The Toxic Residue of Torture
It seems clear that the question of torture won’t go away. It would be easier to talk about moving ahead. Images of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo belong in nightmares. As a physician, my personal nightmare is of the doctors who stood by during torture sessions to monitor the victim’s vital signs. This was supposed to be humane, but what about the Hippocratic oath, which says that a doctor shall do no harm? Is making sure that waterboarding doesn’t cause a heart attack doing no harm? The whole rationale is grotesque.
This is one of those moments when painful truth is the only way to heal.
Ending the Meltdown Melodrama
A new poll has brought some welcome new. When asked, “Do you think the country is headed in the right direction?” more responders say yes than no. This is in stark contrast to the latter stages of the Bush administration, when the no’s were mounting to unheard-of levels, past 80%. The headline says that Pres. Obama’s honeymoon isn’t over, but this poll means something more.
It’s about the melodrama of meltdown.
The Gospel According to Fox News
It’s mysterious how swiftly a society can collectively change its mind. As rapidly as the financial markets crashed, so has Fox News’s credibility. What was gospel to an entire segment of voters and viewers just a few months ago has become a desperate flapping in the wind. Some may view this as part of the swing cycle that politics is heir to. But from the Reagan era forward, certain truths were held to be self-evident, and far from inventing anything, Fox News simply put the high gloss of mass media on them.
If you tune in to Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, or the network’s humbler toilers in the vineyard, their tactics haven’t changed. They must be shocked to find themselves stranded, all the more because it seemed to happen overnight.
SF Chronicle: Virtue and the White House
Although the Presidency is about issues, challenges, and complex negotiations, there’s another side. With every new President we get the pleasure of watching a human being adapt to the office. Very quickly an image emerges. Barack Obama entered the White House at a time of crisis, amid frayed nerves and anxiety. The image we wanted to see was pictured in advance by constant references to Lincoln and FDR, the two Presidents who overcame the deepest crises in our history.
Amid the dog show and the Easter egg roll, the whirlwind foreign visits and being the man who accompanied Michelle Obama to Europe (a wink-and-a-nod reference to JFK, another dapper celebrity politician), what do we feel about this new President as a human being?
Insights on Healing: A Deeper Understanding of Unity Consciousness
The limitations in the effectiveness of healing can be traced to the limitation on our understanding of the body. By understanding the body and health in the context of one universal process at the basis of the cosmos, we provide the basis for a comprehensive vision of health.
Your body is not a structure, it is a process. Your body, the ecosystem, and the universe are all one process.
When we look deeply within any structure it becomes obvious that structures are perceptual artifacts. Even a rock is made up of minerals, which are molecules, which are in turn composed of atoms. But the atoms are not solid entities. They are hierarchies of states of information and energy in a huge emptiness.
Personal Transformation Tools: Seven Steps to Releasing Emotional Turbulence
The practical procedure to transform toxic emotions. By transforming painful experience we not only heal ourselves, but we can also use that process to help ourselves grow spiritually from that experience.
Emotional turbulence interferes with emotional well being and initiative. Fear, anger, guilt and anxiety are deviations from natural condition of balance and stand in the way of spiritual evolution. Restoring balance can be evolutionary in itself.
How to Cope with Economic Stress
Deepak advises on how to keep our spirits up in the current economic crisis and viewers ask about the difference between wants and needs, and spending money.
Pakistan’s Hellish Road to Paradise
What can we do when one man’s Paradise is another man’s brutal dictatorship? This question faces the world once again with regard to Pakistan. It was announced on Feb. 16 that the Pakistani government had reached an agreement with the pro-Taliban insurgents in the turbulent northwest region of that country. In exchange for peace, the government agreed to institute Shariah law, based on Islamic principles of jurisprudence.
