On Battles

I bring you a battle today - mostly because it is a theme I need to revisit this month for my own purposes. War, violence, domination, winning - all part of the human psychic cocktail. Over the years I have found the odd occasion to fight a battle, and have found that my pacifist upbringing had left me with few tools to engage profitably in battle. Those childhood battles amongst siblings and on the playground left me with more of a distaste for people than a toolkit for survival - and I am still surprised when I come across bullying in any form.

I watched Ghandi on DVD the other day, and chuckled to be reminded that he used guilt as a lever to manage his followers in India via his hunger strikes. I smiled: so much like parenting ("So, when you leave the bath running, it's because you think it's OK for me to spend yet another hour working to pay for the water you've wasted?"). This works when you have a bedrock of love, as Ghandi did in his followers, or as I have in my family.

But in those times when the battle you approach is entirely hostile, entirely about needing to win, what do the mysteries say?

Pinkola Estes celebrates wildness - the knowing and the timing of the wild thing that knows when to stalk, knows when to wait, knows when to spring. Instinct. But this is too simple and little understood. Ultimately the behaviour of the wild thing is based on the desirable outcome: survival, advantage. The actions of the wild hunter / warrior is not chaotic or random. It is discrete, considered, strategised. It is based on interrogations into the nature and habits of its opponent, the lie of the land (read the Art of War), tallying of resources.

Casteneda speaks of remaining unavailable, invisible to your opponent, even as you stalk him. He speaks of storing power so that it can be used to devastating effect when you need to. He speaks of moving an individual via his circle of influence, never directly. He speaks of alertness, avoiding assumptions, applying force to a lever.

Battles in my adult life have shown me this: I am the only one who wants to fight with gentlemen's rules, so they likely won't work for me (and they haven't). I have never fought to dominate, my battles are generally about protecting my family, my home, my turf. And most soldiers who have gone to war leaving families behind know that there is nothing more worthy fighting for. Where stakes are high, the art of battle is the most important skill to have mastered. The last, most precious advantage I will not gain until my children are off my hands: having nothing to lose.

Is it food?

Several years ago, a friend of mine gave me a book to read - all about the history of the trade in tea, coffee, tobacco and sugar. The book (don't recall the title or the author - sorry), written somewhere in the mid 20th century, described these 4 commodities as narcotic, and the commerce around them as economic parasitism. I was somewhat surprised, never having looked at these things in this way, but the book made a strong case. A memorable example of the economic parasitism argument was the Boston Tea Party. The author proposed that the colonialist / imperialist / profiteering situation that gave rise to this event had not been appreciably changed nor resolved since then, but had simply gone into hiding behind front-businesses.

This feels too big for me to do something about. But what stuck with me was the peddling of addictive substances as food, creating a media-hype about the benefits of these non-foods: main-lining and normalising them into the thinking and lifestyles of people world-wide. Nutrition and medical media reporting still relates most "new findings" to our craving for sugar, tea and coffee. As tobacco became successfully demonised, so in the face of similar pressures on the other 3 culprits, we learn that it's OK to have coffee daily, that tea has anti-oxidant properties, that children need sugar for energy. The proportion of media messaging around these commodities it exaggerated compared with other foods and drugs. And, since as a race we are addicted to these substances, we are only too ready to have our consciences appeased.

On top of that sits the historical burden of the conditions of production of these substances, often resting on the shoulders of slaves, child-labour and the like. The string of middle-men is entrenched and long, and the end-user prices bear no resemblance to the cost of production.

So the book ultimately proposes this: that the business of bringing these commodities to market is all about creating a demand through creating addiction, then making as much profit as possible by driving prices up and forcing down costs of production.

This made me annoyed. I thought I would test the hypothesis that I was addicted to coffee and sugar (the others never featured much in my lifestyle). I went cold turkey on both. I felt horrible. I craved, I raved, I walked into walls, I shouted at people, I cried. Then after 2 weeks, I felt fabulous! I had energy to spare, I was wide awake first thing in the morning, my post-nasal drip disappeared, my acne improved, I slept well. I noticed that coffee and sugar were my comfort foods. When I was sad or tired, I craved cake and cappuccino. So I ate nuts, cheese, and watched movies instead. My favorite meal: stir-fried lamb tossed with fresh basil, avocado and olive oil.

Then I lapsed. A couple of years later I had systemic candida. I went on a diet to fix it - off the allowed list: sugar, coffee, tea, alcohol, starch, natural sugars of all kinds, meat from animals older than one season, ground vegetables  Added to my diet: Warburgia (Pepper Bark / Isibaha) tincture. 6 Weeks later I had lost 10kg and I was candida free - no more nasty mucus, no more acne.

I'm weaning my little children off sugar (the big ones have migrated there themselves to fix their own health issues). They are cross about it, but not when they're eating other good things.

Stevia was a great help to satisfy the remnants of my craving for sweetness, but my drug of choice is now a cup of chicory (25% coffee added) with a dash of lactose-free milk. And sometimes, expensive, thin slabs of chocolate.

Strange reality

"The world is a mystery. This, what you're looking at, is not all there is to it. There is much more to the world, so much more, in fact, that it is endless. So when you are trying to figure it out, all you're really doing is trying to make the world familiar."

Don Juan words from Casteneda's "Journey to Ixlan".

I have this problem all the time - trying to encourage people to consider that what I describe in my experience has reality, context and relevance. That old buzz-word, 'paradigm' comes into play. It's as hard as getting a 6-year-old to understand why she can't have that pink toy in the supermarket today.

It's like this: the reality of each of us is unique. In those places where we agree to share an idea about reality, we seem to have common ground. But we are talking only "seems" here. This leads us into the dangerous territory of feeling safe with making assumptions about the world and about one-another. Having fewer expectations about the world, people, life, days lead to fewer surprises. We remain more open to grasping a situation in its totality rather than just those things about it which seem to correspond with our reality of the moment.

If I experience something that you have not experienced, this does not make my reality wrong, simply strange. And it is in the lands of strange that adventure, growth and evolution lie. Our fear of the unknown keeps us safely tucked behind closed doors, perhaps reading books, probably believing that we know how the world works. TV, the internet, books - these are repositories of the realities of others - a pity it would be to not excavate your own. It is only through going in amongst the unknown that we can gain new knowledge.

This takes some courage. The conformative pressure of commonly accepted reality has some devastating tools for the ego that attempts to describe something new.

What are your unusual experiences? What is the strange reality you walk in?