Yesterday, I woke and went with my lover and her children to Disney World, the “Most Magical Place on Earth.” This is what happened:
On waking, the children literally jumped with excitement and frustration that we were not already in the car headed to the park. We played very loud music that I couldn’t sing along with because I mostly know the words to the rock songs of the 1970s and 1980s and the songs in the Baptist Hymnal, and a few chants I learned from my studies of Hindu, and a few poems of Robert Frost and Walt Whitman (I LOVE “Pent Up Aching Rivers” by Whitman)—but I can’t sing along with many rap songs even though my youngest son is a professional jazz drummer and can rap like a wizard. As we drive to the park, the bass guitar rattles the car and I wonder if Whitman would have been a rapper had he been born in 2001.
Then we get to the park and I start to feel the delicious pain of remembering my parents as their younger selves and me as my child self when they brought me to the park to stay the year the park opened and how we stayed in the campgrounds—part because Outside was more fun and part because Outside was in the budget and credit cards were a new idea and you put Santa on lay-away because the credit cards didn’t yet put people in bankruptcy or slavery the way they can now.
I paid a little extra to park closer to the door and we went into the park pretty easily and walked smoothly onto the boat that would take us to the doors of the Magic Kingdom.
So far, things felt like what they have been like, except, of course, everyone (not almost everyone), everyone is wearing a mask.
We laugh and run up the stairs of the boat since everyone knows that when you are a child the uppermost seats are best. Then, we walk/run to the front, since the front is better than the back when you’re on a boat.
Now, things start to feel a little off: you’re not supposed to be able to easily park near the gate and walk to the front of the boat at the Magic Kingdom, usually, there are too many people for that. It feels like when you go to a meeting and not many people are there; so, you start to wonder if you’re in the right place.
Still, the morning air is cool, almost sharp but still comfortable, and I can see the Captain of the boat through a window and I can hear the diesel engines and feel how easily their power pushes us into a headwind of 10 knots at a speed of 10 to 12 knots toward the Cinderella castle in front of us across the lake and the children are talking incessantly with happy voices that say nothing with the words but say everything about why people would want to be alive.
The whole scene feels like it should be a great place for a photo, so I back up two steps and ask my crowd to drop their masks so I can take a photo that includes the boat railing, the morning sky, Cinderella’s castle, and their smiles.
Before I can snap the second photo, I hear an angry man’s voice shout over the sound of the diesels, “PUT YOUR MASKS ON. YOU MUST WEAR YOUR MASKS AT ALL TIMES!”
I turned around to see black eyes glaring so much that I could see the white his eyes all the way around the black in the center, even the white by the lids, the exophthalmos glare of the enraged or of someone with severe hyperthyroidism—glaring from behind a face-shield covering the face that was covered (all-but-the eyes) by a black mask.
I could still feel the solid wind blowing cold across the bow first in my face and now into my back as I turn the face the man who had shouted at me and the children and at my lover. All within a second, I looked behind him to see a boat mostly full of faces, staring at us, all from behind masks. Nothing but eyes and masks. So, as a physician and a mathematician, I redo the calculations and easily see that with a 20-knot wind (headwind plus boat speed) on the open deck of the boat that there’s a zero chance that anything that comes from my bronchial tubes will land in the nares of the people on the boat. But, I can not see their mouths—only their eyes: so I do not know what they think. Are they really afraid (I feel sorry and ashamed that they may be), are they made into children afraid of the monster under the bed by this man’s anger? Are they laughing at the ridiculous nature of his demands? Are they angry at me for risking the life of every man, woman, child, and infant on board? I could feel the fear and embarrassment of the children of my fiancé now behind me. I turned back to them and told them to put their masks back on, and I turn around again to be sure the man is satisfied and not walking closer (his surprise approach and his anger has woke my instincts to protect those looking up to me, though my left brain knows he’s not really a threat, my lizard brain is on the edge).
I’m relieved to see him strut away from us, and I feel no anger, only pity for him because it feels to me that this police work just lifted his self-esteem.
I turn back around to snap another photo with the masks pulled back up, but now the scene lacks the smiles. I can only see Cinderella’s castle, and the railing of the boat, and eyes and the tops of people’s heads and I decide there’s no need to take more photos on the boat and hope the cloud that just came over the bow will pass.
I mumble to my fiancé’, “I’m glad he kept us from slaughtering everyone on board.”
Then I turn to see a young man standing near us, I see that he overheard me—he’s also on the rail on the bow. He holds his young lover near him and I can hear his laugh and I can see he’s strong and wearing short sleeves in the cold and he nods a nod of “I’m OK with you” and I can see that his young woman is melting into him and that he has given her his passion and she has given him hers, that morning, before getting on the boat, and that she is his and that he is hers and that they are not afraid of the wind or of our naked faces.
He’s standing between me and the window on the other side of which is the Captain of the boat and the Captain is looking straight ahead at the approaching dock not seeming to notice that one of his people under his charge has become the mask Gestapo. I’m reminded of a Jack London novel but then it’s a vague reminder and I watch the Captain with my mask back over my face and the children are now quiet. I think he’s been a Captain in the coast guard and has captured drug runners and fought high seas or else Disney would not trust him as Delta prefers captains who flew jets in the Airforce and in the Navy. Now, I wonder what he thinks about his present back-and-forth taxi and what he says to his wife when he goes home at night when they watch TV.
After entering the park, the children and my fiancé first ride Space Mountain. The youngest is too short for the ride, so I take her for ice cream. The man who sells us the ice cream wears a mask when he speaks with more enthusiasm than the transaction demands: I cannot tell if he is smiling or if he hates his job and the mask. To eat the ice cream, and to avoid the mask Gestapo, the rules say we must sit still…no walking and eating at the same time (everyone knows viruses can’t jump off of you when you’re sitting like they do when you’re walking). The ice cream melts and drips onto my black Levis as I watch the crowd and I notice that I don’t care.
I do not see a smile anywhere. The park sells masks with smiles painted on them; many people buy the mouse ears and wear them but I see no one wearing the masks with the painted-on smiles.
I cannot see a smile, not one, only masks that all seem black to me now no matter what the color. I see no one kissing (though my fiancé and I did try it once through a mask and gave it up as a worthless pantomime). I feel like I’m caught in a Brave New World; and I wonder if anyone who walks by me has read the book and I want to yell for everyone, anyone, please take off your mask and kiss.
We go to my favorite ride, “It’s a Small World.” I want the song to be stuck in my head for the day, for the week, forever and I watch the little puppets that were high tech when I first saw them when I was 12 in 1972 and rode the boat with my then young parents.
I think about them and about my grandfather who never went to school because he was born out of wedlock at a time when there was no safety net and so was “farmed-out” (a form of indentured servitude that young children—yes white children—endured in the south when their parents could not afford to feed them). I wonder what he would think if he were in this place. I remember my younger self being there in the Magic Kingdom as a child when everything was new. I remember bringing my three sons there when I was single, after their mother and I split. I grieve the loss of that time when I was the father of young sons and could show them the world, the whole thing, as much as I could, and tried to show them that this world (wherever you are in it) is the most Magical Place in the universe because this is where we are and we can make it so, and I wonder if they remember or was all of it masturbation and they remember nothing of it and it only served to make me feel happy to be a father without producing the offspring of showing them anything at all.
Then I look around and see the children of my fiancé and wonder if I’m doing anything to make their day better, and I think not, so I just relax and let them show me how to find magic even with our masks and forget teaching and become their student in our new world.
On the way out, I buy everyone cookies at one of the shops and we are steps from the gate, so we drop our masks to eat them and as we pass through the gate, leaving the park, we are chewing our cookies when the woman at the gate yells to our backs, “YOU MUST WEAR YOUR MASK AT ALL TIMES.”
Later, that night in bed, I see where my sister writes on Facebook about how it’s good that people quit publishing a book that offended people, and I try to think of a book that has offended me, or could have offended me (I think of You Might Be a Redneck IF, since I’m from Alabama) and I think, “Would I would want this book to go out of print?” I think about how people have insulted me and how they dressed up my grandfather as a child and made fun of him because the clothes didn’t fit and then sent him to the fields to work and never to school (and how he never told me about it, my father did). I think of the woman I know who as a child said something offensive to someone at her school in Russia and so the authorities came to her home that evening and questioned her parents—who were at risk of prison or worse if they answered the questions wrong. I remember another woman I know who came to the US from Ukraine as a young woman with $25 and when she arrived dropped her bags and cried because she felt free (now she’s a wealthy anesthesiologist in New York City). I think of another woman who as a child was a refugee in a Vietnam prison camp and how her father sent her and her mother here and couldn’t join them until years later and then he died from cancer soon after his arrival. I think of Bella Thorne (who started at Disney) and how her video showing love between women was banned by YouTube. I remember hearing Larry Flint say, on stage in Las Vegas, when he was old and in a wheelchair and spoke in broken sentences in his weakness and breathlessness (I shared the stage that day to discuss my O-Shot® procedure), “I took Jerry Falwell to the Supreme Court for one reason—freedom of speech. They don’t start by banning what you want to hear. They start by banning what you do NOT want to hear: then you go along with it, and then you lose the right to hear what you DO want to hear. You can agree to ban what you find offensive, but, in the future, you cannot choose who will decide what is offensive.”
He continued with one of the most important most patriotic sentences I’ve ever heard, “Until you’re willing to fight for the freedom of people to say what offends you, you do not deserve freedom of speech.”
“If you’re not going to offend somebody, you don’t need freedom of speech,” said Larry Flynt
I remember the book about How to Kill Eleven Million People and I wonder if my sister has read it, if the man on the boat read it, if the Captain read it, if any Jew read it, if anyone has read it.
I remember a YouTube channel of mine (with 142 videos on it that took me hundreds of hours to make) being removed/banned ten years ago by Google for my talking about sex from a scientific standpoint and for my video about how to mix growth hormone (to help the patients I had involved in a research project I was doing—they said it encouraged illegal drug use). I remember how it was impossible to talk with a person at google about my censorship; so I started a new channel, but also started putting everything important on Vimeo in case Google censored me again.
I go back online and read again about Bella Thorne and I’m grateful for her, and I salute her courage (and I think, “Maybe if Whitman reincarnated, he’s come back as Bella Thorne“) and I cheer for her and for her fans and I hope that a friend of mine, Phoenix Marie, in the entertainment industry will join her cause and that my sister will join her cause: that “We should be able to celebrate love, and ask, “Why are we allowed to glorify and celebrate violence but not love? And, who is anyone to play G-d and decide what I can say?”
But, then I realize, there’s really not much I can do, not really, not about any of it, not about much of anything really, except for what I can reach with my hands within 2 feet of where I sit, and with the very few who may read what I write and read it until the end, and I wonder if I did the math wrong today on the boat (maybe I did actually kill everyone on the boat today even though I’ve already had COVID and survived it after being vaccinated by the actual illness) and I go back to Walt Whitman and I want to go outside and read a poem, to be a poem, and to hear the children, and to hear my children and their children, and I’m sorry for everyone who had to work under another man’s whip and I’m sorry for everyman and every woman’s offense, especially those who I have offended (and there have been many), and I’m grateful for every offense that made anyone angry enough to do more than would have been done without the anger, and here in my own magic kingdom I want to strip my lover naked and forget the masks and kiss with bare lips with nothing between.
Walt Whitman…
O for you whoever you are your correlative body! O it, more than all else, you delighting!)
Legal Disclaimer: The following is a combination of mathematical facts and opinion. This article does not make the author your physician. Do whatever your personal physician tells you to do.
If you click on the following link, you’ll see that the only thing that seems to correlate with the numbers of people who die from COVID is the population density (click)<–
If you plot the data shown in the linear regression, then deaths per million are highly correlated with population density.
That correlation is not surprising (pack people closer together, then disease spread more easily), what is surprising is that if you look at death rates and control for population density, the places with the earliest and strictest mask and quarantine laws (like New York City) have a higher death rate than predicted by population density than in states with later and laxer mask laws (like Texas and Florida). That’s the math.
This puzzle of more masks being correlated with higher deaths was discussed in the Wall Street Journal and a few other places but has been largely not talked about (neither has population density). Mask theory is talked about greatly, but when you look at actual population data (death rates), the reverse of what most expect is seen.
So, why would those wearing masks and quarantining more have a higher than predicted death rate–higher than what the population density would predict? Best I can tell, no one has given a good explanation for that enigma until now.
A Ph.D. researcher from the Standford department of cardiology published an article this week that gives possible reasons why wearing masks more seems to be correlated in population studies with more deaths per million (be sure and read to the end, read the references, and make up your own mind–or trust Big Brother to think for you)…
Dr. Runels, predicting that convalescent plasma may be of help to those who are acutely ill (now considered an effective treatment by the FDA), constructed the following website to help connect those in large or small communities who are acutely ill with COVID with those who have recovered. Please share the website: COVID19Switchboard.org
The inventor of Altar™ cream discusses the research that led to creating a unique and patented blend that heals and soothes irritated and damaged tissue…
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When Benjamin Franklin sat down to think about the virtues, he did so with a particular goal in mind. He tells in his autobiography that he agreed with Cicero that creation of the universe was proof enough that there must be a GOD. Franklin reasoned that if there is a GOD, then GOD must delight in virtue and that anything that GOD delights in must lead to health and happiness. So, Franklin decided to study the virtues as outlined in scriptures and by the philosophers and to condense these virtues as much as possible–then go about living by those virtues.
One of the virtues, as defined by Franklin, is Chastity (Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to weakness or dullness or the injury or your own or another’s peace of mind or reputation).
As a teenager, I read Franklin’s writings and wondered what he meant by having sex “for health.” It’s not too hard to understand what he meant by not having sex to the damage of peace of mind or reputation or to weakness or dullness. The part about offspring is easily understood. But, what about sex for health–do you know what that means?
I don’t want to dwell on it too much. I don’t want to try to play philosopher or sex expert. I just want to tell you how I think I’ve seen the life of my patients and friends and my own life work in using sex for health.
I’m not going to fiddle with a fancy definition or start preaching; I just want to give you a quick way of thinking about how sex can improve health and how it can damage health (and I’m not talking about sexually transmitted disease). I’ve lived in a committed marriage relationship, and I’ve lived with sex freely offered from many directions and freely taken. I’ve had the honor of serving as physician to conservatively 10,000 people over the years (as an ER physician and in general practice and in research) and have cared for the Sisters from the Catholic Church, Priests of Buddha, prostitutes, erotic dancers, married and devoted, and single and living free. I’ve cared for the elderly with young lovers, for the elderly living alone. I’ve taken a few notes about myself and others and will simply offer what seems to me the way to use sex for health.
I’m not going to repeat a Sunday School lesson or a high-school warning about sexually transmitted diseases. I want to offer simply what I’ve noticed seems to work.
Sex should be fun and exciting. It should result in better health. It should increase energy (not drain it). It should cause better health–mental and emotional. To show how that can be accomplished, I can’t think of a direct way to explain or understand; but, the following analogy helps me keep it straight most of the time and will serve as an introduction:
Sex for health is like Leonardo’s famous painting, the Mona Lisa–it’s very good art.
Leonardo reportedly carried this painting with him everywhere. He looked at it from every angle. He added to it occasionally, always looking for a way to make it better. Some say that it was a painting of a woman he loved. Some say it was a self-portrait of his feminine side.
I think it was both.
Sex for health is sex where one person studies another in the most intimate way. Rather than splashing paint everywhere, it’s as much what’s left out as it is what’s put in. One lover starts to see his or her own soul when looking into the other’s eyes. Emotions and personality and sensation and conversation (even conversation with GOD) become so mingled that it’s a chorus of two with harmony and dissonance instead of two people separate like two separate conversations in the same room.
Some go around town splashing as much paint on as many canvases as possible. Their sex becomes like a cartoon: many caricatures but no detail. There’s no study, no deep emotion, and so no real high and no real low. It’s simply a pleasant distraction for a time. But, there’s no art and there’s no energy from the health and energy of synergy.
Some marry, paint a cartoon and then simply settle for the cartoon–repainting it over and over again. There’s no sense of the art. Each person in a love relationship is both the painter and the canvas. Each canvas wants to be studied, to be understood. Each canvas wants the painter to look from the outside and find a way to add more depth, more detail, more inspiration, more emotion.
If the painter loses focus and goes about town painting cartoons, and you are the Mona Lisa begging to be studied, wanting to be taken to a new level of art; then you will not be pleased that the artist took his/her eye away to simply focus on creating a cheap sketch on a chalk board that will be erased when the next school child comes along to draw a caricature.
As Leonardo studied the Mona Lisa for years, carrying the art with him, seeing himself in the art, seeing his lover in the art, he created a masterpiece. As two people travel together using sex as art, that art spills over into the remainder of their life. Strength, creativity, confidence, energy, and health start to emerge. Emotional and physical vitality grow and disease must work harder to break the fort.
Those who look for entertainment with another sketch on another canvas, quickly bore with their simple sketches, so they erase and find another canvas. They look for deep pleasure, but they cannot find it, so they become more frantic and use more paint tearing up one canvas after another but never stopping to become better at the art. So to add to the pleasure, rather than improve the art, they start to use alcohol or cocaine. Even a simple cartoon seems like art now. A little cocaine, a little alcohol, now the sketches become simple; then they become so simple they become meaningless and ugly. Rather than art, they’re drawing crazy and ugly lines on page after page and think they’ve made art until the drug wears off and they see the ugliness of what they created.
So they become angry and reach for another canvas.
Or they blame it on the canvas and increase the number of sketches and canvases but don’t study the art or the canvas. Finally, they can no longer hear the muse of love and art that would have whispered to a sensitive ear. When they come across a clean canvas (open to art), they don’t recognize it and draw a little diagram. If it starts to turn to art, they’ve become so insensitive to the muse that they don’t even see it. They can’t hear the rhyme. They can’t see balance of composition or even color.
Sex becomes only a way to fight their demons.
Now they are drawing for anger at another person. Sex becomes hate mail that the other person can’t read.
Now they’re drawing for damage control. Sex becomes plaster on a damaged ego that washes away by the next day, calling for another patch.
So I’ve seen the women who two weeks ago were the dissatisfied house wife: now, they’ve been dumped in the ER–exhausted and near dead after playing the crack house prostitute until she finally became nearly useless and was dumped at the ER waiting room–it happens every day. Just a little too much dissatisfaction and landing at the wrong party is all it takes.
I’ve examined the depressed woman who’s tried to commit suicide after finding no purpose and no energy and no new goal; unable to be painter or canvas, she feels unloved and would rather know permanent sleep than know another day without depth of affection.
I’ve also seen the lovers of many years or of a few weeks. They only see each other. If another canvas comes along, they don’t want to take their eye away from the masterpiece they’re creating. Another canvas is only a distraction. They want to study the painting they’re working on and find a way to bring more life to it.
If someone comes along and wants to add to the painting–they protest, No! Can you imagine Michael Angelo walking by the Mona Lisa and picking up a brush and starting to add to the picture? Nope. Canvas and painter would be insulted. The Mona Lisa is Leonardo’s Creation alone.
It seems those who know the best of love, don’t want another person painting on their canvas. They don’t need the affections of another. They want to save the blank places (libido and hunger for affection) for their painter. To allow another to fill in the spaces would be to mix colors and mix the effect until it became muddled. That’s why dishonesty hurts the lover even if the mate never knows: the emotional and physical mixture changes. Then when the painter comes home, he’s adding to a canvas that’s been altered by another. So, he/she becomes inept. The cheating person feels bored or unattached since the canvas allowed another’s brush rather than exposing the empty places to the painter and letting that person work the paint to find the best way (starting and restarting—studying until it’s a masterpiece).
I’ve seen the elderly couple that continued to create. Sometimes, another person has even come in and defaced the painting occasionally. But, these master painters just got out the brush and turned the graffiti into another interesting part of the masterpiece.
I’ve met the widow or widower who, after losing their lover, felt so complete that they didn’t want another person to touch them with the brush. Would you want to try to add to the Mona Lisa now that Leonardo is gone?
I’ve also met the widow or widower (or divorcee) who felt defaced or empty and who found another person who could continue to develop the art in progress.
I hope all of this helps.
Peace & Health,
Charles Runels, MD
Runels.com
To be awake requires energy.
One of the common complaints that people bring to their physician is “fatigue.” Sometimes, when people complained to me about fatigue, I found serious diseases like cancer or heart failure. In that case, curing the disease would help the fatigue. But, there are three categories on the fatigue-awake scale that are not often discussed that do not necessarily involve a “disease.”
On the diagram below, look at point A. If you look at the scale, you will see that as negative influences go up (emotional drama, guilt, poor diet, even physical disease, poor health practices) the person dwindles in energy. But, here’s the surprise: because the scale is not linear, as the person decreases negative influences, he/she will not experience much increase in energy. So, there will be little motivation to continue efforts to remove negative influences.
Point A is where most people live.
All the way to the right on the scale, you find death. But before death, the negative influences are so great that the person experiences little change in state even with something very negative. Often, as a physician, I have seen people in the emergency room who were under so many negative influences (drugs/alcohol) that they were not even aware that they had been shot or stabbed.
Someone living at A will need strong, even unnatural influences, to experience improved energy and pleasure (hence a leaning toward drug abuse). We all crave any emotion other than boredom and fatigue. It’s why we go to the movies. Most would prefer fear (scary movies), sorrow (tear-jerking dramas), or fear (action movies), or desire (sex movies) over boredom. It’s what art does for us…wake me up, scare me, make me laugh, make me cry–anything but boredom.
But, don’t really hurt me. That’s a movie or a good book or just good art.
So, when someone lives at A, it takes a great stimulant to bring them back to energy.
Not that movies or art are not helpful. Artists and poets create for us both heaven and hell and hold up for us both love and hate. But, on a physical level, living at A is miserable and making it back to B, where one may feel an upsurge in energy will require removing multiple negative factors.
The main point about point A is that patience will eventually bring them back, but getting from A to B will require patience because immediate and dramatic effects may not be felt when adopting good habits.
At point B, one starts to experience increased energy due to the removal of sufficient negative factors. This would also represent most young people for whom the negative influences of poor diet, exercise, or mental and spiritual abuse of themselves have not yet affected them.
Most healthy adults practicing good diet and exercise will routinely make it here. Because of the sensation of the fall back to fatigue when practicing wrong habits, this person will usually get back on the right path pretty quickly because they will miss the energy lost.
But, most seldom remove enough negative influences to make it to point C.
At point C, the person has removed so many negative factors that he/she operates from a place of creativity, natural flow of energy, love, and even can reach spiritual enlightenment. Achieving this will often require the practice of fasting, prayer, meditation, reading of scriptures/philosophy, and a more diligent removal of negative influences and habits–and the practices of other positive habits–than most are willing to do.
Notice that at this level, even a slight movement to the right on the negative influences line will drop energy precipitously.
The person at C will notice a drop in focus and creativity with even the slightest change. Not that this person is fragile, but their focused mental and spiritual state is sensitive.
The Muse will run, the angels will fly, the vision will fade when offended.
Making it to C, once felt, will cause a person to thirst for GOD, to hunger for health, to beat the walls in anguish, go without food, leave their friends and family–anything to climb back up the hill.
Richard Bucke, who experienced an enlightenment episode while traveling in his carriage, wrote about this experience and the conditions that may lead to it (in Cosmic Consciousness) and how it changes one forever.
The purpose of the Law of Health is to move one to the left on the Negative Influences scale as far as one may dare to go.
After spending years developing what became the O-Shot® procedure, I offered the treatment to Susan. She had suffered permanent scarring of her vagina and anus from the physical abuse dealt her by her former husband.
On her lunch hour, Susan walked to my office from the bank where she; and we did the procedure.
One month later, Susan called me.
“The pain I suffered during sex is gone completely,” she exclaimed. “And, I’m not leaking urine when I run or needing to get out of bed to use the restroom—I’m able to hold my urine. Because I’m now able to sleep and exercise, I feel much better overall and I’ve lost weight.”
Six months later, Susan married her high school sweetheart.
Soon, I started teaching and researching and talking to the press about the O-Shot® procedure.
Then came the surprise.
Sex therapists and other physicians started attacking me online. Even though the materials and methods we use to do the O-Shot® procedure (PRP) had been researched for over a decade (with positive results and a very safe side effect profile), extreme, hate-filled posts and writings appeared regarding me and the other 1,000 plus providers of the O-Shot® procedure (including gynecologists and urologists).
Reading the criticisms of those who poured the hate, it was easy to see that those who hated us understood neither PRP nor how we did the procedure; they made assumptions based on a less-than-awake and less-than-informed state.
Still, I initially felt surprised and hurt. Those feelings of mine were very immature.
When you awaken to Truth about your occupation, your health practices, your love relations, you will (because you are awake) see things that others cannot see.
The man who discovered heart catheterization was kicked out of his hospital. The man who first suggested that physicians wash their hands after delivering babies—also, kicked out of the hospital and died in the insane asylum.
Socrates was forced to drink poison. Boethius, Mandela, Bunyan were all imprisoned. Please make note: they were imprisoned not for harming another person but for their ideas about how to bring peace and harmony.
Dr. George Sheehan, the cardiologist—who wrote a regular article in Runners World about the health benefits of running—was considered to be a quack by his colleagues. It’s difficult to comprehend now, but in the 1970’s cardiologists largely thought that because the left ventricle of the heart enlarged in runners, that running was not beneficial to longevity. Now we know that aerobic exercise does more to prevent heart disease than any blood pressure or diabetes medication.
But, George Sheehan was largely hated by many cardiologists of the 1970s.
When you wake up and then live the truth that you see when awake, you will be disliked. You will not only be debated and opposed, (listen carefully) when you wake up and live the truth you see—by some, you will be HATED.
HATED.
I promise.
It’s not “maybe” someone will not like you.
I’m guaranteeing—HATED.
You may even be harmed in reputation, financially, or even bodily.
When the hate happens, you note it so you can think strategically; but, if you pay too much attention to the hate, you will modify your life to live the truth of the haters. Then, you die in spirit and become despondent, or dull, or even spiritually or physically dead. The muse hides. The angels cry. And you join the timid who run with the mob rather than the brave who fight with their GOD.
Read.
Observe.
Listen.
Then, go inside. That is where you find your awake Self and Your principles of health.
Then, as you live your truth, expect to be hated.
Previous lessons in the Law of Health discuss the need for Love and Fight to find health; but, when it comes to becoming Awake, since arrows are deflected more easily when expect, you would do well to remember to expect to be hated.
C.S. Lewis noted that there are three reasons for pain and suffering: (1) pain as a consequence doing wrong (2) pain for doing good, and (3) pain for reasons we don’t understand.
Ted Bundy and Mahatma Gandhi were both loved and hated during their life. Bundy was swooned over; Gandhi was demonized and assassinated. Since both doing good and doing wrong can lead to pain, then pain and the hatred or love of others cannot be a reliable gauge. No worries though because the test is simple: Is that I’m doing helping others or hurting them?
Go inside and ask and answer that question. That is your guide. For strategy, you can note the hate and the love from outside, but for your purpose and your health practices, use that simple test.
In a quiet place, ask yourself just two questions:
Further Reading…
The Courage to be Disliked<–
September 1966, Birmingham, Alabama, 6 years old, I woke early and my mother cooked scrambled eggs in an iron skillet. There were real butter and real grits. I ate them with my father. He drank coffee and ate more of the eggs than I. My younger sisters still slept.
Then, I walked 1/2 block to the corner to catch bus #98.
An older boy at the bus stop, Bobby Campbell, sat with me during the ride. The older boys at the back of the bus “cussed” and seemed big and menacing.
That was my first day at school.
I also remember my first day of swimming lessons. I felt cold and the deep end of the pool was the bluest water I’d seen. The teacher seemed beautiful, and graceful in her one-pieced, blue, swimsuit, and black hair which reflected the summer sun, and her shoulders strong when she climbed from the water.
Six years later, age 13, night time, a cold Tennessee creek full of snakes, stars poking through a mountain sky in July, and me sitting on a rock with a pretty dark-haired girl from Muscle Shoals–Paula.
She gave me my first kiss.
Remembering those three teachers (of bus rides and swimming and kissing) and the attention I gave to those teachers shows me my best beginner’s mind.
Imagine the focus and eagerness to learn, the beginner’s mind, with the first bus ride, the first time to jump into deep water, the first kiss.
If I use that same mind, even now, when I travel, plunge into water, or touch my lover–then I learn.
Just a book? Then it stays closed.
Only water? I sit on the side of the pool while the children swim.
Just my lover’s mouth? Then I miss the depths of a different spiritual pool.
Trap 1: Letting a name become an explanation.
Naming it “gravity” does not explain why two objects are attracted with a force proportional to mass and inversely proportional to separating distance. Names do not explain.
Trap 2: Thinking the first answer is a real answer.
Ask “why?” five times in a row, and you’re always left with an unanswered question.
Trap 3: Not living with the question.
Most can’t tolerate the unknown. So they let a name or the answer to the first “why” become the answer. Get to the real questions. Then live with the question and your life becomes the answer.
That is the “beginner’s mind.”
Only with the beginner’s mind can you find your best health.
This is one of the lessons teaching the Law of Health (which never changes).
Peace & health,
Charles Runels, MD
Law of Health<–
3-Day Fat Burn<–
You could drink a cup of coffee to wake your brain, and then undo the awakening with lethargy and dumbness by drinking excessive alcohol.
You could practice mental, physical, and spiritual Laws of Health to Awaken–but still lose your best health if you simultaneously consume even one of these “brain dumb downers”:
Benjamin Franklin made “Silence” second only to “Temperance” as the virtue most needed to find the other virtues and your best life. Too much talking not only puts the brain to sleep but also poisons the emotions and wastes time.
His definition well defines the practice: “Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.”
Of course, there’s a time for lighthearted times between friends (this is not trifling but uplifting), but continuous trifling babble consumes time and energy that could have been used to find every type of health.
This one’s worth mentioning separately because the people who will talk non-stop and waste the days of others will find and latch to those who practice silence. Two people who both talk too much can enjoy each other’s company, but they clash so much from trying to talk over each other that they will be most happy with someone who will sit and listen.
So the more you practice silence, the more you will find that incessant talkers want your company. If you sit and listen to every word for as long as they want to numb your mind and waste your day, then you are consuming the narcotic of babble as much as if you were the one talking. It is not their vice but yours; you consume a narcotic to hide from your thoughts and alibi your coma when you sit with incessant talkers.
One of the reasons that the weather channel can relax (for any situation other than an approaching disaster) is that there is nothing that we can do about what we hear. The weather channel reports 100% upon conditions 100% beyond your control.
Even the news about foreign lands and wars can be important to know to be a good citizen, but a continued diet of such information can be an excuse for not thinking and not doing–a narcotic that blocks your best health.
Thoreau called all news “gossip”; the names of people and countries change with every age but the news stays the same.
Interesting isn’t it–that cliche’: “drugs and alcohol” That tells the fact that some like to separate alcohol, “It’s not really a drug.” Drugs that put the mind and emotions to sleep (including alcohol) prevent the total waking of the mind.
Do not suddenly stop medicines given to you by your physician. But, if you want to work with your physician to decrease medications, or if you struggle with boredom or anxiety or depression or insomnia (mental ideas for which drugs with narcotic-like effects are often given), then here are ways to need less medicines so that you can awaken:
a. When worried, think of what’s the worst that can happen and prepare your mind for what you will do in that situation.
b. Think of what you can do to survive the worst possible scenario and what you can do to make the best possible scenario happen, then do those things. Action and prayer eventually slay worry.
c. Many painful emotions erupt from the poisonous chemical balance found in those who do not practice physical activity every day. Exercise one hour per day to stay sane. Exercise two hours per day to enjoy your best health. There may be those who seem to skirt these rules and do well, just like many seem to do well on 3 hours of sleep per night. But, most people find their most wakeful place by following these guides.
Stories can inspire and instruct. Good stories will always be the method of teaching of the prophets and poets. Stories can be verbal, theatre, movies, recorded audio–who knows what will come. Stories will always be enveloped in the form of the most entertaining way to communicate in every age.
Stories become narcotics when they do not instruct or inspire but simply evoke emotion to help the sleeping person think they are awake. The sleeping person feeling the emotion of a mind-numbing story simply feels the emotion of the dream, not the emotion of the present moment.
Watching those stuck in prison or in a hospital bed, I can see the usefulness of a mind-numbing story. But, even there, I have wondered, “Would this person be the next Boethius should the mindless stories go away?”
When I was young, I played chess and imagined a king and his court and soldiers there on the battlefield. Now, with electronic gaming, whole worlds continue to grow in cyberspace with people working to find recognition and power or love there in that space the way I looked for it on the chessboard.
I quit playing so much chess (though I still enjoy the occasional game to exercise my mind) when I read Franklin’s essay where the gout that plagued him spoke to him (in a humorous satire) about how he should have played less chess and pursued more physically active hobbies, leaving chess to the person who does physical labor as an occupation.
The real space around me holds enough people who would thwart my best efforts to keep my mind occupied. The strategies needed for this day become less clear if the narcotic of mindless games become my main focus.
Only one G–.
Those who ignore that G– ignore the most powerful force–prayer or communion with that G–.
Those who approach that G– through a door of religion that puts the mind and body to sleep to the voice of G–, those who must look for G– through a lattice of man-made rules so thick that it muffles G–‘s voice and blocks the Light, those people cannot hear or connect. The rules that define their G– disconnected them from Awakening and from best health.
Religion should be a path that a child could follow to G–, not a narcotic that sleeps you to the universal mind in a coma of man-made dogma.
Music has rhythm, words, melody, and volume.
All of these can be used to either awaken or to put to sleep. All of these components of music can be used to inspire or to evoke emotions and ideas that poison.
Music reflects the spirit of the composer and the performer. You will take on the spirit of both when you dive into a composition. Even without words, you can feel the spirit of the artist who performs and the artist who composed.
When you find an artist and a performer that lifts you (and it may not be at your church and again it may), then consume that music.
If music does for you something other than this, then what is it’s purpose?
The 5th Law of Health speaks of sex. Music that evokes ideas of sex is not a narcotic unless sex has become a narcotic (instead of inspiration and joy).
Music that tears down should be jettisoned and washed away with good music as quickly as you would evoke vomiting followed by the proper antidote should you swallow poison.
As with music, the mind of the reader takes on the state of mind of the writer. So the subject of what you read can be important and helpful, but the state of mind of the writer is just as important.
That idea explains why you can benefit from reading the ancient scriptures even if you do not understand every word of the subject. Because these scriptures came from pens of people who walked the deserts with G– talking through a much less developed lattice of distraction, these deep and pure waters clean the mind of the modern pollutants of overgrown religion and of unbelievers and of wisdom haters. The polluted hype of philosophy cakes that are all frosting with no wheat will wash away in the clean waters that spring from ancient scripture.
The builders of complicated man-made latices (the vampires) know the power of the cleansing waters of ancient scripture and would have you avoid them by keeping you always focused on their growing lattice, which walls you into their prison where they can drink your attention and put you to sleep in a nightmare of disease.
The ancient scriptures dissolve the lattice and fill your mind with the Breath and Words that awaken.
The poison emotions can serve a purpose by pointing you toward your fear. Find the point from which comes the fear (what’s the worst event you’re afraid may happen) and do something to neutralize or combat that fear. Then you awaken back to the clear place of calm purpose.
These emotions are not “bad” any more than pain when you touch a fire is “bad.” These emotions point to a fire in your life that will incinerate your peace and your health unless you take action.
So, pay attention to the emotions, all of them. Then use these ideas (and what comes to you from practicing these ideas) to Awaken.
Peace & Health,
This is one of a series of lessons in the Law of Health: 10 Essential Steps to Glorious Health & Miraculous Healing
Eight years old, I had one baseball and mine was rolling toward “Crisoak Creek.” I don’t know the real name of that creek, but the water was the color and smell of what we called “crisoak” (The real name of the chemical in the water is “creosote”, a category of chemicals put into telephone poles to keep them from rotting).
The putrid chemical smell of that creek would burn my nostrils from 20 yards away. I do not know what industries dumped their waste into that creek, but in the 1960s there were no laws to prevent it. Later, the law would change and eventually the creek would be clean again, but then, I feared that if the ball went into the water it would dissolve. I at least knew that if I entered the water to retrieve the ball that I would develop blistered stinking arms by the time I made it home to wash.
I also remember that I uphill along the bank of that creek and find contributing streams, and if I followed one of those streams uphill, then I would walk away from the smell of the creek, away from town, away from even the suburbs, and into a deep forest of pine and oak and fern. I could walk all day away from Birmingham and never cross a paved road (and often did with the distances getting longer as I got older).
The further away from the city that I walked, the more clear the water.
Eventually, the steel companies strip-mined those miles of forest for the coal. But, then, when I was a child, I could trace the water upstream to clean air, clean water, and lush forest.
To awaken the body and mind, it helps to remember those creeks and streams. You benefit from considering the current medical research, but it also helps to trace thought back upstream to a cleaner place.
Downstream, the factories make drugs that cure disease, and that is good. We need the drugs.
But, upstream, in the thoughts written by those before the times of pharmaceuticals, when thought and food and movement and prayer were all there was–upstream you find powerful healing thoughts that will awaken your mind and body.
When new medical research appears, then people are writing to add to knowledge; but, they are connected to what’s upstream. Without being connected to that research, without connecting to upstream, they are less likely to contribute to the downstream.
Go as far upstream as possible, where the water is clean and flows from those who lived and wrote at least 500 years ago. There you find ideas about health unpolluted by the hope that the local pharmacy will save. There you find ideas from minds that lived in the wilderness, never watched a TV show, never saw a commercial.
They never heard recorded music, only the music that came from the heart of those who would sing in the fields or at home after a day’s work, and perhaps at a rare public event or at the temple.
They had little hope of recovery from severe infection. Surgery was practically non-existent. They knew they had only one body with little hope of recovery from illness except with what might come from connecting to the body’s own inner intelligence and healing powers and from connecting to a higher power that animated the body.
Drink from this stream of thoughts as close as you can to the fountainhead, and you will awaken to a better understanding of and connection to glorious health and miraculous healing.
If you go to the local health food store, you will find many who trust the opinion of the cashier at the checkout counter more than they trust a research cardiologist at the Mayo Clinic. In some ways, this opinion is justified because the research cardiologist may be so focused on the downstream that the fountainhead is forgotten. If you forget the fountainhead, then at best you sculpt a diseased body that can be helped by the surgery and pharmaceuticals that are created downstream; at worst you see death.
With continued focus on the downstream and the identification of some errors in the details found in the fountainhead, some modern physicians ignore the fountainhead completely and though they may be skilled as a technician they rightly should be mistrusted as healers.
On the other hand, there are those who see clearly the wisdom and the purity found in the ancient teachings and unchanging principles of the laws of health but smell the stench of the downstream and never make it to the factory.
It’s difficult to positive think your way or even pray your way out of a motor vehicle accident with a severed spleen while you bleed internally. It’s difficult for the surgeon to repair your spleen and save your life unless you will accept multiple medicines, some of which will be given to you by iv, and some of them you will inhale and some you will take by mouth.
With trauma, it’s easy to see how the downstream makes healing possible that the ancients could not do. But, there are many medical problems (infections, metabolic problems, for example) that are just as dramatic and just as untreatable without the medicines found at your local pharmacy–medicines that did not grow from a tree and that did not come from a root, but came from a factory.
The wise person, sculpting the body-temple, looks upstream and looks downstream with reading and study and critical thinking and with prayer and meditation and with consultation with trusted advisors to find what is needed for health and healing.
, by Ezra Pound (to think about how to read upstream and downstream).