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talabib · 4 years ago

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A Self-Made Millionaire's Path To Financial Independence.

“Money is the most important thing in the world.” It’s a startling and borderline heretical claim. After all, we’re told time and again that you can’t buy happiness.

Well, sure – you can’t spend your way to Earthly bliss. But here’s the flipside: poverty is pretty sure to make you miserable. Far from being the root of all evil, money is the most important tool we have to improve our quality of life. 

If you want to look out for the people you love, you’ll need money – the more, the better. Want to spend more time with your kids? Ditto. How about creating time for leisure, reading, going to the theatre and discovering new cultures and countries through travel? You’ll have guessed the answer by now: money. 

That’s the philosophy of Kristy Shen, a self-made millionaire who retired at 31. In this post, we’ll be exploring how she did it. Expect plenty of unashamedly contrarian takes, left-field strategies and novel concepts. More to the point, expect to find a roadmap to wealth creation, debt eradication and financial independence. 

You’re more likely to make sound decisions if you follow the math rather than your passions.

In 2005, Steve Jobs gave a commencement speech at Stanford University. His advice to the students? “Follow your heart.” That feel-good mantra rippled around the world. Endorsed by the great and good, it soon came to feel commonsensical – why on Earth wouldn’t you follow your passions and do something you love?  Here’s one reason: it’s often the wrong choice. 

Take the often life-defining decision students make every year about what they’re going to study. That was just what Kristy was mulling over back in 2000. She had a shortlist of three possible majors – creative writing, accounting and computer engineering. Her heart told her to go with writing; math told her to go for engineering. Kristy followed the latter’s advice. It was a good call. 

Let’s look at that math. A four-year program in Canada costs about $40,000. Professional writers fall on a spectrum between the unpublished newbie who earns zilch and established pros like Stephen King who earn millions. The average income, however, is $17,000. In 2000, the minimum wage was $6.85 an hour or $14,248 a year. That’s what anyone without a degree could expect to earn, so subtracting that sum from $17,000 told Kristy how much a writing degree was worth: a measly $2,752. 

An accounting degree, by contrast, was worth around $24,000 more than the minimum wage. Computer engineering meanwhile netted you a whopping $40,000 more every year. 

But hold up. You can’t put a price on happiness – surely dreams are worth pursuing whatever the bottom line says, right? Well, not necessarily. After all, if you don’t know where your next meal is coming from, you’re unlikely to wake up excited about your work, especially if it calls for creativity. Passions also change over time; a 2013 study published in Science found that the dreams of nearly all of the 19,000 participants had changed significantly over the previous decade. 

And that’s why it pays to follow the math. Just ask Kristy. Today, she’s a professional writer. The reason she got there is simple: her well-paying engineering job meant she wasn’t reliant on writing to make the rent. Money, in other words, provided her with the foundation which eventually allowed her to pursue her true dream. 

Kristy’s Chinese heritage taught her that debt is a trap to be avoided at all costs. 

Did you know that on average Chinese citizens save 38 percent of their income? Americans, by contrast, squirrel away 3.9 percent of what they earn while the Japanese keep just 2.8 percent for a rainy day. So what’s going on – are the Chinese just inherently frugal? 

Not really. Even before the communists came to power in 1949, corruption was endemic in China. Combine that with the absence of official credit channels like bank loans and you had the makings of a culture which ran on favors. When folks wanted to buy something big, they had a simple choice: take on an onerous personal debt and put themselves in someone else’s power, or save up until they had enough cash to buy it outright. That’s why, historically, debt in China is understood not so much as an “IOU” but an “I own you.” 

If you’re Chinese like Kristy, that history means you’re basically programmed to avoid debt like the plague. But here’s the thing: when you crunch the numbers, it turns out that’s a pretty good attitude to adopt wherever you live. 

Take the Rule of 72, an insight first formulated by a fifteenth-century Italian mathematician called Luca Pacioli. Here’s how it works. To work out how long it takes for your investment to double, divide 72 by the return rate of your investment. So let’s say you’re getting six percent on your $1,000 investment. Seventy-two divided by six equals 12. This last number is the number of years you’ll need in order for that grand to compound into $2,000. Over time, the balance increases. The money you make makes more money.

If you’re an investor, the Rule of 72 is your friend; if you’re a debtor, it’s your worst enemy. Say you buy a $1,000 TV on credit. Typically, the interest rate will be around 20 percent. Divide 72 by 20 and you get 3.6 – that’s how long it’ll take your debt to double! After seven years, it will have almost quadrupled. 

When you put it like that, the Chinese custom of paying off personal debts during the New Year on pain of being cursed with 12 months of misfortune starts to make a lot of sense. But don’t worry – the idea here isn’t to scare you.

Consumer debt is a financial crisis which needs to be addressed immediately. 

Debt is a blood-sucking vampire. It bleeds you dry. Worse, it leaves you terrified of the sunlight, trapping you indoors in an endless cycle of work and repayment. If you want financial independence, you’ll have to put a stake through this bad boy’s heart. 

Consumer debt has the highest interest rates, so that’s where you should start. The first thing you’ll need to do is cut your expenses to the bone. It’s painful but essential. As we’ve seen, the Rule of 72 means your debts grow at an ungodly rate. If you’re saddled with a 10 or 20 percent interest rate, there’s no point trying to save or invest your hard-earned cash – there’s no getting in front of debt. Do whatever it takes, whether it’s finding a side hustle, renting out a spare room, or saying “no” to dinners out. 

Next, you’ll need to prioritize how you repay your loans by putting them in order based on interest rate, from highest to lowest. When you’re surrounded by hungry vampires, it’s always a good idea to kill the one with the biggest appetite first. That means paying the minimum monthly repayment on all your cards to avoid defaulting and throwing everything that you don’t need for essentials like rent at the nastiest bloodsucker. Paying off your smallest loan might make you feel good, but you’re not trying to massage your ego here – you’re fighting for your freedom.

The final step is refinancing your loans. Lots of credit card companies allow you to transfer balances between different cards and pay zero percent interest for a certain amount of time. That’s usually a year. If you’re sure you can use these so-called “grace periods” to pay off a loan completely, use this option. Bear in mind, however, that these companies are gambling on you failing to do so, which will allow them to jack up the interest rate and screw you. 

Remember, trying to gain financial independence while carrying around debt is like running a marathon with a backpack full of bricks – it’ll sap your strength before you’ve even run a mile. If you want to grow your assets, you need to kill that vampire!

If you want to buy happiness, spend your cash on experiences rather than stuff. 

What does cocaine have to do with shopping? Surprisingly, quite a lot. Understanding that connection holds the key to getting the most out of the money you decide to spend on luxuries. 

But before we get to that, let’s talk about the brain. When something good happens, the “pleasure chemical” dopamine surges through your mesolimbic pathway, essentially your brain’s main highway, to the nucleus accumbens – a kind of dopamine processing plant. A substance like cocaine triggers this surge – but so does splurging on a Gucci handbag. In both cases, the reward is a massive neural high. 

Here’s where it gets interesting. As a 2006 article in the journal NeuroImage demonstrated, the nucleus accumbens doesn’t just react to positive stimuli – it also reacts to the expectation of those stimuli. In other words, pleasure isn’t just about absolute dopamine levels but how much dopamine our brains expect is on the way. 

Unfortunately for cocaine addicts and shopaholics, the brain keeps ratcheting its expectation levels upwards. That’s why people need ever-larger amounts of cocaine and ever-more expensive handbags – they’re forever chasing that unrepeatable first high. 

That means you’re not going to enjoy yourself even if you’re wealthy enough to fund your shopping habits. This might sound like the preamble to an old-fashioned moral lecture about how money can’t buy happiness, but it’s really not. Truth be told, it can. It just boils down to what you’re spending it on. 

Not all spending is created equal; some kinds go further than others. When Kristy started her blog and began receiving emails from her readers, she noticed a trend. The more stuff people owned, the unhappier they were. Folks who owned less and used their money to buy experiences, by contrast, were pretty happy with their lot in life.

That’s because possessions give you an initial burst of dopamine which fades as your nucleus accumbens acclimatizes. The pleasure that comes with learning new skills or traveling doesn’t fade nearly as quickly. As long as you practice now and again, you’ll always be able to play the piano, and those holiday snaps from Rome will always take you back to that week you spent in the Eternal City with your husband. 

Buying property isn’t the failsafe investment it’s made out to be. 

Lots of folks are cautious about borrowing money, but they usually make one big exception: a mortgage. Conventional wisdom says buying a house isn’t just a rite of passage into adulthood but a wise investment in the future. After all, you can always sell at a profit, right? 

Well, no. In reality, property comes with all sorts of hidden costs. Let’s talk numbers.  According to the US Census Bureau, the average family stays in their home for 9 years. Typically, these families invest in brick and mortar in the expectation that property prices will rise. Historically, that rate rises and falls with inflation, but for simplicity’s sake, let’s assume here that prices increase by a steady 6 percent every year. 

Our family – let’s call them the Smiths – buy their house for $500,000. Add 9 times 6 percent – 9 years at 6 percent inflation – to that and you get $844,739. That leaves a tidy profit of $344,739. 

Not so fast. To buy the property, the Smiths need a title search from the land registry office. That’s $1,000. The title recording fee costs $150. The lawyer who processes those documents charges another grand. 

Then there’s insurance. Rates vary across the US, but 0.5 per cent of the house’s value is pretty common. Paid annually for 9 years, that comes to $22,500. A property tax of 1 percent per annum adds another $45,000 to the bill. Meanwhile, realtors advise setting aside at least one percent of a home’s value every year for maintenance, which is what the Smiths do. That’s another $45,000. 

Selling isn’t cheap either. A commission of 6 percent of the final sale price clocks in at $50,684. The land transfer tax is 1.2 percent, so that’s $10,137. Oh and there’s another lawyer, who also bills for $1,000. 

That brings us to $175,571 – 51 percent of the Smiths’ profit. But we haven’t talked about interest yet. Like most families, the Smiths paid a ten percent down payment in cash and borrowed the rest from their bank. Over 9 years, they have paid $162,033 in interest. 

That’s a whopping 98 percent of the sale price. And remember, we started by assuming that the value of the Smiths’ house would grow by 6 percent every year. That’s well above the actual inflation rate in the US, which is about 2 percent. In the real world, the Smiths would have lost money!

Use the “Rule of 150” to decide whether to buy a house or use your money for something else.

We crunched the numbers and saw that the cost of buying, owning and selling a house outweighed the returns in the case of a fictional American family. The moral of the story, however, isn’t that you should never buy a house – it’s that you need to work out if that’s a good call in your situation.

Ask a realtor and they’ll swear it’s all very simple. If the monthly mortgage payment equals the rent on a similar house or apartment, you’re better off buying rather than giving your money to a landlord. Look more closely, however, and you’ll find it’s a little more complicated. 

That’s where the Rule of 150 comes in. This is a tool to help you compare the true cost of owning a home with what you would be saving by not renting. Here’s how it works:

Over the first 9 years of a standard 30-year mortgage, only about 50 percent of your payments go towards the actual loan; paying off interest on that loan accounts for the other 50 percent. Now, additional ownership costs like maintenance and insurance are roughly equal to the interest on a standard mortgage during those first 9 years, so that’s another 50 percent. So to calculate your actual monthly payments, you’ll need to multiply your monthly mortgage payment by 150 percent.

That’s how much your home will actually cost per month once you’ve accounted for all your expenses. So say you’re looking at a monthly mortgage bill of $1,500. When you multiply that by 150 percent, you get your true cost – $2,250. If your Rule of 150 monthly cost is higher than your rent, it makes sense to stick it out in the rental market; if it’s lower, you might want to think about buying. 

When Kristy first considered buying a house, she was living in Toronto, Canada’s most expensive city. Prices were out of control and one-person apartments were going for a million dollars apiece. After applying the Rule of 150, she quickly realized that there was no way she was going to be able to buy her own home. 

That opened an unexpected can of worms. If she wasn’t going to blow her savings on property, what was she going to do with that nest egg?

Index investing is less risky than betting on individual companies. 

The American business guru Robert Kiyosaki once remarked that poor people buy stuff, the middle class buys houses and rich people buy investments. What he meant is that rich people put their money into things that make them more money. But you don’t have to be a multi-millionaire to follow their lead. 

Broadly speaking, there are two ways of investing. The first is to do what Wall Street whizzes do – spend a ton of cash on research and fancy algorithms to pick the best companies. The second variant is cheaper, simpler and, most importantly, less risky. 

That’s called index investing. Think of it as betting on the casino rather than individual horses. It doesn’t matter who wins the race – the house always makes money. Let’s unpack that. 

An index is a list of companies ranked by market capitalization, or the overall value of their public shares. When you invest in an index, you’re effectively betting on every one of those listed firms. Because the index contains the stock of multiple high-performing companies, a single failure won’t wipe you out. The only way you can go bust is if every name on your index simultaneously files for bankruptcy. 

That’s highly unlikely. Why? Well, index investing has an elegant built-in barometer. If a company is worth more, the index automatically picks up more shares in that company, and vice versa. If a tech giant releases a world-beating smartphone and its stock soars, the index buys more shares. If a car company runs into trouble and their stock plummets, the index dumps shares. And when a company drops in value from number 500 to number 501, it’s kicked off the index entirely. 

This is a highly intuitive way of gauging the stock market as a whole, which is why major indexes like the S&P 500 – a list of the 500 biggest companies – work like this. 

Index investing is also good for your wallet. The simplicity of the concept means there’s no need to pay for a hands-on fund manager. In the US, for example, a typical index fund charges fees of just 0.04 percent – 25 times lower than what you’d pay for an actively managed fund. The sales commission? $0. If you ever want to see your bank manager sweat, head to your local branch and ask to have your savings put into index funds!

Early retirement doesn’t depend on how much you make – it’s all about how much you save. 

Chances are you’ve idly daydreamed about early retirement. Most folks quickly shelve that idea when they take a look at their bank balance, though. If you’re not raking it in, you just can’t afford to stop working before your mid-sixties, right? 

Wrong. Your time to retirement doesn’t depend on how much you earn but how much you save. If you’re making and spending a million bucks a year, you’re entirely dependent on your job and won’t ever be able to retire. If you make $40,000 a year and spend $30,000, on the other hand, you already have a healthy savings rate of 25 percent. 

The “normal” retirement age is 65 because most people save between five and ten percent of their salaries and have investment portfolios yielding an average of six to seven percent annually. Plug those numbers into a spreadsheet and you’re looking at 40 to 45 years of work. 

The way to reduce that time is to up how much you’re saving. This does two things. Firstly, it cuts your living expenses, which in turn cuts the size of your target portfolio – the amount of cash you’ll need to retire. Secondly, it pumps more money into that portfolio. Think of it as a race: you’re moving the finish closer while also running faster. Even relatively small changes have a big impact. Boosting your savings rate from ten to 15 percent, for example, shaves 5 years off your working life! 

Still not convinced? Well, okay, let’s take a look at the case of a fictional couple we’ll call Paul and Jillian. Together, their annual earnings come to $62,175. That’s the median family income in the US. Deduct 15.2 percent for taxes and you’re left with $52,724.40. 

Now imagine Paul and Jillian decided to turbocharge their savings rate. They rent a small apartment in an affordable city, cook at home and use car-sharing services like Zipcar. All in all, they pay $40,000 to cover their costs and put $12,724.40 into their portfolio every year. 

Let’s lowball the interest rate they’re getting on that and say it’s 6 percent. Even if they never get promotions or better-paying jobs, Paul and Jillian would have a million dollars in 30 years. If they started at 24, they could retire at 54 – 11 years ahead of schedule!

Reducing the size of your target portfolio makes early retirement more manageable. 

How much do you need to save to retire early? That’s exactly what researchers asked in a landmark study published in the investment journal AAII in 1998. 

They used stock market data to simulate what would happen to a group of fictional retirees who withdrew different percentages of their portfolios every year after retirement. Would “Alan,” for example, make it over the line or run out of cash if he withdrew 10 percent of his $500,000 nest egg every year? 

Here’s the answer: Your portfolio is self-sustaining when your annual living expenses are no greater than 4 percent of its total value. Economists call that a safe withdrawal rate. This number allows you to determine the size of your target portfolio – simply multiply your annual expenses by 25. If you need $40,000 a year, you’re looking at a $1,000,000 portfolio.

That’s a lot of cash, right? Sure, but don’t let that put you off – there are also alternative strategies. Take partial financial independence. This gives you the benefits of financial independence, such as flexibility and having more free time, and it’s achievable with a smaller portfolio. 

Say you earn the US median family income of $62,175 and need $40,000 a year to cover your living costs. If you shift to part-time work and earn $28,000 after tax, you’ll have an annual shortfall of $12,000 in your budget. Multiply that number by 25 and you have your new target portfolio – $300,000. Save that amount and you can enter semi-retirement!

Then there’s geographic arbitrage. This is the idea that you can earn income in a country with a strong currency like Germany or the US and retire in a country with a weaker currency like Mexico or Thailand. When Kristy and her husband Bryce visited Vietnam, for example, they realized that you can live a luxurious life there for around $1,130 a month. 

If you’re earning the local average salary of $150 a month, that’s unaffordable; if you’re earning the average US monthly salary, however, it’s well within your reach. So what does your target portfolio look like now? Multiply $1,130 by 12, which gives you $13,560. Then multiply that by 25 and you have $339,000.

So there you have it – a ton of tricks to help launch your journey to financial independence. All you have to do now is ask yourself a simple question. What’s more important – accumulating expensive things or your freedom? Answer that honestly and your money decisions will become clear.

Getting a handle on your finances comes down to one basic principle: follow the math. That means ignoring feel-good advice like choosing to study a subject you love rather than one that will bring in a salary you can actually live on. It also means bucking social trends if they’re not right for you. Crunch the numbers and you might just discover that you’re better off investing your savings in the stock market rather than buying a house and saddling yourself with a lifetime of debt. Why? Well, if you’re growing your money while avoiding ruinous interest rates, you’re setting yourself up for financial independence. And that means you’re one step closer to the ultimate dream: early retirement. 

Action plan: Make invisible waste visible.

Consumerism promises happiness but it’s usually little more than a temporary fix. What it does generate is waste. A lot of waste. Take clothing. According to the Guardian, Americans throw away 11 million tons of clothes every year. So here’s how to eliminate waste in your own wardrobe: make it visible. Simply push all the clothes in your closet to the left, and place an empty hanger with a piece of masking tape in the middle. Everything you wear from now on goes on the right of the marked hanger after it’s been washed. Over time, this reveals how often you use different items. On the right, are the superstars of your wardrobe; in the middle, pieces you do wear but infrequently; and on the left, clothes you never take out at all – the waste. 

#A Self-Made Millionaire's Path To Financial Independence.

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expatimes · 4 years ago

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5 Tips for Developing a Better Relationship with Food

Before you can work toward a good relationship with food, it’s important to pinpoint the signs and symptoms of a bad relationship with food.

A good relationship with food has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of your diet or the types of food you eat, but rather how and why you choose the foods you eat.

When you improve your relationship with food, you’ll notice a lot less stress and worry around eating and more food freedom.

Here are the signs of a bad relationship with food:

You feel guilty about eating.

You avoid or restrict foods that are “bad” for you.

You have developed a long list of rules surrounding the foods you can and cannot eat.

You rely on calorie counters or apps to tell you when you’re done eating for the day.

You ignore your body’s natural hunger cues.

You have a history of yo-yo dieting or following the latest diet fads.

You feel immense stress and anxiety when eating in social settings due to fear of what others may think of your food choices.

You find yourself restricting and/or binging food.

You don’t have to experience all of these signs to have a bad relationship with food. Yet, the telltale sign that your relationship with food could be improved is if you feel any type of shame, guilt, stress, or fear regarding the foods you eat.

It’s also important to realize that your relationship with food may be transient. Sometimes you may eat with complete freedom and have no remorse for the foods you eat (this is great), but other times you may feel guilty after eating certain foods (this is not great, but normal).

The goal of a good relationship with food is to have more positive experiences with food than negative ones. Showing patience and kindness toward yourself is paramount.

Summary

A bad relationship with food usually involves restricting or overeating foods, regular dieting, and feeling shame or guilt upon eating certain foods.

A good relationship with food is like any other relationship — it takes time, practice, and a lot of patience.

It’s important to understand that your relationship with food goes deeper than fueling your body. Unlike animals that eat solely for survival, humans eat for a variety of reasons, such as joy, pleasure, culture, tradition, socialization, and to fuel their bodies.

When you start to appreciate food as more than just a fuel source, you can begin to see value in it and develop a healthier relationship.

Signs of a good relationship with food include:

You give yourself unconditional permission to eat the foods you enjoy.

You listen and respect your body’s natural hunger cues.

You eat when you’re hungry and stop when you’re full.

No foods are off-limits.

You don’t obsess over the number on the scale.

You don’t let the opinions of others dictate which foods you eat.

You don’t feel the need to justify your food choices.

You understand that you’re not defined by the foods you eat.

You enjoy all food in moderation.

You choose foods that make you feel your best.

Calories are not the focus of your food choices.

If you’re looking at this list and thinking, “I’ll never get to this point,” you’re not alone. Many people struggle with the idea of ditching the diet mentality and pushing away years of the diet culture messages they’ve been getting since a young age.

Instead of focusing on checking off every item on the list, try to approach one at a time at a pace that suits you.

Summary

A good relationship with food involves welcoming all foods in moderation, eating foods that you enjoy, not allowing food to control your life, and knowing that the foods you eat do not define your value as a person.

It’s one thing to hope for change — and it’s another to actively try to make change happen.

First, remember that you’re your own person. You have your own history with food, your own food preferences, and every right to navigate this journey in a way that suits you.

That said, below are some helpful tips.

1. Give yourself unconditional permission to eat

One sign of a good and healthy relationship with food is allowing yourself unconditional permission to eat.

When you create rules around when you can and can’t eat, you’re setting yourself up for hunger, feelings of deprivation, and fear of food.

Whether you overeat at lunch or have a few extra cookies for dessert, you still deserve to eat when you’re hungry or want to. Your body deserves food no matter the day or situation.

2. Eat when you’re hungry

Every person is born with the natural ability to regulate their hunger. You can see this with children, who can easily tell when they’re hungry or full. Although, as people age, they begin to lose this ability for a number of reasons.

Despite your parents’ best efforts, how often did they tell you to clean your plate? While their intentions were good, this told you as a child to ignore signs that you were full and eat until other stimuli (e.g., a clean plate) told you that you were done (1).

Along with this, diet culture has taught people to rely on an arbitrary number of calories to tell them when they’re done eating for the day instead of eating until they’re satisfied.

Still, the closer you can get back to listening to your natural hunger cues, the better you can regulate your appetite and manage your food intake (1, 2).

3. Practice mindful eating

Mindful eating has become the cornerstone of fixing a bad relationship with food. It involves eating in the moment and being fully present for the eating experience (3).

When you eat mindfully, you’re eating free of other distractions, such as your phone, the TV, a book, etc. Rather, you take time to make gentle observations, such as the taste and texture of the food, how your hunger and fullness cues change, and your enjoyment of the food.

Learning to slow down and savor the food you’re eating can help you learn which foods you genuinely enjoy and also become more in tune with your body’s natural hunger and fullness regulation.

What’s more, it can help you identify the reasons for your food choices. Are you eating because you’re starving and will eat anything in sight? Do you want to eat the food because you think it’ll make you feel better emotionally or physically?

While you eat, try to answer some of these questions:

What flavor and texture am I noticing right now? Do I enjoy it? Am I only eating it because it’s available, or because I really wanted it?

Does this food hit the spot? Does it satisfy the craving I’m having?

Has this food solved a problem like I may have thought it would?

How is this food changing my appetite? Do I notice my hunger going away?

How do I emotionally feel while I eat this? Does it bring me joy, guilt, anger?

Was I actually hungry? If not, why did I decide to eat (e.g., emotional eating, cravings, boredom)?

Some of these questions might be difficult and hard to address. Writing your thoughts down in a journal may be helpful. The key is to answer these questions without judgment and instead with a curious mind.

Over time, these observations can help you identify the reasons for your food choices and whether other healthy coping mechanisms may be warranted.

If you’re interested in giving mindful eating a try, check out our free 21-day mindful eating challenge.

4. Welcome all foods in your diet

Ascribing a food as “bad” gives it unnecessary power. Indeed, certain foods are more nutritious than others and contribute to improved health. Still, eating a single food isn’t going to miraculously affect your health in any way either.

When you label a food as “bad,” you automatically put it on a pedestal. Usually, people call foods “bad” when they taste good and aren’t very nutritious (e.g., high in sugar, fat, salt). Yet, as soon as you tell yourself you can’t have something, the more you’ll crave and want it.

A research study demonstrated this phenomenon. A group of self-proclaimed restrictive dieters and non-dieters were given a milkshake and then put into private rooms where they could have as many cookies as they wanted (4).

Interestingly, non-dieters were much better at regulating their intake and stopped when they felt satisfied, while the dieters ate significantly more cookies. This was attributed to a process known as “counter-regulation” (4).

Essentially, the dieters felt that since the milkshake already “broke” the rules of their restrictive diet, they might as well overeat the cookies (4).

When you allow all foods into your diet, you’re better able to control your intake, as you know these foods are always available. However, when you restrict foods and believe they’re a rarity, you’re much more likely to overdo it and subsequently enter an endless cycle of guilt.

Contrary to popular belief, it’s quite rare that you’ll always want cookies or cake. When you allow all foods into your diet, you’ll notice that your cravings for certain foods start to diminish (5, 6).

This phenomenon is called habituation. It states the greater exposure you have to a food or flavor, the less interesting and appealing it becomes (6).

So start viewing all foods as equal, with no food being better or worse than another. When you stop viewing foods as “good” or “bad,” you remove the food’s power. Over time, you won’t feel the need to overeat it when it’s around.

5. Mind your plate

Imagine a life in which you don’t have to justify your food choices to yourself or anyone else.

Most people are constantly giving themselves or other people an explanation for their food choices. For example, “I’m eating ice cream because I had a bad day” or “I have to have a salad for dinner because I didn’t have time to exercise.”

Instead of giving a reason for your food choices, allow yourself to eat food that you feel is best for you at that very moment.

Summary

Developing a good relationship with food takes time, patience, and kindness toward yourself. Allow yourself to navigate this journey without judgment, and take it day by day.

#health Read full article: https://expatimes.com/?p=15280&feed_id=22016

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kendrixtermina · 7 years ago

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So, this intelligence Center Thingy

It was something included in one of the 12gram books as a qualifier/addition to your 12gram.

I did not detail it in my initial series because I did not think it added terribly much or had particularly unique distinctions but at some point I added my classification to my description more for completeness’ sake (maybe one day a person familiar with it will come along?) and some people (namely @jerdle) got curious as to what was meant by “Queen of Diamonds”, so I guess now you can decide for yourselves. This cost me a day, slightly a token of friendship but mostly mysself being ridden by my completionist urge. I hope one or two people appreciate it.

Reviewing it here has actually made me think of how it perhaps does add some dimension not otherwise captured.

The Theory

The whole thing is based on yet another idea of a “Soul Anatomy”/ Subdivision of the psyche and the idea that certain parts are more pronounced in certain people, that we have what they term a “center of gravity”. a part we default to unless we’re paying attention.

Unlike the 3 in the classic enneagram, this theory subdivides the mind into 4 intelligence centers:

The instinctual center. The inbuilt software and base drives, as it were. This is also what allots all higher functions their energy, hence why ppl often commit to more than they can actually do once they feel worn out. (Indeed i wrote this sentence right before interrupting this article for a lunch break. Lets nom some leek gratin.)

The moving center - Learned skills and reactions. Rule of Thumb: If a baby can do it, its instinctual (though babies can do alot more than ppl assume), if it has to be learned or trained, it’s moving. A baby knows to suck, look around for things to nom and cry if none is available, but they need to learn to hold a bottle or spoon. This seems somewhat analogous to Jung’s Sensing function(s).

The intellectual center - NOT strictly mbti Thinking since it also involves abstract thought, symbols and concepts.

The emotional center - Your FEEELINGS, including both basic emotion & sophisticated social and ethical processing in the sense of Jungian “feeling”. Aesthetic distinctions are also here.

Each of these has a “positive” or “negative” part or a central dialectical contrast (relevant later if combiined with either postivistic or negativistic Essence types)

For the intincstual center, thats comfort vs discomfort, pleasure or pain. For the moving center, it’s moving vs rest, for the intellectual, it’s yes/no or true/false, whereas for the emotional center it’s like vs dislike or right/wrong.

Depending on their dominant center, a person may describe the same events in different ways or pay attention to different aspects of experience -

Picture, for example, four people at a restaurant. An instinctually centered person will notice the quality of the nom stuff, the temperature of the room, the ratio of price to portion size, wether the chairs are comfy etc. A Moving centered person will notice the spatial positions of the tables, how easy it is to maneuver between them for the waiters, funny background events, what various people are doing & with how much skill,(eg. a clumsy waiter balancing things wrong) - meanwhile an emotionally centered person would pay attention to the people most of all & notice stuff like bored children, couples arguing etc. & focus on keeping their conversation partner engaged, all the whiletheir intellectually centered spouse blabbers on about some article they read, say, about the relation between currency exchange rates and political unrest.

According to the author you can easily pick out someone’s dominant center by hearing them talk, at times easier than it is for the person themselves, who, after all, sees their usual PoV and way of operating as simply “normal.”

When asked to tell you their life story, for example, a moving-centered person might tell you all the places they went and used to live, and recount activities or sensory impressions, whereas an emotionally centered person will phrase things in terms of relationships and their reactions & feelings about things

the instinctually centered folks are usually determined by principle of exclusion (or thatr’s what the author did) as they simply don’t communicate as many preoccupations & perceive things more as sensory images than semi-verbal judgements.

In addition, each of these can be further subdivided into a “mechanical” part, an “emotional part” and an “intellectual” part - And out of a given center,

“the mechanical part” represents actions that can be taken without paying attention, because they have become learned/ automatic

“The Emotional Part” is in charge when your attention is held by an external object or stimulus that you react to. This part is emotional about the center’s functioning, whatever it happens to be, & thus the seat of enthusiasm.

“The “Intellectual part” pertains to behavior/ actions done when you sustain attention through deliberate effort beyond where your whims would lead you

These which may or may not roughly with the classic eneagram’s instincts but it already doesn’t match in my case so yeah, not equivalent.

“Dominant Center + Dominant Part” would then be your full typing possibly tacked onto whatever your 12gram/ Essence type happens to be.

Because spelling out stuff like “The emotional part of the emotional center” gets clunky soon (& uses the same word to mean different things) and because these esoterics ppl are all so damn extra, they refer to your classic western card game for terminology:

Mechanical Part: Jack

Emotional Part: Queen (I know, I know... -.-)

Intellectual Part: King

Instinctual Center: Clubs

Moving Center: Spades

Intellectual Center: Diamonds

Emotional Center: Hearts (no shit sherlock)

So you can comfortably replace the afore-mentioned clunky term by “Queen of Hearts” - and yes, the book did make the obvious reference/joke.

The idea is that the mechanical parts can be, and often are doing completely independent things, whereas the ‘Queens’ can influence each other and the kings can consciously cooperate, and functionality/enlightenment can be seen as a measure of how much your centers are in alignment, doing the same thing rather than goin on autopilot (here we find some overlap with the classic enneagram philosophy wise)

There’s also a concept of ‘process’ here in that new information usually catches the attention of the ‘queen’ where interest is generated, then the ‘king’ must put in effort to understand & master the thing, until it is eventually stored in the mechanical part so that the ‘jack’ can now do it at any time.

One exeption is the instinctual center whose ‘mechanical’ part de facto consists of inborn biological programing and is a hardware limitation, so to speak, although i suppose epigenetics could have some influence.

BTW: the author briefly mentions mbti at one point and says than an intellectually centered Lunar would get INTJ... which i can see for some INTJs but mine are, as it happens, both Mercury-Saturns in the 12gram. IDK about this thing, gotta think & introvert about it.

The Types

Jack of Clubs

Here we find the mantaining of basic homeostasis and largely unconscious body functions, the stuff we don’t normally think about unless we are cold, hungry or sick. We may note sudden fluctuations such as an adrenaline spike but usually what we’ll pay attention to is its cause.

A person centered in the jack of clubs will not necessarily be a hypochondriac (though they can be), but they’ll automatically look out for, and invest energy in their wellbeing and comfort without needing to be reminded - This is also the friend who may not have the most exciting stories (as they tend regard adventures and explorations with mild alarm and don’t hugely seek out novelty for it’s own sake), but looks out for your welbeing & comfort and can give great advice on such matters that can be of huge practical use in everyday life & help you free up energy for other things through a new diet or napping regiment or something that helps you chill.

Speaking of chill, their concern with homeostasis primarily generally makes them even-tempered, mellow and cogenial folks without much drama potential, though some might wish for more stimulating companions. They’re placid, unobstrusive everyman types who go through life without much fuss or bother who prefer the familiar and wholesome. If they do travel, they might be fussy about what to bring in order to fulfill every possible need & be comfortable.

Others might find them a bit mysterious because they don’t seem all that concerned with, and certainly aren’t constantly ranting about, abstract ideas, activities or other people’s business. They are often good at their jobs but not overly invested beyond a level of detached competence.

Queen of Clubs

These are basically the Appetites - the emotional part of the instinctual center is emotional about sensations. It’s the process of taking in stimuli through the five senses and deciding wether they’re pleasant or unpleasant (not necessarily the same as wether they’re actually good for your survival - see suggary food. ) - It evaluates the stimulus itself more than its context so this is where we can be lead to indulge cravings or bad habits. Usually the ‘stimulus’ or ‘object of attention’ is something more benign tho - like when you are tired and keep thinking of sleeping, or when you’re hungry and see a delicious Pizza.

People who are centered in the Queen of Clubs will naturally be more aware of pleasant and unpleasant sensations, so they will try to create comfortable and pleasurable environments full of nice things to appeal to their senses - pretty furniture, nice smells, rich fabric etc. They’llbe inclined to be a bit of a gourmand, connoseur or aesthete and might even turn this into their job, for example as an interior designer or someone who sells handmade ceramics.

They’re often considered very attractive regardless of their appearance (often without being aware of it or thinking it a big deal) because of their natural sensuality and “animal magnetism” - besides, their interest in pleasure and comfort usually extends to others, or as a bonding activity: They want their friends to be well-fed, comfy and enjoying nice things. This totally extends to their sexuality as well - they frequently have an “If it feels good, it’s good” attitude & might not be the world’s most responsible people, as they tend to be focussed on things that hold their attention. This none-too -disciplined, impulsive quality is the whole basis of consumer culture - people will have their attention occupied by having better/more/shinier until they get gratification & then the fun begins anew.

Despite this, they can also have a pronounced maternal quality & strong caring/mentoring instincts - after all mother instincts are crucial for the survival of the species which ppl can seen as being the same as one’s own survival in an evolutional sense.

The thing with all the queens (and a crucial thing to know about people centered in them) - is that since they’re all about these strong “good/bad” judgements, they have a lot of those and their can chance and fluctuate as the person becomes more or fed up with whatever held their attention so they’re not the most reliable or steady folks. If you date on of these be aware that they’re a package deal - you can’t have the liking & vivacity without the revulsion and dislike.

King of Clubs

While the emotional part of the instinctual center is rather liberal with expending it’s energies, the intellectual part is cautious about preserving it for when it might be needed to sustain one’s life - It is the cunning and perceptive animal mind, the fight or flight instinct, something that strives to observe & keep track of its surroundings & the other processes the person is doing without being all too detectable itself- as such, it can ever seem mysterious, even a bit sinister.

Unlike the other intellectual parts it doesn’t have its attention directed by the person, but is a background process type of thing, which, for most people, kicks in in exceptional times,the exceptional awareness, preseverance and reaction speed of high-adrenaline situations - sudden alertness, time slowing down, pain being blocked out until later, small unatlethic parents lifting heavy objects to save their trapped children, that sort of thing.

A person centered in the King Of Clubs, then, is someone very in touch with their strong, pronounced survival instincts and likely to seem formidable to others - they’re not really approachable or comfortable to be around unless one has come to know them quite well, and that only occurs if and when they wish for someone to know them well - They can be intimidating when they want to, at times verging on seeming brutal, almost as if they could errect an invisible wall to repell unwanted advances.

With the survival calculations everyone does in the background much closer to their conscious awareness, they can be quite suspicious, perceptive and exceptionally aware of their surroundings, and calculating about many things in life. Some of them can also have or develop great charisma and exert much influence over others.

As it represents the highest developed part of our animal nature, it’s probably no coincidence that, as an archetype, this sort of personality is often found in movie villains - or think the archetypical gunslinger.

Jack of Spades

This is your repertoire of learned movements, all manner of complex procedural knowledge, from how to catch a ball to using a keyboard, driving a bike etc. all of the complex movements we do everyday which we once had to learn but can now do without thinking - like when you are walking and thinking mostly of where to go or typing and thinking of words, but having little awareness of your actual feet or fingers - this is never more clear than, say, when one walks or drives the wrong way out of habit.

the same time this unconscious procedural knowledge often does actions more efficiently than we would if he had to figure out every step (See the centipede’s dilemma - ppl confusing themselves & having a hard time getting back into the rythm of an action after thinking about how they’re doing it/ when paying more attention. There’s a reason why all those meditation audios tell you not to listen “while driving or operation machinery”)

A person centered in the jack of spades is usually a creature of habit: steady, down-to earth, efficient and consistent in performance with great tolerance for routine or repetitive motions that would bore or tire others beyond endurance - as such they make perfect employees for a great manner of jobs from everything to repair, data entry, farming, accounting or warehouse stock control - and luckily enough it’s a very common center of gravity, humanity as a whole does seem suited to taking care of the various stuff that needs doing.

One way to identify one of these for sure (as opposed to ppl who just do automatic drudgework because they have to, as all of us do) is to watch if they resort to repetitive motions in time of stress - people cutting up vegetables, agressively cleaning or mowing the lawn after an argument with their spouse, for example, perhaps leading the spouse to wonder how they can be concerned with such banal, mundane things at a moment like this - They’re not being insensitive, it’s just their coping mechanism, they’re doing the best they can to deal with their emotional pain in a constructive manner. People are, in general, much more likely to revert to their ‘default’ center when under stress.

Sometimes you have to make the diagnosis by principle of exclusion - relatively steady, don’t seem overly concerned with emotions or ideas, etc; while the intellectual part of the moving center will lose interest in something after it’s fully mastered, these folks don’t mind doing the same job all their life or living in the same neighborhood.

Queen of Spades

While the Jack of spades is characterized by its steadiness, the queen is dintinguished by a lack thereof - as with the other emotional parts, it gets the feels about this particular function (in this case, movement) and has its attention held by a particular object, in this case an action, movement, kinesthetic experience or spatial problem - its the part that enjoys sports, or watching sports (though the patience & rigor to become exeptional - indeed seeking thrills can end in the hospital instead)

Here lives the need for speed, the enjoyment of fast cars, video games, amusement park rides, action movies and physical comedy, and if we consider how much cash we as a species spends on such things you get an idea of the moving mind’s importance.

A person centered in the Queen of Spades is often flashy and extravagant in their movements, moves more than necessary for a given activity. They like novelty and can flip from obsessively practicing a new activity to losing all interest in it once they get bored - as such it should be little surprise that they like traveling, often to new unusual places rather than the hugely monetized tourist hangouts.

They might be the sort willing to make do with very little and lead a bohemian vagabond hippie lifestyle in order to escape the ghastly fate of working a boring repetitive job and staying in one place for too long, chasing cool & worthwhile experiences such as mountainclimbing, wild water rafting or karate lessons in more of a breadth than a depht approach.

King of Spades

The kind of physical action that requires sustained attention - such as operating heavy machinery where one moment of inattention can end in severing an important water pipe or power cable, or losing a finger. This part of the moving mind operates much slower and more deliberate than the others - the domain of careful, intentional movements.

As such, it is inextricably linked with tool use, crafting and technology, the search for finding better, easier, smoother and more efficient ways to do all manner of physical tasks - it is also what we use to figure out objects and how they work - you may be able to assemble an ikea chair, lego or a tricycle all on your own just by looking at the parts and how they fit together - or you might resort to reading the manual for a little help from the intellectual center. (It’s worth noting that procedural knowledge is indeed in a wholly different brain region than abstract knowledge or biographical memories - you could have complete amnesia and still know how to fix a bike or learn gardening.)

It is of little surprise that people who have this as their primary center are in high demand in our current technology based economy - not only are they neede to invent, refine and improve all sorts of devices, they are needed to fix them for the technologically challenged. Such people are capable of greats effort of sustained attention when trying to solve a particular problem, be it to break new athlethic records, design video games or new techniques for animaztion or to improve some vulnerable part of an engine, they can focus their attention on the problem for days, months or years until it is finally solved.

But while they find great satisfaction in problem-solving, they easily lose interest once the basic question has been solved, at times leading to a trail of unfinished projects or more endurant people perfectingtheir new techniques for them.

Movement in the strictest sense isn’t their only province, but also an understandng of spatial relationships and composition - meaning, this is a kind of skill than an architect, engineer or surgeon would need.

Jack of Diamonds

As with the other centers, this is kind of the “memory” where already acquired knowledge goes to be recalled - Information on facts or cause and effect relations as simple data. This is where you keep all the basic information you need to function in the world, and when you think of it it’s quite amazing how much of that even relatively “dumb” humans contain - At least one language (in some areas you need way more), knowledge of abstract systems like money and numbers, some idea of what one needs to purchase so they and their family can live, where to get a cheap deal, the history & mythology of where the live, some trivia about their favorite, and a bunch of politcal opinions for which they might be willing to shoot their neighbor, so yeah -

This is where we return to the adage: “Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit Salad.” The Jack of Diamond is more like the mind’s file clerk, it retrieves data with a “true/false” label attached upon a certain trigger - like a question or related topic, leading to many a mental or conversational wiki walk. Rote memorization obviously has its limits, especially where discernment needs to be applied or many contradictory factors need to be considered, or where Data needs to be updated and there’s a danger with sticking with the first information you got “filled” with as the only correct one.

If you challende a person who has their center of gravity in the Jack of Diamonds to a pop quiz or game of trivial pursuit, you will lose - They are always in the process of acquiring all kinds of raw, exact information and can recite a lot of it very quickly, often to the effect of impressing nearby people and garnering a reputation. The death & birth dates of celebrities, the ingredients in food, any funfacts about historical events... they stockpile it all just for its own sake, if perhaps in what others may consider a dry or dusty manner.

They are not necessarily overly enthusiastic or exited about the information but they kinda take it in for completeness’ sake. This is more the sweatervest nerd than the passionate one, but they do pretty well in academic disciplines that require rigor, attention to detail and turning raw data into publishable work. , doing statistical tests or methodcal analysis (Including in literature/ the humanities)

Queen of Diamonds

As with the other Queens, the queen of diamonds is marked by animation and enthusiasm, though it can be as transient as an object keeping your attention - in this case the objects are ideas, theories, facts, ways of thinking and ways of thinking about thinking, but non indiscriminately or all at once - rather there’s a pattern of changing “current obsession” - In other words, this is the seat of curiosity and fascination and “exiciteable” nerds.

A commontrait for ppl centered in the Queen of Diamond is owning a stack of books they bought because of interest in the basic concepts but then they don’t always get around to reading or finishing them because something else occupied their attention.

Even so, they’re often sought out as friends and companions because they provide stimulating conversation that might distract you from your instinctive or emotional quagmires - who doesn’t like some nerd humor or interesting debates?

More a breadth than a depht of knowledge here, they might be too exclectic for the rigors required of scholars, but make good generalists, enthusiastic teachers and good science-related communicators, though they might have a problem with staying on course or doing the repetition expected in a teacher’s role one they grow bored of something.

King of Diamonds

This is where the fruit salad comes in, or rather, study time! Sustaining attention to intellectual matters even when it seems like drudgery, and ultimately a necessity for functioning in academic settings, even in matters one is reasonably enthusiastic for to reach understanding & pass exams, one must study even on you ‘off’ days and even the less exciting topics - on such days, attention needs to be explicitly focussed through sustained effort, and that is where the King of Diamonds comes in.

It’s one of the slowest moving parts of the human mind - in contrast to the quick, repeated answers of the Jack of Diamonds, this is a long, laborious process that comes with the understanding that we cannot have all the answers because there’s still much we don’t know - rather than applying quick good/bad or true/false statements, this part understands the relativity of context and how a precept that may be helpful in one situation may be inappropriate or even criminal in another - rather than seeing the facts and ideas as individual data points it tries to fit them all and their connections together into a whole like a precariously balanced house of cards.

People with their center in the king of diamonds tend to be quiet and wait long before speaking and so, might ironically be mistaken for dullards (Doesn’t help that this type is supposedly fairly unusual.) - they are so tentative and careful about ideas that it can be hard to tell that they are, in fact, quite absorbed in ideas - it’s the part that knows that it doesn’t know. They are hesitant to make assertions unless they are certain - while knowing that you can never fully know - indeed if you asked one of them what their center of gravity is, they’d most likely answer that they don’t know.

Jack of Hearts

So, let us think. What would be an ‘automatic’ or ‘memorized’ response in regards to... social processing? (as if I had to read through/eat the author’s anti-intellectualism again, I get to stress that as much as they are as sophisticated as abstract reasoning and all parts of a whole, social processing & value judgements =/= emotions)

Well, this would be “politeness/manners/habitual pleasantries”, automatic responses we produce in relation to others - this is also where cultural sensibilities and attitudes are encoded, deeply rooted and difficult to observe - but all to obvious if we spend a while in a different circle or culture and find that the responses we have taken for granted are no longer appropriate - volumes have been written about the various subtle differences in the way that people from different cultures handle things like time, personal space, relationships to family members and strangers, business transactions dining andmany others complex interactions of social life.

We learn these mechanical responses by imitation when we are very young, long before we even realize that we’re learning anything - and often those differences in responses can be recognized very early on in toddlers and babies - no wonder we don`t always realize that they are learned. These responses can produce many of the same emotions we find in the ‘queen’ of hearts, but compared to those, they are much less intense & ebb away once our friends and relatives lose interest in the matter, since they are merely being imitated. - This mechanism is also what’s responsible for “crowd emotions”, huge groups of people being swept up in fervors ar concerts, sporting events and political rallies... or after tragedie, crimes and disasters, mass hysteria etc

Wether restrained or violently demonstrative, this automatic imitation of the group’s emotional tenor is one of the most characteristi manifestations of the jack of hearts. This part of the psyche can be sentimental and affectionate, but just as easily cold & rejecting, depending on the stimulus - Loyalty toward one group can turn to violence against the other, prejudice may be absorbed alongside otherwise helpful socalization, there’s a risk of us vs them thinking & sheeple groupthink - Though in its proper context when balanced by the other parts of the person, the Jack of Hearts has an important function to perform in providing the social lubricant necessary for unfamiliar people to interact within the same society and offset initial instrinctual-level suspicious (exactly what is sometimes missing between members of different cultures, allowing those latent suspicions to take over) - this is also how ppl pick up their culture’s aesthetic sensibilities and tastes.

A person centered in the Jack of Hearts will usually have a friendly and gregarious demeanor (unless they were raised by total bigots, or had very negative experienced growing up, which might lead them to meet others with a lot of fear and suspicious) - typically, though, they are cheerful and positive in most social situations and appear caring and warm in most relationships.

This type is very attuned to the little social conventions of friendship - expect lots of birthday/christmas/aniversary presents, thank you notes for any favors or gifts, get well cards for any illness and condolences for any misfortunes. They know the appropriate attire for every occasion, so ask them if you’re ever in doubt.

However, these conventional, reflexive ways of showing concern are kind of how they do it and beneath this some of them can seem, or actually be somewhat shallow and insensitive - since the jack of hearts operates by imitation, they might only be aware of the surface manifestation of emotion and to mimic the general emotional tone without deeper awareness of what is occurring - this part of the emotional center is automatically oncerned with people and relationships and is fond of gossip without awareness of what harm might be done by talking indiscriminately about others.

Their tastes are also likely to be conventional - sentimental movies, love songs, stuffed animals, soap operas & mass-produces decorative objects appeal to this type and will be found in abundance in their surroundings - men will make lots of jokes, be loyal to their favorite sports team and have a favorite tavern where he socializes with a few good buddies. When functioning from the negative half of things, the same person can then turn spiteful and petty with a tedency for jealousy, vindictiveness and cruel remarks disguised as humor, like subtly insulting nicknames

Queen of Hearts

The emotional part about the emotional center is emotional about, well... emotion (they keep using that word...) but what all this actually means is that this part of the human mind enjoys emotion for its own sake and values those impressions and experiences that create emotion - preferably intense emotion, be it positive or negative. Where the jack of hearts likes or dislikes, the queen hates or loves passionately. Where the jack may be pleased about pretty easthetics, the queen is gonna be ecstatic and where the jack’s programmed reactions are relatively consistent, the queen is prone to dramatc moodswings and changes in opinion. This is where we fall and love... and also what fuels axe murders pretty much. Anytime we’re experiencing strong out-of-control emotions, we’re probably in Queen of Hearts mode, having our attention held by whatever we’re emoting at and since the emotional center is first and foremost concerned with interpersonal relationships, it’s likely to be another person.

It s the part of us that identifies with other people and can be liable to lose sense of our own worth in concern of what people thing of us - or what judges others. This part is greatly interested in what others are doing, especially in their own relationships, and wether others are living up to the tenets of moral behavior - and if they’re not, it’s what wants them punished and creates outrage, be it about celibrities or public figures, or in personal life where it can lead to possesiveness or jealousy in its extremes.

However, it’s also what allows us to enjoys intense emotions in fiction genres such as horror and drama (At this point, I shall risk the claim that her majesty is also the part that writes most fanfiction - IDK why the author thinks dark art is a negative, cathartic fantasy is about the safest outlet there is for anything. Or rather I know why but I don’t buy it nor the premises it stands on, but FYI they see it as a masturbatory thing somehow or that’s their reasoning)

- and also the seat of noble and altrustic emotion, charitable and philanthropic impulses as well as religious fervor (or course you wanna be careful with that one and the author actually agrees with me though they mght not recognize their flavor of woo-woo as ‘religion’ or ‘belief’)

If this is your center of gravity, you probably have a lot of feelings - since the queens grow bored easily & may change opinion relatively quickly (and none more than this one because of the intense energy involved in Feelings(TM) ), you may experience them mood swings and have an affinity for the extremes, moving between exstatic enthusiasm and bleak despair, seldom finding a moderate middle ground.

Having the attention hel by an object and that object being emotional, this would be the type of person who would rather feel anything, no matter how painful, than nothing. - sometimes, they might pretty much provoke an emotional exchange in order to feel something. They always find someone to love or hate, sometimes that’s the same person for reasons that have more to do with their internal processes than what the actual person did - they might also apply the same fluctuation inward, alternating between grandiose self-love and self-loathing - all this often attracts people who are more repressed or subdued themselves and look to experience a little of the intensity for themselves, though they might fail to realize that whole “if you can’t handle me at my worst you don’t deserve me at my best” deal.

This storm of feels does, however, command a huge amount of passion & energy that can be put in the service of great things if the person knows how to channel it (just think of the feats of endurance or foolishness we can perform for the ones we love)

King of Hearts

Ya did not honestly think we were escaping the obligatory alice in wonderland reference? Well apparently one poignant way to explain the ‘King of hearts’ is to look at the infamous royal couple from that book, including its less memelicious half - the angry queen who wants everyone beheaded and the mild-manared little King who walks after her and pardons everybody.

Forgiveness is a good example of a process that is without doubt emotional/social/ethical in nature but also takes work & might require a person to get over themselves, the parts that require continous effort. These tend to be emotions that are more quiet & contemplative rather than loud & demonstrative - compassion, empathy, consideration, patience, humility, and the drive toward self-improvement and growth - effort levels are not the same for all people & I still think there’s some ideology lodged here but at the same time they’re not completely off with the “true love/care” business & how it requires sustained concern and comitment - this is where we consider whats best for another rathen than freaking out about what they think of us, where we dont just want to be understood but also to understand others, where we dont just want to be loved but to actively love, the constant effort to do right.

If you believe in that sort of thing this is also where you would supposedly find the door to all that spiritual enlightenment/salvation mumbo jumbo whatever your preferred flavor is - or perhaps those are just names we give our ideal selves not understanding that they’re just part of us. In any case, artistic discernment of a more relative kind also lives here & this is the point where it goes beyond like or dslike and you can appreciate that there’s different things for different contexts.

People who have this as their center of gravity are less apparent in being emotionally centered, because they can seem relatively even-tempered or even detached (in a zen kind of way), able to examine possibilities with compassion but without immediate identification, to understand that appreciating one thing doesn’ equal putting down another or praising it to all heights...

(I would now say that I don’t think to flatter Mari but that she may well be one of these, in case she’s reading this, (if she’s not a queen of Spades but she seems way more humble & considerate than adventurous),but then I remember that Mari does not have internet right now because she is currently having a ValuableLifeExperience(TM) on a tropical island, no doubt exercising her deep thoughts & aesthetic discernment to its fullest and being all sweet & considerate to everyone.

I miss my sisters, they moved across the country, gotta visit them one of these days. )

#typology #extraTypology

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animalegeo · 6 years ago

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The Psychology of Animals

One of the issues of analyzing animal behaviour with limited human parameters...

Despite what men and women think, creatures do faculties that are interesting. Considering available statistics and the simple fact animal psychology remains in its growing phase, it'd be early to extend a blue print for its creature'mind', even though a lot of scientists have tried to achieve this and there was a success at the comprehension of the creature mind through analysis of behaviour and learning from creatures. Obviously, behaviorists would believe it unnecessary to speak about a creature'mind' as per these, answers and learning from animals might possibly be clarified with institution of stimuli that are unique and also modifications. Psychologists believe critters reveal their behaviour and answers will not need intentionality.

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); Which usually means that animals demonstrate an effort and error pattern of activities as opposed to using their mind to act in a specific way and comply with a stimulation response pattern. That really is exactly what Konrad Lorenz, a ethologist thought to be'action patterns' or even FAPs also it's thought a FAPs are due by stimuli throughout the animal kingdom. Without speaking into your head right back if your brain is for the mind as the spirit is into the body would be debatable however we can't deny that the mind, we could explain animal behaviour. Just how much do this position be right?

Creature mind

Is now a topic of interest. Are critters in a position to feel and think? Are animals intelligent? Could they employ in sight to address issues that are certain? Those questions will be responded to by Anybody using a pet in your home. Ofcourse critters they understand oftentimes creatures can address issues, as well as just what is coming later needing read expressions. When your bird can move pressing a lever from a cage may be viewed a educational or learning from mistakes behaviour? Animals aren't able to speak inside our individual language plus we usually do not know animal language therefore there's a difference in communication, which could possibly be a main reason that we're not capable of knowing whether creatures have'emotional experiences' and utilize in sight to fix issues or if that which for these is only error and trail.

The issue with us humans

Iis that people estimate other creatures with your real tool that is sole - terminology. We speak about insight, emotions and feelings also it's not possible to judge animal thoughts we know a few creature moves and unless we understand animal terminology, we can't dig in to your brain of species. But because we're limited in comprehension and our awareness of creatures, it'll be unwise and too dismissive to look at that critters use trial and error solutions to answer the entire planet. It consists of course chiefly accepted across Science and psychology which in Darwinian terms and conditions, the individual brain function as probably the very evolved is effective at complex psychological routines, insightsand expectations compared to the low creatures and the wider brain could likewise inherently imply a greater skill for complex cognitive capabilities. Creatures are effective of functions which want brain capacities.

A study is by Ann and David Premack who implied it is likely to show non human apes language. They may produce and functioned with also a bonobo Kanzi and chimpanzees to indicate that animals may find language and comprehend words. Some terminology instruction has been noticed in birds such as parrots but bonobos and chimpanzees might demonstrate some type of behaviour nevertheless parrots show learning through learning from mistakes. Round the animal kingdom we've run into examples and cases, when creatures becoming or sulk sad whenever they lose perhaps even a one or a partner, like us humans. Animals show breeding behaviour that is organized and complicated, their social life and exceptionally improved learning behaviour appear to be primarily depending mostly on survival plans.

Learning Behavior:

Learning in creatures was mainly clarified by behaviorists who believed that creature learning can possibly be clarified with the essentials of conditioning or institution. Ergo your dog learns how to salivate if he sees his own owner appearing from their kitchen having a specific plate since that can be a blueprint that's been replicated with the dog has correlated the proprietor and also the dish with all the gratification of his own appetite for food. However, is it a reflexive can be the dog of penetration about the circumstance and behaviour? Some psychologists might believe psychologists may think about the gap determined on your mind and that like dogs, us have emotions like happiness and expectations of some thing.

Social Behavior:

Particular pests such as bees reveal exceptionally complex social behaviour, more technical than several of the bigger creatures. However, bees not have skills that are significantly more mental than the animals can bees reveal sophistication in reactions that are societal that are behavioural? Bees are apt to own technical neurons for complex activities even though it's implied that the should live develops sophistication in societal behaviour in the event of rodents, bees and other insects which prefer colonies or group and have a tendency to possess their particular rules to prevent or survive attacks from different creatures.

Mating behaviour :

Through the animal kingdom, the breeding behaviour of creatures is exceptionally intricate. Creatures can resort to entice a mate from secreting pheromones into human body colors. Some critters are known to expire utilize their cues during sight and smell to spot and bring a mate and like humans creatures to partner. We humans chiefly depend on our perception to determine who we desire as a partner nonetheless we use understanding and a little insight to stabilize our breeding procedure. In critters the copulation process appear to be controlled with bodily adjustments which might or might not signify the existence of your mind. However, later having a partner when creatures suffer, it's a very crystal clear sign that people will need to reevaluate our comprehension of animal breeding behaviour predicated only on programming that is .

Animals

Appear showing not exactly a myriad of behaviour that humans are designed for and also have complex societal, reproduction, and learning behaviour plus so they reveal emotions of distress (after having a close one), joy (about becoming a meal), altruism (the should help different creatures by warning of threat ) and reveal many such complex routines of activity to keep survival of these species. ) Is that our own exceptional speech that is individual and they're unable to state how they feel or what. It might possibly be implied that creatures have certain parts of their brain which make them be never great and helpful at behaviours at others. Typically, creatures identify days or weeks until we perform and natural disasters and earthquakes.

Reptiles such as snakes possess highly improved feeling of vibrations, as an instance, rodents and also certain insects and birds possess a highly developed awareness of dogs, radiation have a far greater perception of smell and noise compared to humans, chimps demonstrate higher elastic behaviour than humans (in accordance with a report from Jianzhi Zhang) and humans have developed language discipline from mental performance together with improved cognitive capacities. Together with your brain being capable to do a few complex tasks, humans are thought to be probably the very evolved from the animal kingdom, yet we must bear in mind that mental faculties might well not be evolved in every area both and certain other creatures could possibly have improved abilities in performing certain activities which we humans would be capable of. That isn't just a question of that is way better yet that is way better. Could it be correct to believe humans will be many or one of probably essentially the superior, considering that? This can be a matter which relative psychologists biologists, ethologists, behavioral ecologists, socio-biologists, zoologists and creature physiologists might need to reply.

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oliveraaliyah1994 · 4 years ago

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Best Allopathic Medicine For Premature Ejaculation In India Marvelous Diy Ideas

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How Will I Stop Premature Ejaculation

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apriltwentythree · 7 years ago

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do you want to know what my favorite neurotransmitter is…? Acetylcholine.

the other day I was at the local book store, and ended up browsing the sports section. i noticed this book ‘the performance cortex’ ; there was a chapter in it titled ’motor hunter’ focussing on Steph Curry. I am a Curry fangirl and can consume almost anything about him, even this silly Water filter Ad! anyways, i stood there for 20 minutes reading about his brain, and about how he does what he does on the playing court! the book in general attempts to speak about how Sports-Scouting is increasingly relying on neuroscience. and personally, i felt it may be an even better approach than the Moneyball-like Sabermetrics. (Moneyball btw, is one of my all-time favorite sports movies.)

later, i walked out with the realization that i am now officially a Neuro-junkie!

it is after being a part of the Brain-Gut-MentalHealth group project, that I started to obsess over the Vagal Nerve, for starters.

real quick, it goes like this….Cranial nerves are those that emerge directly from the brain, rather than from the spinal cord. there are 12 pairs, responsible for carrying sensory info to the brain, and motor signals to muscles and organs. Vagus nerve— sometimes referred to as Vagal nerve—is the 10th and the longest one, originating in the medulla oblongata and is named for its wandering path through the body. it is like a superhighway that handles sensing the internal environment of the body and regulating it, like lowering heart rate, constricting the bronchi of the lungs, reducing blood pressure, to name just a few. one of the easiest bio-hacks they say, in order to keep the Vagus nerve in tip-top-shape, is to take cold showers in the morning.

now, if you are a neuroscientist or neurologist or, a superior-Neuro-junkie reading this blog and say hey, some of your understanding here is not exactly right, i would just say i’m sure you’d know better! and will agree with you happily. on the other hand, if you are someone who thinks you are decently-smart but usually take your brain for granted, and cannot self-influence, ever, to read up on generic brain stuff unless you get Alzheimers some day, then this blog is decently-sufficient for your lukewarm-curiosity!

anyways, the Vagal nerve has been extensively studied; there is this dork-geek-nerd-joke that only dorks-geeks-nerds will find funny ‘what happens in Vagus doesn’t stay in Vagus but affects many aspects of emotionality and neurobiology, ha ha’!

to say more…lets say, you are hungry, the gut sends a hormonal trigger to the brain (Ghrelin) and when you are feeling full, it sends another (Leptin). but, now they say there is a neural circuit from the gut cells—dubbed Neuropods— that have nerve endings, which can directly communicate to the brain through Vagal neural synapses. and this overturns many ideas around appetite and satiety! say, you are into serious-dieting. taking appetite suppressants may not work as they usually target the slow-acting hormonal route to the brain, which can take up minutes to hours. but, as the instant-connection Vagal neural circuit takes about 100 milliseconds or less, targeting the Vagus may work better at losing all those unhealthy, add-on pounds!

the Vagal gives legitimacy to the idea of ‘gut feeling’ as a sixth sense, and I doubt if any of the other nerves can beat the magic!

all my Vagalmania led me to Acetylcholine and, made me think about it in context with Epinephrine, the rollercoaster neurotransmitter. now, the story there is….um, independent of the Central Nervous System, the Autonomic Nervous system houses two subsystems — Sympathetic and Parasympathetic—speaking really simplified!

Sympathetic translates to “Adrinergic”. Neurotransmitters — Epinephrine, Norepinephrine— are behind your high heart rate in both super-pumped-up situations and heart-in-the-mouth situations. and on March 31st, guess it was Sympathetic pathways that totally ran the show! This system does have a say in most Akhlat Latifa feelings that knock us over, be it beauty-weed mode or fighter-jet mode. Parasympathetic translates to “Cholinergic”. Neurotransmitter — Acetylcholine— slows down your heart rate and makes you stay in calm, comfortable situations. It’s Parasympathetic pathways that make you want to socializie and say hello. like today May 10th, which also happens to be my mother’s birthday. somewhere I read, it’s the myelinated Vagus B-fibers emerging from the Nucleus Ambiguus inside the Medulla O, that takes care of all the cholinergic responsibilities.

anyways, reading up on the lovely Acetylcholine made me think about the month of April which was like a hangover-recharge month for me, with my Parasympathetic totally working up the scene. Lot of peace, lot of beauty. Zero rollercoaster rides, zero adrenaline rushes. Thank you vagal B-fibers.

but, guess I also slightly miss my adrenergic lifestyle of the past one year, with all the nonstop-gaming, and what not….

the whole world must be engaged in all kinds of interesting things happening around. but while THIS socmedia-window-to-the-world stays super-inactive, I keep on staying in some kind of cozy, mental time-warp that I have taken quite a liking to. it’s always good to need less, I guess. and to feel oh-so-minimalistic.

Anita Desai popped up inside my head the other day, and I was reminded of one of her fiction works. in the story, all her protagonists play games at twilight, and one of them goes into a time-warp of a few hours, as he stays inside a shed next to the garage, while the others keep being engaged in all kinds of interesting games happening on the lawn around the house.

aside from being a neuro-junkie, I have always been a creative-junkie. so taking cue from Desai’s writerly imagination, I felt like “playing derivative” at her work, and go inside the head of her time-warped protagonist. and to see what I can pick up from that last weekend of March, what I can pick up from what’s on there, at this socmedia-window-to-the-world!

and there’s scope for gaming...

but let me write a quick disclaimer: bcos of KL’s celebrity clout, all the lovely colors were color-gamed by all the world more so than ever, and as imagination-inventor, AK always thinks this is immensely cool and it gives her an inception-orgasm. but, since the colors were also endorsed to crazy-overkill on this socmedia-window-to-the-world ---a lot of times in intolerance and with spite and hatred even--- AK had given away all colors sometime back in February, as part of “The Curse of Raghu”, thus making a statement of protest against the misappropriation of disability-imagination in a happily-ableist world. AK truly remains in a BnW world.

okay then, game-time!

Reference Tweets from Mar 30th:

https://twitter.com/CarDroidusMax/status/1112035121916493826

https://twitter.com/CarDroidusMax/status/1112034751521665029

#lawpoint1 -- back in August sometime, when AK/KL had first begun sparring on SM, AK had shared this Malayalam film clip and KL had shared back this ICICI Bank Ad. in both, the color is predominantly red. it is quite implicit that it is only blue in a red-disguise; there wasn’t any doubts whatsoever back then. this fact is significant as this was the first time AK/KL had ever faced-off. so if she so wishes, AK can re-possess any color. example, the red and yellow on the KSRTC bus in the above reference photo, KSRTC bus and the green in the twitter profile Cover image, the sort-of-purple on the shirt of the guy on the road in same Cover image, and the colors on Capt. Cavey DP, even! Winner takes all.

#lawpoint2 --- there was supreme court judgment sometime in September that since Karthiyayini had 2 ‘Y’s in her name, any Y in Kerala could be used to AK’s requirement. back then, as a hat-tip to this landmark judgement, the aYYappan-sabarimala ruckus had followed. so, since we already have a precedence regarding settlement of Y disputes, all 26 alphabet can be monopolized by AK just like in the board game. to say explicitly, AK can call Monopoly on the lovely district of waYanad or kottaYam or any other place for that matter. this rule is especially valid on this socmedia-window-to-the-world as the AK/KL combat had initially also begun by involving the lovely malayalam actor parvathY thiruvothu.

In clear conclusion, about the two reference tweets from KL on Mar 30, AK would like to say -- അതേ, വളരെ ഭംഗിയുണ്ട് :)

this out-of-sync and strenuous “comeback” above is the equivalent of how in her fiction, Desai writes: Ravi bawled, shaking his head so that big tears flew. “Raghu didn’t find me. I won, I won…”

all ക്രിയേ��്റിവ് മണ്ണാങ്കട്ട gaming aside, it’s also some Desai appreciation…her way of writing… sensitive imagery about gamer protagonists and their gaming worlds! It’s good how sensitivity is not just romantic fiction-feature anymore, at least for me! growing up, my mother used to sometimes romanticize my ‘differences’ using the word apoorvaraagam, and that was that! Most of us are like her I guess, rarely ever intuitively-acknowledging the many differences in how different people navigate the same world.

the Neuro-junkie in me thinks that Sensory Processing Sensitivity (SPS) seems to be what Desai’s timewarp-ed protagonist is going through; temperamental personality trait involving increased sensitivity and deeper cognitive processing of social and emotional stimuli. apparently, people with a high measure of SPS make up about 15-20% of the population. they say it is the gene variants of ADRA2b and 5-HTTLPR that lead to the emotionally enhanced vividness in perception.

It’s good that making sense of these will influence how we raise our children; help make lives, more tolerant and relaxed for them!

hey KL, what is your son like? does he still prefer football to cricket despite his sub-continental genes? is he old enough to have a favorite football team? someday, will you be teaching him to hack-stalk women? :) .…. my son is right now in a freezer, probably waiting for his uterus implantation by year-end! Johan is expected to default-love soccer thanks to namesake Johan Cruyff.... let’s see how that sports inheritance goes!

p.s. In this Malayalam film scene, Nanda (Revathy) tries to humor her hard-stalker Naren (identical twin no.1 Lalettan). He somehow has all the A-Z on her, while she knows next to nothing about him and just keeps going in circles trying to figure out.....

I have always loved this song from Mayamayooram. Janakiamma singing ഇതളടർന്ന വഴിയിലൂടെ വരുമോ വസന്തം....? is easily among her best! Also, I will never really know why Shobhana is not superstar-Shobhana; she is effortless in everything…. ഒടുക്കത്തെ പേട്രിയാർക്കി തന്നെ, അല്ലാതെന്താ?!

#CLASSYwomen

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lindafrancois · 6 years ago

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5 Lesser Known Symptoms of Hypothyroidism

Hypothyroidism

Depression | Dry Skin and Hair Loss | Weight fluctuations | Constipation | Disturbed Homeostasis

Essentially a disorder of the endocrine system, hypothyroidism is a condition wherein the thyroid gland of the human body is unable to produce enough thyroid hormones (T3 and T4).

Since the thyroid hormones are essential for a large number of bodily functions (including increase and/or maintenance of the body’s basal metabolic rate), hypothyroidism induces a host of problematic symptoms in the body of the patient. These symptoms of hypothyroidism are more commonly observed in women as compared to men. Also, hypothyroidism symptoms in adults differ from the symptoms in infants and/or children.

Hypothyroidism is caused due to a variety of reasons, ranging from radiation therapy to autoimmune diseases. . However, there are several symptoms of hypothyroidism that are relatively less popular and/or easily identifiable, including mental illnesses like depression, as well as constipation.

Here are 5 of the many lesser known symptoms of hypothyroidism:

1. Depression:

Hypothyroidism is characterized by a significant decline in the levels of thyroid hormones in the body of the patient. The lack of thyroid hormones causes the brain functioning to slow down, which may also induce a sort of fugue state in certain severe cases. Lack of thyroid hormones makes it difficult for the brain to focus, which leads to clinical depression.

Depression is characterized by loss of interest in daily activities, perpetual feelings of sadness, anger and/or frustration (along with other negative emotions), which causes disruptions in the normal day-to-day life of the person. For some people, depression may also induce feelings of irritability, most commonly observed in adolescents and pregnant women.

There is no blood test that can detect the presence of depression, and the only way to diagnose the condition is to check for abnormally low levels of thyroid hormones in the body of the patient and perform clinical correlation.

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2.Dry Skin and Hair Loss:

Thyroid hormones work in synergy with several growth hormones of the body. This combined action of both categories of hormones ensures regular cell generation as well as maintenance of already existing cells. This phenomenon is responsible for providing elasticity and moisture to our skin.

However, when a person suffers from hypothyroidism, the depleted levels of thyroid hormones in their body limit the functionality of the growth hormones as well. These leads to reduced energy levels, hair loss as well as dry skin that can be considered as symptoms of hypothyroidism. In case your hair starts falling more than usual without any other explanation, it might be a good thing to get blood tests to rule out hypothyroidism.

Dry, flaky skin is also a symptom of hypothyroidism, but it is also a result of many other conditions (including cold weather), it is not as easily identified.

3.Weight fluctuations:

The body weight of a person may increase or decrease due to a variety of reasons. In women, bloating and weight gain are common during certain periods of the menstrual cycle. In men, exercise and/or diseases like diabetes contribute to weight fluctuations. However, unexplained weight gain or weight loss are tell-tale symptoms of hypothyroidism.

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Since thyroid hormones are critical to maintaining an optimal basal metabolic rate (BMR) in the human body, the lack of thyroid hormones in hypothyroidism can cause serious weight-related complications. Not only does the body gain unnecessary weight, the patient also experiences difficulty in losing the extra weight. At the other end of the spectrum, hypothyroidism symptoms in men and women also include the following:

Weight loss, that may result in anorexia in some severe cases.

Abdominal fluid accumulation, known as ascites. It causes bloating by fluid retention in the abdomen of the patient.

Metabolic syndrome: it is a cluster of health conditions like high blood pressure, excess body fat and the like, that increase the patient’s risk of a heart stroke.

Heightened or diminished appetite are also common symptoms of hypothyroidism.

General obesity

Since most of the above-mentioned symptoms can be attributed to several other conditions, it is not easily correlated to being a symptom of hypothyroidism.

4.Constipation:

Since the thyroid hormones released by the thyroid gland are responsible for maintaining the metabolic rate of the body, it is not uncommon that a person with an underactive thyroid gland suffers from chronic constipation. However, constipation is a common problem in the elderly patients, and hence it is not generally considered primarily as a symptom. The lack of T3 and T4 thyroid hormones makes proper digestion difficult, especially the digestion of foods containing high amounts of protein. In the case of hypothyroidism, the food digestion and waste elimination process are significantly slowed down, resulting in the uncomfortable state of constipation.

This is because depletion of thyroid hormones in the body causes a significant decrease in the motor activity of the digestive system, causing gastrointestinal dysfunction. In such cases, patients are advised to increase water intake, take high-fiber food items, and so on.

5. Disturbed Homeostasis:

The thyroid gland is responsible for maintaining an optimal body temperature that facilitates all bodily functions. An underactive thyroid gland can lead to disturbed homeostasis, which may cause the following symptoms:

Intolerance to cold or hot environments

Night sweats

Internal shivering, extreme perspiration for no reason at all

Little perspiration

Low basal body temperature, below 97.8 degrees Fahrenheit

Clammy palms

Cold hands and feet (more commonly observed in children and infants as a symptom of hypothyroidism)

Quick Bytes

Is susceptibility to infections a symptom of hypothyroidism?

Yes, recurrent or frequent infections can be considered as a symptom of hypothyroidism.

What are diminished reflexes?

Diminished reflexes are characterized by a person’s inability to react to stimuli at a normal rate. It can be a possible symptom of hypothyroidism.

Can hypothyroidism cause disturbances in the menstrual cycle of women?

Yes, hypothyroidism symptoms in women include irregular menstrual cycles. However, it may also be due to other reasons, such as stress, pregnancy and so on.

Recommended Read: Why Am I not Losing Weight? 5 Less Known Reasons for not Losing Weight

The post 5 Lesser Known Symptoms of Hypothyroidism appeared first on Truweight.

5 Lesser Known Symptoms of Hypothyroidism published first on https://dietariouspage.tumblr.com/

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pamphletstoinspire · 6 years ago

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A LANDSCAPE WITH DRAGONS - The Battle for Your Child’s Mind - Part 4

A story written by: Michael D. O’Brien

________

Chapter IV

The Mortal Foe of My Children

The New Illiteracy

Like it or not, we are fast becoming an illiterate people. Yes, most of us can read. Indeed, adults and children now read more books, numerically speaking, than at any other time in history. But our minds are becoming increasingly passive and image oriented because of the tremendous influence of the visual media. Television, film, and the video revolution dominate our culture like nothing before in the history of mankind. In addition, computers, word processors, pocket calculators, telephones, and a host of similar inventions have lessened the need for the disciplines of the mind that in former generations were the distinguishing marks of an intelligent person. In those days man learned to read and write because of necessity or privilege: maps, medical lore, the history of the race, genealogies, and recipes. Each of these could be handed down intact to the forthcoming generations far more easily, and with greater accuracy in written form than by word of mouth.

So too with the ancient myths and legends that embodied the spiritual intuitions of a people. The printed word guaranteed that no essential detail would be lost. And if the storyteller had the soul of an artist, he could also impart the flavor of his times, the spiritual climate in which his small and large dramas were enacted. Words made permanent on a page would to some extent overcome the weaknesses of memory and avoid the constant tendency in human nature to distort and to select according to tastes and prejudices. Furthermore, the incredible act of mastering a written language greatly increased a person’s capacity for clear thought. And people capable of thought were also better able—at least in theory—to avoid the mistakes of their ancestors and to make a more humane world. The higher goal of literacy was the ability to recognize truth and to live according to it.

Something is happening in modern culture that is unprecedented in human history. At the same time that the skills of the mind, especially the power of discernment, are weakened, many of the symbols of the Western world are being turned topsyturvy. This is quite unlike what happened to the pagan faiths of the ancient classical world with the gradual fading of their mythologies as their civilizations developed. That was a centuries-long draining away of the power and meaning of certain mythological symbols. How many Greeks in the late classical period, for example, truly believed that Zeus ruled the world from Mount Olympus? How many citizens of imperial Rome believed that Neptune literally controlled the oceans? In Greece the decline of cultic paganism occurred as the Greeks advanced in pursuit of truth through philosophy. For many Greeks the gods came to be understood as personifications of ideals or principles in the universe. The Romans, on the other hand, grew increasingly humanistic and materialistic. Though the mystery cults of the East flooded into the West as the Empire spread, the Roman ethos maintained more or less a basic pragmatism; at its best it pursued the common good, civic order, philosophical reflection. At its worst it was superstitious and unspeakably cruel. But all of this was a long, slow process of development, inculturation, and decline.

By contrast, the loss of our world of symbols is the result of a deliberate attack upon truth, and this loss is occurring with astonishing rapidity. On practically every level of culture, good is no linger presented as good but rather as a prejudice held by a limited religious system (Christianity). Neither is evil any longer perceived as evil in the way we once understood it. Evil is increasingly depicted as a means to achieve good.

With television in most homes throughout the Western world, images bombard our minds in a way never before seen. Children are especially vulnerable to the power of images, precisely because they are at a stage of development when their fundamental concepts of reality are being formed. Their perceptions and understanding are being shaped at every moment, as they have been in every generation, through a ceaseless ingathering of words and images. But in a culture that deliberately targets the senses and overwhelms them, employing all the genius of technology and art, children have fewer resources to discern rightly than at any other time in history. Flooded with a vast array of entertaining stimuli, children and parents suppose that they live in a world of multiple choices. In fact, their choices are shrinking steadily, because as the quantity increases, quality decreases. Our society is the first in history to produce such a culture and to export it to the world, sweeping away the cultures of various nations, peoples, and races and establishing the world’s first global civilisation. But what is the character of this new civilization?

The modern mind is no longer formed on a foundation of absolute truths, which past societies found written in the natural law and which were revealed to us more explicitly in Christianity: At one time song and story handed down this world of insight from generation to generation. But our songs and stories are being usurped. Films, videos, and commercial television have come close to replacing the Church, the arts, and the university as the primary shaper of the modern sense of reality. Most children now drink from these polluted wells, which seem uncleanable and unaccountable to anyone except the money-makers. The children who do not drink from them can feel alienated from their own generation, because they have less talk and play to share with friends who have been fed only on the new electronic tales.

Busy modern parents seem to have less time to read to their children or to tell them stories. Many children grow up never having heard a nursery rhyme, not to mention a real fairy tale, legend, or myth. Instead, hours of their formative years are spent watching electronic entertainment. The sad result is that many children are being robbed of vital energies, the native powers of the imagination replaced by an addict’s appetite for visceral stimuli, and creative play replaced with lots of expensive toys that are the spinoffs of the shows they watch. Such toys stifle imaginative and creative development because they do practically everything for the child, turning him into the plaything of market strategists. Moreover, most media role models are far from wholesome. Dr. Brandon Centerwall, writing in the June 10, 1992, issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, links television violence with the soaring crime rates. There would be ten thousand fewer murders, seventy thousand fewer rapes, and seven hundred thousand fewer violent assaults, he says, if television had never been invented.

Many parents exercise very little control over their children’s consumption of entertainment. For those who try to regulate the tube, there is a constant struggle. A parent may stand guard by the television set, ready to turn it off or change the channel if offensive material flashes across the screen, but he will not be quick enough. Immoral or grotesque scenes can be implanted in his children’s minds before he has a chance to flick the remote control. He may even fall victim to his own fascination and lose the will to do so. Scientific studies have shown conclusively that within thirty seconds of watching television, a viewer enters a measurable trancelike state. This allows the material shown to bypass the critical faculty, so that images and ideas are absorbed by the mind without conscious reflection. Even when the contents of a program are not grossly objectionable, hours of boredom and nonsense are tolerated, because the viewer keeps hoping insanely that the show will get better. Television beguiles many of the senses at once, and the viewer is locked into its pace in order not to “miss anything”.

But perhaps the shows ought to be missed. When one listens carefully to many of the programs made for children, one frequently hears the strains of modern Gnosticism: “If you watch this, you will know more, be more grown-up, more smart, more cool, more funny, more able to talk about it with your friends.”—“You decide. You choose. Truth is what you believe it to be.”—“Right and wrong are what you feel are right and wrong for you. Question authority. To become what you want to be, you must be a rebel.”—“You make yourself; you create your own reality.”—“We can make a perfect world. Backward older people, especially ignorant traditionalists, are the major stumbling blocks to building a peaceful, healthy, happy planet.” And so forth. It’s all there in children’s culture, and it pours into their minds with unrelenting persistence, sometimes as the undercurrent but increasingly as the overt, central message. What stands in the path of this juggernaut? What contradicts these falsehoods? Parental authority? The Church? In film after film parents (especially fathers) are depicted as abusers at worst, bumbling fools at best. Christians are depicted as vicious bigots, and ministers of religion as either corrupt hypocrites or confused clowns.

The young “heroes” and “heroines” of these dramas are the mouthpieces of the ideologies of modern social and political movements, champions of materialism, sexual libertarianism, environmentalism, feminism, globalism, monism, and all the other isms that are basically about reshaping reality to fit the new world envisioned by the intellectual élites. Victims of their own gnosis (which they see in grand terms of “broadness” of vision, freedom, and creativity), they are in fact reducing the mystery and majesty of creation to a kind of Flatland. If this were a matter of simple propaganda, it would not get very far. No one can survive long in Flatland, because at root it is busy demolishing the whole truth about man, negating the ultimate worth of the human person, and turning him into an object to be consumed or manipulated. Thus, the propagandist must prevent any awakening of conscience and derail the development of real imagination in his audience. He must inflame the imagination in all the wrong directions and supply a steady dose of pleasurable stimuli as a reward mechanism. He must calm any uneasiness in the conscience by supplying many social projects, causes, and issues that the young can embrace with passionate pseudo-idealism.

The late Dr. Russell Kirk, in a lecture on the moral imagination, warned that a people who reject the right order of the soul and the true good of society will in the end inherit “fire and slaughter”. When culture is deprived of moral vision, the rise of the “diabolic imagination” is the inevitable result. What begins as rootless idealism soon passes into the sphere of “narcotic illusions”, then ends in “diabolic regimes”.1 Tyrants come in many forms, and only the ones who inflict painful indignities on us are immediately recognizable for what they are. But what happens to the discernment of a people when a tyrant arrives without any of the sinister costumes of brutal dictators? What happens when the errors come hi pleasing disguises and are promoted by talented people who know full well how to use all the resources of modern psychology to make of the human imagination the instrument of their purpose? How long will it take the people of our times to understand that when humanist sentiments replace moral absolutes, it is not long before we see idealists corrupting conscience in the name of liberty and destroying human lives in the name of humanity?

In many ways this new visual culture is pleasurable, but it is a tyrant. Literature, on the other hand, is democratic. One can pause and put a book down and debate with the author. One can take it up later, after there has been time to think or do some research. The reader’s imagination can select what it wishes to focus on, whereas in electronic visual media the mind is pummeled with powerful stimuli that bypass conscious and subconscious defenses. It is tragic, therefore, that authentic literature is slowly disappearing from, public and school libraries and being replaced by a tidal wave of children’s books written by people who appear to have been convinced by cultic psychology or converted in part or whole by the neopagan cosmos. Significantly, their use of language is much closer to the operations of electronic culture, and their stories far more visual than the thought-full fiction of the past. They are evangelists of a religion that they deny is a religion. Yet, in the new juvenile literature there is a relentless preoccupation with spiritual powers, with the occult, with perceptions of good and evil that are almost always blurred and at times downright inverted. At least in the old days dragons looked and acted like dragons. This, I think, not only reflects truth in a deep spiritual sense, it is also a lot more interesting. A landscape with dragons is seldom boring.

Invasion of the Imagination

The invasion of our children’s imagination has two major fronts. The first is the degradation of the human image. The second is the corruption of conscience. The territory of fantasy writing, for example, which was once concerned with a wholesome examination of man’s place in the cosmos, has become almost without our knowing it a den of vipers. The genre has been nearly overwhelmed by the cult of horror. A new wave of grisly films and novels is preoccupied with pushing back boundaries that would have been intolerable a generation ago. The young are its first victims, because they are naturally drawn to fantasy, finding in the genre a fitting arena for their sense of the mystery and danger of human existence. Yet the arena has been filled with demonic forms and every conceivable monster of the subconscious, all intent, it appears, on mutilating the bodies, minds, and spirits of the dramatic characters.

The novels of R. L. Stine, for example, have practically taken over the field of young adult literature in recent years. Since 1988, when the first title of his Fear Street series was released, and 1992, when the Goosebumps series appeared, more than a hundred million copies of his books have made their way into young hands. Through school book clubs, libraries, and book racks in retail outlets ranging from department stores to pharmacies, an estimated one and a quarter million children are introduced to his novels every month. For sheer perversity these tales rival anything that has been published to date. Each is brimming over with murder, grotesque scenes of horror, terror, mutilation (liberally seasoned with gobbets and gobbets of blood and gore). Shock after shock pummels the reader’s mind, and the child experiences them as both psychological and physical stimuli. These shocks are presented as ends in themselves, raw violence as entertainment. In sharp contrast, the momentary horrors that occur in classical tales always have a higher purpose; they are intended to underline the necessity of courage, ingenuity, and character; the tales are about brave young people struggling through adversity to moments of illumination, truth, and maturity; they emphatically demonstrate that good is far more powerful than evil Not so with the new wave of shock-fiction. Its “heroes” and “heroines” are usually rude, selfish, sometimes clever (but in no way wise), and they never grow up. This nasty little world offers a thrill per minute, but it is a like a sealed room from which the oxygen is slowly removed, replaced by an atmosphere of nightmare and a sense that the forces of evil are nearly omnipotent.

Stine does not descend to the level of dragging sexual activity into the picture, as do so many of his contemporaries. He doesn’t have to; he has already won the field. He leaves some room for authors who wish to exploit the market with other strategies. Most new fiction for young adults glamorizes sexual sin and psychic powers and offers them as antidotes to evil. In the classical fairy tale, good wins out in the end and evil is punished. Not so in many a modern tale, where the nature of good and evil is redefined: it is now common for heroes to employ evil to defeat evil, despite the fact that in the created and sub-created order this actually means self-defeat.

In the Dune series of fantasy novels, for example, a handsome, young, dark prince (the “good guy”) is pitted against an antagonist who is the personification of vice. This “bad guy” is so completely loathsome physically and morally (murder, torture, and sexual violence are among his pastimes) that by contrast the dark prince looks like an angel of light. The prince is addicted to psychedelic drugs and occult powers, both of which enhance his ability to defeat his grossly evil rival. He is also the master of gigantic carnivorous worms (it may be worth recalling here that “worm” is one of several medieval terms for a dragon). There is a keen intelligence behind the Dune novels and the film that grew out of them. The author’s mind is religious in its vision, and he employs a tactic frequently used by Satan in his attempt to influence human affairs. He sets up a horrible evil, repulsive to everyone, even to the most naïve of people. Then he brings against it a lesser evil that has the appearance of virtue. The people settle for the lesser evil, thinking they have been “saved”, when all the while it was the lesser evil that the devil wished to establish in the first place. Evils that appear good are far more destructive in the long run than those that appear with horns, fangs, and drooling green saliva.

The distinction may not always be clear even to discerning parents. Consider, for example, another group of fantasy films, the enormously successful Star Wars series, the first of which was released in 1977, followed by two sequels. They are the creation of a cinematic genius, so gripping and so thoroughly enjoyable that they are almost impossible to resist. The shining central character, Luke Skywalker, is so much a “good guy” that his heroic fight against a host of evil adversaries resembles the battles of medieval knights.

Indeed, he is called a “knight”, though not one consecrated to chivalry and the defense of Christendom, but one schooled in an ancient mystery religion. He too uses supernatural powers to defeat the lower forms of evil, various repulsive personifications of vice. Eventually he confronts the “Emperor”, who is a personification of spiritual evil. Both Luke and the emperor and various other characters tap into a cosmic, impersonal power they call “the Force”, the divine energy that runs the universe. There is a “light side of the Force” and a “dark side of the Force”. The force is neither good nor evil in itself but becomes so according to who uses it and how it is used. There is much to recommend this film trilogy, such as its message that good does win out over evil if one perseveres with courage. The romantic side of the plot is low-key and handled with surprising sensitivity to the real meaning of love (with the exception of two brief scenes). Other messages: The characters are unambiguously on the side of good or evil; even the one anti-hero, Han Solo, is not allowed to remain one. He becomes a better man through the challenge to submit to authority and to sacrifice himself for others. Luke is repeatedly told by his master not to use evil means to defeat evil, because to do so is to become evil. He is warned against anger and the desire for vengeance and is exhorted to overcome them. In the concluding film, Luke chooses to abandon all powers, refusing to succumb to the temptation to use them in anger. It is this powerlessness that reveals his real moral strength, and this is the key component in the “conversion” of the evil Darth Vader. The final message of the series: Mercy and love are more powerful than sin and hate.

Even so, the film cannot be assessed as an isolated unit, as if it were hermetically sealed in an antiseptic isolation ward. It is a major cultural signpost, part of a larger culture shift. If Dune represents the new Gnosticism expressed aggressively and overtly, Star Wars represents a kind of “soft Gnosticism” in which the gnosis is an undercurrent beneath the surface waves of a few Christian principles. It is important to recall at this point that during the second century there were several “Christian Gnostic” sects that attempted to reconcile Christianity and paganism and did so by incorporating many praiseworthy elements from the true faith. Similarly, Luke and company act according to an admirable moral code, but we must ask ourselves on what moral foundation this code is based, and what its source is.

here is no mention of a transcendent God or any attempt to define the source of “the Force”. And why is the use of psychic power considered acceptable? A major theme throughout the series is that good can be fostered by the use of these supernatural powers, which in our world are exclusively allied with evil forces. Moreover, the key figures in the overthrow of the malevolent empire are the Jedi masters, the enlightened elite, the initiates, the possessors of secret knowledge. Is this not Gnosticism?

At the very least these issues should suggest a close appraisal of the series by parents, especially since the films were revised and re-released in 1997, and a new generation of young people is being influenced by them. The most pressing question that should be asked is, which kind of distortion will do the more damage: blatant falsehood or falsehood mixed with the truths that we hunger for?

Vigilance, Paranoia, and Uncle Walt

No assessment of the situation should overlook the influence of Walt Disney Productions. Its unequalled accomplishments in the field of animation and in drama for children have made it a keystone in the culture of the West. Walt Disney became a kind of secular saint, a patron of childhood, the archangel of the young imagination. Some of this reputation was merited. Who among us has not been delighted and, indeed, formed by the films released in the early years of production, modern retellings of classic fairy stories such as Sleeping Beauty, Pinocchio, and Snow White. In these and other films, evil is portrayed as evil, and virtue as a moral struggle fraught with trial and error. Telling lies makes your nose grow long; indulging in vice turns you into a donkey; sorcery is a device of the enemy used against the good; witches are deadly. There are even moments that approach evangelization. In Fantasia, for example, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” segment is a warning about dabbling in occult powers. In the final segment, “Night on Bald Mountain”, the devil is shown in all his malice, seducing and raging, but defeated by the prayers of the saints. As the pilgrims process toward the dawn, they are accompanied by the strains of Schubert’s “Ave Maria”. Although there are parts of this film too frightening for small children, its final word is holiness.

Upon that reputation many parents learned to say, “Oh, it’s by Disney. It must be okay!” But even in the early years of the Disney studios, the trends of modernity were present. As our culture continued to follow that tendency, films continued to diverge from the traditional Christian world view. Snow White and Pinocchio are perhaps the most pure interpretations of the original fairy tales, because the changes by Disney were of degree, not of kind. Much of the editing had to do with putting violence and other grotesque scenes off-screen (such as the demise of the wicked queen), because reading a story and seeing it are two different experiences, especially for children.

By the time Cinderella hit the theaters, the changes were more substantial. For example, Cinderella’s stepsisters (in the Grimm version) were as beautiful as she, but vain and selfish. And the prince (in both the Grimm and Perrault versions) sees Cinderella in rags and ashes and still decides to love her, before she is transformed back into the beauty of the ball. These elements are changed in the Disney version, with the result that Cinderella wins the prince’s hand, not primarily because of her virtue, but because she is the prettiest gal in town. Some prince!

Walt Disney died in 1966. During the late 1960s and 1970s the studio’s approach gradually changed. Its fantasy and science fiction films began to show symptoms of the spreading moral confusion in that genre. “Bad guys” were at times presented as complex souls, inviting pity if not sympathy. “Good guys” were a little more tarnished than they once had been and, indeed, were frequently portrayed as foolish simpletons. A strain of “realism” had entered children’s films—sadly so, because a child’s hunger for literature (visual or printed) is his quest for a “more real world”. He needs to know what is truly heroic in simple, memorable terms. He needs to see the hidden foundations of his world before the complexities and the nuances of the modern mind come flooding in to overwhelm his perceptions. The creators of the new classics had failed to grasp this timeless role of the fairy tale. Or, if they had grasped it, they arbitrarily decided it was time to change it. What began as a hairline crack began to grow into a chasm.

The Watcher in the Woods is a tale of beings from another dimension, seances, ESP, and channelling (spirits speaking through a human medium), a story that dramatically influences the young audience to believe that occult powers, though sometimes frightening, can bring great good for mankind. Bedknobs and Broomsticks, a comedy about a “good” witch, softens ancient fears about witchcraft. Pete’s Dragon is the tale of a cute, friendly dragon who becomes a pal to the young hero and helps to defeat the “bad guys”. In another time and place such films would probably be fairly harmless. Their impact must be understood in the context of the much larger movement that is inverting the symbol-life that grew from the Judeo-Christian revelation. This is more than just a haphazard development, more than just a gradual fading of right discernment in the wake of a declining Christian culture.

This is an anti-culture pouring in to take its place. Some, of it is full-frontal attack, but much of it is subtler and pleasurably packaged. Still more of it seems apparently harmless. But the undermining of a child’s perceptions in forms that are apparently harmless may be the most destructive of all. By the 1990s, old fairy tales such as Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, and The Little Mermaid were being remade by Walt Disney Productions in an effort to capture the imagination (and the market potential) of a new generation. The Little Mermaid represents an even greater break from the original intention of fairy stories than earlier retellings such as Cinderella. The mermaid’s father is shown to be an unreasonable patriarchist and she justifiably rebellious. In order to obtain her desire (marriage to a land-based human prince), she swims away from home and makes a pact with an evil Sea Witch, who turns her into a human for three days, long enough to make the prince kiss her. If she can entice him to do so, she will remain a human forever and marry him. So far, the film is close to Hans Christian Andersen’s original fairy story. But a radical departure is to be found in the way the plot resolves itself. Despite the disasters the little mermaid causes, only other people suffer the consequences of the wrong she has done, and in the end she gets everything she wants. Charming as she is, she is really a selfish brat whose only abiding impulse is a shallow romantic passion. In the original Andersen tale, the little mermaid faces some difficult moral decisions and decides for the good, choosing in the end to sacrifice her own desires so that the prince will remain happily married to his human bride. As a result of her self-denial, she is taken up into the sky among the “children of the air”, the benign spirits who do good in the world.

“In three hundred years we shall float like this into the Kingdom of God!” one of them cries.

“But we may get there sooner!” whispers one of the daughters of the air. “Unseen, we fly into houses where there are children, and for every day that we find a good child who gives its parents joy. . . . God shortens the time of [our] probation.”

Obviously there has been some heavy-handed editing in the film version, a trivialization of the characters, stripping the tale of moral content and references to God, with a net result that the meaning of the story is seriously distorted, even reversed. In a culture dominated by consumerism and pragmatism, it would seem that the best message modern producers are capable of is this: In the “real” world the “healthy ego” goes after what it wants. You can even play with evil and get away with it, maybe even be rewarded for your daring by hooking the handsomest guy in the land, winning for yourself your own palace, your own kingdom, and happiness on your own terms.

Harmless? I do not think so.

Aladdin especially represents the kind of films that are apparently harmless. To criticize it in the present climate is extremely difficult, because so many people in Christian circles have simply accepted it as “family entertainment”. But Aladdin begs some closer examination.

The animated version is adapted from the Arabian Nights, a fairy tale that originated in Persia and reflects the beliefs of its Muslim author. According to the original tale, a magician hires a poor Chinese boy named Aladdin to go into an underground cave in search of a magic lamp that contains untold power. Aladdin is not merely poor, he is lazy. Through neglect of his duties, he failed to learn a trade from his father before he died and now is vulnerable to temptation. When he finds the lamp, Aladdin refuses to give it up and is locked in the cave. When he accidentally rubs the lamp a jinn (spirit) of the lamp materializes. In the Islamic religion the jinni are demonic spirits, intelligent, fiery beings of the air, who can take on many forms, including human and animal. Some jinni are better characters than others, but they are considered on the whole to be tricksters. According to Arabian mythology, they were created out of flame, while men and angels were created out of clay and light. Whoever controls a jinn is master of tremendous power, for the jinn is his slave. Aladdin, helped by such a spirit, marries the Sultan’s daughter, and the jinn builds them a fabulous palace. But the wicked magician tricks them out of the lamp and transports the palace to Africa. Aladdin chases them there, regains the lamp in a heroic struggle, and restores the palace to China.

In the Disney remake, Aladdin is now a young hustler who speaks American urban slang in an Arabian marketplace. He is a likeable teenage thief who is poor through no fault of his own. He wants to make it big. When he meets the Sultan’s daughter, who is fleeing the boring confinement of her palace, and rescues her through wit and “street-smarts”, the romance begins. The film strives to remain true to some of the original plot, but in the characterization one sees evidence of the new consciousness. The film’s genie is a comedian of epic proportions, changing his roles at lightning speed, so that the audience barely has time to laugh before the next sophisticated entertainment industry joke is trotted out. He becomes Ed Sullivan, the Marx Brothers, a dragon, a homosexual, female belly dancers, Pinocchio, and on and on. It is a brilliant and fascinating display. He is capable of colossal powers, and he is, wonder of wonders, Aladdin’s slave. An intoxicating recipe for capturing a child’s imagination.

This is a charming film. It contains some very fine scenes and deserves some praise for an attempt at morality. The genie, for example, admonishes the young master that there are limits to the wishes he can grant: no killing, no making someone fall in love with you, no bringing anyone back from the dead. Aladdin is really a “good thief”, who robs from the comfortable and gives to the poor. He is called a “street-rat” by his enemies, yet he feels within himself aspirations to something better, something great. He is kind and generous to hungry, abandoned children; he defies the arrogant and the rich, and he is very, very brave. He is only waiting for an opportunity to show what sterling stuff he is made of. It is possible that this film may even have a good effect on the many urban children who five close to that level of poverty and desperation. By providing an attractive role model of a young person determined to overcome adversity, it may do much good in the world. There are even moments when spiritual insight is clear and true—when, for example, at the climax of the tale the magician takes on his true form, that of a gigantic serpent. And yet, there is something on the subliminal level, some undefinable warp in the presentation that leaves the discerning viewer uneasy.

Most obvious, perhaps, is the feeling of sensuality that dominates the plot. It is a romance, of course, and it must be understood that a large number of old literary fairy tales were also romances. But this is modern romance, complete with stirring music and visual impact. Aladdin and the Princess are both scantily clad throughout the entire performance, and, like so many characters in Disney animation, they appear to be bursting with hormones. There is a kiss that is more than a chaste peck. Nothing aggressively wrong, really. Nothing obscene, but all so thoroughly modern. At the very least, one should question the effect this stirring of the passions will have on the many children who flock to see the latest Disney cartoon. The cartoon, by its very nature, says “primarily for children”. But this is, in fact, an adolescent romance, with some good old cartoon effects thrown in to keep the little ones’ attention and some sly innuendo to keep the adults chuckling.

The handling of the supernatural element is, I believe, a more serious defect. To put it simply, the jinn is a demon. But such a charming demon. Funny and sad, clever and loyal (as long as you’re his master), harmless, helpful, and endlessly entertaining.

Just the kind of guardian spirit a child might long for. Does this film implant a longing to conjure up such a spirit? The film’s key flaw is its presentation of the structure of reality. It is an utterly delightful advertisement for the concept of “the tight side of the Force and the dark side of the Force”, and as such it is a kind of cartoon Star Wars. Like Luke Skywalker, Aladdin is a young hero pitched against impossible odds, but the similarities do not end there. Luke becomes strong enough to battle his foes only by going down into a cave in a mysterious swamp and facing there “the dark side” of himself. Then, by developing supernatural powers, he is enabled to go forth to defeat the evil in the world. Similarly, Aladdin first seeks to obtain the lamp by going down into the jaws of a lionlike beast that rises up out of the desert and speaks with a ghastly, terrifying voice. The lamp of spiritual power resides in a cave in the belly of the beast, and Aladdin takes it from him. Here is a clear message to the young who aspire to greater things: If you want to improve your lot in life, spiritual power is an even better possession than material powers such as wealth or physical force. It could be argued that Luke does not enlist the aid of demonic beings, nor does he cooperate with supernatural forces for selfish purposes. Indeed, he is a shining idealist. But this argument presumes that developing occult powers does not place one in contact with such evil beings—a very shaky presumption to say the least. At best there is an ambiguity in Luke’s cooperation with “the Force” that leaves ample room for the young to absorb gnostic messages.

What is communicated about the nature of spiritual power in Aladdin? Leave aside for the moment the question of the hero being helped by a “good demon” to overcome a bad one. Leave aside also the problem of telling the young that they should ignore their natural terrors of the supernatural in order to succeed in their quests. Leave aside, moreover, the subtle inference that light and darkness, good and evil, are merely reverse sides of the same cosmic coin. There are subtler messages in the film. For example, a theme running throughout is that Aladdin is “worthy” to master such power, though we never learn what constitutes his worthiness. The viewer assumes that it is his bravado, cunning, and basically good heart. In reality, none of us is worthy of powers that properly belong to God alone. None of us is worthy of restoration to Paradise. Salvation is Gods gift to mankind by the merits of his death on the Cross. Even so, we have not yet reached our one true home. We have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, and in this world no one is capable of wielding evil supernatural powers without being corrupted by them. It is modern man’s ignorance of this principle that is now getting the world into a great deal of trouble. A powerful falsehood is implanted in the young by heroes who are given knowledge of good and evil, given power over good and evil, who play with evil but are never corrupted by it.

Beauty and the Beast handles the problem differently, but the end result is the same — the taming of the child’s instinctive reaction to the image of the horrible. The Beast is portrayed as a devil-like being. He is not merely deformed or grotesque, as he is in the written fable. In the film his voice is unearthly and horrifying; he is sinister in appearance, his face a hideous mimicry of medieval gargoyles, his body a hybrid abomination of lion, bull, bear, and demon. His castle is full of diabolical statues. Of course, the central themes are as true and timeless as ever: Love sees beneath the surface appearance to the interior reality of the person; and love breaks the spell that evil casts over a life.

Yet here too there are disturbing messages: A “good witch” casts the spell in order to improve the Beast’s character, implying that good ends come from evil means. But no truly good person does harm in order to bring about a good. While it is true that good can come out of evil situations, it is only because God’s love is greater than evil. God’s primary intention is that we always choose the good. In the original fairy tale, the spell is cast by an evil sorcerer, and the good conclusion to the plot is brought about in spite of him.

The Disney Beast really has a heart of gold. By contrast, handsome Gaston, the “normal” man, proves to be the real villain. He is a despicable parody of masculinity, a stupid, vain macho-man, who wishes to marry the heroine and chain her to the ennui of dull village life. The Beauty in the original tale embraces the virtues of hard work and the simple country life that result from her father’s misfortune. The Disney Beauty pines for something “better”. There is a feminist message here, made even stronger by the absence of any positive male role models. Even her father is a buffoon, though loveable. This gross characterization of “patriarchy” would not be complete without a nasty swipe at the Church, and sure enough, Gaston has primed a clown-like priest to marry them. (The depiction of ministers of religion as either corrupt or ridiculous is practically unrelieved in contemporary films — Disney films are especially odious in this respect.)

To return for a moment to the question of beauty: A principle acknowledged in all cultures (except those in a terminal phase of self-destruction), is that physical beauty in creation is a living metaphor of spiritual beauty. The ideal always points to something higher than itself to some ultimate good. In culture this principle is enfleshed, made visible. If at times spiritual beauty is present in unbeautiful fictional characters or situations, this only serves to underline the point that the physical is not an end in itself. In Disney’s Pocahontas we find this principle inverted. Dazzling the viewer’s eyes with superb scenes that are more like impressionistic paintings than solid narrative, stirring the emotions with haunting music and the supercharged atmosphere of sexual desire, its creators are really about a much bigger project than cranking out yet another tale of boy-meets-girl. Beauty is now harnessed to the task of promoting environmentalism and eco-spirituality. The real romance here is the mystique of pantheism, a portrayal of the earth as alive, animated with spirits (for example, a witchlike tree-spirit gives advice to Pocahontas about the nature of courtship). The earth and the flesh no longer point to something higher than themselves; they are ends in themselves. The “noble savage” understands this; the white, male, European Christian does not. And as usual, Disney portrays masculinity in its worst possible tight (excepting only the hero, Smith, who is sensitive and confused). The other European males are rapacious predators, thoughtless builders, dominators, polluters, and killers; and those who are not any of the foregoing are complete nincompoops. It is all so predictable, all so very “consciousness-raising”. What child does not take away from the film the impression that, in order to solve his problems, industrial-technological man need only reclaim the lost innocence of this pre-Columbian Eden?

I did not view Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame in a theater but watched the video release at home. The effect of the full-screen experience must have been overwhelming for audiences, because the visual effects in the video version were very impressive, clearly among Disney’s most brilliant achievements in animation. However, I was disturbed by themes that have now become habitual with this studio. Within the first ten minutes of the story a self-righteous Catholic moralist rides into the plot on horseback and chases a poor gypsy mother, who runs barefoot through the streets of Paris, carrying her baby in her arms, in a desperate attempt to reach the sanctuary of Notre Dame cathedral. She stumbles on the steps of the church and dies. The moralist picks up the baby, discovers that he is deformed, a “monster”, and decides to dispose of him by dropping him down a well, all the while muttering pious imprecations against this “spawn of the devil”. So far, not a great portrait of Catholicism. In the only redeeming moment in the film, a priest rushes out of the cathedral, sees the dead woman, and warns the moralist that his immortal soul is in danger. To amend for his sin, he must agree to be the legal guardian of the baby. The moralist agrees, on the condition that the monster be raised in secret in Notre Dame.

In the next scene the baby is now a young man, Quasimodo, a badly deformed hunchback who lives in isolation in the tower of the cathedral. He is the bell ringer, a sweet soul, humble, good, and creative, content to make art and little toys and to observe from his lonely height the life of the people of Paris. His solitude is broken only by the occasional visits of the moralist, who takes delight in reminding Quasimodo that he is a worthless monster who survives only because of his (the moralist’s) “kindness”. Is there anyone in the audience who has missed the point: The moralist is the ultimate hypocrite, the real monster. Quasimodo’s only other friends are three gargoyles, charming, humorous little demons who are reminiscent of the Three Stooges. They encourage him to believe in love, to believe in himself, to have courage. In one interesting short scene, the gargoyles mock a carving of the Pope. Later in the film there is a scene depicting the churchgoers praying below in the cathedral. Without exception they pray for wealth, power, and gratification of their desires—a portrait of Catholics as utterly selfish, shallow people.

A sensual young gypsy woman flees into the cathedral to escape the moralist (who is also a judge). Safe inside, she prays for divine assistance in a vague, agnostic fashion. In stark contrast to the prayers of the Catholics, there is nothing selfish in her prayer. She merely asks for justice for her people. As the music swells, she turns away from the altar, still singing her “prayer”, strolling in the opposite direction of the Catholics who are approaching the altar. Her supplication dissolves into a romantic musing that is more sentiment than insight into the nature of real mercy and justice. Disney’s point is clear: Traditional Christianity is weak, blind, and selfish; “real Christianity” is sociological and “politically correct”.

The romantic element, a mutual attraction between the gypsy woman and a young soldier, is simply a rehash of the screen romances that have become a necessary ingredient in Disney animated films. Lots of body language, lots of enticing flesh, a garish portrayal of the tormented moralist’s secret lusts, a contrasting depiction of the beautiful young couples sexual desire as pure and natural, and a sensual screen kiss that is inappropriate for young viewers (as it is in Aladdin, The Little Mermaid, and other Disney films). Perhaps we should ask ourselves if viewing such intimate moments between man and woman is ever appropriate, even for adults. Is voyeurism, in any form, good for the soul?

The Hunchback of Notre Dame concludes with a frenzied climax in which the forces of love and courage are pitted against the ignorance of the medieval Church. Quasimodo has overcome the lie of his worthlessness through the counsel of his gargoyles and is now strong enough to defy the moralist. He rescues the gypsy girl, who is about to be burned for witchcraft, and flees with her to the bell tower. There the moralist tracks them down (after first pushing aside the ineffectual priest who tries to stop him) and attempts to kill them. As one might expect, he comes to a bad end. The gypsy and the soldier are reunited, and Quasimodo makes do with platonic love. All’s well that ends well.

Based on Victor Hugo’s novel of the same tide (published in 1831), the film retains much of the plot and characterization and even manages to communicate some truths. But the reality-shift evidenced in the modern version is a serious violation of the larger architecture of truth. The truths are mixed with untruths, and because of the sensory impact of the film medium, it is that much more difficult for an audience to discern rightly between the two. This is especially damaging to children, who because of their age are in a state of formation that is largely impressionistic. Moreover, most modern people do not know their history and do not possess the tools of real thought and thus are vulnerable to manipulation of their feelings. Young and old, we are becoming a race of impressionists.

Rather than thinking with ideas, we “think” in free-form layers of images loosely connected by emotions. There would be little harm in this if the sources of these images were honest. But few sources in culture and entertainment are completely honest these days. And even if the mind were well stocked with the best of images (a very rare state), it is still not equipped to meet the spiritual and ideological confusion of our times. The problem is much deeper than a lack of literacy, because even the mental imagery created by the printed word can be merely a chain of misleading impressions, however well articulated they may be. The real problem is religious illiteracy, by which I mean the lack of an objective standard against which we can measure our subjective readings of sensation and experience. Without this objective standard, one’s personal gnosis will inevitably push aside the objective truth and subordinate it to a lesser position, when it does not banish it altogether. That is why a modern maker of culture who feels strongly that Catholicism is bad for people has no qualms about rewriting history or creating anti-Catholic propaganda and will use all the powers of the modern media to do so.

One wonders what Disney studios would do with Hugo’s Les Miserables (published in 1862), an expressly Christian story in which two central characters, the bishop and Jean Valjean, are heroic Catholics fighting for truth, mercy, and justice in the face of the icy malice of the secular humanists, against the background of the French Revolution. Would the scriptwriters and executives sanitize and politically correct these characters by de-Catholicizing them? It would be interesting to observe the contortions necessary for such a transformation. Perhaps they would do what Hollywood did to Dominique Lapierre’s wonderful book, The City of Joy. The central character in that true story, a Christlike young priest who chose to live among the most abject of Calcutta’s poor, is entirely replaced in the film version by a handsome young American doctor (who was a secondary character in the book). In the Hollywood rewrite, the doctor is idealistic but amoral, and he is in the throes of an identity crisis. Uncertain at first if he is merely a technician of the body, slowly awakening to the possibility that he might become a minister to the whole person, in the end he chooses the latter. Following the gnostic pattern, he becomes the knower as healer, the scientist as priest. It is a well-made film, containing some good insights and moving scenes, but by displacing the priest of Christ, it loses an important part of the original story’s “soul”, cheating us of the real meaning of the events on which it is based.

Where Catholicism is not simply weeded out of the culture, it is usually attacked, though the attacks tend to be swift cheap-shots. Take, for instance, Steven Spielberg’s smash hit, Jurassic Park.

Again, there is much to recommend this film, such as the questions it raises about science and morality, especially the issue of genetic engineering. In the struggle between people and dinosaurs there is plenty of human heroism, and the dinosaurs are even presented as classic reptiles—no taming or befriending here. So far so good. On the level of symbolism, however, we are stunned with an image of the reptile as practically omnipotent. The Tyrannosaurus rex is power incarnate, and its smaller cousin, the Velociraptor, is not only fiercely powerful, it is intelligent and capable of learning.

There is a telling scene in which the most despicable character in the film, a sleazy lawyer, is riding in a car with two young children. When a dinosaur approaches the car to destroy it, the lawyer abandons the children to their fate and flees into an outdoor toilet cubicle. The T-Rex blows away the flimsy structure, exposing the lawyer, who is seated on the “John”, quivering uncontrollably and whining the words of the Hail Mary. The T-Rex picks him up in its jaws, crunches hard, and gulps him down its throat. In the theater where I saw the film, the audience cheered.

Where Is It All Leading?

At this point, the reader may be saying to himself, “What you describe may be true. I’ve seen evidence of it, and I’ve struggled to understand it. I’ve tried to pick my way through the flood of things coming at my children, but I’m not having much success. I’m uneasy about the new culture, but I don’t seem to have the skills to argue with it.”

I think most conscientious parents feel this way. We know something is not right, but we don’t quite know how to assess it. We worry that our children might be affected adversely by it, but at the same time we don’t want to overreact. The image of the “witch-hunt” haunts us (a fear that is strongly reinforced by the new culture), but we are equally concerned about the need to protect our children from being indoctrinated into paganism. What, then, are we to do?

Our first step must be in the direction of finding a few helpful categories, a standard against which we can measure examples of the new culture. I have found it useful to divide the field of children’s culture into roughly four main categories:

1. Material that is entirely good.

2. Material that is fundamentally good but disordered in some details.

3. Material that appears good on the surface but is fundamentally disordered.

4. Material that is blatantly evil, rotten to the core.

I will return to these categories in the next chapter’s assessment of children’s literature, where I hope to develop them in greater detail. I introduce them here to make a different point. Two generations ago the culture of the Western world was composed of material that, with few exceptions, was either entirely good (1) or fundamentally good but disordered in some details (2). About forty years ago there began a culture-shift that steadily gathered momentum, a massive influx of material that appeared good on the surface but was fundamentally disordered (3). It became the new majority. During this period entirely good material became the minority and at the same time more material that was diabolically evil began to appear (4). There is a pattern here. And it raises the question: Where is it all leading?

I think it highly unlikely that we will ever see a popular culture that is wholly dominated by the blatantly diabolical, but I do believe that unless we recognize what is happening, we may soon be living in a culture that is totally dominated by the fundamentally disordered and in which the diabolical is respected as an alternative world view and becomes more influential than the entirely good. Indeed, we may be very close to that condition. I can think of half a dozen recent films that deliberately reverse the meaning of Christian symbols and elevate the diabolical to the status of a saving mythology.

The 1996 film Dragon Heart, for example, is the tale of a tenth-century kingdom that suffers under a tyrannical king. When the king is killed in a peasant uprising, his son inherits the crown but is himself wounded when he is accidentally impaled on a spike. His heart is pierced, and he is beyond all hope of recovery. The queen takes her son into an underground cave that is the lair of a dragon. She kneels before the dragon, calls him “Lord”, and begs him to save the princes life. The dragon removes half of his own heart and inserts it into the gaping wound of the prince’s chest, then heals the wound with a touch of his claw. The queen says to her son, “He [the dragon] will save you.” And to the dragon she says, “He [the prince] will grow in your grace.” The prince recovers and grows to manhood, the dragon’s heart beating within him.

The prince becomes totally evil, a tyrant like his father, and the viewer is led to believe that, in this detail at least, traditional symbolism is at work—the heart of a dragon will make a man into a dragon. Not so, for later we learn that the prince’s own evil nature has overshadowed the dragon’s good heart. When the dragon reappears in the plot and becomes the central character, we begin to learn that he is not the terrifying monster we think him to be. He dabbles in the role the superstitious peasants have assigned to him (the traditional concept of dragon), but he never really does any harm, except to dragon slayers, and then only when they attack him without provocation. Through his growing friendship with a reformed dragon slayer, we gradually come to see the dragon’s true character. He is wise, noble, ethical, and witty. He merely plays upon the irrational fears of the humans regarding dragons because he knows that they are not yet ready to understand the higher wisdom, a vision known only to dragons and their enlightened human initiates. It is corrupt human nature, we are told, that has deformed man’s understanding of dragons.

The dragon and his knight-friend assist the peasants in an uprising against the evil prince. Even a Catholic priest is enlisted in the battle. This character is yet another Hollywood buffoon-priest, who in his best moments is a silly, poetic dreamer and at worst a confused and shallow remnant of a dishonored Christian myth. Over and oyer again, we are shown the ineffectiveness of Christianity against evil and the effective power of The People when they ally themselves with the dragon. The priest sees the choice, abandons his cross, and takes up a bow and arrow, firing two shafts into the head and groin of a practice dummy. In a final battle, he overcomes his Christian scruples and begins to shoot at enemy soldiers, quoting Scripture humorously (even the words of Jesus) every time he shoots. An arrow in a soldier’s buttock elicits the priest’s sly comment, “Turn the other cheek, brother!” When he aims at the evil prince, he murmurs, “Thou shalt not kill! Thou shalt not kill!” then proceeds to disobey the divine commandment. The arrow goes straight into the prince’s heart, but he does not fall. He pulls the arrow from his heart and smiles. Neither Christian myth nor Christian might can stop this kind of evil!

Here we begin to understand the objectives that the scriptwriter has subtly hatched from the very beginning of the film. The prince cannot die because a dragon’s heart beats within him, even though he, not the dragon, has corrupted that heart. The evil prince will die only when the dragon dies. Knowing this, the dragon willingly sacrifices his own life in order to end the reign of evil, receiving a spear thrust into his heart. At this point we see the real purpose of the film—the presentation of the dragon as a Christ-figure!

Shortly before this decisive climax, the dragon describes in mystical tones his version of the history of the universe: “Long ago, when man was young and the dragon already old, the wisest of our race took pity on man. He gathered together all the dragons, who vowed to watch over man always. And at the moment of his death, the night became alive with those stars [pointing to the constellation Draco], and thus was born the dragon’s heaven.”

He explains that he had shared his heart with the dying young prince in order to “reunite man and dragon and to ensure my place among my ancient brothers of the sky”.

In the final moments of the film, after the dragon’s death, he is assumed into the heavens amidst heart-throbbing music and star bursts and becomes part of the constellation Draco. The crowd of humans watch the spectacle, their faces filled with religious awe. A voice-over narrator says that in the years following “Draco’s sacrifice” a time of justice and brotherhood came upon the world, “golden years warmed by an unworldly light. And when things became most difficult, Draco’s star shone more brightly for all of us who knew where to look.”

Few members of the audience would know that, according to the lore of witchcraft and Satanism, the constellation Draco is the original home of Satan and is reverenced in their rituals. Here is a warning about where Gnosticism can lead. What begins as one’s insistence on the right to decide the meaning of good and evil leads inevitably to spiritual blindness. Step by step we are led from the wholly good to flawed personal interpretations of good; then, as the will is weakened and the mind darkened, we suffer more serious damage to the foundation itself and arrive finally if we should lose all reason, at some manifestation of the diabolical.

When this process is promulgated with the genius of modern cinematic technology, packaged in the trappings of art and mysticism, our peril increases exponentially. My wife and I have known devout, intelligent, Christian parents who allowed their young children to watch Dragon Heart because they thought it was “just mythology”. This is an understandable naïveté, but it is also a symptom of our state of unpreparedness. The evil in corrupt mythology is never rendered harmless simply because it is encapsulated in a literary genre, as if sealed in a watertight compartment. Indeed, there are few things as infectious as mythology.

We would be sadly mistaken if we assumed that the cultural invasion is mainly a conflict of abstract ideas. It is a major front in the battle for the soul of modern man, and as such it necessarily entails elements of spiritual combat. For this reason parents must ask God for the gifts of wisdom, discernment, and vigilance during these times. We must also plead for extraordinary graces and intercede continuously for our children. The invasion reaches into very young minds, relaxing children’s instinctive aversion to what is truly frightening. It begins there, but we must understand that it will not end there, for its logical end is a culture that exalts the diabolical. There are a growing number of signs that this process is well under way.

In most toy shops, for example, one can find a number of soft, cuddly dragons and other monsters to befriend. There are several new children’s books about lovable dragons who are not evil, merely misunderstood. In one such book, given as a Christmas present to our children by a well-meaning friend, we found six illustrations that attempted to tame the diabolical by dressing it in ingratiating costumes. The illustrator exercised a certain genius that made his work well nigh irresistible. One of the images portrayed a horrible, grotesque being at the foot of a child’s bed. The accompanying story told how the child, instead of driving it away, befriended it, and together they lived happily ever after. The demonic being had become the child’s guardian. One wonders what has become of guardian angels! Such works seek to help children integrate “the dark side” into their natures, to reconcile good and evil within, and, as our friend expressed it, to “embrace their shadows”.

In Lilith, a classical fantasy by the nineteenth-century Christian writer George MacDonald, the voice of Eve calls this darkness “the mortal foe of my children”. In one passage a character describes the coming of “the Shadow”:

He was nothing but blackness. We were frightened the moment we saw him, but we did not run away, we stood and watched him. He came on us as if he would run over us. But before he reached us he began to spread and spread, and grew bigger and bigger, till at last he was so big that he went out of our sight, and we saw him no more, and then he was upon us.

It is when they can no longer see him that his power over them is at its height. They then describe how the shadow temporarily possessed them and bent their personalities in the direction of hatred. He is thrown off by love welling up within their hearts.

The German writer Goethe, in his great classic work Faust, uses a different approach to depict the seduction of mankind. At one point the devil says:

Humanity’s most lofty power,

Reason and knowledge pray despise!

But let the Spirit of all lies

With works of dazzling magic blind you,

Then absolutely mine, I’ll have and bind you!

In children’s culture a growing fascination with the supernatural is hastening the breakdown of the Christian vision of the spiritual world and the moral order of the universe. Reason and a holy knowledge are despised, while intoxicating signs and wonders increase.

________

1 Russell Kirk, “The Perversity of Recent Fiction; Reflections on the Moral Imagination”, in Reclaiming a Patrimony (Washington, D.C.: The Heritage Foundation, 1982).

#a landscape with dragons

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canadianfamilypharmacyblog-blog · 7 years ago

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Loss of Appetite and Eating Disorder: Causes, Symptoms, Treatment

When appetite is disturbed, not all people perceive this as an alarming symptom. But they should: a change in appetite can be one of the signs (although not unambiguous) of a stomach and/or duodenum diseases. Also, an imbalance of appetite is observed in other pathologies, for example:

infections of various types;

intoxication (poisoning);

problems with the endocrine system;

diseases of the nervous system, mental disorders;

beriberi, anemia and other malnutrition.

Why a man loses appetite?

The symptom "no appetite" can be a sign of chronic gastritis, characterized by a decrease in the secretion of the pancreas. With oncological diseases (stomach cancer), a patient often rejects a certain type of food, mainly meat, and its derivatives, as well as a decrease in appetite until anorexia occurs - the complete indifference to food. Sometimes experienced doctors correctly diagnose cancer on the basis of a single sign: when a patient complains of a bad appetite for a long time, lack of pleasure from taking even his favorite food, and also a taste perversion.

A special condition that should be distinguished from loss of appetite is sitophobia, refusal of food. This may be a consequence of a mental illness or a settled fear of pain that increases after eating - for example, in chronic ulcers. The perverted appetite with desire is chalk, coal and the like substances are observed not only in pregnant women but also in patients with gastritis with reduced or absent acid formation.

The pathologies of the stomach and intestinal tract (duodenum) are extremely rarely accompanied by increased appetite; they are more likely to have a poor appetite. Cider, which occurs with peptic ulcer, should be treated more as a need for frequent meals, than as an increase in appetite: it provokes pain that occurs one and a half to three hours after eating (the so-called late pain) or in 5-6 hours (" hungry "pain). A patient may have the desire to eat as quickly as possible, and in a supine position, for patients with disorders that have arisen after resection of the stomach; first of all, with the development of hypoglycemia - a complex symptom based on an imbalance in the level of glucose in the plasma.

What may affect appetite?

The food center of the brain receives and processes all information concerning food:

how and in what quantities it arrives;

how it is assimilated;

what are the conditions of nutrition;

how food reserves are used in the body.

Appetite does not arise when the food resources of our body are already exhausted but in advance; this is a system that acts "ahead of the curve". Therefore, with changes in the established diet, the brain can give an "alarm", and the appetizing stimuli will act differently, causing a decrease or an increase in appetite.

Appetite is aroused when the stomach is empty and its walls contract. A person with a low body temperature also wants to eat. To increase appetite, external factors work on which the conditioned reflex has been developed in the body: for example, the kind of a delicious dish, its smell. As an irritant can even act as a wall clock, marking the beginning of the lunch break!

Appetite is gradually inhibited during eating: the food intake stretches the stomach walls, begins its digestion, the products are digested and absorbed by the body, the hormonal background changes accordingly, and the food center gives the command - "enough, the person is full!" Types of appetite and its disorders

There are varieties of appetite:

general, or simply "I want to eat!" when a person is ready to take any food;

specialized forms, when the appetite is directed to some kind of food and is dictated by the body's need for a specific group of substances: proteins or carbohydrates, fats, vitamins or minerals, etc.

On the one hand, the appetite provides the food in the body of the desired type in certain quantities. On the other hand, it "includes" the mechanisms necessary for its assimilation: salivation, the secretion of gastric digestive juice. A good level of appetite at all times was considered a sign of health. But loss of appetite, on the contrary, signals the ill health of this or that system. Anorexia (no appetite) or bulimia (pathological enhancement) of appetite often indicates problems with the digestive tract, endocrine disorders, beriberi, mental disorders and even brain tumors. To return a normal appetite, you need to set a proper meal schedule and, of course, start treating the underlying disease.

One of the most powerful factors that serve to stimulate appetite is a change in blood sugar, especially if it occurs abruptly. It's very easy for a modern person to provoke it: just a few minutes to eat a handful of sweets, drink a hot bottle on a hot day in a gulp, or go to a fast food restaurant. Then everything goes according to the established pattern:

the blood has an excess of sugar (its level can increase by 100-200%);

the body "beats alarm" and starts the mechanism of accelerated transfer of sugar into fatty deposits;

the sugar level falls sharply below the norm, and the food center again regards the situation as critical;

the person experiences a new attack of appetite.

Disorders of the appetite of all kinds are sometimes united by a common term - dysrexia. There are clear subgroups of pathologies:

hyporexia - a decrease in appetite;

anorexia - when a person does not have any appetite;

hyperrexia - pathological appetite growth;

bulimia - an extreme variant of hyperrexia, uncontrolled gluttony, "wolfish appetite";

pararexia - any perversion of appetite.

Sometimes the discrepancy is confused with its pseudo forms; there is even a special term - "pseudo-correction". So, a very hungry person can "eat like a wolf", and a person who had heavy breakfast may experience a decrease or lack of appetite at the traditional lunch time.

What to do if you lost appetite?

In many ways, treatment depends on the cause of this condition. As a rule, the appetite is restored after the disease, which has become the cause of poor appetite, is completely cured.

If the loss of appetite is associated with pregnancy, then, no treatment is required, after a few weeks, the appetite will recover itself;

If appetite loss is caused by appendicitis, surgical intervention will be required;

People suffering from dementia are prescribed high-calorie nutritional formulas, and even artificial nutrition through a gastrostomy tube;

If the loss of appetite is caused by nausea, doctors prescribe special drugs on the basis of ondansetron or promethazine;

If the cause of the lack of appetite are infectious diseases, the treatment is carried out with antibiotics;

If loss of appetite is associated with a decreased level of thyroid hormone, special hormone replacement drugs are prescribed. You can buy these drugs online at the official website of Canadian Family Pharmacy - www.cfop.biz. This is one of the health pharmacies you can trust;

The main methods of cancer treatment are radiation and chemotherapy, surgical intervention.

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corvus-bones · 7 years ago

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Personal breakdown of house alignment.

House 1: Mercury, Ceres

(Mercury) You are mercurial in appearance or manner, especially if Mercury is close to (within 10 degrees of) the Ascendant. You are restless, adaptable, changeable, easily distracted, versatile, and nimble. You enjoy talking but might often monopolize the conversation or fail to listen (you might be too busy thinking about what you will say next to truly listen). You have a mischievous and even precocious manner. Lively and interesting, you quickly adapt to new situations. In fact, you treat most new endeavors with curiosity and great interest. Your first reaction to new stimuli is logical and curious rather than emotional.

(Ceres) Being a nurturer and nourisher is a strong part of your identity. You are caring, sympathetic and concerned for others. You identify deeply with your role as parent. You may find it quite natural to nurture yourself.

House 2: Mars, Chiron

(Mars) You are likely to be a hard worker, although you appreciate the process and might be slower than some as you focus on the method and tend to each step deliberately and carefully. You love to produce things of practical value. You are ambitious when it comes to making money and acquiring possessions, but you might be impatient or impulsive when it comes to spending. You can be quite possessive, both of material things and of people. You like a physical challenge, and your physical abilities and energy make up a strong part of your sense of self-worth. You like to work independently, or you value things most when you have achieved something on your own. The world of the five senses is most important to you on sensual and sexual levels. You have a hearty appetite with strong stamina. You defend your values fervently.

(Chiron) Chiron is associated with the emotional wounds we receive early on in our lives. The sign Chiron is in dominates, but the house placement shows in which area the personality is motivated and into which they will put their efforts. In the second house, it can indicate great self-confidence, so long as there are physical comforts. There may have been little or no affection or even inappropriate affection, in childhood. This could now be shown through stubbornness and a dismissive attitude to others’ opinions. You could be a great teacher of self-worth, when you have dealt with your own issues.

House 3: Node

(Node) The North Node in 3rd House, also known as the Dragon’s Head in the 3rd House, brings good fortune in many areas: siblings, neighbors, co-workers, an intellectual career, mental capacity, education, and travel for the specific purpose of education. The corresponding Dragon’s Tail in the 9th House shows a disdain for organized religion or perhaps extreme superstition. There may also be some danger in travel or a troubled journey for a mysterious or secretive reason. It also indicates a person who should also avoid gambling.

House 4: Jupiter, Pluto, Juno

(Jupiter) You have strong instincts that you tend to be guided by, particularly on a professional level. You readily make warm connections with others, particularly valuing your family and close loved ones. Old age is expected to be pleasant and rewarding. Strong morals were reinforced in your childhood. You dream of, and will usually attain, a large or spacious home. You likely feel that “happiness is home”.

(Pluto) Early experiences may have led you to feel self-protective or to be secretive about yourself. A parent might have been secretive or ashamed, for example, and this pattern is deeply ingrained in your psyche. You might feel a sense of guilt for where you came from, even if most of you feels proud of your roots. A parent might have encouraged you to look beyond the surface of matters, and might have encouraged in you a love for psychology. A parent might have been very protective of you and attempted to shield you from negative experiences, and you subsequently grew to fear change. Or, your early experiences might have included a shocking, intense, or scary event that lives within you. Alternatively, you might have absorbed the strong fears or obsessions of a parent.

(Juno) You need a comfortable and secure relationship of mutual nurturing and emotional support. This is the foundation stone for all your other activities and pursuits. The most important relationships in your life will be with those you share your home with, or close family.

House 5: Uranus, Neptune

(Uranus) Fifth house play and self-expression are happy hunting grounds for Uranus. Creativity and change are the bywords of Uranus in the fifth. You take great pleasure in doing things differently. You are naturally creative and find it easy to implement change. As a teenager you may decide to date an older person. Your love relationships will always start with a twist. Charming and zany in love, you will create your own world with ease. Your love of freedom will make you choose activities that may sound weird to others. You will go about life with zest and find challenges in all that you do. Others will find your offbeat lifestyle stimulating.

(Neptune) You are an imaginative and creative person with a strong sense of drama. You are inspired by art and feel compelled to express yourself in a fantastic or dramatic manner. You could be an excellent actor. You might also be an especially creative teacher or caregiver, perhaps drawn to helping children with special needs. You have an exceptionally strong need to be appreciated, particularly on romantic and creative levels. Your love life involves a lot of fantasy, and often your deep need for drama can lead you to see things that you want to see. Your romantic perceptions may not be accurate as a result. You might attract unusual, chaotic, or secretive circumstances in your love life if you are not spiritually content. You might be attracted to lovers who you feel need to be saved somehow, but you could end up with people who are confused, distant, non-committal, or dependent. Keeping a high level of drama in your love life is important to you, but it can also be exhausting over time. Finding a balance will be vital — keep your ideals, but try to avoid expecting far too much from ordinary people.

House 6: Moon, Fortune

(Moon) You have an emotional need to be useful, to work productively, to be organized and on top of things, and to lead a healthy life. If these matters are chaotic in your life, it’s a symptom of emotional unrest. You need a lot of variety on the job–to be stimulated and engaged in order to feel happy. Some of you might seem to change jobs often, forever in search of the “perfect fit” job. Acceptance that any job requires some level of routine is hard for you. You are very sensitive, and especially aware of minor health annoyances or body aches and pains. Some of you have hypochondriac symptoms. Some attempt to get out of things they don’t want to do by emphasizing health problems or even exaggerate illnesses in order to gain sympathy. At your best, however, you’re a person who always helps out and shows your affection for others in practical ways in order to help them solve problems and improve their lives.

You have a sympathetic nature and instinctively reach out to people in need of help. You also have a deeply ingrained tendency to want to improve or “fix” other people’s lives, which can be annoying to the person who has no desire to be changed or “helped” in this way. For you, affection and caring must be expressed in tangible acts or service of some kind.

(Fortune) When a natal chart contains the Part of Fortune in the 6th house, great joy and success can come through work. The native may be very lucky in finding jobs and doing very well at interviews. In fact, this placement can bring him new jobs through unexpected and random events. In addition, the Part of Fortune can create very harmonious relations with one’s co-workers, employers or even employees (if someone has his own business). This placement is rather beneficial for doctors, healers, veterinaries and nutritionists.

House 7: Saturn

(Saturn) The seventh house rules partnerships and marriages. That is, the seventh house reveals the way you relate to your closest friend/partner or enemy. This house opposes the first. The first house signifies the way you project your energies towards others, while the seventh house signifies the energies you project onto others, and the energies you are looking for in a close relationship. You can think of it as that part of your own energies you want to be resonated or boomeranged from your partner. The seventh, Libra, and Venus are all related. Venus rules relationships involving warmth and love. The seventh house is not naturally connected to love. Successful marriages are a combination of seventh house (partnership) and fifth house self-expression (love). Saturn in the seventh house may mean a number of things. If we follow the energy resonance line of thinking then you are probably drawn to saturnine people. You may very well have fewer relationships. While in a relationship you may feel weighed down by a sense of responsibility which may turn you off relationships. Or, you may find it difficult to build bridges with someone else. That may, in turn, keep you away from relationships. Don’t let this happen to you. Be aware of your predilection. Know that you might be the kind of person who takes relationships more seriously than most. Be aware that your sense of responsibility makes you a very good partner. Your partner benefits from your attitude. Advertise yourself as someone who might not get into relationships easily but when you do, they last forever.

House 8-10: n/a

House 11: Lilith

(Lilith) As the 11th house is the realm of Uranus and Aquarius, Lilith in the 11th house feeds the desire of being different and unique, which can even lead to provocative extremes. This can lead to becoming a member of weird subcultures, concerning one’s clothes, music, and lifestyle. This style is definitely something absurd for the average people, which will see the native as awkward. Thus, alienation from the others is something which can frequently happen.

On the other hand, such a native will enjoy friendships that are based on one-to-one principles. There is a high possibility that such a person’s friends have also their Lilith in the 11th house. Social outcasts and loners, which have experienced the same fears and traumas, tend to blend better with people of their own kind.

House 12: Sun, Venus, Pallas, Vesta

(Sun) You have a tendency to be introspective and need some space and seclusion in order to pull up your strength. You may avoid the spotlight, and if you do find yourself in a public role, you tend to hide your true self behind that role! Because your will is directed inwards, you need to find a path for yourself that allows you to “get away from it all” at least some of the time. Honor your need to be alone with yourself, but avoid over-identifying with your inner world to the point that you truly feel alone in a crowd. You shine when you serve others in some way. Your compassion sets you apart from others, but try to work with it rather than let your compassion work against you by reinforcing your own sense of loneliness.

(Venus) You are big on romance and you tend to live and breathe your partner once you’re hooked. Not the best at defining your boundaries — where your needs and your partner’s needs separate — you can get hurt in love rather easily. You can also feel used quite readily. You are attracted to people from all walks of life, finding a partner who has an unusual background or quirky personality most attractive. Partners who mistake your compassion for weakness can take advantage of you. Being openly affectionate and trusting often doesn’t seem safe to you. You may feel your love won’t be appreciated or reciprocated. You may get involved in secret love affairs or fall in love with a person who is quite unavailable to you at different points in your life. Love and sacrifice often seem to go hand in hand for you – having to give something up to be with the one you love, or having to relinquish some person or some aspect of an important love relationship. You value a certain amount of self-sacrifice and a giving attitude in a partner, as you embody these traits. You can be quite mysterious to others, even if you don’t mean to be, because your romantic needs are kept hidden. Although you are quite naturally drawn to relationships that are unusual, secret, challenging, and unequal, do take the time to examine why this may be the case. Be certain that you are not, in some way, punishing yourself because you don’t feel worthy of an equal and public relationship. Because Venus represents attraction, and the twelfth house is associated with the feet, your feet may be especially attractive and/or erogenous zones!

(Pallas) You are very attuned to the collective consciousness, and may have a deep and natural understanding of spiritual teachings. Your mind and creativity are a conduit for the more universal knowing, and you could be a channel or be very psychic. You are likely to choose a path of service to others, especially those in confinement.

(Vesta) Your devotion is of a spiritual nature, and to service with compassion and surrender. Your challenge is to accept the necessary sacrifices of your path in a spirit of faith and trust. You may have fears stemming from karmic memories, and fears of intimacy that manifest as a need for isolation and retreat. Banishing fear with faith is the crux of your devotional path.

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