How would you feel if I told you that from tomorrow, and for the rest of your life, you can no longer have processed sugar in your diet? Only honey and the natural sugars in fruits and vegetables…
Or no alcohol ever again? Even a seasoned drinker like myself who is neither an alcoholic nor a merely social drinker who has also been known to abstain at times would find it very hard to go more than a few weeks without fancying a couple of drinks after work or a few more at the weekend.
Coffee, Tea, Nicotine. All stimulants that we have used for centuries, even though as seen recently in stories about people who drank too many espressos in one day and suffered convulsions, Caffeine in hot drinks doesn’t come without risks aswell as benefits. Nicotine has fallen from grace, recently fast becoming completely socially unacceptable, it’s a horrible feeling to be a smoker in a public place like shopping centers or having to huddle somewhere outside in the winter with your fellow smoking workmates.
We are addicted to them all and some to even harder drugs and that is what they are DRUGS. We’re all drug addicts, half the population is on anti depressants, stimulants, muscle relaxants, pain killers, tranquillizers and those are just the ones receiving a fix from their Doctor or Pharmacist let alone all the ones self medicating (I take dietary supplements for a self diagnosed condition what of it? ;-)
When they get someone off hard drugs it’s by replacing it with several substitutes, yoga, spirituality or religion, physical exercise, writing, painting, counselling others in the same position all designed to wean them off of one addiction on to some others. Other ways to invest your time and imagination, the ability to have dreams again, it’s all good and always involves connecting with people again or with the environment and nature. That is what was missing in the first place…
So many people live separate lives, so many single people today in their flats alone because it’s progress not to live at home with the family or because the modern world almost expects and wants you to spread your wings and travel, move for work. Thank goodness for social networking sites allowing us to reconnect with loved ones far away, the internet has been a massive force for good in that respect.
Connection to others is the reason we come together to be fans of the same subject or team, to gather to make something new like a performance or a show, to dance and sing together, to share festivals and celebrations and commiserations all of the things that we have lost in our rush to find work in the city at the start of the Industrial Revolution. Only to find that now the people who can still afford to do so are buying up all of our ancestral homes in the countryside, knocking three cottages into one so that they can come down from London at the weekends and stay for a few weeks in the summer, doesn’t matter that local kids have to move miles away to estates in towns on the outskirts of citys (but good for bored gardeners who can play while the owners are away, like in hottubs and on trampolines).
Community, Community, COMMonUNITY
We all want it back but whose is brave enough to build it and see if they will come?
The signs look good there is so much going on these days to reinvest in the countryside, in ways that bring people and nature and people back together again, it’s a great start but still not enough.
Do we have to be addicted to something is that in our nature?
Well it certainly seems so doesn’t it, count them up if you’ve got less than five I’d be surprised and you have to be honest and count anything that you don’t think you could do without for the rest of your life.
What will we be addicted to in the future that is positive?
The business model of pharmaceutical companies revolved around creating chemicals from scratch from a design that can be patented, they don’t understand much of what goes on in plants and naturally occurring sources of chemical compounds. Some have 500 different component parts and the interactions between them all is far too complex for them to be entirely understood with current technology.
There is a fad for linking your product with a natural basis or suggesting it is an extract of a certain fruit or vegetable, herb or plant which is the active ingredient. It’s hoped that our drive towards more ecologically sound sources of products and packaging will lead to more orders, even though things like shampoo still contain a cocktail of other chemicals which are still produced artificially with waste products from the processes that create them and all in the name of progress and saving time being the ultimate aim or making a better more profitable product.
The most natural thing is seasonal consumption, sharing to ensure a fair deal for everyone, coming together of people in celebration of good times and supporting each other through the hard times, working to overcome obstacles to build a future together and sharing stories of the past which inform the present.
Thats Tribal
It’s Primal
Natural
Right
Secure
Shamanic
A Community
We walked away from using plants to connect us to the whole of creation, we are after all just clever animals who now use plants and their derivatives to calm us down or liven us up never to search for what makes us the same as the plants and the other animals, not to commune with one another we do them to lose inhibitions or to break down the boundaries that our egos have built in the way of actually connecting with someone, to be able to avoid cynicism or the thick skins we’ve all had to develop to respond to the impetus provided by the world we’ve created. It’s our fault that it’s like this and it’s our job to respond and stop it from becoming a constantly self fulfilling prophesy, circular reasoning on a planetary scale…
Or no alcohol ever again? Even a seasoned drinker like myself who is neither an alcoholic nor a merely social drinker who has also been known to abstain at times would find it very hard to go more than a few weeks without fancying a couple of drinks after work or a few more at the weekend.
Coffee, Tea, Nicotine. All stimulants that we have used for centuries, even though as seen recently in stories about people who drank too many espressos in one day and suffered convulsions, Caffeine in hot drinks doesn’t come without risks aswell as benefits. Nicotine has fallen from grace, recently fast becoming completely socially unacceptable, it’s a horrible feeling to be a smoker in a public place like shopping centers or having to huddle somewhere outside in the winter with your fellow smoking workmates.
We are addicted to them all and some to even harder drugs and that is what they are DRUGS. We’re all drug addicts, half the population is on anti depressants, stimulants, muscle relaxants, pain killers, tranquillizers and those are just the ones receiving a fix from their Doctor or Pharmacist let alone all the ones self medicating (I take dietary supplements for a self diagnosed condition what of it? ;-)
When they get someone off hard drugs it’s by replacing it with several substitutes, yoga, spirituality or religion, physical exercise, writing, painting, counselling others in the same position all designed to wean them off of one addiction on to some others. Other ways to invest your time and imagination, the ability to have dreams again, it’s all good and always involves connecting with people again or with the environment and nature. That is what was missing in the first place…
So many people live separate lives, so many single people today in their flats alone because it’s progress not to live at home with the family or because the modern world almost expects and wants you to spread your wings and travel, move for work. Thank goodness for social networking sites allowing us to reconnect with loved ones far away, the internet has been a massive force for good in that respect.
Connection to others is the reason we come together to be fans of the same subject or team, to gather to make something new like a performance or a show, to dance and sing together, to share festivals and celebrations and commiserations all of the things that we have lost in our rush to find work in the city at the start of the Industrial Revolution. Only to find that now the people who can still afford to do so are buying up all of our ancestral homes in the countryside, knocking three cottages into one so that they can come down from London at the weekends and stay for a few weeks in the summer, doesn’t matter that local kids have to move miles away to estates in towns on the outskirts of citys (but good for bored gardeners who can play while the owners are away, like in hottubs and on trampolines).
Community, Community, COMMonUNITY
We all want it back but whose is brave enough to build it and see if they will come?
The signs look good there is so much going on these days to reinvest in the countryside, in ways that bring people and nature and people back together again, it’s a great start but still not enough.
Do we have to be addicted to something is that in our nature?
Well it certainly seems so doesn’t it, count them up if you’ve got less than five I’d be surprised and you have to be honest and count anything that you don’t think you could do without for the rest of your life.
What will we be addicted to in the future that is positive?
The business model of pharmaceutical companies revolved around creating chemicals from scratch from a design that can be patented, they don’t understand much of what goes on in plants and naturally occurring sources of chemical compounds. Some have 500 different component parts and the interactions between them all is far too complex for them to be entirely understood with current technology.
There is a fad for linking your product with a natural basis or suggesting it is an extract of a certain fruit or vegetable, herb or plant which is the active ingredient. It’s hoped that our drive towards more ecologically sound sources of products and packaging will lead to more orders, even though things like shampoo still contain a cocktail of other chemicals which are still produced artificially with waste products from the processes that create them and all in the name of progress and saving time being the ultimate aim or making a better more profitable product.
The most natural thing is seasonal consumption, sharing to ensure a fair deal for everyone, coming together of people in celebration of good times and supporting each other through the hard times, working to overcome obstacles to build a future together and sharing stories of the past which inform the present.
Thats Tribal
It’s Primal
Natural
Right
Secure
Shamanic
A Community
We walked away from using plants to connect us to the whole of creation, we are after all just clever animals who now use plants and their derivatives to calm us down or liven us up never to search for what makes us the same as the plants and the other animals, not to commune with one another we do them to lose inhibitions or to break down the boundaries that our egos have built in the way of actually connecting with someone, to be able to avoid cynicism or the thick skins we’ve all had to develop to respond to the impetus provided by the world we’ve created. It’s our fault that it’s like this and it’s our job to respond and stop it from becoming a constantly self fulfilling prophesy, circular reasoning on a planetary scale…
Light n Love
Jon
x
