I’ve been thinking about the past of “illnesses” recently.

I’ve been thinking about the past of “illnesses” recently. Not just because of the Covid Mystery, but also because I’ve been rereading a favorite novel, Neal Stephenson’s 2700 page, three volume: “The Baroque Cycle.”

It is set between the years around 1670 to 1730, and one of the details everywhere has to do with human beings getting “sick” for various reasons. The Pox is dominant for the land borne, with Scurvy dominant for the seafaring.

Some people die, some survive. Survivors of the Pox are scared for life. In an age of formal events among royalty, and everyone wearing elaborate wigs, a woman’s face might have some black spots (beauty marks), where a cosmetic was applied to hide the hole left by the bursting pustules. What substances was the Wisdom of the Body trying to eliminate, the usual channels not being enough?

Scurvy took your teeth, and then your gums, on its way to perhaps killing you. Folks knew fruit and fresh water and such made a difference, but when a ship was at sea for months, trying to get Spanish (stolen from Mexico) silver and gold, to Spain, the risks were assumed, although for an ordinary sailor he might have been “pressed” into service, involuntarily.

Elimination is to be matched with intake/reception. Substance must move through the body, in order for life of the body to continue.

Slavery was everywhere, and a common work for a slave was to row large navel vessels, chained to an oar with five others, all ill fed and whipped.

Royalty was bred like so many good horses, what with intermarriages and the strange aspects of the division between protestants and Catholics, such that we can have a German royal line as a king in England, whenever the English protestants and Catholics switched power alliances in the House of Lords.

Science was in its youth and Newton believed there would be a smallest piece of lifeless matter he called the “atom”. He got in arguments with Leibniz, who asserted that the smallest should be called “monads”, as being of the same qualitative state as realty, which everywhere demonstrated consciousnesses and will.

The leading savants, natural philosophers – of different nations, argued with each other, and with the Church. Royalty murdered enemies rather frequently. War was everywhere, and great armies would be created, battles fought, and when over the pressed soldiers would be left to fend for themselves. The lives of the poor being life-substance for the rich.

Some folk were drawn to such mysteries as Alchemy (Newton), and went so far as to think that the physical substance “mercury” was meant, not the mercury-process in the life of soul and spirit. They drank mercury, not realizing that the alchemists hid teachings about initiation in those formulations of words, in order to share the work of seeking the Philosopher’s Stone, without being murdered by some Churchmen. Inquisitions, and all that stuff and bother.

Having a laboratory required having a patron. It was not uncommon for such a room, or sets of rooms, to have constant ongoing experiments requiring crucibles and forges. As a consequence, one might suggest that the thinking of the savants was often taking place in a laboratory filled with noxious and dangerous metal based poisons. And/or, stuff for making gunpowder and other weapons.

Those original seekers of truth, swimming in seas of toxins, might have become materialists, in part by uniting/poisoning their minds with over-refined matter in an intimate and dangerous sense.

In a battlefield a barber was a surgeon, cutting off limbs when necessary to avoid the spread of “infection” (accelerated decomposition) to the rest of the body. Doctors, or at least those who claimed to be trained to be a doctor, bled people who were “ill” with fevers and other maladies which the Wisdom of the Body used to restore balance. Men got the “stone”, a nugget of hard matter we call today a “gallstone”. A few adventurous folk started experimenting with the “cut”, which removes the stone, granting life – if you don’t bleed to death first.

Most streets were gutters of garbage and horse manure. In bad winters people starved, even among the aristocrats. The poor and the homeless … nobody cared, except them.

Fast forward to our Age …

A lot of the same issues remain. Rich and powerful people don’t care about poor people. The laws favor the former to a frightening degree. Science is still inventing new weapons, while gold and silver continue to be pursued.

We live longer, which is a plus. The Pox and Scurvy are controlled. We still maim our young males, and now females, by using them as pawns in war-games.

As to health in general, the world is rich with seven billion plus souls willing to play, in the same general sand box, although in first world countries heath-care is better. Some plausible rumors (and lawsuits) suggest that pharmaceutical companies like to use Africa to test drugs.

The cutting edge of therapeutic substances is a cut-throat business. Meanwhile, a lot of illness is due to poor nutrition, and only recently can one make money feeding people better food.

There is a tale that Big Sugar, knowing sugar’s ill effects on health, ran an advertising assault insisting it was fats that made us ill, not sugar. Winston Price, a dentist, traveled the world in the 1920’s, looking for people with better teeth than what he was seeing. The best were often tribal (closer to nature), ate a lot of animal fats, and were a bit overweight by our modern aesthetic values.

Is modern medicine as good as it could, or should, be?

Well … we don’t yet have a cure for cancer, or for heart disease. We can treat symptoms, but cancers come back, and back and back, and heart attacks happen again and again and again.

On a psychological level, such as with our elderly, we keep the body alive, but the mind not so much. Among adolescent males, responsible for all those school shootings, part of the story for awhile was that such young people often were on antidepressants, which can have a warning about suicidal and/or homicidal tendencies for those taking this kind of “medicine”.

We don’t hear much about that anymore.

Doctors do stress that Stress is a killer. Can’t be measured directly, although high blood pressure, heart palpitations, and other maladies are suggestive. Life style changes is a kind of euphemism for ditching the job, the wife, the traffic, i.e. the zones of stress creation.

In reaction to stress people take drugs such as alcohol and cocaine. A society that wants to actually function, ought to make it a principle that self-medication choices were a right. Only we know the state of our own consciousness. Even if a source of power (a government, for example) makes a substance illegal, that does not end the need, or the suffering, or the movement of wealth involved in the trade in illicit drugs.

Does the field of Medicine need to know more? Of course. They don’t know everything, otherwise we would cure, rather than suppress symptoms. Even the “flu” is not cured.

Our pandemic is often compared to the Spanish flu of 1918. It was a world-wide disease process. It followed the world-wide stress of the great war. Survivors physically and psychologically worn down. Clean air and water scarce. Food too.

Hyperinflation on the way, as well as a world-wide economic depression.

The scale of the shared trauma is staggering, if we actually bother to think about that. If we consider the individual human organism as a whole-environment, in response it will need many different kinds of healing processes, to confront the stress, and the ongoing industrial pollution.

The “elimination” of wage-slavery might have remarkable social effects.

Have we mistaken a massive social re-balancing for an illness, or is the illness itself just one more symptom of something far deeper?

Right from the beginning, when Media made available the Official Narrative – that this is a plague or a contagious disease, Stress was increased for everyone. Some consider the believers in the Official Narrative to be fear driven fools, but on a macro-social scale, people lining up waiting to get diagnosed, and then lining up to get vaccinated, while losing the job, and other increased stresses of life, …

… the affect of the ever increasing stress makes more people susceptible to becoming an environment favorable to a micro-organism.

On 9/11/2000, the seeds of three wars erupted upon the world. The war on terrorism caused vast amounts of capital to flow into intelligence agencies. The war in Iraq killed a lot of people, most of them locals. The war in Afghanistan went on and on and on, and then as every sane person expected, America had to quit, although 23 million dollar drone sales have continued to rise.

A costly bloodless war for the Pentagon … for the “enemy”, they could not be more bled.

In America, in order to avoid having to draft people, the Pentagon ordered National guards, men and women, to deploy, and return, and deploy and return, and deploy and finally mostly return.

PTSD, and the criminalizing of drugs, made head cases of millions of Americans. Big Pharma murdered thousands of our young people with a non-addictive very addictive “medicine” for pain relief.

Then there was 2008, and a near world-wide bank failure. #meto. Increased murder of Blacks by police. And, Finally came Trump.

So a super stressed-out people gets illness, whose main effect is more stress for the ordinary, and far greater wealth for the high and mighty. The official cure is worse than the disease, as it continues to manufacture new levels of stress with the threat of multiple vaccinations needed. Meanwhile, those who don’t get the jab are made social pariahs.

Recall: Stress triggers the fight or flight reflex, which dumps a bunch of extra energy into the physiological&psychological inwardness. This includes constricting blood vessels. This can happen several times a day, everyday.

Stress is a major factor in disease. Having less stress almost helps everyone. People going back to nightclubs and football games releases stress. Not going back to your former job means …

Sequential and Simultaneous Time (post Moon-Eclipse Thoughts)

In a sense, Time does not exist. Change, however, does. Memory allows reflection, the imagination dreaming. Attentive to the Moment is valued across all spiritual ways.

Thinking with/about simultaneous time/change is not easy. We have a hard “time” finding new thoughts, given that our minds are embedded within millions of concepts bound to ideas of linear time.

Yet, we are Script of the Mystery, and self-study is a teaching. To appreciate the Now, use the imagination to picture a vision of the Earth Globe as a medium in which over seven billion souls seek their personal trials of growth of character (Steiner’s “consciousness soul”)

Seven billion flowers growing toward the sun, yet rooted in the earth. This field of spiritual challenge and life shares an endless Now. The past is always over, the future remains uncreated.