Born on the East Coast, but lived on the West Coast for a decade before living in Italy for a decade. Science, psychology and extreme history buff. Presently, in the Northwest. “Fourth Way”, Jung, primal therapy. Eclectic. Very, very eclectic.
“What’s it all about, Alfie?”
Let’s introduce me and let you have a clue as to what I am about.
The purpose of my blog is to explore and define (even “divine”) the current situation of the world and of the human beings in that world.
Understanding is based on having lived experiences in which knowledge and theory can be applied. Context changes everything.
I stepped off the plane in Rome, Italy, in the mid-80s, determined to help my wife with her career as a dancer. I never expected an intense course in culture that began with an intense experience of culture shock. I never expected Italians to be so different than their American counterparts. And, I never expected to get drawn into a decades-long and continuing study of the history of the West, its particular psychology.
I could say “I managed” to learn this, that, and the other thing. As we say on the East Coast, “Forget about it!”. Forget all that Western Cartesian ego. I didn’t “think the thought”….rather, the case of the “thought thought me”.
Some years before, I had had a reading with one of the most remarkable psychics I have ever known. Truman Capote wrote a whole essay about him. “RP”…
In the first reading, of the few things I am willing to reveal now, he told me that I had to put together “the rational and the esoteric”.
You might imagine that I had no idea what that really meant at the time. Over time, that is, over the decade I spent in Italy, what it meant was totally and absolutely clear.
That is ultimately what I will be writing about here. What happened to us as we incorporated the Roman point-of-view. As we banished the relationship to the ‘greater psyche” to concentrate on reason, or, what we took to be reason.
To accomplish that, I begin with a history of my relationship to science. I begin with medical science. I went to a East Coast med school for two years. Stayed until I was actually embarrassed to continue when I hated it that much.
But, as with the time in Italy, I got to learn things. Not just an enormous amount of science, but about the controversies of science. I came to particularly lose respect for quite a few otherwise intelligent men whose actual take on, eg. Vitamin C, revealed massive resentment based on willingness to lie (?) or, minimally, refuse to take the time to actually “do” science, examine all the facts, and, then, have to admit…”the paradigm has shifted”.
After that, I will go onto take a deeper look at science, its whole overreach culturally, as it attempts to substitute itself for the deeper, older understanding of traditional religion.
Psychology is the tougher nut to crack, as it is a combination, legitimately, of science and unscientific self-observation. I have extensive experience in this area that began in the ’70s. Why-oh-why do so many follow a “party line”, as it were? Why the lack of eclecticism?
I will get into that.
My immediate concern springs from what we have all observed in this both real-and-artificial crisis. Our “plague”. Posturing by the non-qualified. Selling out by the qualified. And, all that avoidance of the value of vitamins’ and alternative therapies’ capacity to boost immunity, keeping it strong and functioning as infection wears it down.
I didn’t know that major Silicon Valley media companies would go all “Inquisitional” on people, such as myself, for having opinions that were not *orthodox*.
It turns out that what I got exposed to in the late ’60s in a Quaker private school, what I observed to grow in intensity and become held much more extensively, would be the dominant force of a supposedly “post-Communist” world. Supported, by the way, in this case by the leaders of “5 minutes of hate” directed at non-conformists, such as Linus Pauling.
What else can one be but, commanded from within, a “Contrary Warrior” to all this self-congratulatory ego validation? Against all haIf-truths that keep us turning in circles? If you have read down to here, you are yourself more than a bit of one.
I smile.
Contrary Warrior Health Blog 