Q: (L) Well I have to say that I did much, much better today. I had been in that horrible state for a couple of weeks, and I did much better today with my cortisone and that little bit of DLPA. I don't know if I'll take any more tomorrow. It really helped. I would suggest that anybody else who feels like they’re falling into the pit, try it too. But you don't want to take it more than two or three days. (Belibaste) So the diet and supplements made us less sensitive to this beaming?
A: Yes.
Q: (L) Speaking of diet, that leads me to my question. Hold on here, let me get my page. Since our awakening in respect of vegetarianism versus meat eating, and that awakening quite by chance, by experience, by experiment, by learning things, by ya know, hard lessons, we've been publishing a lot of material that we've been finding because of course coming to some realizations has propelled us or induced us to search for the material, the research, that explains what we experienced in the vegetarian vs. meat eating experiments. So, we have been publishing these things, and as we've been publishing things along that line, things about gluten, about the evils of dairy, about lectins and plant foods, about the necessity for eating more meat, and eating much more fat, and basically just that the Paleo diet is best suited for the human being, we've attracted a whole lot of what I can only describe as "vegetarian trolls". I mean, they're like fanatics.
So last night, I was thinking about this. And while the authoritarian personality as defined and described by Bob Altemeyer can easily explain some of these behaviors, what we really come down to again is another split. I mean, you have the split between people who know that consciousness exists outside of the body, or that consciousness exists prior to the body. And then you have the Darwinists where consciousness is a byproduct of material evolution. And of course, the Darwinists are the Big Bang type people too, which is really kind of a really bizarre creation theory.
So, you get this subdivision. You have the people who are Darwinists and Big Bangers, and then you have people who are fundamentalists who basically, in a funny sort of way, are like the Darwinists because they too believe in a miraculous creation. So even though they may seem, or may appear to be, on exactly opposite sides of the fence, in a certain sense they're both authoritarian-type personalities. Which kind of highlights what Altmeyer said about authoritarians. They follow the beliefs, dictates, or ideas of the constituted authorities according to what they're brought up with.
An authoritarian personality in Moscow would believe that communism - maybe not today, but at some time - that communism is the best way of life. Do or die, communism is what's real and good and proper. And the same individual, the same personality type on the other side of the ocean in the United States believes that capitalism is the best option. In other words, people are brought up with certain authorities in their lives that espouse certain ideas about things, and they're acclimated or enculturated to these ideas. Their personalities make them follow it slavishly - that being the key word: slavishly.
It seems to be that this same divide - even though the divide is not defined by an ideology, because any ideology serves this slavish following - what is different is the slavishness of the follower versus the person who actually cares about the facts and is able to emerge from their enculturated conditioning and consider other ideas. So, hang on, I'm going somewhere here!
So, the thing is Altemeyer wrote another book about "amazing conversions" where he gathered data and analyzed people who had been born in a strongly religious family and background, and experienced a lot of this programming as they were growing up. But then, they grew up and emerged from it. They didn't necessarily turn against it, but they stopped believing, they changed their minds, they became something else. And then there were also people who were brought up in completely non-religious environments. Some of them were even anti-religious, who then, when they grew up, converted to religion or fundamentalism. Usually it's fundamentalism when they do these conversions. Most people don't convert to Catholicism or Methodism, they convert to fundamentalism. So, the key thing that he noticed about the people who grew up in non-religious households and then converted to religion was that most of them had very serious psychological issues. They were abused, damaged in some way, and just basically there was not something inside them that helped them to come to terms with themselves, or life, or the world. So they had to seek, basically, a savior on the outside or something that would give them the answers. Because once again, they were individuals who needed someone or something to follow slavishly.
And then about the people who converted out of religion, they were quite different all the way around. They were more independent. There was such a variety of them because they could think and do and be somewhat differently. Some of them became atheists, some of them became spiritual - but not religious. They followed all different paths. They were very individualistic. But the main thing was that they had a strong inner belief in what was right. In a funny sort of way, their religious background actually really worked on them. It led them to search for the truth even if they came to the idea that they could not find the truth or that it certainly was not to be found in their religion. It was ingrained in them that religion was about truth, and they themselves were more intelligent than their peers. They were people who made good grades, were successful in intellectual endeavors. And then they came to the idea that using their minds to find the truth was a useful way to get through or understand life. So, they used their minds to search for truth, which was inculcated in them as the highest value, and that search was turned on their religion which didn’t stand up very well to scrutiny.
So, you have these two different kinds of people. Once again, there is this divide between people who want or need to be slaves, and people who individuate, who are able to do this against all odds – certainly against their family, social and cultural programming. I mean most of these people who become free of religions because they wanted the truth, simply discovered that their religions were not - they didn't consider them to be adequate explanations of anything. They weren't believable. So these people, they wanted the truth and they were individualistic and they were completely different from the slavish followers who, even if they were brought up in anti-religious households, needed to “find religion” because they NEEDED to be slaves! Just as some individuals “find” Darwinism and become slaves of it. Or any other idea that is followed slavishly..
I guess what I'm getting to is that I'm seeing this again in the issue about vegetarianism. Now, all things being equal, we gave the strong vegetarian approach a really good try. During that period of time, all of us had issues and we kept referring it to detox. You're detoxing, you've got detox symptoms. And that's what nearly everybody who was on these detox diets talks about. "Oh, you're having detox symptoms." And of course we believe that there is a certain amount of detoxing that is needed and can be done, but to go on forever having detox symptoms every time you turn around and that everything is written off to detox symptoms is kind of - you wonder when is it going to end? When is your body going to start working on detoxing on a regular cyclical basis in a 24-hour period so that you don't have to go through some horrible ordeal every three or four days. And of course there was the experience that Atriedes had that led to a few little clues that in fact, vegetables may not be as good as they're cracked up to be.
So now we have all of these vegetarians. And they're fanaticism is amazing. However, I thought about this last night. I starting thinking: Ya know, there are people who are like cockroaches: they can survive on anything. Some of these people say, "Oh, I'm very, very healthy. I've never had any problems. I've never lost any weight. I didn't lose any strength." Ya know, if somebody tells you that, maybe it's true. I don't know the person personally, but I'm going to accept the fact that maybe they're telling the truth. On the other hand, I've known a lot of vegetarians who are not healthy. They may feel alright for awhile, and it may be kind of a relative thing: they don't know how good they could feel, so they think they feel relatively well. But then they develop some kind of sickness and they die and people wonder about it because their diet was so “healthy”.
And then they go after the people who eat meat and say, "Oh, you're meat eaters, you're always sick!" Well, the problem is that those people who are ordinary meat eaters that are being accused of always being sick are not really eating a Paleo diet. They are eating meat along with all kinds of corrupt and polluted and toxic foods. Drinking sodas, eating lots of carbs, etc. Because if you're eating a Paleo diet, you're minimizing carbs and not eating dairy and all that stuff.
So, anyhow, what I'm getting to is that while I was thinking about all of this, I was thinking about this divide once again between the slavish following of something, and being able to have the courage to say, "I was doing that, I tried it, there were problems, I began to explore, and I learned this and this and this and tried something different." There's this divide, this split. I started wondering about people who are fanatical vegetarians. I'm not talking about people who can be a vegetarian and maybe if they really receive some information that suggests that being a vegetarian is not such a good, they could then change. Which is kind of what happened to a lot of people we know and a lot of people in our group... We can name a dozen or so people who were strict vegetarians for 20 years, and they've stopped being vegetarians and their health improved!
So then, I remembered something that was said in a session on October 7, 1995 when we were discussing another topic entirely, but what come out what was this exchange:
