clearmiddle
The Living Force
Fascinating -- thank you! The answers to the "personal" questions seem to offer clues, for me, anyway, about what to observe more closely in my own life. Signs of unseen connections? I am not sure.
Make that another.Jason (ocean59) said:Add another heartfelt thank you from me, for the time and energy spent in the session, and sharing here. Most interesting indeed!
I LOLed at the "Wait and See" comment, isn't that always the truth for so many situations. :)
The information about meat also made a lot of sense, good to see that explained in more detail.
SethianSeth said:Exciting information here, for sure. The bits about schizophrenia and meat as a sacrament hit really deep. Fat energy = the gift mother earth intended for us as energy. It deeply enhances the eating experience to give thanks for the energy sacrifice, and when the weight of this exchange is given its due it is the best motivator to DO SOMETHING with the energy. There is no free lunch.
Thanks Chateau Crew!
Q: (Ailen) And when you eat veggies you're basically eating a much lower level of consciousness. (L) Not only that, but in a sense you're rejecting the gift and you're not feeding consciousness. And that means that all eating of meat should be a sacrament.
A: Yes
Laura said:A: No not exactly. When humankind "fell" into gross matter, a way was needed to return. This way simply is a manifestation of the natural laws. Consciousness must "eat" also. This is a natural function of the life giving nature of the environment in balance. The Earth is the Great Mother who gives her body, literally, in the form of creatures with a certain level of consciousness for the sustenance of her children of the cosmos. This is the original meaning of those sayings.
The future shaman is traditionally thought to exhibit certain exceptional traits from childhood. He is often very nervous and even sickly in some ways. (In some cultures, epilepsy is considered a "mark" of the shaman, though this is a later corrupt perception of the ecstatic state.) It has been noted that shamans, as children, are often morbidly sensitive, have weak hearts, disordered digestion, and are subject to vertigo. There are those who would consider such symptoms to be incipient mental illness, but the fact is extensive studies have shown that the so-called hallucinations or visions consist of elements that follow a particular model that is consistent from culture to culture, from age to age, and is composed of an amazingly rich theoretical content. It could even be said that persons who "go mad," are "failed shamans" who have failed either because of a flaw in the transmission of the genetics, or because of environmental factors. At the same time, there are many more myths of failed Shamanic heroes than of successful ones, so the warnings of what can happen have long been in place. Mircea Eliade remarks that:
... The mentally ill patient proves to be an unsuccessful mystic or, better, the caricature of a mystic. His experience is without religious content, even if it appears to resemble a religious experience, just as an act of autoeroticism arrives at the same physiological result as a sexual act properly speaking (seminal emission), yet at the same time is but a caricature of the latter because it is without the concrete presence of the partner. [Eliade, Shamanism, 1964]
Laura said:Session Date: August 20th 2011
Q: (L) I don't think there is a country... If you think about any one country, they're all in bed together. I guess in a certain sense, we're already in the least bad place we can possibly be.
A: Yes
Elisa said:Thanks all the team for another great session. Oustanding for me the issue regarding schizophrenia. My mother is schizofrenic and sometimes she
states to see a little boy entering and getting out of her room. Maybe flashes of other realities. OSIT.
The largest study ever to track bipolar disorder and schizophrenia within families offers evidence that the two psychiatric disorders share a common genetic cause.
For more than a century the psychiatric community has debated whether schizophrenia and bipolar disorder were two distinct disorders or were more connected.
Over the course of their illnesses, many patients experience similarities in certain symptoms characteristic of both, such as manic mood swings in bipolar disorder and psychosis in schizophrenia.
Recent genetic studies suggest a common genetic cause for the two conditions. But earlier studies in families have not supported this conclusion, finding no increase in bipolar disorder in family members of schizophrenics and vice versa.
Family Links: Bipolar Disorder, Schizophrenia
In an effort to help settle the question, researchers in Sweden linked a comprehensive national health registry to equally comprehensive hospital discharge records.
Three decades of registry and hospital data (1973 to 2004) involving 9 million Swedes from 2 million families were analyzed to determine risk for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder among biological and nonbiological relatives of patients with one or both of the disorders.
Close to 36,000 people with schizophrenia and 40,500 people with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder were identified.
The analysis revealed that:
First-degree relatives (parents, siblings, or offspring) of people with either schizophrenia or bipolar disorder were at increased risk for both of these conditions.
If a sibling had schizophrenia, full siblings were nine times more likely than the general population to have schizophrenia and four times more likely to have bipolar disorder.
If a sibling had bipolar disorder, they were eight times more likely to have bipolar disorder and four times more likely to have schizophrenia.
Half siblings who shared the same mother were 3.6 times more likely to have schizophrenia if their half sibling had schizophrenia and 4.5 times more likely to have bipolar disorder if their half sibling had bipolar disorder. Half siblings who shared the same father had a 2.7-fold increase in schizophrenia risk and a 2.4-fold increase in bipolar disorder.
Adopted children with a biological parent with one of the disorders had a significant increase in risk for the other.
Shared and non-shared environmental factors also contributed to risk, but they were less important influences than genetics.
The findings appear in the Jan. 17 issue of the journal The Lancet.
'Time to Rethink Disorders'
"It is time that we rethink the way we view these disorders," study co-author Christina Hultman, PhD, tells WebMD. "And it is clear that we need more genetic studies to help us better understand this shared risk."
In an editorial accompanying the study, Cardiff University dean of medicine Michael Owen, MD, PhD, suggested that the earlier family studies were far too small to show the genetic link between schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
In an interview with WebMD, Owen called the latest research very strong, with major implications for how patients are managed.
"When someone receives a diagnosis of schizophrenia it is easy for clinicians to overlook mood disorder and other symptoms that don't fit with that diagnosis," he says. "The same is true for psychotic symptoms that may occur in people labeled with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder."
He adds that it is important for clinicians to recognize that symptoms can, and often do, change over time.
"Most patients don't fit neatly into categories, and the more questions you ask the more likely you are to find a combination of psychotic and mood symptoms," he says.
John H. Krystal, MD, of Yale University Medical Center and the VA Connecticut Healthcare System, agrees.
He tells WebMD that psychiatry has long struggled with "a gray zone" of patients who do not neatly fit into the categories of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.
He adds that the new research could have major implications for the development of new treatments for the psychiatric disorders.