	still	themselves,	but	they	have	learned	to
relate	in	a	totally	new	way,	making	it	seem	as	if	each	separate	atom	has
vanished—that	is	to	say,	died.	I	can’t	emphasize	enough	that	if	science	cannotexplain	the	emergence	of	wetness	from	dryness,	it	cannot	explain	the
emergence	of	consciousness	in	the	brain.	True	creative	leaps	are	always
inexplicable	and	therefore	miraculous.
The	Source	of	Everything
What	science	should	do	is	hold	the	miracle	under	a	microscope	to	get	closer
to	where	creation	occurs.	There	are	faint	physical	traces	to	be	followed	down
to	a	very	subtle	level.	It	has	long	been	known	that	the	brain,	and	the	body	as	a
whole,	is	surrounded	by	a	very	weak	electromagnetic	field.	With	the	proper
photographic	emulsion,	this


 Raisin – Vitis vinifera – 10 g
Pathya – Haritaki – Chebulic myrobalan – Terminalia chebula – fruit
rind – 10 g
Sita – Sugar Candy – 20 g
Fine powder of haritaki and sugar candy is pounded with raisin paste
to prepare tablet.
Uses•
•
•
•
•Gastro oesophageal reux disorder – upward reux of stomach acid S
erosion of stomach mucous membrane – burning, gastritis, dyspepsia,
excessive thirst,
Murcha – unconsciousness, fainting episodes
Bhrama – dizziness, psychosis
Mandagni – low digestion strength
Amavata – Rheumatoid arthritis
Triphala Guggulu
Triphala – Amla, Haritaki, Vibhitaki – 30 g rams
Pippali – Long pepper fruit – Piper longum – 10 g rams
Guggulu – Commiphora mukul 50 grams.
If the guggulu is soft, then pound all these three components together and
roll pills.
If guggulu is hard, add double quantity of water to it, heat till it melts. Add
rest ingredients and roll pills of 500 mg. Dry under sunshade.
Uses
Piles, stula, non healing wounds, aches and pains.
Dose – 500 mg pills – up to 6 per day, after food, in divided doses (1–2
tablets 2–3 times a day)
If made well, can be stored for 1–2 years.
Avoid during pregnancy.1.
2.
3.66. Ghanavati – Kashayas
Made into Tablets
Y
Ghanavati can also be called Kwatha vati or Kashaya vati, kashayam tablet,
kwatham tablet etc. It is the condensed tablet version of Kashaya – herbal
decoction.
Preparation Method –
First kashaya is prepared.
Kashaya is ltered and the heating process is continued.
Heating is continued till the kashaya turns to a thick, semisolid consistency.
e raw herbs used for preparing kashaya – are collected and made into ne
powder.
e ne powder is added to the thick semi solid Kashaya and a mass is
prepared. It is rolled into the form of pills of 500 m g each.
It is dried under sunshade, preserved in air tight container.
Advantages of Ghanavati/Kashayam Tablets –
Easy dosage xing
Easy to carry and handle
Helps to avoid bitter/astringent taste of Kashaya.4.
5.
6.Easy to transport
Lesser dose.
No need of preservative. (Kashaya needs preservatives).
Disadvantages of Kwatham Tablet –
When compared to kwatham tablets, regular kashayas are easily absorbed and
assimilated into the body. is is especially applicable when we prepare kashaya
afresh and administer it in mild hot condition.
Dose of Ghanavati – Usual adult dose is 2 tablets 3 times a day before or after
food.
Shelf Life – About 1 year.
Store in a cool dry place, away from direct sunlight.67. Masi Kalpana – Ash
Therapy
Y
Carbonization of the drugs to make them therapeutically t for external use.
Or conversion of herbs into carbon/soot/charcoal/ash form.
ese substances can be of plant, animal or mineral origin.
e rst classical reference of Masi preparation is found in Sushruta Samhita.
Master Sushruta explains about preparing soot out of Black snake shed skin.
In Sushruta Samhita Shareera Sthana section, 10th chapter, 11th Verse,
Master Sushruta explains that, when the child birth does not happen at the
expected time, then black snake’s shed skin should be burnt and vagina is
exposed to the smoke coming out of its burning.
In Sushruta Samhita Chikitsa Sthana 9/17, Sushruta explains that the paste
made out of ash of black snake skin is useful for external application is useful
for the treatment of vitiligo.
In Sushruta Samhita Chikitsa Sthana 1/101, Sushruta explains that ivory,
skin, body hairs, hoof, horn, bones of four legged animals are burnt into ash,
made paste with sesame oil and applied locally on skin for regrowth of the lost
hair.
Two methods
Open Burning Method: Here the contents are burnt in open air. It is burnt
on a mud or an iron pan. is is useful in case of softer herbs such as Triphala.
It is the most commonly used method.Closed Burning Method: Here the contents are burnt in a closed and sealed
container. For example, burning herbs in a mud pot after sealing the mud pot
with a plate. It is used for harder substances. It is less commonly practiced.
Open Method of Preparation
e substance of any origin, selected for masi preparation has to be powdered.
It has to be roasted in a open pan until it turns to be black soot like powder.
e end product is triturated to ne homogenous powder & preserved in air
tight container.
Triphala Masi: (Open method)
It is made into paste with honey and applied over syphilitic wounds.
It is added with 20% salt and used for tooth brushing.
Hastidanta Masi: (Closed method) – It is made into paste with thick
decoction of tree turmeric (Daruharidra – Berberis aristata) and goat milk and
applied over skin areas where hair growth is desired.
Indications
Baldness, early greying, alopecia areata and other hair related problems.
Shelf Life: It can be stored for many years.•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•68. Principles of Making
Herbal Ghee – Ghritham
Y
As per Ayurveda, cow ghee has a unique quality – Samskarasya Anuvartanat. It
takes the herb properties into it, without leaving its own inherent properties –
A unique nature.
Aims of Herbal Ghee Medicines
To extract fat soluble active principles.
To make use of therapeutic values of ghee.
To enhance the shelf life of the preparation.
To enhance the medicine absorption.
To make the preparation more palatable.
Ayurvedic Herbal Ghee Uses
Gandusha – Oil pulling – ghee pulling
Karnapoorana – ear drops
Nasya – Nose drops
Massage (Shata Dhauta Ghrita, Jatyadi Ghrita) etc
Hair care•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•Enema
Oral consumption
Any Ayurvedic Ghee Has ree Components
Kalka – paste of herbs
Cow ghee – Ghrita
Drava – Liquids – water/milk/Kashaya/juice extracts etc.
Proportions of 3 Components
Kalka – paste – 1 part/1 ounce/100 grams
Ghrita – ghee – 4 parts/4 ounce/400 ml
Drava – Liquids – 16 parts/16 ounce/1600 ml
1:4:16
Kalka – Paste – Fresh herb – crush it in a mortar and pestle, and use it afresh
For Dry herb – take ne powder
Add suﬃcient quantity water
Make a semisolid paste
Kashaya – Herbal Decoction
1 part of herb + 16 parts of water boiled and reduced to ¼ parts S
lter.
1+16 S 1/4
100 grams + 1600 ml S 400 ml•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•Principle Behind Making of Ayurvedic Herbal Ghee
Herb (Paste) + Ghee + Liquid (kashaya, juice extract, m ilk etc)
Herb + Ghee – fat soluble principles of herbs transfer into ghee
Kashaya = water soluble extract of the herb.
It contains water soluble principles of herb.
is also gets transferred into ghee.
Ayurvedic herbal ghee = Ghee soluble herb principles + Water soluble
active principles
Steps Involved in Ayurvedic Ghee Making
Get the ghee. Keep it ready.
Get the kashaya ingredients – Make Kashaya
Get the kalka herb – make paste.
Start making the herbal ghee.
Till When to Heat the Ghee
e ghee is heated till the total moisture quantity evaporates from the
mix.
e nal product should be devoid of any moisture content.
Herb + ghee + liquid (kashaya/ water /juice extract/milk etc)
How to Know at Herbal Ghee Is Finally Made?
First take the ghee in the vessel. Add Kalka (herbal paste) to it.
Mark the level of the ghee in the vessel.•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•Approximately the


 Sodium 91mg;
Carbohydrate 64g (Dietary Fiber 13g); Protein 17g.
Vary It! Any dark leafy green (chard, beet tops, collard greens, or
kale) may be substituted for the spinach. You can use chopped
frozen greens in this smoothie if you don’t have fresh on hand.
V e g e t a b l e  S o u pPrep time: About 3 min • Blending time: 1 min • Heating time: 1–5
min • Yield: 2 servings
Ingr edients
1/2 cucumber
1 carrot
1 cup vegetable or chicken broth
3 tomatoes, cored and quartered
1 cup chopped chard or kale
1/2 cup cilantro or parsley
Dir ections
1 Peel the cucumber and cut it and the carrot into chunks.
2 Combine the broth, tomatoes, chard or kale, cilantro or parsley,
cucumber, and carrot in the blender container.
3 Secure the lid on the container.
4 Starting on a low speed and gradually easing toward high, blend
the ingredients for 45 seconds or until smooth and there are no
visible pieces of vegetable in the mixture.
5 Pour into a saucepan and heat over medium-high heat for 5 to
10 minutes or until carrot is soft; or pour into a microwave-safe
bowl and microwave on high for 1 minute or until hot.
6 Pour the soup into 2 bowls, and enjoy!
Per serving: Calories 98 (From Fat 14); Fat 2g (Saturated 0g); Cholesterol 0mg; Sodium 557mg;
Carbohydrate 21g (Dietary Fiber 5g); Protein 5g.
Vary It! If you want a chunkier soup, pulse for 10 to 20 seconds in
Step 4.Tip: If you own a Vitamix blender, skip Step 5 and run the
machine on high for 4 to 6 minutes or until the soup is hot.
B e a n  S o u p
Prep time: About 3 min • Blending time: 1 min • Heating time: 1–5
min • Yield: 2 servings
Ingr edients
2 green onions
2 celery stalks
1 carrot
1 cup vegetable or chicken broth
1 cup cooked kidney or navy beans
1 tablespoon fresh savory or thyme leaves
Dir ections
1 Cut the onions, celery, and carrot into chunks.
2 Combine the broth, onions, celery, beans, carrot, and savory or
thyme in the blender container.
3 Secure the lid on the container.
4 Starting on a low speed and gradually easing toward high, blend
the ingredients for 45 seconds or until smooth and there are no
visible pieces of vegetable in the mixture.
5 Pour into a saucepan and heat over medium-high heat for 5 to
10 minutes or until vegetables are soft; or pour into a
microwave-safe bowl and microwave on high for 1 minute or
until hot.
6 Pour the soup into 2 bowls, and enjoy!Per serving: Calories 155 (From Fat 9); Fat 1g (Saturated 0g); Cholesterol 0mg; Sodium 574mg;
Carbohydrate 29g (Dietary Fiber 8g); Protein 10g.
Vary It! If you want a chunkier soup, pulse for 10 to 20 seconds in
Step 4.
Tip: If you own a Vitamix blender, skip Step 5 and run the
machine on high for 4 to 6 minutes or until the soup is hot.
C a b b a g e  S l a w
Prep time: About 3 min • Blending time: 1 min • Yield: 2 servings
Ingr edients
2 green onions
2 celery stalks
1 carrot
1 apple
1 cup fresh carrot juice
1/2 cup plain yogurt
1 cup chopped red or green cabbage
2 tablespoons chopped walnuts
1 tablespoon fresh thyme leaves
Dir ections
1 Cut the onions, celery, and carrot into chunks.
2 Peel the apple (if not organic) and cut into quarters. Remove
the core and seeds.
3 Combine the carrot juice, yogurt, onions, cabbage, celery,
carrot, apple, walnuts, and thyme in the blender container.4 Secure the lid on the container.
5 Starting on a low speed and gradually easing toward high, blend
the ingredients for 45 seconds or until smooth and there are no
visible pieces of vegetable in the mixture.
6 Pour the smoothie into 2 glasses, and enjoy!
Per serving: Calories 190 (From Fat 57); Fat 6g (Saturated 1g); Cholesterol 4mg; Sodium 183mg;
Carbohydrate 30g (Dietary Fiber 5g); Protein 7g.
V egetable Mocktail and Cocktail
Smoothies
Using vegetable smoothies at social gatherings is just plain
smart. You want a slightly sweet and pleasing drink to share
with friends, so these nonalcoholic and spiked cocktails are not
only delicious but good for you. Table 16-1 lists vegetables that
work well for party smoothies, tells you how much to use, and
outlines what they’ll do for your body.M i n t e d  C a r r o t  M o c k t a i l
Prep time: About 4 min • Blending time: 1 min • Yield: 2 servings
Ingr edients
2 mangoes
2 slices pineapple, 1/2 inch thick
1 carrot, lightly steamed
3/4 cup fresh carrot juice
2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
2 tablespoons chopped fresh mint
2 to 4 fresh mint leaves for garnish (optional)Dir ections
1 Peel the mangoes and remove the stones. Cut the mangoes and
pineapple slices into chunks.
2 Cut the carrot into chunks.
3 Combine the carrot juice, lemon juice, mangoes, pineapple,
carrot, and chopped mint in the blender container.
4 Secure the lid on the container.
5 Starting on a low speed and gradually easing toward high, blend
the ingredients for 45 seconds or until smooth and there are no
visible pieces of vegetable in the mixture.
6 Pour the smoothie into 2 glasses, garnish with fresh mint leaves
(if using), and enjoy!
Per serving: Calories 204 (From Fat 9); Fat 1g (Saturated 0g); Cholesterol 0mg; Sodium 73mg;
Carbohydrate 52g (Dietary Fiber 6g); Protein 3g.
S p i c y  T o m a t o  M o c k t a i l
Prep time: About 4 min • Blending time: 1 min • Yield: 2 servings
Ingr edients
1 apple
3/4 cup fresh carrot juice
2 tablespoons fresh lime juice
4 tomatoes, quartered
2 stalks celery
2 slices pineapple, 1/2 inch thick
1/2 to 1 jalapeno pepper
2 tablespoons chopped fresh cilantro2 to 4 fresh cilantro leaves for garnish (optional)
Dir ections
1 Peel the apple (if not organic) and cut into quarters. Remove
the core and seeds.
2 Cut the celery stalks and pineapple slices into chunks.
3 Combine the carrot juice, lime juice, tomatoes, celery,
pineapple, apple, hot pepper, and cilantro.
4 Secure the lid on the container.
5 Starting on a low speed and gradually easing toward high, blend
the ingredients for 45 seconds or until smooth and there are no
visible pieces of vegetable in the mixture.
6 Pour the smoothie into 2 glasses, garnish with fresh cilantro
leaves (if using), and enjoy!
Per serving: Calories 161 (From Fat 14); Fat 2g (Saturated 0g); Cholesterol 0mg; Sodium 124mg;
Carbohydrate 39g (Dietary Fiber 6g); Protein 4g.
Tip: Rim the edges of the glasses with coarse salt. Combine 1/2 cup
coarse salt and 1 tablespoon fresh, chopped parsley, thyme, or
cilantro. Tip into a shallow dish or saucer. Run a wedge of lime or
lemon around the edges of the glasses. Turn glasses upside down
and set into the herbed salt. Twist to secure salt to the rim of the
glasses and remove. Turn the right side up and ﬁll with the
smoothie mixture.
C a r r o t  M o c k  M i m o s a
Prep time: About 3 min • Blending time: 1 min • Yield: 2 servings
Ingr edients
2 slices pineapple, 1/2 inch thick1/2 cup fresh carrot juice
1/2 cup fresh orange juice
2 carrots, lightly steamed
Ice
1/2 cup club soda
Dir ections
1 Cut the pineapple slices into chunks.
2 Combine the carrot juice, orange juice, pineapple, and carrots
in the blender container.
3 Secure the lid on the container.
4 Starting on a low speed and gradually easing toward high, blend
the ingredients for 45 seconds or until smooth and there are no
visible pieces of vegetable in the mixture.
5 Fill 2 tall glasses with ice halfway. Pour the smoothie into the
glasses, about three-quarters full. Add club soda, and enjoy!
Per serving: Calories 103 (From Fat 4); Fat 0g (Saturated


 medical research is to improve Americans' health most effectively
and efficiently. In our opinion, the primary purpose of commercially-funded clinical
research is to maximize financial return on investment, not health."105
This book's central focus is to steer this discussion back to where, as a scientific
debate, it belongs: on the path to prejudice-free analysis of facts. To clarify one more
time, the point is not to show that diseases like cervical cancer, SARS, AIDS or
hepatitis C do not exist. No serious critic of reigning virus theories has any doubt
that people or animals (as with avian flu) are or could become sick (although many
are not really sick at all, but are only defined as sick, and then are made sick or
killed). Instead, the central question is: What really causes these diseases known as
cervical cancer, avian flu, SARS, AIDS and hepatitis C? Is it a virus? Is it a virus in
combination with other causes? Or is it not a virus at all, but rather something very
different?
We will embark on a detailed examination of the hypotheses of science, politics
and the media elite, looking at all of the available evidence. At the same time,
27 Introduction
alternative explanations or causes will be described: substances like drugs, medicines,
pesticides, heavy metals or insufficient nutrition. All these factors can severely
damage or even completely destroy the immune system-and their devastating
effects can be encountered in the victims hastily branded with a diagnosis of cervical
cancer, avian flu, SARS, AIDS or hepatitis C. Ultimately they are victims of complex,
broad socio-economic and political forces and further marginalized and degraded
by a profession that pledges to "do no harm."
Chapter 1 explains what microbes (bacteria, fungi, viruses) actually are, and
what role they play in the complete cycle of life and the ways in which the medical
establishment and the media have turned these microbes into our worst enemies. In
Chapter 2, we'll travel from the middle of the 19'h century until modem times, in
order to separate myth from reality in microbe theory. Louis Pasteur and Robert
Koch rose to become medicine's shining lights, but we cannot leave them out of this
analysis since they were certainly not immune from lying and deception. Nor will
we shy away from the question of whether polio is a viral disease or if poisons like
pesticides have not made at least their contribution to the destruction of the spinal
nerves that is so typical of this disease.
With this background knowledge, we dive into the past three decades: into the
time of modem virus research. Chapter 3 thus begins with the history of HIV I AIDS,
which arrived in the early 1980s, triggering an almost unprecedented mass panic
that continues to this day. And now the whole world also seems to accept that
Hepatitis C, BSE, SARS, avian flu and cervical cancer are also triggered by a causative
agent (pathogen). In Chapters 4 through 8, we will see that these statements do not
hold up and that other explanations make more sense.
28 Cha pter 1
Medicine Presents a Distorted Picture of
Microbes
"The gods are innocent of man' s suffering. Our diseases and
physical pains are the products of excess!"
Pythagoras (570 -510 B.C.)
"The microbe is nothin g, the terrain is everything!"1
Louis Pasteur
'Where there is life, there are germs. "2
Robinson Verner
"Diet clearly has a major influence on man y diseases and
modulates the complex internal community of microor ganisms.
These microor ganism s, weighin g up to 1 kg in a normal adult
human, may total lOO trillion cells. "3
Jeremy Nicholson
Prof essor of Biochemistry
Microbes: Br an ded as Scapegoa ts
People are very susceptible to the idea that certain microbes act like predators,
stalking our communities for victims and causing the most serious illnesses like
SARS (pulmonary infection) or hepatitis C (liver damage). Such an idea is thoroughly
simple, perhaps too simple. As psychology and social science have discovered,
humans have a propensity for simplistic solutions, particularly in a world that seems
to be growing increasingly complic ated.4 It also allows for a concept of the "enemy
at the gates" allowing individuals to shift responsibilit y for their illnesses to a fungus,
a bacteria or a virus. "Man prefers to perish rather than change his habits!" the
author Leo Tolstoy once said.
But this scapegoat thinking has often led humanity astray, be it in personal life, in
science or in politics. Fishermen and politicians both earnestly assert that seals and
dolphins contribute to the depletion of ocean fish stocks. So, each year in Canada,
29 -
Chap ter 1
one hundred thousand seals-often just a few days old-are battered to death, 5 while
every autumn in Japan, thousands of dolphins are hacked apart while still alive.6
But in their blind hate for the animals, the slaughterers completely overlook the
fact that it is their own species-Homo sapiens-is responsible for the state of our
oceans and that through massive overexploitation and high-technology catch
methods, we have plundered the world's fish stocks. A German-Canadian study that
appeared in Nature in 2003, found that industrialized fishing has dramatically
reduced the stocks of predators like tuna and swordfishes, marlins, cod, halibut, ray
and flounder in the world's oceans since the beginning of commercial fishing in the
1950s-by no less than 90%.7
Our modern concept of the lethal microbes similarly avoids the big picture issues.
Some can be harmful; neverth eless, it is negligent to ignore the role individual
behaviors (nutrition, drug consumption, etc.) play instead of simply pointing a
finger at these microorganisms. "Whether the method of treatment affects the
animal predators in the wilderness or the bacteria in the gut, it is always risky to
tamper with the natural balance of forces in nature," writes microbiologist and
Pulitzer Prize winner Rene Dubos.8
Medical and biological realities, like social ones, are just not that simple.
Renowned immunology and biology professor Edward Golub's rule of thumb is that,
"if you can fit the solution to a complex problem on a bumper sticker, it is wrong! I
tried to condense my book The Limits of Medicine: How Science Shapes Our Hope for
the Cure to fit onto a bumper sticker and couldn't."9
The complexities of the world-and above all, the living world-might seem too
difficult for any one individual to grasp with even approximate comprehension.
Informing ourselves on economics, culture, politics and medical science seems
incredibly daunting. Man "is not an Aristotelian god that encompasses all existence;
he is a creature with a development who can only comprehend a fraction of reality,"
writes social psychologist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann. 10 Supposed experts are no
exception. Most doctors themselves, for instance, have hardly more than a lay
understanding of the concepts that loom on the horizons of molecular biology,
including research into microbes and their role in the onset of diseases.
Correspondin gly, if you asked most doctors to define the unmistak able
characteristics of retroviruses (HIV, for example, is claimed to be one), they'd most
likely shrug their shoulders or throw out a bewildering cryptic respons e. Another
challenge for many doctors would be a description of how the polymerase chain
reaction (PCR) f unctions, even though it developed into a key technol ogy in
molecular biology in the 1990s, and is brought up again and again in connection
with the alleged discovery of the so-called avian flu virus HSNl (on PCR, see chapter
3, about the "miracle weapons" of the epidemic inventors).
30 Medicine Presents a Distorted Picture of Microbes
Ignorance and the desire for oversimplification are root problems in medical
science. As early as 1916, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein remarked in his
diary: "Humanity has always searched for a science in which simplex sigillum veri
ist," essentially meaning, "simplicity is a mark of truth."11 And microbe theory fits
exactly into this scheme: one disease, one agent as cause-and ultimately, one
miracle pill or vaccine as a solution. 12
But this oversimplification belies the goings-on in the "invisible" micro-world of
cells and molecules. The living world-on both a small and large scale-is just much
more complicated than medical science and the media lets on. For this reason, as
biochemist Erwin Chargaff points out, "The attempt to find symmetry and simplicity
in the world's Jiving tissue has often led to false conclusions."13 There are even a few
people who believe that what is now called'molecular biology' encompasses all life
sciences. But that is not the case, except on a superfici al level: everythi ng we can see
in our world is somehow made up of molecules. But is that all? Can we describe
music by saying that all instruments are made of wood, brass, and so on, and that
because of that they produce their sounds?"14
Biology-the science of life-isn't even capable of


: “Plant sources of
protein alone can provide adequate amounts of the essential and non-
essential amino acids, assuming that dietary protein sources from plants are
reasonably varied and that caloric intake is suf ficient to meet ener gy needs.
Whole grains, legumes, vegetables, seeds, and nuts all contain essential and
non-essential amino acids.”
Scream it from the mountaintops: Plant proteins are 100 percent
complete!Myth 3
Carbohydrates make us fat.
Reality:  Some carbs do, but good carbs don’ t.
Most trendy diets claim that all carbohydrates are bad guys, yet of the
three macronutrients that provide calories in our diet (carbs, protein, and
fat), carbohydrates are the body’ s primary fuel source. They’re responsible
for managing your heart rate, digestion, breathing, exercising, walking, and
thinking.
Roughly 70 percent of your daily calories should come from good
(complex) carbohydrates. The ones to avoid are called simple carbs.
Both types of carbs are sugars. Both are digested and converted into
glucose, which is used by the body for ener gy: in the blood as glucose, or
stored in either the muscles or the liver as glycogen. When consumed in
excess, carbohydrates can be converted to fat.
Simple carbohydrates include table sugar, molasses, honey, alcohol,
white bread, white pasta, white rice, fried chips, sugary cereals, fruit juices,
candy, and milk. Most simple carbs are nutritionally empty because they
have been tinkered with by humans, stripped of their fiber, minerals, and
vitamins. They are digested quickly by the body and cause a sharp spike in
your blood sugar levels.
In response to this spike, your pancreas pumps out insulin to transport
and deliver the ener gy-bearing glucose to cells throughout your body. This
process causes your blood sugar and insulin levels to swing like a
pendulum, leaving you feeling fatigued, hungry, and craving still more
simple carbohydrates.
And because simple carbohydrates are digested so quickly, any excess
sugar is converted to fat. For these reasons, most simple carbohydrates are a
poor food choice.
In contrast, complex carbohydrates are nutritious, and include
vegetables, whole grain breads and pastas, beans, peas, brown rice, sweet
potatoes, oats, fruits, and whole grain cereals. They are loaded with fiber,
vitamins, minerals, and micronutrients. Unlike simple carbohydrates,
complex carbohydrates cause a balanced and controlled release of sugar
into your system. This slow release gives the body more time to use the
carbohydrates as fuel; as a result, fewer turn to fat and insulin remains
stable.So if you consume, whole, good, natural carbs, you will enjoy more
consistent ener gy throughout the day without gaining extra pounds.
As you can see, the two types of carbs dif fer immensely from a
nutritional standpoint. Simple carbohydrates are calorie laden, providing
little nutrition and causing weight gain. Complex carbohydrates are lower in
calories and, because they are loaded with fiber, provide bulk that fills you
up sooner, alleviates hunger pangs, and keeps you feeling satisfied longer.
So go eat your carbs—as long as they’re complex.
Myth 4
You can’ t get enough calcium eating a plant-based diet.
Reality:  A diverse, plant-based diet is one of the best available sources
of calcium—and lets you avoid the deleterious ef fects associated with dairy
products.
Great sources of calcium include green leafy vegetables, nuts, oranges,
kidney beans, lima beans, whole grains, Swiss chard, lentils, raisins,
broccoli, kale, celery, tofu, and romaine lettuce.
One reason why Americans have such a high incidence of osteoporosis
(or weakening of the bones) isn’ t a lack of dietary calcium but an excess of
animal protein, which leaches calcium from the bones.
In fact, did you know that the countries with the highest rate of dairy
consumption, including the United States, New Zealand, Britain, and
Sweden, also have the highest rates of osteoporosis? Although their citizens
consume massive amounts of dietary calcium, the excessive protein in that
milk, cheese, steak, fish, and eggs always trumps this important mineral,
leaving them with a net deficit.
Meanwhile, people in rural China, who consume one-third the amount of
dairy we do, have almost zero cases of osteoporosis. Dr. John McDougall,
author of The McDougall Program for a Healthy Heart, has scoured the
medical literature on the topic and has yet to find one case of dietary
calcium deficiency in humans—so long as they consumed an adequate
number of calories. So no milk mustache for you!
Myth 5
You can’ t get enough fat eating a plant-based diet.Reality:  Trace amounts of fat are present in all fruits, vegetables, and
other plant foods.
Strawberries are 5 percent fat; bell peppers, 6 percent; broccoli, 8
percent; spinach, 1 1 percent; and soybeans, 41 percent. Several high-fat
plant foods contain in excess of 80 percent fat, including certain nuts and
seeds, as well as avocados, olives, and coconuts.
By eating a delicious, plant-happy diet, you will consume roughly 9 to
15 percent of your total calories from fat, which is ideal.
Getting your fat from plant-based foods means you will be consuming
healthy monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats as opposed to dangerous
saturated fats. You will be able to eat more food than you ever dreamed of
without gaining weight, and feel wonderful.
Myth 6
You can’ t be a competitive athlete and eat plants.
Reality:  Tell that to Tony Gonzalez, the 247-pound tight end for the
Kansas City Chiefs football team. For health reasons, Tony changed his diet
after signing a five-year contract extension, making him the league’ s
highest paid tight end, and went on to break the NFL  record for receptions
by a tight end in 2008. His teammates have nicknamed him China Study
after T. Colin Campbell’ s book of the same name, which Gonzalez studied
before changing his diet—and which you will soon be reading about.
James Gar ee, 25
Firefighter
Before becoming a firefighter, I was co-captain of the University of
Colorado football team, where I weighed 300 pounds. To keep up my
weight, I used to eat 8,000 calories a day—I’d go to Arby’ s and ask
for five Arby meals, an order of curly fries, and a lar ge Coke. But
ever since Rip flipped me, I’ve lost over sixty pounds. But it can be
difficult. Food is personal. If you don’ t understand what someone is
eating, you go into a kind of defense meltdown. For example, if you
tell people that the way they eat at home isn’ t good for them, they’ll
say, “Are you telling me that my granny’ s trying to poison me?”Or tell that to Ruth Heidrich, who in 1982 was diagnosed with metastatic
breast cancer and cured herself by eating a low-fat, plant-strong diet. She
has since won more than one thousand triathlons. Or tell Salim Stoudamire,
the plant-eating point guard for the NBA  Atlanta Hawks, who says that by
the fourth quarter, when most players are starting to fade, he’ s picking it up
a notch. Or tell Martina Navratilova, the world’ s winningest tennis player,
who serves up plant-based foods exclusively. Or tell plant-devourer Dave
Scott, my hero and six-time winner of the famed Hawaii Ironman triathlon.
Or better yet, try going plant-based yourself and see how much your own
athletic performance improves.
Myth 7
By eating only plant-based foods, you’ll miss key nutrients.
Reality:  You’ll be stockpiling away the nutrients like never before,
improving your health, and reversing disease. If you were to hold a triathlon
based on the quantity of nutrients in each food, plants would cross the finish
line and get a massage before meat, dairy, and eggs even had a chance to
get of f the bicycle.
Calorie for calorie, the most nutrient-dense foods are plants, not animals.
After all, plants are the mother source of all calories and all nutrients for all
creatures, whereas animal-based foods are essentially plant foods recycled
into an unhealthy package.
The only nutrient that plant-based foods lack is vitamin B12. But you
can get a daily supply of B12 by downing two tablespoons of nutritional
yeast, a glass of fortified soy milk, a bowl of fortified cereal, or, if you
wish, a daily 500-microgram pill that should be chewed or dissolved in the
mouth to increase absorption.
Myth 8
If eating only plant-based food, your ener gy will be low.
Reality:  Your ener gy levels will be more constant and consistent than at
any other point in your life.
Think of high-fiber and nutrient-heavy plant foods as the big logs in the
fireplace that burn for hours. Think of low-fiber and nutrient-light foods
such as simple carbohydrates as wads of newspaper that go up in a flash.
When you’re eating plant-strong, you won’ t have the ener gy peaks andvalleys of the past, and if you so choose, you won’ t even need cof fee to get
your butt and mind in gear in


 removed from the air, even
though family members “like” them. They don't belong in air. The
lungs treat them like toxins to be coughed up or removed by the
kidneys and immune system. This includes colognes, scented
tissues, soap and shampoo  and shaving supplies. If you can walk
into the bathroom blindfolded and know you're in the bathroom,
it's not clean enough. Everything in the bathroom pollutes the air
of the whole house. People who must use fra grance  should apply
it outdoors to keep the indoor air less pol luted.PUSHING BACK AGE
285Anemia
Oxygen gets to the brain on a car rier
system of tiny rafts called red blood
cells. They were meant to be an exact
shape and size to fit the most oxygen
molecules onto them.
Each red blood cell  is shaped like a
doughnut without the hole. This fits a lot
more oxygen, O 2, than round balls
would. Yet, if there isn't enough vitamin B 12, the dimple isn't put
into them to make them doughnut shaped. This reduces the body's
oxygen supply and the disorder is called “pernicious” anemia.
The changed shape of the red blood cells is reflected in a bigger
volume called mean cell volume  (MCV). The correct volume for
red blood cells is about 90 cubic microns. Many eld erly persons
have a MCV over 100!
I have seen pernicious anemia  to be associated with Ascaris
infestation. Kill Ascaris  on a frequency generator (408 KHz) or
zap. The source of Ascaris  is usually a pet, owned in the past.
Once infected, the tiny worms do not leave your body on their
own. The infestation may date back to childhood. What a relief
for the bone marrow  whose job it is to make red blood cell s to
have enough vitamin B 12 again! What does Ascaris  do with your
B12? B12 is a beautiful rose colored vitamin. Some worms are
actually pink from absorbing your B 12! Giving B 12 shots is the
current clinical treatment for B 12 deficiency. Killing Ascaris
twice a week by zapping and taking B 12 lozenges (see Sources ) is
a better solution. (If your loved one is getting shots, make sure
that no isopropyl alcohol  is used on the skin beforehand. Provide
vodka yourself in a small pocket flask or 70% grain al cohol for
this purpose. Unfortunately, the shot itself may con tain traces of
this harmful solvent—take a sample home for testing.)
Fig. 36 Red blood
cells, top and side
view.THE CURE FOR ALL DISEASES
286Other kinds of “anemia ” can deprive your elderly person of
oxygen. A low red blood cell  count (under 4.4 million/mm3) is
the “garden” variety. Sometimes iron  levels are low and can ex-
plain the low red blood cell count. Sometimes they are not.
Most regular anemias, including low iron  levels, are associ-
ated with hookworm  infestations.
Kill all Ancylostomas  along with Ascaris  twice a week. It is
not wise to take iron  pills, even if they do raise hemoglobin  lev-
els, except in life-threatening situations. Remove the tiny crea-
tures that cause microscopic bleeding  instead. Iron in the form of
pills is too easily snatched up by bacteria who also need it,
making them more virulent to the body. Use grain alcohol rinse in
the bathroom to kill Ascaris  and hookworm  eggs under fin-
gernails. Don't have pets in the house or keep them on daily
parasite killing herbs.
It takes nutritious food to build the blood back up to its
normal hemoglobin  level. Eggs and meats (all very well  cooked)
are the richest sources of iron  and other minerals used in blood
building. B 6 and other vitamins are also involved and can be
given as a B-complex (see Sources ). Do not use black strap
molasses  as an iron source, or any molasses, since it con tains
toxic molds. (The molds could be detoxified with vitamin C  the
same way as honey. However, I have not tested enough molasses
for solvents and you cannot risk these.) In the past, when the
nutrient properties of molasses were discovered, the molasses
manufacturing was a small, carefully conducted busi ness. Now it
has molds which cause platelet  destruction, (purpuric spots)
internal bleeding, and immune failure.PUSHING BACK AGE
287Acid Levels
Oxygen must first jump onto its raft, the hemoglobin, in the
lungs. Later, in the brain, oxygen must jump off again to enter the
brain cells. A difference in acid levels makes this possible. Acid
levels operate the latching system that decides whether oxygen
will be attached to hemoglobin or let go! Acidity un latches
oxygen. There should be no acidity in the lungs so oxy gen can
attach here. Sometimes, the entire body is too acid! Diabetics,
asthmatics, arthritics, especially, suffer from total body acidity.
Acid was meant to be removed from the blood and loaded
into the stomach at mealtime for digestion. When this isn't hap-
pening, it was meant to be shipped out of the body with the urine.
But the kidneys may be doing a poor job because they are
clogged with tiny crystals and because not enough water is drunk,
so the body's acid levels rise. You can test total body acidity by
measuring the pH of the morning urine. It should not be under
(more acid than) 5.5. If the body acid level is too high, help the
kidneys excrete it by adding more water to the diet and more
minerals to neutralize the acid. The main minerals for this
purpose are calcium  and magnesium.
Increase Minerals
Adding water to the diet could be the most difficult of tasks if
your elderly loved one “doesn't like it.” Calcium should be in the
form of milk, magnesium as a tablet. When tablets cannot be
swallowed; use magnesium oxide powder (see Sources ). Use 1/8
tsp. added to cooked cereal, soup, stew, pudding. Magne sium,
being a mineral, does not get destroyed as vitamins may. You can
add it anywhere in the diet where it won't be tasted. Notice how
calming it is to have extra magnesium in this grad ual way. And
how much better the sleep is at night.THE CURE FOR ALL DISEASES
288When water “doesn't taste good,” there is probably a valid
reason. The body may be trying to reject chlorine  or other toxins
in it. In this case, filter it with a small all-carbon  unit that is
changed right on sched-
ule. A plastic pitcher
(not clear plastic or
flexible plastic) with a
carbon pack fitted into
the top is best. Sterilize
it once a week  by put ting
a cup of water and one
tbs. of grain alcohol in it
and turning it up side
down so the filter can
soak for 15 minutes.
Flush out the alcohol
with two pitchers of
water. Make sure the
temperature suits the
person. Temperature can
mean everything to the
never-thirsty person.
Don't allow ice cubes,
however, nor beverage
making, with the essen-
tial water. Adding lemon
or vinegar  (white dis-
tilled) and 1 tsp. honey is
probably the best way to
stimulate both thirst and
appetite.
When blood is properly oxygenated it takes on a bright red
color, unoxygenated blood is more purple. A chelation  doctor
can easily see the state of oxygenation.
Fig. 37 Water pitcher with filter.PUSHING BACK AGE
289Chelation
Chelation is a  powerful  way to  quickly  improve  oxygena tion
of blood. The most important rule to observe, though, is to take
the treatment slowly. Especially if ethylene diamine tetra
acetate  (EDTA ) is being used to remove heavy metals, it is im-
portant to take the treatment over a two hour time period. Mini
doses may be given in a shorter time. Generally, you are in
charge of the flow rate. Discuss it with the nurse. Weekly
chelations can correct many problems of the elderly that no other
treatment could.
Because of hostility from insurance companies who do not
wish to add another cost to their ledger and doctors indoctri nated
with misinformation, bad publicity is given to this won derful,
life-prolonging mode of treatment. Clinical doctors who have no
time to really investigate the statistics of chelation  treatments and
for whom this is purely competition may feel antagonistic to
these treatments. Your loved one should not be the one who must
suffer from medical politics. Go to see for yourself  what
chelation is all about. The receptionist should be glad to show
you around. The secret is to talk to the patients themselves. They
are usually sitting around a room, eating their lunch and reading
as their IV's drip. The pulse, blood


 beyond violence and expressed themselves as follows:
Life is love and love is life. What keeps the body together but love? What is desir e but
love of the self?... And what is knowledge but love of truth?
The means and forms may be wrong, but the motive behind is always love—love of the me
and the mine. The me and the mine may be small, or may explode and embrace the
Universe, but love remains.
The voice is that of a South Indian master, Nisar gadatta Maharaj,
speaking to followers in the late 1970s. The expression “life is love and
love is life” has such ancient roots that no idea is more venerable. Yet this is
a love we have lost contact with in our own age, distracted as we are by
sexual attraction, unstable emot ions, and religious dogma. Love based on
the experience of spirit gives rise to the possibility that we can return to our
true nature, throwing aside our unloving behavior as a bad and very long
dream.
A love based on “higher” values espoused by the world’ s religions
seems, as Freud pointed out, impossibly ideal. The scriptural injunctions to
love the Lord with all thy heart, all thy soul, and all thy might  are legion.
Yet there is sober truth in Emily Dickinson’ s mournful little poem:
Sometimes with the Heart
Seldom with the Soul
Scarce once with the Might
Few—love at all.
If all our attempts to find a spiritual foundation for love have shown
themselves to be so wanting, where can we turn?
Spirit can only be called on when it is real, and it can only be real if it is
real for you. In other words it has to be you. This is exactly what the Vedas
teach. Rather than “soul,” they equate spirit with “Self,” not the everyday
self with its thoughts, wishes, needs, and drives but a higher Self that is
silent and eternal. The difference is explained in a classic Vedic metaphor:every person is like a piece of gold. If you were a gold ring, a gold watch, a
gold chain, you could say “I am a ring, a watch, a chain,” but these are
temporary shapes. In truth you are just gold—that is your essence, no
matter how the shape changes.
In the same way, we each have  a self, defined in modern psychology as
an image developed over time. It is a mysterious fusion of ego, personality,
and memory that everyone amasses between infancy and early childhood.
Being complete ly personal, your self is also completely isolated and
separate from every other self. Yet, if you saw yourself truly, you would no
longer identify with this haphazard, ramshackle thing, your self. In truth
you are the Self, created from the same spirit that in infinite form is called
God. You are one grain of gold, compared to which God is all the gold that
exists, and yet you can rightfully say, “I am gold.”
We all draw upon the higher Self for identity, life, awar eness, will, and love.
The Self that Lord Krishna teaches about in the Bhagavad-Gita  is an
eternal aspect of human nature that transcends all individuality, all change
in time and space. Speaking of the immortal “dweller in the body,” Krishna
declares,
Weapons cannot cut him,
Fire cannot burn him,
Water cannot wet him,
Wind cannot blow him away....
He is eternal and pervading everything,
Subtle, immovable, and ever the same.
What is important here is that the Self is a real experience.  It is not an
ideal, far removed from ordinary reality—which is how most of us think of
the soul—but as close to you as breath. The Self is love’ s source, and
therefore it is more real than the things that block love—anger, fear,
egotism, insecurity, and mistrust. Those qualities, however widespread they
may be in socie ty, are temporary; they grow up over time and have to be
learned. The Self, by contrast, is secure in peace and safety; it knows only
love because its experience is only of love.
When you interact with another person, you are free to feel anything,
from the deepest hatred to the deepest love. You may be repelled orattracted; you can convey rejection or acceptance. But at the level of the
Self, you always meet another person in love.
The person you love r eflects your shar e of universal love. If you learn to look deep enough, you
will see that your r eality is only love.
In a famous passage the V edas declare,
As is the microcosm, so is the macrocosm,
As is the atom, so is the universe.
As is the human body, so is the cosmic body,
As is the human mind, so is the cosmic mind.
This verse can be simplified to a few words: you are the univers e. Whatever
a person sees in his or her surroundings, from the smallest detail to the
largest panorama, is that person. Reality is a mirror of the soul.
The Vedic tradition divided the world into reality and illusion. Illusion, or
Maya, is composed of transient forces and events. Reality is formed of
spirit. Thus the task set for every  person was to pierce the veil of illusion in
order to discover the spirit in everything. The same task is set before us
now.
Materialism has no room for an assertion like that. After having written
more than a dozen books about the conjunction of mind and body, which
seemed radical a few years ago, I now find myself witness to the weakness
of materialism on all fronts. What is a healing prayer but a successful
attempt to abolish the distinction  between inner and outer reality? What is a
spontaneous remission of cancer but the material body’ s obedience to wisps
of intention entertained by the mind? Einstein’ s physics tells us that
everything that appears solid to our senses is actually 99.999 percent empty
space. The classic Eastern metaphysical description of a spiritual reality
standing behind an empty material illusion suddenly seems very plausible.
My cosm ic grandmother was the person who taught me that the angels
eternally pull against the demons. In her worldview the angels always win
—the world of love is ultimately the one we are born to live in. My
experience has also given me hope that this is true, and out of that hope I
decided to write this book about love.Darkness, however terrible, never fully extinguishes the spark  of light.
One of the most moving love stories I’ve ever read happened between two
enemies in the Holocaust. A devout Catholic was suffering in a hideous
medical “experi ment” being conducted at Auschwitz. She was a young
woman, and as it happened the doctor who presided over her clinical torture
was also a woman, which somehow made her sadism all the more
horrifying. Death came slowly, but at last it came. The young woman
whispered unint elligibly, and the doctor, assuming she was uttering a curse,
drew back. The young woman reached out. She struggled to lift something
from her neck and managed at the last moment to hold it out to her
tormentor. “For you,” she was whispering as she handed her rosary to the
doctor, a last blessing as she departed the world.
Such a story arouses a surge of hope amidst the tears. We woul d all like
to believ e that one redeemed soul can help redeem another, even in the
depths of terrible darkness. If that is true, then love’ s power is as great as
spiritual teaching tells us it is.
I am not proposing in this book that we simply go back in time and adopt
Indian metaphysics—that would be impossible, given the vast changes in
culture over the past few thous and years. Instead I propose that the Vedic
sages were the first to map a path to love, which they called a Sadhana. A
path implies a beginning and an end. In this case the beginning is a reality
in which love is longed for but uncertain, swamped by fear and anger,
overwhelmed by the counterforce of hatred. The end is a reality where
nothing exists but love.
What r emains now is the deepest healing of all, the healing of love.
OceanofPDF.comLOVING  PRACTICE
Making a Soul Bar gain
HEALING THE SPLIT  between love and spirit is the goal of this book, and
periodically I will give practical suggestions to that end. Usually these
“loving practices” are directed  to the reader, but I recommend, where
possible, that you and your beloved both try them.
The first loving practice address es doubts you may have about whether a
“higher” love has any kind of accessible reality. To someone who has never
fallen in love, you cannot prove that the experience exists. There is no
power in words to evoke passion ate romantic love, just as the fragrance of a
rose is meaning less however beautifully you describe it. How much more
alien, then, is the love promised by union with spirit? Look at the following
list of things that love is suppo sed to accomplish, expanded from the list
that appeared earlier in the text:
Love is meant to heal.
Love is meant to renew.
Love is meant to make us safe.
Love is meant to inspire us with its power.
Love is meant to make


 major medical specializations. Crichton had no intention of
pursuing cardi ology, but he had a simple, quite novel insight during
this particular rotation: what if heart disease was not the same for
every patient but had some kind of personal meaning for each one?What prompted Crichton to speculate along these lines were some
famous pathol ogy ndings made in the early fties. During the
Korean War autopsies were routinely performed on young soldiers
who had been killed in battle, and doctors were surpris ed to nd
that the arteries of more than 70 percent showed advance d stages of
atherosclerosis; these young arteries were already building up fatty
plaques, cuttin g oxygen o from the heart, and moving inexorably
in the direction of a heart attack.
Yet if men as young as seventeen already had this disease,
Crichton wondered, why did a typical coronary occur much later,
typically in a man’s forties or fties? “You had to assume that all
these patients had been walking around with clogged arteries since
they were teenagers,” Crichto n writes. “A heart attack could happen
anytime. Why had they waited twenty or thirty years to develop a
heart attack? Why had the heart attack happened this year and not
next, this week and not last week?”
To answer his questions, he decided to learn something about the
feelings the cardiac patient s had about their disease. The direct
approach seem ed to be the best, so Crichton went on the ward and
asked his patients point-blan k, “Why did you have a heart attack?”
He realized that his inquiries might set o unforeseeable reactions.
“My question also implied that the patients had some choice in
the matter, and therefore some control over their disease. I feared
they might respond with anger. So I started with the most easygoing
patient on the ward, a man in his forties who had had a mild attack.
“Why did you have a heart attack?”
“You really want to know?”
“Yes, I do.”
“I got a promo tion. The company wants me to move to Cincinnati.
But my wife doesn’t want to go. She has all her family here in
Boston, and she doesn’t want to go with me. That’s why.”
The man said this completel y calmly, without any sign of anger.
When Crichton went on to question the rest of the ward, every other
patient had a similar answer:
“My wife is talking about leaving me.”
“My son won’t go to law school.”“I didn’t get the raise.”
“My wife wants another baby and I don’t think we can aord it.”
Not one person lacked an answer, yet not one mentioned
arteriosclerosis as the cause of his heart attack, nor the standard risk
factors, such as a high-fat diet, hypertension, lack of exercise, and
smoking. In the late 1960s, the mind-body connection was
considered not quite legitimate, and Crichton was perplexed by his
patients’ perspective. Looking back, he writes, “What I was seeing
was that their explanations made sense from the standpoint of the
whole organis m, as a kind of physical acting-out. These patients
were telling me stories of events that had aected their hearts in a
metaphysical sense. They were telling me love stories. Sad love
stories, which had pained their hearts. Their wives and families and
bosses didn’t care for them. Their hearts were attacked. And pretty
soon, their hearts were literally  attacked.”
This insightful account does not “prove” anything new about
heart disease. Yet Crichton can be credited with anticipating a key
mind-body concept, now widely accepted, that our feelings do not
live in a separate world from our cells. It is the precise timing of
these heart attacks, howeve r, which was controlled by the victim
but also comp letely unforese en by him, that gives Crich ton’s story
its unique fascination. His patients knew what they had done only
after they did it. This blind  spot opens up a new aspect of the
mystery. We see the body acting out the mind’s dramas, yet we have
not yet spied the director who decides which scene comes next. That
is because the mind has decided to deny a part of itself.
A Space Beyond Reason
Because magic seems so foreign to it, the rational part of our
minds is generally quite fearful of the nonrational part. The very
word “magic” has a sinister overtone to most of us, equat ed with all
that is dark, dangerous, uncanny, and wild. But the threa t has been
greatly exaggerated. We spend much of our lives in the space
beyond reason. If I say “I love you,” the sound waves from my voice
bounce against  your eardrum, setting up a vibration that the innerear turns into an electric signal. This impulse is passed along the
neurons to the brain’s speech center, and you look pleased.
Reason knows  all about this journey, except for the last step,
which is the most important. Why are you pleased that I love you?
Why do those electrical impu lses in the brain have a meaning? If I
say a dieren t sentence, “You have terminal cancer,”  the same
physical impulses carry my voice to your brain’s speech center, but
now you are devastated. Scientically, the signals are all but
identical, yet the results they produce could hardly be more
dierent. An EEG cannot decipher the meaningfulness of brain
activity; the squiggles on the readout have nothing to say about
what distinguishes love from hate, joy from sorrow, inspiration from
tedium. The output generate d by swamis deeply immersed in bliss
creates patterns that closely resemble epileptic attacks; the voltage
generated by the nervous system of a poet is not necessarily less
than that from a psychopath.
Meaning slips through the ngers of science, which provides any
person who is interested in meaning with a good reason to take
magic seriously. The materi alistic bias of science leads it to shun
things that cannot be directly contacted by the senses. Yet nature
has reserved a huge region set apart for things that cannot be seen,
touched, or weighed. If you have ever observed a ock of swallows
ying at dusk, you have seen them wheel and turn together, veering
o at impossib le tangents in the blink of an eye. How does each bird
know to turn at the precise instant the others do? Scien tists have
established that there is no bird acting as leader—the impulse is
somehow shared by every bird at once. The magic lies in each one
but also in between, over, and around them. It is uid and invisible,
like the air, but more so.
A similar mystery exists if I happen to think a word at random
—“archipelago.” In order for me to think this word, millions of
brain cells have to re in a precise pattern at the exact same instant.
One isolated cell doesn’t dream up the word and then pass it along.
It appears everywhere at once. For that matter, where was
“archipelago” hiding when I wasn’t thinking it? The location of
mental space is as elusive as the space outside the universe.Mental space is so inconceivable that one could easily claim that
it is entirely magical. Computers can be programmed to play chess
at the grandmaster level, but unlike real grandmasters, they do not
grow tired, have brilliant inspirations, throw tantrums, exult in
victory, or sulk in defeat. One grandmaster went mad and refused to
play in tournaments unless a pineapple sundae was placed next to
the board. Such a thing is inconceivable to a computer’s mimicked
intelligence, but it is all too human. This is what it means to have a
mind. If a computer became the greatest chess player in history,
humans would still have all the fun.
Magical thinking, then, presents itself not as a deviation from
reason but as a way of probing past it into a space that is more alive
and meaningful. It is just as natural to us as rationality, and perhaps
more so. At birth a baby is totally self-centered; therefor e it comes
as no surprise that we started out in life thinking magically all the
time. On the day you were born, you began to look around the
world that was born with you. Soon a peculiar ying object
appeared in your eld of vision. Soft and rather doughy in
appearance, it oated randomly before your eyes, sometimes visible,
sometimes darting out of sight.
You did not relate to this object until the day came when you
made a momentous discover y. Spurred by an intense desire for the
breast or the bottle, you had an impulse to reach out. When you
acted on this untested impulse, the apparatus that fastened onto the
breast was this same object—and now you understood. The entity
dangling in front of your eyes was yours to command; you acquired
a hand.
The most complex motor skills, such as playing the violin or
performing gymnastics, develop from the same basis. A desire
reaches out into some unknown region and comes back with a
report: it nds out what is possible and what is not.


able level.
    I buy my C from Bronson who e thically gives me the quality stuff. I know for a fact that the vitamin C sold by Prolongevity is
also top quality. I've had clients who bought cheaper C than Bronson's and discovered it was not quite like Bronson's in appe arance
or taste. More importantly, it did not seem to have the same therapeutic effect.
    The distributors I've mentioned so far, Bronson, NOW, Cooper, Prolongevity and Vitamin Research Products are all
knowledgeable about differences between actual manufacturers and are ethical, buyin g and reselling only high quality products.
Other distributors I believe to be reputable include Twin Labs, Schiff and Plus. I know there are many other distributors wit h high
ethic levels but I can not evaluate all their product lines. And as I've mention ed earlier, businesses come and go rather quickly, but
I hope my book will be read for decades. I do know that I would be very reluctant to buy my vitamins at a discount department
store or supermarket; when experimenting with new suppliers I have at times  been severely disappointed.
    Co-enzyme Q -10. This substance is normally manufactured in the human body and is also found in minuscule amounts in
almost every cell on Earth. For that reason it is also called "ubiquinone." But this vitamin has been only recently discovered, so as
I write this book Co -enzyme Q -10 is not widely known.
    Q-10 is essential to the functioning of the mitochondria, that part of the cell that produces energy. With less Q -10 in heart cells,
for example, the heart has less energ y and pumps less. The same is true of the immune system cells, the liver cells, every cell. As
we age the body is able to make less and less Q -10, contributing to the loss of energy frequently experienced with age, as well as
the diminished effectiveness o f the immune system, and a shortened life span.
    Q-10 was first used for its ability to revitalize heart cells. It was a prescription medicine in Japan. But unlike other drugs used to
stimulate the heart, at any reasonable dose Q -10 has no harmful side  effects. It also tends to give people the extra pick up they are
trying to get out of a cup of coffee. But Q -10 does so by improving the function of every cell in the body, not by whipping
exhausted adrenals like caffeine does. Q -10 is becoming very popul ar with athletes who measure their overall cellular output
against known standards.
    Besides acting as a general tonic, when fed to lab animals, Co -Enzyme Q -10 makes them live 33 to 45 percent longer!
    DMAE is another extremely valuable vitamin -like substance that is not widely known. It is a basic building material that the
body uses to make acetylcholine, the most generalized neurotransmitter in the body. Small quantities of DMAE are found in fis h,
but the body usually makes it in a multi -stage synt hesis that starts with the amino acid choline, arrives at DMAE at about step
number three and ends up finally with acetylcholine.
    The body's nerves are wrapped in fatty tissue that should be saturated with acetylcholine. Every time a nerve impulse is
transmitted from one nerve cell to the next, a molecule of acetylcholine is consumed. Thus acetylcholine has to be constantly
replaced. As the body ages, levels of acetylcholine surrounding the nerves drop and in consequence, the nerves begin to
deteriorate. DMAE is rapidly and easily converted into acetylcholine and helps maintain acetylcholine levels in older people at a
youthful level.
    When laboratory rats are fed DMAE they solve mazes more rapidly, remember better, live about 40 percent longer than r ats not
fed DMAE and most interestingly, when autopsied, their nervous systems resemble those of a young rat, without any evidence of
the usual deterioration of aging. Human nervous systems also deteriorate with age, especially those of people suffering fr om
senility. It is highly probable that DMAE will do the same thing to us. DMAE also smoothes out mood swings in humans and
seems to help my husband, Steve, when he has a big writing project. He can keep working without getting 'writers block', fogg ed
out, or rollercoastering.
    DMAE is a little hard to find. Prolongevity and VRP sell it in powder form. Since the FDA doesn't know any MDR and since
the product is not capped up, the bottle of powder sagely states that one -quarter teaspoonful contains 333 mi lligrams. Get the hint?
DMAE tastes a little like sour salt and one -quarter teaspoonful dissolves readily in water every morning before breakfast, or
anytime for that matter. DMAE is also very inexpensive considering what it does. A year's supply costs abo ut $20.
    Lecithin is a highly tonic and inexpensive food supplement that is underutilized by many people even though it is easily
obtainable in healthfood stores. It is an emulsifier, breaking fats down into small separate particles, keeping blood chole sterol
emulsified to prevent arterial deposits. Taken persistently, lecithin partially and slowly eliminates existing cholesterol de posits
from the circulatory system.
    In our cholesterol -frightened society lecithin should be a far more popular supplem ent than it currently is. It is easy to take either
as a food in the granular form or when encapsulated. Lecithin granules have very little flavor and can be added to a home -made
vinegar and oil salad dressing, where they emulsify the oil and make it blend  with the vinegar, thickening the mixture and causing
it to stick to the salad better. Lecithin can also be put in a fruits smoothie. A scant tablespoon a day is sufficient. Try t o buy the
kind of lecithin that has the highest phosphatidyl choline content because this substance is the second benefit of taking lecithin.
Phosphatidyl choline is another precursor used by the body to build acetylcholine and helps maintain the nervous system.
    Algae. Spirulina or sun dried chlorella are also great food supple ments. Both make many people feel energized, pepped -up. It is
possible to fast on either product and still maintain sufficient energy levels to take of minimal work responsibilities. Alga e reduces
appetite and as a dietary supplement can assist in weight l oss. It contains large amounts of highly -assimilable protein due to it's
high chlorophyll content, as well as a large amount of beta carotene. It also assists in detoxification of the lymphatic syst em. It can
be purchased as tablets or powder. Take a heapi ng teaspoon daily, or at least six tablets.

Chapter Seven
The Analysis of Disease States:
Helping the Body Recover

From the Hygienic Dictionary

Diagnosis. [1] In the United States, making a diagnosis implies that you are a doctor duly licensed to engage in diagnostic
function.... The making of a diagnosis is reserved only for doctors.... The term "analysis" does not have such an expli cit leg al
definition. Thus, it is the term of choice of iridologists and the one most often used by them. It is essential for the survi val and
promotion of iridology that those who choose to engage in its practice avoid naming any disease condition. As we have se en, to do
so is to infringe on rights reserved exclusively for doctors and can land the iridologist, sooner or later, in a snarl of leg al troubles.
    It is better for the iridologist to refrain from suggesting to a person that he has any particular dise ase, letting such diagnostics
remain the province of licensed doctors. In so doing, the iridologist will avoid transgressing the law and stepping on the to es of
those who are legally qualified to diagnose.
    It is indeed unfortunate that one of the grea test pitfalls awaiting the iridologist is the temptation to name diseases. The feelings
of satisfaction and power resulting from conferring a name are deeply rooted in the human psyche. For example, the Bible tell s us
that man's first task on Earth was to name the animals, thus giving him power and dominion over them.
    Strong is the temptation to name diseases because nearly everyone has come to expect that his malady has a name. Patients hav e
come to expect, and doctors have been trained to make, a dia gnosis.... "After all," the patient may reason, "how can you hope to
deal with my condition if you aren't knowledgeable enough to call it by name?"
It is not necessary to name diseases in order to exercise dominion over them. Dr. Bernard Jensen, Vision s of Health.

    In self defense, I must make it very clear from the first word that hygienists and most other naturopaths of various persuasi ons,
and especially I myself, have never in the past, never!, and do not now, diagnose, treat or offer to cure, d isease or illness.
Diagnosis and curing are sole, exclusive privileges of certified, duly -licensed medical doctors and may only be done with a grant
of Authority


, iron and fibre, and they are a good
source of healthy monounsaturated fat.
They contain more calcium than any other
nut, which makes them great for vegans
who do not eat any dairy products. They
also contain amygdalin, also known as
laetrile or vitamin B17, the controversial
anti-cancer nutrient that some claim may
contribute to fighting cancer.Almonds contain several phytochemicals
including beta-sitosterol, stigmasterol and
campesterol, which is thought to
contribute to a healthy heart. A handful of
almonds a day helps to reduce the risk of
heart disease by lowering low-density
lipoprotein (LDL) or ‘bad’ blood
cholesterol by as much as 10 percent.
Their high monounsaturated fat content, a
key fat found in many Mediterranean diets,
gives them much greater benefits than
simply being cholesterol lowering. Nearly
every research study shows that those who
eat a traditional Mediterranean diet not
only have a lower risk of heart disease
and cancer, they also live longer.So, what is the Mediterranean diet? This
diet incorporates the basics of healthy
eating with olive oil and perhaps a glass
of red wine – among other components
characterizing the traditional cooking style
of countries that border the Mediterranean
Sea. The Mediterranean diet is known to
be low in saturated fat, high in
monounsaturated fat and high in dietary
fibre.
A recent analysis of more than 1.5 million
healthy adults demonstrated that following
a Mediterranean diet was associated with
a reduced risk of overall and
cardiovascular mortality, a reduced
incidence of cancer and cancer mortality,
and a reduced incidence of Parkinson’sand Alzheimer’s diseases.
The Mediterranean diet emphasizes
getting plenty of exercise, eating primarily
plant-based foods such as fruit and
vegetables, whole grains, legumes and
nuts; replacing butter with healthy fats
such as olive oil; using herbs and spices
instead of salt to flavour foods; limiting
red meat to no more than a few times a
month; eating fish and poultry at least
twice a week; and drinking red wine in
moderation. The diet also recognizes the
importance of enjoying meals with family
and friends.
ApplesApples are one of nature’s best ‘fast’
foods. The benefits supplied by apples are
huge and very encouraging, and include
protecting bone health, contributing to the
possible prevention of asthma, heart
disease and cancers such as lung, breast,
colon and liver cancers. In order to get
these benefits, apples need to be part of a
daily healthy diet.
French researchers found that a flavonoid
called phloridzin, which is found only in
apples, may protect post-menopausal
women from osteoporosis and may also
increase bone density. Another nutrient
found in apples, known as boron, also
strengthens bones. New research suggests
that the phytonutrient quercetin, may helpto prevent Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
The pectin in apples lowers LDL or ‘bad’
cholesterol. People who eat two apples
per day may lower their cholesterol by as
much as 16 percent. According to a study
of 10,000 people, those who ate the most
apples had a 50 percent lower risk of
developing lung cancer. Researchers
believe this is due to the high levels of the
flavonoids, quercetin and naringin.
It is important to keep in mind that a lot of
the goodness of this is fruit is contained in
the skin. If they are not organic, they need
to be washed carefully and thoroughly
before being eaten whole.Asparagus
Asparagus originates from the
Mediterranean, and the southern and
northern parts of Africa, with Egypt
possibly being the first country to cultivate
and value this vegetable for its medicinal
properties.
Asparagus is a member of the lily family,
which includes leeks, garlic and onions. It
is an alkaline food, which is rich in
protein but low in calories and
carbohydrates. It is also an excellent
source of potassium, folic acid, vitamins
A, C and K and traces of vitamin B
complex. It has an abundance of an amino
acid called asparagine, which helps tocleanse the body of waste material. Some
people tend to pass out smelly urine after
eating asparagus. It is one of the few
vegetables that are highly dense in
healthful nutrients that help alleviate many
ailments.
A unique phytochemical in asparagus that
produces anti-inflammatory effects helps
relieve arthritis and rheumatism.
Asparagus is also a prime source of
antioxidant and glutathione that can help
prevent cancer and also the progression of
cataracts and other eye problems. The
healthful nutrients in asparagus juice
make
it an important addition to the diet of
people who are trying to control their
blood sugar levels. However, it is not tobe taken by people with advanced kidney
diseases.
Aubergines
Aubergines are part of the nightshade
(Solanacene) family, which also includes
tomatoes, potatoes and chilli peppers.
Like all other edible members of this
family, the aubergine is thought to have
originated in India where it grew wild,
and it was first cultivated in China. It was
introduced into Europe during the Middle
Ages by the Moors when it soon became
popular. Thomas Jefferson introduced
aubergines to the United States in 1806.
It’s known as eggplant in America,aubergine in Europe, and brinjal in South
Africa.
Aubergine is an excellent source of
dietary fibre and vitamins B1, B6 and
potassium, as well as copper, magnesium,
manganese, phosphorus, niacin and folic
acid. In a study to determine the glycemic
index (GI) of various vegetables, it was
concluded that aubergine has a low GI of
15.
Aubergine has been used as a cholesterol-
lowering agent, and there are some studies
to support that claim. Other studies,
however, do not support this so further
research is needed to establish its
effectiveness in lowering cholesterol.The National Diabetes Education Program
of NIH, Mayo Clinic and American
Diabetes Association recommend an
aubergine-based diet as a source of
management for type 2 diabetes. The
rationale for this suggestion is the high
fibre and low soluble carbohydrate
content.
The formation of new blood vessels in the
body is known as angiogenesis, and is a
normal process in growth and wound
healing. Angiogenesis also plays an
important role in the growth and spread of
cancer by feeding the cancer cells with
oxygen and nutrients. In a study at the
Department of Nutritional Science in
Japan, it was established that nasunin, theantioxidant from aubergine peel, is an
angiogenesis inhibitor, and might be useful
in preventing angiogenesis-related
diseases.
Avocados
The story behind the avocado is that it
originated in Mexico or Central and South
America, and was cultivated there by the
pre-Inca races of Peru, and the Mayas of
Yucatan and Guatemala.
Avocados are an excellent source of
monounsaturated fatty acids, potassium,
vitamins E and B, and fibres. A week-long
study involving 45 volunteers who ateavocados every day reported an average
17 percent drop in total cholesterol, LDL
(‘bad’) cholesterol and triglycerides, and
an 11 percent increase in high-density
lipoprotein (HDL) levels. They are rich in
natural beta-sitosterol, and the American
Journal of Medicine has reported that
researchers found that
beta-sitosterol
 was
able to lower LDL cholesterol in 16
human studies.
According to a report in the Journal of
Nutritional Biochemistry, the carotenoids
and tocopherols (chemical compounds
which may have vitamin E activity) in
avocado were shown to inhibit the growth
of prostate cancer cell lines in an artificial
environment (in vitro). Studies haveshown that phytochemicals extracted from
the avocado fruit inhibit and kill cancer
cells, suggesting that the phytochemicals
from avocado included in diet may offer
protection against cancer.
Avocados contain glutathione, which
functions as an antioxidant to scavenge
free radicals, which is what we need to
rid our bodies of. Dr David Heber,
director of the UCLA Centre for Human
Nutrition, has stated that evidence
suggests that glutathione may help prevent
certain types of cancers and heart disease.
Three factors in avocado, folate,
glutathione and potassium, help prevent
high blood pressure and stroke. They also
help to lower homocysteine levels,cholesterol and atherosclerosis.
According to the American Institute for
Cancer Research in Washington, replacing
butter, cheese or cream on a sandwich
with mashed avocado not only helps to
reduce calories but also increases the
healthy monounsaturated fatty acids
(MUFA) intake.
Avocado oil, which I call nature’s
cosmetic remedy, strengthens the skin by
stimulating collagen, thereby reducing
wrinkles and improving skin texture.
Being rich in vitamin E, a free radical
scavenger, it assists in slowing the aging
process. Avocado oil offers better skin


 should soon find it
much easier to breathe through  your nose by practicing this exercise. No
longer will you require over -the-counter nasal decongestants,
antihistamines, or nasal steroids!
By hold ing your breath, you sha rply increase the concentration of nitric
oxide in  your nasal cavity, resulting in dilation of the nasal p assages and
smooth, easy nasal breathing once more.
As you move on to the breath ing exercises in the next chapt er, your
ability to hold your breath will improve, resulting in even greater nasal
freedom.
Nasal Br eathing at Night
The idea l amoun t of sleep requir ed each night varies from perso n to person.
The late British prime minister M ar garet Thatcher was said to ge t by on just
four hours sleep, but most of us  need seven or eight hours of good-qualitysleep to set us right for the day.  If we struggle to get to sleep, or if sleep is
interrupted by snoring or sleep apnea, it can be particularly ha rd to get up
the foll owing morning, and a lack of sleep can severely af fect
concentration, mood, and even the most basic of activities. Even if we seem
to s leep soundly the whole night through, the quality of sleep can be
reduced by mouth breathing and  heavy breathing, meaning we still wake up
with a dry mouth and a feeling of lethar gy.
Fifty-year -old A nnette described to me how she rarely slept eig ht hours
continuously. Si nce her children were very young, her usual s leep pattern
had involved lying awake for several hours in an ef fort to try to fall asleep,
followed by a few hours of light sleep, waking again around 3 A.M. The next
two hours were usually spent  trying to fall asleep again, resulting in
frustration and exhaustion when she finally had to get up fo r her day’ s
work.
Just like Annette, for many years I too woke up tired and lethar gic,
suf fering from poor concentration throughout the day. The key to improving
the qual ity of my sleep was incredibly simple: All I had to do w as to learn
to keep my mouth closed during  sleep. Because we are unaware of how we
breathe at night, the only sure w ay to ensure nasal breathing is to wear light
paper tape across the lips to pre vent the mouth from falling ope n. And this
is ex actly what I instructed Annette to do. If you feel uncomfo rtable about
using the paper tape at night, a stop snoring strap is a good alte rnative and
helps to keep the lower jaw from dropping during sleep. Stop snoring straps
are com monly used by people with obstructive sleep apnea and can be
purchased from OxygenAdvantage.com.
T aping t he mout h at night ensur es the benefits of good breathing during
sleep, allowing you to fall asl eep more quickly, stay asleep longer, and
wake feeling ener gized. The tape that I have found most suitable, as it is
simple to use, h ypoaller genic, and light, is 3M Micropore tape, which can
be bought from most drugstores. T o help make the tape easier t o remove in
the morning, gently press the tape against the back of your hand a couple of
times to  remove  some of the glue before applying the tape to your face. All
you nee d to do is tear of f about 4 inches/10 cm of tape, fold a tab over at
both end s to make removal easi er in the morning, dry your lips, close your
mouth, and gently place the tape horizontally over the lips.At first, Annette  was slightly ne rvous about using the tape, though she
was keen to try anything that might help her sleep and increase  her ener gy
levels. I nitially, she found taping her mouth to be uncomfortable, and
noticed that her breathing inc reased due to anxiety when she used it.
However, over the next few days she practiced wearing the tape for short
periods of 20 m inutes while she went about her normal activities at home.
This helped to acclimatize her to breathing through her nose and to
overcome any fears about wearing the tape at night.
Once sh e was used to the feelin g of taping her mouth closed, Annette
was dete rmined to use the techn ique to improve her sleep qualit y. She went
to bed at her usual time and was surprised to find the tape to be a comfort.
As soon as she placed the tape on her mouth, it was almost like a signal to
fall asleep—which she did. That night, Annette slept more deeply than
usual, and even though she woke up without the tape on the first two days,
she felt more re sted. On her third day, she went to bed wearing  the tape at
10 P.M.  and slept like a baby until 9:53 A.M. An nette excitedly told me that it
was the first time in years that sh e’d had a proper night’ s sleep, and she was
amazed to feel so alert and ener gized when she woke up.
Over the years, I have introduced this taping method to thousands of
people with incredible results. U nless you breathe calmly through your nose
at night,  you have no idea what it feels like to have a great n ight’ s sleep.
T aping the mouth at night is a  simple but very ef fective tec hnique, and
while it may sound a little strange, it is well worth getting used to.
Continue to wear the tape un til you have managed to change to
breathing throug h your nose at night. How long this takes will vary from
person t o person, but in genera l wearing the tape for a period of around
three months is suf ficient to rest ore nasal breathing during sleep. Breathing
through your nose will result in a naturally moist mouth when y ou wake up.
If your mouth is dry upon wak ing, you know that your mout h was open
during s leep. W hen a child has  one eye with weaker vision, the treatment
often re commended is to temporarily cover the good eye with  a patch to
train the  brain to strengthen the weaker eye and restore normal vision. In
the same  way, wearing tape acr oss the lips during sleep or when alone in
your house during the day gradually trains the body to adapt to nasal
breathing both day and night. S pending a guaranteed eight hours breathingthrough your nose while you sleep is an opportune way to reeducate your
respiratory center to adjust to a more normal breathing volume.CHAPTER 4
B r e a t h e  L i g h t  t o  B r e a t h e  R i g h t
F or thousands of years, masters of the ancient arts of yoga, tai chi, and
qigong have espoused the importance of quiet, gentle, and light breathing. I
recently had the pleasure of meeting tai chi Master Jennifer Lee in London.
Master L ee has reached the rank of Seventh Dan and was awar ded gold in
ten c ategories during the interna tional 2009 W ushu Champions hips held in
Hong Kong and Hainan, China. As the two of us talked, Master Lee
described the similarities between her work and mine. She explained that
during t ai chi tournaments, judges pay particular attention to whether they
can noti ce the breathing of com petitors, with points being deducted when
breathing is evident.
W ithout knowin g why, other tha n the fact that it has been passe d down
from ge neration to generation, Master Lee practices a breathing exercise
that is very similar to the reduced breathing exercise we will explore further
on. It is no coincidence that Master Lee’ s breathing was textbook perfect. It
was abd ominal, ef fortless, and almost invisible to the eye. I have watched
many people breathe—thousands, in fact—and without doubt, Master Lee
displayed the most perfect breathing I have ever seen.
W ell-known qigong and tai chi M aster Chris Pei explains how breathing
is at the very co re of the Chines e concept of chi  ( qi ): “Generally speaking,
there are  three levels of breathing. The first one is to breathe softly,  s o that a
person s tanding next to you doe s not hear you breathing. The second level
is to breathe softly so that you  do not hear yourself breathing. And the third
level is to breathe softly so that you do not feel  yourself breathing.”
This philosophy  of ef fortless breathing is echoed by authentic teachers
of Indian  yoga and traditional Chinese medicine. I use the word authentic  inorder to dif ferentiate practitione rs who have a deep knowledge of breathing
and how it af fects physiology fr om those who don’ t. Unlike m any modern
W estern teacher s of yoga, who instruct students to breathe hard  in order to
remove toxins from the body, authentic teachers know that when it comes to
breathing, less is more. The traditional Chinese philosophy  of T aoism
succinctly descr ibes ideal breathing as “so smooth that the fine hairs within
the n ostrils remain motionless.”  T rue health and inner peace occurs when
breathing


 It ispossible to buy unhulled millet, usually by special order from the health fooddistributor—if you’ll take a whole sack. Millet can be hulled at home in smallbatches. Here’s how we figured out how to do it. There probably are betterways.
Using a cheap steel-burr flour mill, set the burrs just far enough apart that the
seed is ground to coarse grits, but not flour. This pops the hulls loose. An old millwith worn-out burrs works great for this job. Then you have to get some handseed cleaning screens just large enough to pass the grits but not pass the hulls(most of them). Window screen or other hardware cloths won’t work. Seedcleaning screens come in increments of 1/128 inch; we use a 6/64" round screen.Other batches of millet might work better with a screen one step larger or smaller.It will take you a little ingenuity to find hand-held screens. They’re used by seedcompanies and farmers to clean small batches of seed for inspection and areusually about one square foot in size with a quality wooden frame. Larger framesmade of the same screening material are used in big seed cleaning machines. (Thehulls could also be winnowed out by repeatedly pouring the grit/hulls mixture backand forth between two buckets in a gentle breeze.)
After you’ve screened out most of the hulls, the rest will rinse out, floating off
as you wash the grain prior to cooking. We never hull more than enough millet fortwo or three meals and keep the uncooked (unwashed) millet in the freezer in anairtight jar. It is interesting how people will accept poor nutrition and itsconsequent sickness as the price of convenience.
If you eat much buckwheat you should also figure out how to hull (sometimes
called groating) it yourself. Someone should write a thorough book on the home
milling of cereals. And perhaps sell the equipment by mail. Probably would be agood little homestead business.
Something else you need to keep in mind about seed. Even though the
embryo’s food supply is protected by the seed coat, it still slowly deteriorates,steadily oxidizing and losing nutritional value. Eventually old seed looses the abilityto sprout. The decline in germination ability matches a decline in nutritional quality.Any seed you are going to use for eating should possess the ability to sprout,strongly and rapidly. (After you’ve comparatively sprouted a few grain samples,you’ll know what I mean by this.) Fortunately, cereal grains usually sprout well forquite a few years after harvest if they have been stored cool and dry. Eating deador near-dead seeds will help move you closer to the same condition yourself.
Finally, one more warning about buying store bread. Salt-free bread tastes
“funny” to most people. It bakes fine, salt is not necessary to the leaveningprocess, but no bakery could stay in business without salting their bread. Thestandard level of salt is two percent by weight. That is quite a lot! Two percentequals one teaspoonful per pound. I’ll have more to say about the evils of salt.
I imagine some of my readers are feeling a little overwhelmed by all these
warnings and “bewares ofs,” and intricacies. They are used to taking noresponsibility for securing their own food supply quality and have come to expectthe “system” to protect them. I believe it is not because of lack of governmentintervention, but because of government intervention itself, our food system is veryperverse. Until our mass consciousness changes, if you wish to make yourself andyour family truly healthy, you are going to have to take charge and become quite adiscriminating shopper. Unconscious consumers are on a rapid road to the totalunconsciousness of death.
And again, let me remind you here that this one small book cannot contain
everything you should know. The bibliography at the end of should become yourguide to earning your post-graduate education in nutritional health.
Freshness Of Fruits And Vegetables
Most people do not realize the crucial importance of freshness when it comes
to produce. In the same way that seeds gradually die, fruits and vegetables gothrough a similar process as their nutritional content gradually oxidizes or isbroken down by the vegetables own enzymes, but vegetables lose nutritionhundreds of times more rapidly than cereals. Produce was recently part of a livingplant. It was connected to the vascular system of a plant and with few exceptions,is not intended by nature to remain intact after being cut. A lettuce or a zucchiniwas entirely alive at the moment of harvest, but from that point, its cells begin todie. Even if it is not yet attacked by bacteria, molds and fungi, its own internalenzymes have begun breaking down its own substances.
V egetables, especially leafy vegetables, are far more critical in this respect than
most ripe fruits. All, however, deteriorate much like radioactive material; theyhave a sort of half-life. The mineral content is stable, but in respect to the vitaminsand enzymes and other complex organic components, each time period or “halflife” results in the loss of half the nutrition. Suppose a lettuce has a half life of 48hours, two days after harvest only 50 percent of the original nutrition remains.After two more days, half the remaining half is gone and only 25 percent is left.After two more days half of that 25 percent is lost. Thus six days after harvestand a lettuce contains only bout 12 percent of its original nutrition. A two dayhalf-life is only hypothetical. Those types of produce I classify as very perishableprobably do have a half-life of from 36 to 48 hours. Moderately perishableproduce has a half life of about 72 hours; durable types of produce have half livesof 96 hours or longer.
Very Perishible  Moderately Perishible Durable
lettuce zucchini apple
spinach eggplant squash
Chinese cabbage sweet peppers oranges
kale broccoli cabbage
endive cauliflower carrot
peaches apricots lemons
parsley beets
The half life of produce can be lengthened by lowering its temperature. For
that reason, sophisticated produce growers usually use hydrocooling. Thisprocess dumps a just-cut vegetable into icy water within minutes of beingharvested, lowering core temperature to a few degrees above freezing almostimmediately. When cut vegetables are crated up at field temperatures, and stacksof those crates are put in a cooler, it can take the inside of the stack 24 hours, orlonger, to become chilled. Home gardeners should also practice hydrocooling. Fillyour sink with cold water and wash/soak your harvest until it is thoroughly chilledbefore draining and refrigerating it. Or, harvest your garden early in the morningwhen temperatures are lowest.
Still, when you buy produce in the store it may have been sitting at room
temperature for hours or possibly days.
The bottom line here: fresh is equally as important as unsprayed or organically
grown!
The Real Truth About Salt And Sugar
First, let me remind certain food religionists: salt is salt is salt is salt and sugar is
sugar is sugar. There are no good forms of salt and no good forms of sugar. Saltfrom a mine and salt from the sea both have the same harmful effect; white sugar,natural brown sugar, honey, molasses, corn syrup, maple syrup, whatever sweet
have you. All are sugars and all have the similar harmful effects. I know of no
harmless salt substitute that really tastes salty. Nutrisweet is basically harmless tomost people and can be used as a very satisfactory replacement for sugars. (Afew people are unable to tolerate nutrisweet, causing the anti-chemicalists tocirculate much anti-nutrisweet propaganda, but you should carefully consider thisthought before dismissing nutrisweet—there is almost no food substance thatsome people are not allergic to or unable to digest. The fact that nutrisweet ismade in a chemical vat and the fact that some cannot handle nutrisweet does notmake it “of the devil.”
And its not all black and white with the other items either. Sea salt does have
certain redeeming qualities not found in mined salt and under certain very specialconditions, eating small quantities of salt may be acceptable. Similarly, some formsof sugar are not quite as harmful as other forms, though all are harmful.
The primary health problem caused by table salt is not that it contributes to
high blood pressure in people with poor kidneys, though it does that. It is not thateating salt ruins the kidneys; salt probably does not do that to most kidneys. Thereal problem with salt is that sodium chloride is an adrenal stimulant, triggering therelease of adrenal hormones, especially natural steroids that resist inflammation.When these hormones are at high levels in the blood, the person often feels verygood, has a sense of well-being. Thus salt is a drug! And like many drugs of itstype, salt is a habituating drug. However, we are so used to whipping our adrenalswith salt that we don’t notice it. What we do notice is that we think we like thetaste of salted food and consider that food tastes flat without it. But take away aperson’s salt shaker and they become very uncomfortable. That’s because theaddict isn’t getting their regular dose.
What’s wrong with repetitive adrenal whipping is that adrenal fortitude is
variable; many people’s adrenals eventually fail to respond to the prod of salt andthe body begins to suffer from a lack of adrenal hormones. Often those inheritingweak adrenals manifest semi-failure in childhood. The consequence is that
ordinary, irritating substances begin causing severe irritation. The person becomes
allergic to pollen, dust, foods, animal danders, etc. We see asthma