A person who comes to their doctor with reports of dizziness, numbness, vision problems, tiredness, pain – anything which cannot be objectively measured, preferably in a laboratory -is likely to be told that “there is nothing wrong with them”.

A woman told her doctor that there was a crab inside her tearing at her with its claws and eating her. Because of the state of medical technology at the time nothing was found and she was put in a mental hospital. Many years later an ulcer the size of a grapefruit (which is large for an ulcer) was found in her stomach.

The myth of control is prevalent in Western scientific medicine, also in alternative medicine and new age beliefs. This is the belief that the mind can and does control the body.

The myth of control has led to the widespread view that physical illness is often psychosomatic. That it is all in the mind, which means that people with physical pain are not believed by doctors.

A Canadian study in the 1980s of people with multiple sceloris found that 7 of the 21 women and 1 of the 14 men (the gender difference is significant) were told by doctors that their illness was psychological in origin.

Until 1988 myalagic encephalomyletis (ME)/ chronic fatigue immune dysfuntion syndrome was regarded as a psychiatric condition. In that year the Centers of Disease Control in the United States recognised it as a physical illness.

The new age belief that “we create our own reality”, that pain and physical illness are all in the mind, is also part of the myth of control. Although the cognitive and social authority of new age practitioners is considerably less than that of the orthodox medical profession, that authority is sufficient to cause distress and suffering to those people who believe and accept it.

Right. That was why I sat on the sides of seats for 6 months. *rolls eyes*

I have found that I can often talk myself out of sicknesses if I catch them early enough; this also almost always works for stomachaches too; probably because I have IBS and most stomach problems are worsened by stress or worry.

I went to a counselor one summer, because the preceding semester at college had left me more often than not in a very suicide prone place. The counselor said that I seemed calm enough, and since I wasn’t acting out or whatever words he used for being more openly emotional, it meant that I must be fine and should try taking vitamins or something. That’s the closest I’ve ever gotten to actually committing suicide and this guy says I’m fine??? All because I wasn’t emotional enough; just because I didn’t come in weeping or something. *kicks angrily at something*

While the new age movement is shallow and materialistic, and there is a good deal of nonsense in it, it is also idealistic and some of it I find attractive. It shades into movements like ecofeminism, Green politics, Green spirituality, Wicca, alternative medicine and transpersonal psychology. Because it is vague and amorphous people can easily find something in it with which they agree.

The book “Women, Sex and Addiction: A search for love and power” by Charlotte Davis Kasl (1989) has a favourable mention of the new age movement. It is a wise and compassionate book. There is also a brief description of Kundalini yoga. “Kundalini stands for female sexual energy represented by a coiled serpent in the form of a flower resting at the base of the spine. When the serpent uncoils, energy rises through the body, awakening pure knowledge and a state of bliss, and sexual energy is transformed to cosmic consciousness.” The author, who is a Quaker, would be appalled at the attitudes of the “snake lady”.

TI

I’ve heard the argument before….it is easier to study in a clean apartment (true) you can tell if something has been stolen much more easily if the apartment is clean (true, and a good point my housekeeper brought up which I’d never thought about before)……it’s easier to find things in an organized apartment (true) and several other things that are true, but truth doesn’t always translate into making it easier to maintain a decent apartment. The more stressed I or anyone else here gets, the harder it is to take care of stuff. Plain and simple. It’s frankly very frustrating to me why people don’t understand that. Does anyone have suggestions as to how I might explain myself better? I’ve tried writing notes to my parents……Dad is easier to talk to…..we were having a conversation about this and other stuff last night…..

are there any posts that might answer this question/talk about it? Thanks….

TI

One of the problems with new age spirituality is that it inherits a lot of problems from the stuff it was based on. A lot of new age spirituality is a slight modification of Theosophy, which had a lot of negative and destructive, not to mention racist, aspects to it, and it also basically stole some of the worst variations of ideas about karma from other religions. Everything bad that happens in this life is punishment for something bad you did in a previous one. If someone abuses you in this life, it’s because you have karma to work out with them. Etc. (And these aren’t theoretical situations either– we’ve known people who were really told those things, and we were told by someone, ourselves, that if we were deprived of something we really wanted in this life, it must be because we had too much of it in a previous one.)

And yeah, I have met people who held new age beliefs and seemed, themselves, to be really sincere and caring. We ran into quite a few of them at the “spiritual bookstore” (read: mostly new age) where our spouse used to work. But a lot of them did buy into ideas that, from what we could tell, had destructive aspects to them, and there’s a disturbing lack of fact-checking that goes on (like with claims about an unbroken witchcraft tradition supposedly dating from pre-Christian Europe, claims about “Native American spirituality,” or that it’s been “scientifically proven” that crystals emit energy, or whatnot). That doesn’t mean any of these were “bad people,” but there were extremely negative aspects to a lot of what they were accepting as fact.

I don’t know if this helps any in figuring out what words to attach to the thoughts in your head or if this just confuses things.

My family is fundamentalist Christian. I’ve never seen so much hatred, sincerity, superiority, and closed-mindedness in the same place as I did when I went to school at a fundamentalist Christian school… but if I looked at the individual people, I saw people who somehow believed they were doing the right thing, that they were helping others, that they were really following the Bible and God’s will.

I couldn’t find any malice in their hearts at all. It was more like they themselves had been deceived. And most of the time, these ways of living, while they hurt others, hurt the people who held them, too.

The best approach, I think, is to respect them as human beings, even if you violently disagree with what they believe and what they do. But then, that’s the same approach I’d take with anyone, no matter how evil I thought them to be.