Chapter 55: Compassion and Addiction, Synchronicity is a Proverb, the Placebo Effect and the Government’s Responsibility for Compassion

Chapter 55: Compassion and Addiction, Synchronicity is a Proverb, the Placebo Effect and the Government’s Responsibility for Compassion

 

http://darrylpenney.com

 

Abstract: love and compassion are orgenes and would be expected to be similar, but they are not. Compassion is a modern addiction of the mind and is the cause of our current extinction event fuelled through the placebo effect. Synchronicity is shown to be a Proverb, and compassion has evolved and is desirable, but needs to be managed through social security and the responsibility lies with government.

 

Orgenes have appeared in the last two chapters as the death orgene and the determination orgene and it is becoming apparent that there are a number of these, such as love, compassion etc. that link the life processes with non-logical operations so as to allow evolution. Whilst death might be a ‘stable state’ and something that we can comprehend easily, determination, love and compassion are a little ‘touchy feely’ and could do with a solid scientific base to make them more ‘usable’ and definable.

 

Let’s go back to basics, so from previously, where: the Half-truth may be true, false, ‘true some of the time and false the rest of the time’, and ‘both true and false at the same time’.

 

Formal logic is true/false, ‘true some of the time and false the rest of the time’ led us into existence and ‘both true and false at the same time’ was said to be indeterminate/chaos and too difficult to comprehend and would be left for later. The Half-truth, presents a reality because it is continuous and covers all possibilities and so it should cover the ‘touchy feely’ cases as well, and we find that the ‘true and false at the same time’ term is where we need to look.

 

The orgene is a combination of the logical and the non-logical at the same time and this is necessary because it is being done and it is only being done because of the Rule of Life. In other words, the organization might be complex, but the logic is simple (and there is no going back) and there are logical aspects and non-logical aspects. Is there any difference between true/logical and false/non-logical? The definition of the Half-truth doesn’t appear to see any difference, so I’ll press on.

 

I am going to be quoting from a book entitled ‘Love and Survival: the scientific basis for the healing power of intimacy’ by Dr. Dean Ornish. Many instances are given where discussion groups and support groups have lengthened the life of people that have had heart problems, cancer etc. This type of interaction has been looked at previously in chapter 40: The Placebo – Nocebo Continuum, chapter 41: The Cell to the Placebo Effect, and chapter 42: The Second Law of Life with Stress and Placebo.

 

Dr.Ornish’s book cites a large range of experiments that seem particularly compelling and provides an opportunity to look at more orgenes. I might restate that the first Law of Life is about creation of life, the second about the environment and the third about the family with the proviso that the three laws are inter-related. Now the third law has not been discussed much before because it relates to the family and family relationships have grown out of the need to teach the young to give them a better chance of survival on their own and has become more important as the size (of both the animal and thus the investment) has grown.

 

The death orgene is a step away from componentization and the determination orgene is a step away from iteration, and both of these are factors in the first Law of Life. Now love/compassion are orgenes that are a step away from the third Law of Life and whether they are separate or two sides of the same thing, we will have to decide and that will lead to some surprises. In dealing with many of the concepts, it is difficult to ‘pigeon hole’ them because, as mentioned previously, we, in our world O, use a different type of measurement units than is used in the universe, world P. In the same way, we use the vast majority of words, such as love and compassion etc. without a basic single definition. A look in a dictionary will confirm the multitude of ‘shades’ to a word, and I have tended to use a ‘/’ to denote these ‘shades’.

 

For example, science admits to space-time and that there is a fifth dimension, but it is unknown, as stated in the paper by Kaluza and Klein, whereas I believe there is a fifth dimension of entanglement/measurement and our universe is a probability space, as mentioned earlier. How does one describe the relationship between two points in a probability field where the sum of all points must always be 1? We know that there is entanglement in the determinacy of different types of particles, as mentioned previously, and also, by definition that we can measures the value between two points.

 

‘Grace is also the organizing force behind “coincidences”, the synchronistic experiences in our lives that some consider chance but are definitely not random.’ (Invisible Acts of Power, Caroline Myss, p 17) This quotation contains the word ‘grace’ that will be looked at later, but ‘synchronicity’ is interesting because it is supposed to be a relationship between people/things that changes, presumably by the mind. From above, I do believe that there is entanglement/measurement between two points, but synchronicity is a higher order that I don’t believe that we can be justified in contemplating. It is tempting, because synchronicity is similar or aligns with entanglement/measurement, but finding patterns (confabulation) from fragments is heritable, and is a more likely explanation. It is also likely, from the Rule of Life that if there were an effect from synchronicity, the effect would change reality and have been used and would still be with us.

 

Synchronicity was put forward by Jung a hundred years ago and his standing and reputation was such, that the word has come into the language without a real definition, only a vague ‘sense’. Perhaps, all that we can say is simply that randomicity is not synchronicity and synchronicity is not randomicity, but what is it? From above, we showed that it is probably not physical, which means it is mental and can only be a concept and we have a general method of dealing with concepts, so the Mathematics of the Mind should help us.

 

It so happens that I use a saying that ‘everything turns out for the best’ because it is the act of looking at the problem and seeing where the best is, and the fact of that ‘looking’ often finds a better solution, or a better result occurs because of the ‘looking’. It is a method of positive thinking, and it works. For example, I have completely uncivilized ‘boat-people’ housed next to my unit and to stop hearing them, I play the guitar and sing and I am getting quite good with the guitar, so ‘everything turns out for the best’! I am becoming proficient with the guitar. Simple general solutions to the Mathematics of the Mind are proverbs that work most of the time, but not to be replied upon, as mentioned previously (chapter 22: Magic, Proverbs, Politics and the Voting System).

 

Given that synchronicity is not randomicity, it must be something that produces the ‘feeling’ of ‘things going our way’ and yet it is not physical, so, I believe that synchronicity is a proverb with the same basis as ‘everything turns out for the best’, as described above. In other words, the concept that the mind influences everything in the material and the immaterial world to help us in some way, has the same effect as saying that I use my mind to seek out possibilities that I have not previously considered that will benefit me. If the reader is not convinced that synchronicity is a proverb, remember that the aim of this book is to simplify so that we can absorb and use concepts more easily and I am prepared to think that synchronicity, without a firm definition, is equivalent to ‘everything turns out for the best’.

 

 

 

From above, ‘grace is also the organizing force’, so what is grace? ‘In theology, grace is defined as unmerited divine assistance, aid given to help us regenerate our spirits and lives – a virtue coming from God. The concept of grace exists around the world. In secular history, kings, as representatives of divine power on earth, would grant mercy and pardon, or grace, to their subjects. In Greek mythology, the three graces were sister goddesses, daughters of Zeus, who bestowed joy, charm, and beauty on mortals.’ (p 16)

 

From above, a difficulty occurs because of the range of meanings for words, and the simplest method is to give them a unique meaning and so I’ll take the graces from Greek mythology, which ‘were sister goddesses, daughters of Zeus, who bestowed joy, charm, and beauty on mortals’. These graces could be considered to be useful and heritable and thus, could be called anti-orgenes. This contrasts with two other forces that are well-known orgenes that are not logical, and in fact, so illogical, that the World is in the grip of an extinction event that the planet has not seen since the Cambrian. These are love and compassion and will arise out of the problem below.

 

I have tried to simplify throughout this book and I’ll do so again. The experiments referred to above in Dr.Ornish’s book are A: longevity increases, correlated with the warmth of the relationship with parents decades before, B: longevity increases, correlated with marriage/confidant, C: longevity increases, correlated with support groups, D: longevity increases, correlated with owning a pet or being petted. I have condensed many experiments over many pages in Dr. Ornish’s book to the above four lines and written them in such a way that the results are obvious and not easily forgotten.

 

The mind/brain evolved hundreds of millions of years ago in fish, probably around the time of the Cambrian, as mentioned previously, and is best thought of as a component and comes into this world in a ‘cut-down’ form for a number of reasons to do with the physics of delivery at birth. Essentially, the neurons are there, but not the connections and the state of mind is thus dependent on upbringing. In A above, the warmth of the relationship with parents decades before, presumably ‘sets the state’ of mind for the decades later, and brings A into line with the other cases B, C and D.

 

Then, to explain all of the cases A to D, I believe that we need look no further than the placebo/nocebo effect, and whilst several chapters have been cited above, a simple restatement might be useful. Single celled organisms joined together to form multicellular organisms to enable them to evolve lensed eyes and consciousness/creativity in the Cambrian. This increase in size produced a reality unattainable to single cells, and a covenant had to be put in place that every cell had communication with the brain and the brain produced a mind/brain that attained consciousness/creativity and could make decisions. As each cell contributes to the mind/brain, the mind/brain sends messages to the cells and this produces the placebo/nocebo effect. As has been mentioned before, an exalted level of mental view affects the cells of the body and increases longevity and explains A to D.

 

If this is a little short and simple, a deeper investigation of B should increase the understanding. The participants that were married with or without a confidant and those single with a confidant followed the same path of longevity into the future, whereas single without a confidant had much shorter longevity, showing, I believe, that mental stimulation feeds back to the cells and stimulates them and produces health and longevity.

 

As an example of how ‘strong’ is the physical effect that comes from mental thought, around 1550, ‘Bloody’ Mary, Queen of England announced twice that she was pregnant and both times they were ‘phantom’ pregnancies, so great was her desire for an heir. This indicates the degree of ‘motivation’ handed to the cells by the mind wanting to become pregnant to continue the succession.

 

Love that ultimately produces children and spending time and money on the less successful people are orgenes from a logical perspective. However, other people have different ideas. ‘A man in one of my workshops took me aside to tell me the story of his divorce. It remains unique in my experience. This man told me that his wife found his compassion for others impossible to live with. As he told me, “my ex-wife believes that people should take care of themselves. I have always believed people should take care of other people”’. (p 143)

 

If love and compassion are orgenes from a logical perspective, the paragraph above shows clearly that many people do not agree with that premise. A little further back we considered cases A to D and found that mental stimulation was good for longevity and the body in general, but this presents a disastrous situation where the vast majority of people are thinking and acting illogically! Let me restate that love produces offspring to compete with us and the helping of the unfortunate to compete with us must be considered orgenes and not in our best interests from a logical standpoint, but obviously we do this because it makes us feel good mentally which flows through to the body through the placebo/nocebo effect.

 

Wow! We are, in the main, addicted to doing good works, and this act is supported by the Churches and government. The Churches help the poor and the government gives welfare to the poor and those that can’t work and we all feel happy! This state of euphoria is destroying our civilization and causing a worldwide extinction event! Where is the world going to, when at least one Church discourages contraception? Similarly for governments, that in the last chapter, we showed that they were giving social security handouts to the wrong people and here it is again! Remember that governments have the ‘strength’ of reality and Churches do not have a reality and are actually dependant on governments, as discussed earlier, so governments have to enforce their will. A Church that does not listen and work with the government is a terrorist organization as discussed in chapter 38: Stopping Terrorism – a General Solution.

 

Looking at the world in terms of reality, it has been shown that the government, police and judiciary obey reality and the same can be said for the United Nations as well as business and workers, in all probability because they operate under Survival of the Fittest. From this, the reality of civilization, points to the fact that social security, from above, is an orgene and is illogical and is not a reality and not sustainable. Compassion is not part of Survival of the Fittest, but love and procreation is necessary for evolution. Compassion is an orgene that has only been (effectively) in existence in modern times. Our minds have ‘twisted’ the basis (or logic) of multicellular organisms and compassion could be called a ‘cancer’ of the organism in the same way that cancer is a ‘modern’ disease. This ‘cancer’ of the mind is an addiction caused by a modern orgene that was unknown for 3000 million years.

 

Wow, again! Our modern lifestyle has not only created the ‘modern’ diseases like cancer, heart problems etc. it has created a perversion of the reality imposed by the formation of multicellular organisms which is throwing evolution into reverse! We have taken over from Survival of the Fittest (iteration) by using our mind/brain and mathematics to undo evolution in a few hundred years. The full Mathematics of the Mind has to be used to convert the Selection of the Indifferent (that we have at present: mind/mathematics) to selection of the Best (mind/Mathematics of the Mind).

 

Under Survival of the Fittest, there was very limited capacity to carry those that couldn’t support themselves, and even over the last 10,000 years as the mind/brain took over, only a limited number of people could be ‘carried’, however, over the last hundred years, our society has changed and welfare spending has ‘blown out’. I don’t want to get involved in this area because everyone knows that there are grave problems and it is up to the government to sort this out.

 

A small ‘sharpening’ of our focus might be informative. From previously, the organisational logic behind a cell is similar to the organisational logic of the body and should be similar to our government because they all possess reality. The people (cells) vote for and elect a government (brain) that passes laws for the benefit of the voters (cells) by using parliamentary process (mind) to the benefit of the voters (cells). Thus, this process is the same as goes on in our bodies (and cells) because of the Rule of Life. We previously determined that government is a reality, and the illustration clarifies the situation. Further, it is apparent that world government is similar and it is the government that is ultimately responsible for who should breed and for managing Survival of the Best. However, if government is lacking foresight/application, there is the Forever Club, as mentioned previously.

 

I have used the word ‘addiction’ and perhaps I should justify this. ‘The Rule of 3 states that you CANNOT survive:

3 seconds without spirit or hope,

3 minutes without air,

3 hours without shelter in extreme conditions,

3 days without water,

3 weeks without food, and

3 months without companionship or love. (The Survivors Club, Ben Sherwood, p 128) ‘I had not considered, before writing this book, that caring for others and going that extra mile for family, friends, coworkers, or strangers could have a connection to our physical health. Now I believe that the human spirit needs to develop generosity and compassion to be healthy.’ (Invisible Acts of Power, Caroline Myss, p 6)

 

The above shows that companionship/love is necessary for survival and generosity/compassion to be healthy and that is for the family/tribe (third Law of Life) so it is not difficult to imagine that compassion etc. could be expanded to include the whole world (second Law of Life), as most religions state (as I have said that the laws are interdependent). So, when predation is removed, we have a problem with overpopulation worldwide.

 

To stop the extinction event that we are in, due to overpopulation, we can support those that are alive, at present, but a scheme as described in the previous chapter must be implemented to change evolution and stop the breeding of those people that don’t show determination. This is a scheme that can be put in place and that does not eliminate compassion from the population, but it allows the government control of it in a positive way, and I suspect, it will pay for itself by reducing social security, cost of prisons, mental health savings etc. and then the positives of working longer, reduced nursing home costs etc., and this has all been considered previously.

 

To restate this important point, using the Mathematics of the Mind, it is necessary to understand and solve the problem of compassion, which is a good ‘force’, but if used without understanding, can cause an extinction event, as it is doing. We need the Survival of the Best, to speed up evolution, but it must be handled properly because we can wipe out (up to) 3,000 million years of evolution if the climate ‘flips’. This may not be likely, but there is a non-zero probability of it happening, and so, why take the risk?

 

Conclusion: I don’t know what the conclusion will be! I have outlined the problem and the solution and it is up to those in government to get the world back on track by limiting compassion because compassion is foreign and addictive to our minds, and is a modern ‘disease’ brought on by our attempt to control our destiny without the proper tools. Compassion seems to be a good thing, but it is an orgene and consequently must be handled ‘with care’ because it is illogical and addictive.

 

Chapter 55: Compassion and Addiction, Synchronicity is a Proverb, the Placebo Effect and the Government’s Responsibility for Compassion

Chapter 42: The Second Law of Life with Stress and Placebo

Chapter 42: The Second Law of Life with Stress and Placebo

 

‘According to Will Tuttle, author of The World Peace Diet, “until we are willing and able to make the connections between what we are eating and what was required to get it on our plate, and how it affects us to buy, serve, and eat it, we will be unable to make the connections that will allow us to live wisely and harmoniously on this earth.”’ (Meatonomics, David Robinson Simon, p xix) This is a statement similar to reality: ‘get along with your neighbours’, but ‘most of our beliefs about nutritional needs, consumption levels, and farming and lawmaking practices are based on traditions that have largely melted away – at a pace so slow and seductive, we’re barely aware of it. As the comic strip’s Calvin put it, “Day by day, nothing seems to change. But pretty soon, everything’s different.”’ (p xxi)

 

The best that we can hope to be, in an evolutionary sense, is a person that is successful in the Survival of the Best and to do that, we have to know what we are doing, and that is, presumably, the reason for reading this book. We have seen that the more facts that you learn, the more creative that you become because there are more dendrites to interact within the brain, and in the Mathematics of the Mind it is the number of attractors considered, which is also the broadness of your learning. As an added bonus, the more that the brain is used, the less chance of dementia later in life and one of our aims must be to have a long and healthful life.

 

With an enquiring mind, you will no doubt have accumulated a significant number of assets and are financially comfortable and wish to enjoy that state for many years. If you are not financially comfortable, now might be the time to change your life by considering these simple steps, and they are simple because the Rule of Life indicates that whilst an organism or animal might increase in complexity, the organization simplifies (plus, it can’t restart, which we will see to be important later)).

 

It is the organization that concerns us because our genes are in the Palaeolithic, our epigenes have probably changed over one or two generations, our seventh sense thinks that we are in a drought, our eighth sense is uneducated and completely lost, and as the first paragraph says we don’t even realize that we have lost our way and are being played by marketeers and ‘big’ business. The result is the Obesity Epidemic, where 60% of the population are overweight or obese as well as the prevalence of ‘modern’ diseases of cancer, strokes etc.

 

‘Today, 99 percent of the farm animals raised in the United States live in steel and concrete factories with no resemblance to a traditional farm.’ (p xxii) Consequentially, they are fed inappropriate diets that produce weight gain, are bred to increase output with minimum inputs and ‘then there’s the fact that meat and dairy keep getting cheaper. This development is driven partly by subsidies, partly by efficient methods of factory farming, and partly by the industry’s practice of offloading its costs onto others.’ (p xxii)

 

The above paragraph was quoted in the context of the state of mind and the condition of the cells of the farm animals held and fed under these conditions as an illustration of the last two chapters and shows that our food has changed, as above, to make money for Big Business and we are the poorer in health for allowing it to happen, but there are ways to circumvent this degrading of the food supply and the first step is knowledge and the second is to act on it. Consequently, this chapter is about the logic of what to do about turning modern food to our advantage and not to Big Business’s advantage, taking control of our situation, lengthening a healthy life, and so on. In the next chapter, I present a means of allowing us to act on it.

 

Going back to the end of chapter 40, firstly we have not two effects in the placebo/nocebo, but a continuum of effects, and the act of measurement that this continuum opens up means that there are many possibilities in mental health that we can explore. Secondly this continuum ranges from the mind being able to repair knees etc. to killing the whole individual. This is a huge power that the cells have turned over to the mind and we should know more about it and be able to control it better than we do, and as we shall see, it is part of the second Law of Life, which is the state of mind, exercise and nutrition.

 

Firstly, I must re-visit the discussion of components, which are necessary, because, under the Rule of Life, the organization of the body should be in its ‘simplest’ state and that state is ‘componentization’, which is a logic machine used in atoms, reproduction and now we see it in the formation of our bodies. Every part of us must be a component that will cause the least impediment if it is little used, but can expand to do any job required of it. For example, a muscle gains strength if it needs to be stronger, and it does this through being used, myelin sheath is added to nerves to increase our reaction speed, if needed, in both cases, presumably by the emotion of close ‘calls’ with predation that cause the mind to instruct the cells which produce it. This communication can now be better understood in the light of the last two chapters where we looked at the signalling between cells in the body.

 

If I seem to be ‘jumping about’ it is because I need to bring attractors into the argument, so that the second law can be expanded to state that ‘state of mind’ is the placebo/nocebo continuum (downward acting), creativity/consciousness (downward acting) and the seventh sense (upward acting) and stress (up and down). Also, nutrition is a continuum from ‘take-aways’ to the Palaeolithic diet and exercise can be from the ‘couch potato’ to the athlete. I have replaced the individual terms with continua, which are measurements and enables us to use the fifth dimension in the same way that measuring the photon caused determinacy. This may sound strange, but the dimensions of our universe must encompass everything that we can do, and space-time is not enough to include measurement, that is logic and aligns with entanglement.

 

This measurement of these three continua allows a reality to be constructed as an orthogonal system and we can produce a simple Mathematical Model to measure a combination of the three factors. This is the first step in measuring our ‘fitness’, which is fitness in a health aspect, our usefulness to society, our fitness to pass on our genes, our fitness to be part of society and so on. Obviously more attractors would be needed, or more terms in the model would be needed for accuracy, but the principle is the same.

 

What is evolution passing on? Survival of the Fittest contains many factors, such as ability to fight, ability to hide, ability to procreate, ability to eat a range of foods and so on. The Survival of the Best must cover these also, in a forward not backward-looking sense, but at this point I want to restrict the discussion to personal fitness and a simple mathematical summation of the three factors should suffice. State of mind is a form of measuring ‘mental health’ and the placebo/nocebo continuum shows the power and dangers of thought to the functioning of the body. Exercise and nutrition are also necessary, but from above: “day by day, nothing seems to change. But pretty soon, everything’s different.”’ Our job is to rationalize the situation.

 

Traditionally in a ‘slower’ society, you ate what your parents ate and you knew that that food would give you adequate nutrition and you would have had to work physically for it. The modern world, from above, changes rapidly and we have ‘lost’ role models and people tend to eat what tastes good, which is those foods that are hard to find in the wild: carbohydrates, fats and salt. Likewise, exercise is not pleasant and we try to do as little as possible and muscle mass decreases and we become fat and so on. At the moment sixty percent of adults are overweight or obese, so the only sensible way is to go back to a regime that worked and that was the Palaeolithic way of life. Of course we can’t afford to emulate this way of life, but we can try to change it using the Survival of the Best, the forward looking reality and the Mathematics of the Mind using our minds as drivers, and what I am doing here is an example.

 

The subject of this chapter is to formulate the best medical plan, so we will have to restrict the discussion. Our bodies are composed of components that do everything we ask of them unless we abuse them, and that is precisely what we are doing when we eat the ‘incorrect’ food, think sloth and neglect exercise. One of the principal requirements of Survival of the Best is to look after ourselves in all ways, and that includes living as long as possible.

 

The result of our living is in our hands, and the life that we have lived, shows our capabilities of strength of mind, determination, willpower and any number of other positive and negative attributes, and these are factors that can be used to determine the Survival of the Best. But, not knowing is the same as not caring if we don’t learn, and this book is the opportunity to learn, and it is being made available to be used on the internet. Given that the answer is now available, sickness is to a large extent due to modern life and if we allow ourselves to get sick it is our fault. If we get sick, we turn to the medical profession that is largely based on the placebo effect, and expect a dramatic turn around! Surely, it is better to give our bodies the thoughtfulness, exercise and nutrition that it was designed for.

 

If you are worthy of passing on your genes, you should have the determination to do something that you think is worthwhile with your life and the basic inputs that you need to support that life are strength of mind, nutrition and exercise. Your body has evolved to do what the mind says is necessary to do to survive and pass on genes, and those social attributes are not genetic or epigenetic. In other words, we pass on genes (long-term), epigenes (short-term) and social attitudes (short-term), by means of DNA, some sort of blocking of DNA for organ differentiation, methylation of the DNA for epigenetics and the family life and teaching for social attitudes.

 

On the path of greater socialization, our cortex grew, but was restricted by body shape for birth, the cortex came into the world in a minimum ‘cut-down’ package, grew as a component and learnt about family life as soon as possible. This required a long nurturing period and the family (and extended family) evolved. This family-life brought problems of inbreeding that were solved hundreds of millions of years ago and show why the Rule of Life is so necessary in that there is no going back because any reduction might have unexpected consequences.

 

Somewhere hard-wired in the hindbrain is the solution to inbreeding, and that is that the young must move away to a new tribe or feeding ground to prevent inbreeding. Another piece of hard-wiring is that you must look after, feed, protect your progeny etc. Clearly, these are attributes of Survival of the Fittest, and are still with us today. However, the Mathematics of the Mind is imprecise and ranks the attractors, so if the above two attractors are still with us, what of less ‘important’ attractors.

 

Reality (‘getting along with your neighbours’) requires ‘quiet time’, a settled existence, but we have seen that a disrupted family life, even (in some cases) one-parent families increases the risk that children are more anti-social. Keeping this as brief as possible and considering the mental disruption as another attractor, modern life with stress at work, home, upbringing etc. may have changed the health outlook of modern civilization. ‘Almost every major illness that people acquire has been linked to chronic stress. (Segerstrom and Miller 2004; Kopp and Rethelyi 2004; McEwen and Lasky 2002; McEwen and Seeman 1999) (The Biology of Belief, Bruce H. Lipton, p 121)

 

As we have seen, the placebo/nocebo continuum directs a stress in the form of un-natural variations in hormones etc., in a ‘reverse’ seventh sense, to every cell in the body where it must cause ‘distress’ to the working of the cells. The seventh sense is the effect that a change in diet has on the mind, and poor nutrition has the same effect as a drought and causes a stress into the brain as the seventh sense.

 

It is my opinion, though I will continue to use the term, the mind is a concept, not a ‘thing’ because it is a ‘bonus’ of leaving off or reducing the insulation on a computer. The brain is a computer in the normal sense of the term, but it uses a tree structure to hold the memories and varying levels of neurotransmitters to ‘age’ memories into the subconscious. The long dendrites serve two purposes, firstly to connect and secondly to create consciousness when the myelin sheath is lacking. ‘There is no tissue that is not “body,” and no response that is not “mind,” and any analytical terminology which tends to divert one’s attention from these irreducible facts must be used with extreme care.’ (Job’s Body, Deane Juhan, p 148)

 

I want to accentuate that ‘There is no tissue that is not “body,”’ means that every part of the body is a cell, even the myelin. ‘Specialized glial cells, oligodendrocytes and Schwann cells sheath nerve axons with myelin, an insulating fatty substance which improves the transmission of neural impulses.’ (p 146) ‘And no response that is not “mind,”’ means to me, that every response is due to the ‘mind’. The mind, by this definition is not just in the brain, but throughout the body, because that ‘this significance is considerable is strongly hinted at by the sheer size of the “hidden” gamma system: As it turns out, fully one third of the motor neurons in the human body are gamma.’ (p 197)

 

I am trying to condense this as much as possible so, to generate a better understanding of the second Law of Life, I have inserted some figures to add perspective, bearing in mind that I am over 70 years old. I consider myself to be young, but have been around a long time!

 

The second Law of Life can be stated as:

 

  1.   Nutrition. I consume over thirty varieties of nuts, seeds and fruit in the morning and over thirty varieties of vegetables, herbs and spices with fish, cheese etc.
  2.    Exercise. Each day I work FAST for about two hours, or dance FAST for the same time as well as walk for 45 minutes every second day. One hundred push-ups (2×50) and four minutes standing on one leg (alternately, one minute each time) with eyes CLOSED.
  3.    State of Mind.
    1. (a)  placebo/nocebo continuum (downward acting from the mind) The placebo/nocebo pathway is the effect of being told something, whereas
    2. (b) creativity/consciousness (downward acting from the mind) is the generation of thought by your mind, and
    3. (c) the seventh sense (upward acting from the body) is the changing of the minds thinking through the type of food eaten.
    4. (d) Stress is very important (upward and downward) as the seventh and anti-seventh sense.So the answer to a ‘health package’ is that it is part of a ‘whole’ and it behoves one to look to nutrition, exercise, mental attitude and stress levels in modern life, and trust to your body to stay healthy, as it should. While modern medicine has many good points, it might be best to consider that much of it depends on the placebo effect and we can update the saying ‘let food be your medicine …’ to ‘let the second Law of Life be your medicine’.Predictions, comments etc.: the subject above is complicated and intertwined and that is why the Mathematics of the Mind works so well, but it requires predictions and I will use them to illustrate where we are going. The second Law of Life is one of three intertwining laws and concerns Life in the environment, and as such is basic and all-encompassing. We can use this fact to say that a solution will be found for any problem that we set, and that will be a general solution.In particular, the second law defines a method, and gives a system for considering that solution, and a subject that has caused much controversy is the ‘Diet’. Hundreds of diets have been formulated and it is considered that none of them work, so here is the system that allows you to use your favourite diet and measure the effects using a forward indicator. In other words, measure the effect before you start the diet, and if the results are not good enough, try looking at another diet. I have my favourite and I will give it as an example in the next chapter.
Chapter 42: The Second Law of Life with Stress and Placebo

Chapter 40: The Placebo – Nocebo Continuum

Chapter 40: The Placebo – Nocebo Continuum

 

This chapter looks at the body in relation to the ‘Placebo Effect’, the next chapter at the role of the cell, and the chapter after that will show how to optimise the choice of ‘medicine’ to be used. We all know the proverbs ‘a stitch in time saves nine’ and ‘prevention is better than a cure’, so, I will try to show that prevention of sickness might be a better option than what is happening now.

 

‘The fact that most doctors are not trained to consider the impact of the placebo effect is ironic because some historians make a strong case that the history of medicine is largely the history of the placebo effect. For most of medical history, doctors did not have effective means to fight disease. Some of the more notorious treatments once prescribed by mainstream medicine include bloodletting, treating wounds with arsenic, and the proverbial cure-all, rattlesnake oil. No doubt some patients, the conservatively estimated one third of the population who are particularly susceptible to the healing power of the placebo effect, got better with those treatments.’ (The Biology of Belief, Bruce H. Lipton, p 108)

 

This quotation contains several important points, but one ‘error’ that shows an interesting side to medicine that is not generally known and I don’t have a reference at hand. ‘The Black Death in England was a bubonic plague pandemic, which reached England in1348, and killed perhaps half the population. It was the first and most severe manifestation of the Second Pandemic, caused by the Yersinia pestis bacteria.’ (Wikipedia, Black Death). So many people died in Europe during, I believe, three pandemics, that the population ‘evolved’ a short-term defence to the plague by the body accumulating excess iron in the blood at the expense of the ‘disease’ of haemochromatosis (unknown at that time) in later years, and bloodletting prevented this affliction by removing iron from the body and excess accumulations of iron were used up in producing new haemoglobin. I believe that enough elderly patients made a remarkable recovery after bloodletting, because they had haemochromatosis that bloodletting became general medical practice. At least it was a treatment that worked for the ‘unknown disease’ and for the placebo effect.

 

I enjoy telling that story because it makes sense of the bizarre, in the same way that I like ‘solving’ the problems in this book, at least to my satisfaction, bearing in mind that I am seeking a ‘useable’ solution (until a better one comes along). No one seems to know why the placebo effect works, but it often works as well as ‘modern medicine’s sophisticated technology, including the most “concrete” of medical tools, surgery.’ (p 108) ‘Despite the fact that there are 650,000 surgeries yearly for arthritic knees, at a cost of about $5,000 each, the results were clear to Moseley: “My skill as a surgeon had no benefit on these patients. The entire benefit of surgery for osteoarthritis of the knee was the placebo effect.”’ (p 109)

 

I feel that a small digression at this point is warranted to ‘point’ the way into the problem of the placebo effect. Behind all this discussion is the Mathematics of the Mind and the attractors (which are the quotations) and the discussion is a means of ‘integration’ of the attractors. Mathematics uses the word ‘integration’ as a ‘summing’ and I am doing the same with the attractors, but in a different sense in that the wider the summation, the better is the result, whereas, in mathematics, we are summing to a ‘limit’. Another point that I want to stress is that a subject such as the placebo effect needs to be ‘put in its place’ in the ‘order of things’, and that is the power of the Mathematics of the Mind to enable us to (possibly) redesign the practice of medicine by bringing it into a ‘part of a whole’, or, in other words, reduce our reliance on it.

 

Whilst the use of placebos could have a beneficial effect on patients: ‘studies have shown the placebo effect to be powerful in treating other diseases, including asthma and Parkinson’s. In the treatment of depression, placebos are stars. So much so that psychiatrist Walter Brown of the Brown University School of Medicine has proposed placebo pills as the first treatment for patients with mild or moderate depression. (Brown 1998) Patients would be told that they’re getting a remedy with no active ingredient, but that shouldn’t dampen the pill’s effectiveness. Studies show that even when people know that they are not getting a drug, the placebo pills still work.’ (p 109)

 

This corresponds to the Hawthorne effect where worker that were being studied performed better because of the interest shown in their work. The medical profession have always used a ‘white coat’ approach to enhance their status and this seems to work, along with the attention, to produce a placebo effect even when patients are told that it is a sugar pill, as described above.

 

Just how good is the medical profession? ‘Last year a new study, based on the results of a ten-year survey of government statistics, came up with even more dismal figures. (Null, et al, 2003) That study concludes that iatrogenic (illness resulting from medical treatment) illness is actually the leading cause of death in the United States and that adverse reactions to prescription drugs are responsible for more than 300,000 deaths a year.’ (p 77)

 

This might sound like a lot of deaths, but the life expectancy in the developed world is longer than most of the world that use traditional remedies and this means that medical care in the developing world is probably inferior. However, going back to the quotation, above that: ‘some historians make a strong case that the history of medicine is largely the history of the placebo effect’, that does seem to be the case except for modern antibiotics which, unfortunately, seem to be reaching the end of their useful life because bacteria are so versatile.

 

The problem with medicines in general is that they appear to cause side-effects and that this problem is a result of the body using chemicals in different locations in the body for different purposes and a ‘medicinal dose’ is applied throughout the body which causes disruptions. ‘Complicating the drug side-effect issue is also the fact that biological systems are redundant. The same signals or protein molecules may be simultaneously used in different organs and tissues where they provide for completely different behavioural functions. For example, when a drug is prescribed to correct a dysfunction in a signalling pathway of the heart, that drug is delivered by the blood to the entire body. This “cardiac” medicine can unintentionally disturb the function of the nervous system if the brain also uses components of the targeted signalling pathway. While this redundancy complicates the effects of prescription drugs, it is another remarkably efficient result of evolution. Multicellular organisms can survive with far fewer genes than scientists one thought because the same gene products (protein) are used for a variety of functions.’ (p 75)

 

Apart from antibiotics, no form of medicine used throughout the world offers ‘real’ confidence in their use, and I would be content to agree that ‘some historians make a strong case that the history of medicine is largely the history of the placebo effect’. Herb based and animal parts ‘remedies’ are not spectacularly successful, nor the ‘energy’ based ‘needle sticking’ acupuncture and neither does homeopathic dilution convince that the results are anything more than the placebo effect.

 

It has to be mentioned somewhere that, whilst the placebo effect is for the good, the opposite effect, called the nocebo effect can be bad for us. ‘While many in the medical profession are aware of the placebo effect, few have considered its implications for self-healing. If positive thinking can pull you out of depression and heal a damaged knee, consider what negative thinking can do in your life…. Our positive and negative beliefs not only impact our health but also every aspect of our life. Henry Ford was right about the efficiency of assembly lines, and he was right about the power of the mind: “if you believe you can or if you believe you can’t … you’re right.”’ (p 111)

 

This statement sounds like ‘free-will’ and it is very powerful, given that the placebo effect can ‘fix’ knees, stop pain, promote happiness etc., whereas the nocebo effect can cause ‘bad’ thoughts, depression and even kill healthy individuals as in ‘pointing the bone’. The development of a head, and thus a ‘free-will’ or mind, enabled the organism to make the best decisions for the cells of the multi-celled organism. It is apparent that it is difficult to separate the mind from all of the cells that contributed to its making, and that is the point of the two chapters and the top down (this chapter) to the bottom up (next chapter), that there is no difference!

 

From the cells perspective, the cells are static unchanging differentiated into ‘organs’ reliant on the will of the mind/brain, but by pulling together they create nerves which allows creativity (the ninth sense) because action potentials in the nerves induce new action potentials due to quantum mechanical effects and these ‘spurious’ thoughts are creativity. The mind/brain is ‘different’ to the way cells function because it can create and give the organism more choice than the traditional five senses. That discussion is also part of the next chapter.

 

Keeping to the macroscopic, ‘free-will’ means freedom to make choices and that is the (evolved) purpose of the mind/brain, to confabulate the surroundings to recognise predators as soon as possible and choose to ignore, fight or flee. This decision-making can be as simple as two nostrils for smell as we saw in the simpler organisms prior to fish, and then fish and more advanced animals used a better method that we call logic. We evolved a reality from the possibility of existence and a probability space contains five dimensions, namely: three space, time passing and conservation/entanglement overall.

 

Conservation/entanglement is a logical dimension and has been fully discussed earlier, so moving on with the thought that those cells that banded together reaped the benefits of a new dimension and a new reality, and that is the world we live in today. Someone might discover how to use entanglement to instantaneously, at every point in the universe know/sense energy use or other factors and create a new reality.

 

I’m trying to say that the mind/brain evolved so that the cells could enter a new reality and they ‘own’ the mind/brain and keep track of it through their sensors that every cell must have (next chapter). Conversely, the mind/brain owes allegiance to the cells because the mind/brain only exist because the cells are prepared to die for the brain (apoptosis). In other words, especially when the next chapter is read, it is/will be obvious that every cell and the mind in the organism are ‘one’. On the scale placebo to nocebo, so the cells respond through their sensors, the hormone system, and sick cells will affect the mind/brain through the seventh and eighth senses.

 

Finally, putting it another way, the creativity/consciousness of the mind results from the cells banding together to form a mind (and a new reality) and the cells TRUST the mind and do what the mind tells them, through the cells’ senses, even to kill themselves (apoptosis), get better or get worse. That is the placebo/nocebo effect.

 

I would like to leave it there, but the ramifications are immense in that firstly we have not two effects in the placebo/nocebo, but a continuum, and the act of measurement that this continuum opens up links our mind to a wider plane as we seen in previous chapters. Secondly this continuum ranges from the mind repairing knees etc. to killing the whole individual. This is a huge power that the cells have turned over to the mind and is part of the second Law of Life, state of mind, exercise and nutrition, and this will be discussed later.

 

Chapter 40: The Placebo – Nocebo Continuum