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Recently I read two items about the power of groups. The first concerned a new book, Talking to the Enemy, written by an anthropologist named Scott Atran, who has traveled around the world making a detailed study of terrorists and all violent extremists, including suicide bombers, by asking one simple question: Why do they do it?
The answer is not, as we believe in the West, religion.
As Atran puts it: “People don’t simply kill and die for a cause. They kill and die for each other.”
Several weeks ago I had the privilege of speaking with my good friend James O’Dea. As co-director of the Social Healing Project and former director of the Washington, D. C. office of Amnesty International, James has spent many years smoothing the way for warring sides to reconcile and forgive.
For 10 years he has co-hosted “compassion and social healing” dialogues with Dr. Judith Thompson, in which members of very divided social and political groups — Republican and loyalist Northern Irish, Turkish and Greek Cypriots, Israelis and Palestinians — meet in an attempt to heal from their shared experience.
I thought forgiveness an appropriate meditation for all of us, in the wake of the very fraught and polarized American mid-term election.
In the social-healing dialogues, O’Dea and Thompson move the emphasis away from who is right and who is wrong, and toward who is wounded and how to heal. And in most cases, they discover that both victim and perpetrator are wounded.
Lately, I’ve been asking myself a few pretty basic questions: What on earth is a gene? And, an even bigger question: What on earth is evolution?
In 1953, molecular biologists James Watson and Charles Crick claimed to have unlocked the “secret of life” by unraveling deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), the genetic coding in the nucleus of every cell. Thereafter, scientists came to believe that within the coiled double helix lay every individual’s lifelong blueprint.
Recently, an amazing statistic emerged from a little known sleep laboratory at the University of Swansea in Great Britain: namely, that the number of people in Western society experiencing a lucid dream has increased by up to 40 per cent in the last 30 years.
In fact, current estimates are that most of us — eight of every 10 people — will experience a lucid dream at some point in our lives.
In a lucid dream you are, in a sense awake; you remain aware that you are dreaming and so can consciously manipulate the dream’s events. This neat ability was recently highlighted in the movie Inception, where Leonardo DiCaprio and Ellen Page are able to custom-design their dreams in order to blow up cafes, curve streets into the heavens and in general bend reality to their will.
This ability used to be relatively rare — a mark of the gifted psychic or sensitive. But according to Professor Mark Blagrove, one of Britain’s leading authorities on dreams, our dreaming patterns are drastically shifting. These days far more of us are able to delve into our dreams and consciously control them.
After 21 years of reporting on the excesses and dangers of modern medicine for my newsletter What Doctors Don’t Tell You, I have become a bit ho-hum when confronted by yet another new revelation about the practices of drug companies.
But I have to tell you that I have been shaken to the core by new evidence that a good percentage of the medical research published in the world’s top medical literature is ghostwritten.
In the pharmaceutical world, ‘ghostwriting’ has a particular meaning. A drugs company will hire a PR firm — known in pharma-speak as a ‘medical education and communication company (MECC)’ – to prepare clinical trials, engage a ghost to write an article with a positive spin on the results, and then enlist a prominent academic to put his name to a paper he’s had nothing to do with in order to give it a patina of respectability.
This ‘study’ will then be submitted (and usually published) in a respectable medical journal.
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