The Relevance of Color in Chinese Medicine

For many thousands of years Chinese Medicine has associated the color red with the heart - which is a more encompassing term than just the organ itself. It also relates to the energy field and the area of the body and auxiliary organs that the heart governs. There has been a suprising steady growth in scientific data to support this in recent years, as well as many books relating to the a color-based diet.

"Go red" or "wear red" have become universal mantras for promoting heart-health during February, American Heart Month. But health and nutrition experts say we should also be eating red to protect our hearts. Americans are encouraged to discover the power of eating heart-healthy red foods during the first-ever National Eat Red Week, Feb. 4-10.
Why eat red? Science suggests the pigments that make up the red color in many fruits and vegetables, like tart cherries and tomatoes, are powerful disease-fighting antioxidants that may help reduce inflammation associated with atherosclerosis or hardening of the arteries and reduce certain risk factors for heart disease.
A recent study from the University of Michigan(1) revealed that cherry-enriched diets in animals lowered total blood cholesterol levels and reduced triglycerides (fatty acids), major risk factors for heart disease. With more than 80 million Americans living every day with some form of heart disease, scientists are increasingly studying the heart health impact of the foods we eat.
"We've always known fruits and vegetables were 'healthy,' but now we're beginning to better understand precisely why," said Dr. Steven F. Bolling, a cardiac surgeon at the University of Michigan Cardiovascular Center who also heads the U-M Cardioprotection Research Laboratory. "Researchers are uncovering the unique potential for plant compounds, like those in cherries, to affect multiple heart health factors. For cherries, we're learning the benefits may come from effects on both cholesterol levels and inflammation."

Thyroid Gland - Quick Digression

I have just resumed posting on this blog and I the following information I thought to be quite useful so I have posted it now. I will trying and incorporate this into a discussion of Qi and Chakras later on.

Like all high-performance machines, the human body requires a sensitive fuel-management system. The thyroid gland serves us well in its role as a combination throttle and thermostat, varying the rate at which we burn our metabolic fuel in accordance with our needs. The thyroid, located in the front of the neck, manages this delicate control function mainly through the production of several iodine-containing thyroid hormones. When thyroid hormones reach their target tissues throughout the body, they stimulate those tissues to increase their metabolic rate. The thyroid itself is controlled, like most of the endocrine glands, by the “master gland” called the pituitary, itself under the control of the deep brain structure called the hypothalamus.
The combination of hypothalamus, pituitary, and thyroid normally functions flawlessly to maintain metabolism at the required levels, but like all complex control systems, it is subject to failure, especially with increasing age.

1.The most common form of thyroid disease is hypothyroidism, which occurs under any of a number of circumstances when there’s insufficient thyroid hormone activity.2 Symptoms of hypothyroidism include fatigue, muscle weakness, lethargy, weight gain, and a tendency to feel cold even in warm environments.

Art & Aesthetics

In a post-religious world, there have been several exponents who have tried to argue that art and the aesthetic experience can be a valid substitute for the religious experience.

The crux of the argument is that during an intense aesthetic experience, the senses are heightened and "elevated" leading to a change in the way one perceives the world. In the most intense experiences the barrier between the subject and object (be it a painting or music or novel) is dissolved.

Harold Bloom in his work "Where shall wisdom be found" seeks to find meaning through literature, but although he seems to do much to describe the human condition, he does not teach us how to transcend it. It seems to degenrate into a list of some many moments of aesthetic experience and beautiful works.

The ancient Greeks to me are a most interesting race because they were the ones who had imbued the aesthetic experience with the greatest importance. I suspect that many of the ancient Greeks had felt dissillusioned with the stories of Homer and the capriciousness of the Gods, in the same way that modern man had felt that traditional religious forms did not suffice.

The great plays of Sopholcles and Euripidies shed much light on the human condition.

The Limitations of Western Philosophy

When reading western philosophy - I was looking for answers, but I discovered that there none to be had.

In most western philosophy textbooks, the issue of "progress" in philosophy is gently sidestepped. At most authors who touch upon this issue mutter something about there never being definitive answers to questions, and what definies a "classic" is but a novel approach to the same question, which will spur discussion for centuries to come. This, coupled with the unfortunate retreat of of the analytical school into increasingly archane logical convulsions, sub-divided into a greater number of specialized schools which have little bearing on the everyday life of people has led to the role of philosophy being greatly diminished.

Continental philosophy has fared as badly, with a tendency for authors to prize jargon and obfuscation over lucid prose. The tendancy for philosophers to posture and preen has obscured the weight of their ideas. The madness of Louis Althusser, Michel Foutcault has overshadowed their valid contributions to philosophy.

This is not to say that Western Philosophy does not illuminate problems or see situations in a different light, or provide a suberb underpinning for science, but it does not seem to offer any solutions to my initial problem.

The problem with Western philosophy is a deep seated one, and it has deep consequences for the philosophy of religion and epistemology (not to mention political philosophy and Western Culture as a whole). The problem stems from the work Renee Descartes and his use of systemic doubt, and this problem was further highlighted by Immanuel Kant. Many of our present problems can be traced to this fact.

Briefly stated Descartes posited the existence of a demon that controlled the sense data that entered your brain. His question was how we knew the external world exists, given the existence of illusions and dreams show that we do not always hold true beliefs about the external world. Using his intellecut to doubt and discard what we cannot have a firm grounding of he tried to find a firm basis from which we could rebuild our belief of the world. Inhis Mediations he came to the conclusion that we can only be sure of the fact that we think and because we think, we exist. Cogito ergo sum. However he has opened up a huge gap between our self and the external world. There is no way to know that the external world is accurately represented by what be perceive. We could be brains in vats which were stimulated through electrodes with the same result. It is this severing of the self from the external world has led to many ills which have manifested in modern society. In contemporary culture this vision has been explored in the movie, the Matrix.

Kant took this still further by stating that we cannot even be sure of our self - when we look inwards we are but a bag or random thoughts and feelings, there is no self as such that we can grasp onto. There are many parallels here with Buddhist philosophy but more on that later.

Having retreated into the shell of the shelf and created a yawning abyss between himself and the external world, and having turned his powerful intellecutal doubt on everything, including himself - Man is left with a nihilism leads him to despair and meaninglessness. Because Man has become so divorced from the external world, there are several by-products of this:

1) Man began to cultivate a detached, dispassionate attitude to nature. It is seen as a commodity to be exploited, to be experimented upon. Everything is assigned a value and inherently tradeable. The philosophical trends of the enlightenment lay the groundwork for the eventual take off of the capitalist economy.

2) The essential connection between people has been lost. Each person is perceived as an atomized Other, leading to a retreat into the protection of the rights of the individuals and a de-emphasis of the duties and obligations that people may have to other people. Some totalitarian philosophies have tried to take it to the opposite extreme, by treating people as Others and as commodities where they are conflated into a mass and are thus exploited by a privileged class. Obviously both tendancies can and do exisit in a given society, but it does not change the essential fact that the connection between people has been lost.

3) Spiritual pursuits and religiosity are either denigrated or abused through a fundamentalist belief in an anthropomorphic God. By turning the light of the intellect on and trying to find and prove the existence of God, God is nowhere to be found. Intellectual proofs of God fail to convince and thus people either retreat into saying that there is nothing to belive in or live on Faith alone with a fundamentalist approach to religion and claim to have a special relation with a human God. (For a good treatment please read Karen Armstrong's History of God)

Please note that the tendancies above a direct or indirect result of a dualistic world-view. (A good introduction to the issues dealt with in this blog is the chapter on "The Devil" in Roger Scruton's Modern Philosophy.) And if we are unable to breakaway from this flawed initial assumption we will continue to spin in circles within the stale boundaries that Western Philosophy has set itself. (One good book which allows us to step back and look at our past through different eyes is David Loy's A Buddhist History of the World)

So what can we do about all of this? I was almost driven to depair at the fact. One answer that Roger Scruton suggested was the redeeming power of Art and Aesthetics. I had subconciously tried to take this path but it only afforded me temporary relief which I will deal with in my next post.

Inaugural Post

Welcome! This blog has been in gestation for a number of weeks now and I have finally found a block of time to get it up and running. My apologies for the rough and ready layout, but I shall be spending some time in the coming weeks, working on the design and the overall feel, so please be patient.

The objective of this blog (and I hope to eventually migrate this onto a full fledged website) is to provide a forum to build a community to discuss topics that are close to my heart. (You could also call these my all-consuming interests).

I have been spending a lot of time over many years and I hope to use this as a forum to synthesize some of my thinking on various topics. But in a nutshell they encompass Health and Spiritual Development, with an emphasis on Asian Philosophy.

My interest in the above probably started out some time when I was probably 11 or 12, where I would experience this feeling of uneasiness around dusk. This feeling was hard to describe but I can describe it as a heady mix of lethargy cum depression, with a heavy dose of fear mixed in. Oddly enough this feeling would fade as soon as it was night. (I am somewhat of a night owl so my energy levels revive in the evening - although I have been trying to change that as well as my sleeping habits - but more on that later.) Perhaps this is what is called a "Dark Night of the Soul"?

Anyways in order to cut a long story short I have been seeking to address this feeling ever since. In my next post I would like to write a little about how I came to an interest in Asian Philosophy, after taking the long way around, by studying Western Philosophy - first Analytical Philosophers such as Locke, Berkeley, Hume, J.S. Mill and then Continental Philosophy - Marx Hegel, Nietzsche, Heigegger and Satre.

Again please note that many of the opinions expressed in the blog are my own, and may yet be underdeveloped and needing refinement. Thus I would like to beg your patience on this matter and will at all times, welcome any opinions that you all may hold.