One Little Way to Stop Depression

I once learnt a neat trick to help with depression, called a "visualisation tool".  I think I learnt it from the Enneagram but I'm not exactly sure where I got it from. Not that it matters... what matters is that it worked for ME!

I have been able to break myself out of a rut ever since. Sure it won't work for everyone, especially those who are clinically depressed, perhaps on meds or suffering from manic depression. But for those of you like myself whose woes stem largely from negative self-talk, this helps. Not just helps - cures it. It goes like this.

Life is full of disappointments. Not everything goes smoothly. Things don't always work out. Ok, got that.

This happens to all of us, whether you are a saint or an axe murderer, or most likely somewhere in between. It's how we deal with it that makes us different as healthy individuals.

If you suffer from negative self-talk fixation these 'little things' can spiral downward, until they end up totally out of proportion. The trick is to cut it off, nip it in the bud, stem the flow, etc before you get into a down mood, aka "the blues". At this point it is worth noting that repetitive fixation does not achieve anything (aka 'going around in circles'). It is totally unproductive.

As soon as you recognise the familiar voices - "I'm no good", "I'm a failure", "I always muck things up" you have identified the process. If you can do that, then this visualisation tool will do the trick to stop it from getting worse. If you can't discern when your own negative self-talk kicks in, then I'm afraid this won't help you. Off to therapy for you. Sorry.

Here it is in a nutshell.

Most of us are stationary, often sitting or lying, when the negative self-talk first kicks in. This is one reason why activity, including sport, work, even mundane chores is recommended as therapy and is preferable to wallowing in our mires - because actions engage the brain and circumvent the inner thought processes. So we sit there, or lie there, echoing our deriding sentences criticising our ineptness and patheticness.

Now, imagine a switch on the opposite wall.

This is the magic switch that turns off depression. You have to believe or at least imagine that it works. All you have to do is get up and go over to the wall, visualise the switch and flick it off. Don't make the mistake of sitting there and imagining that you're doing it — get up and do it!

It doesn't sound like much, does it? What you have done is stopped your thought processes, halted them in their tracks and shut down the broken record of your life commentary that is playing. NSTF over.

Sounds too easy? Well here's why it works.

Most of the self-perpetuating misery is a bad habit that, yes, plays like a broken record. As long as you're sitting there with your head in your hands going over and over with reciting your inadequacies and personal downfalls, you are only reinforcing the negative thoughts and driving the depression further and further downward.

By getting up out of the seat we are breaking the cycle, interrupting the thoughts, halting the downward spiral. Visualising the switch gives us a goal, and flicking this switch is acknowledging that we have control. It is incredibly empowering to discover that most of our suffering is self-inflicted - where we repeat messages learnt as children as we navigate through life and learn and internalise correct behaviours.

Unfortunately we also internalise the parental chastisement and forget to turn it off once we have learnt how to succeed (behave). If you're anything like me and you don't need anyone else to remind us of our shortcomings, you may well be a candidate for using the Imaginary Switch Trick. Try it. What have you got to lose? (apart from looking like a bit of an idiot walking over to walls and seemingly stroking them upwards)

To cap it off... it is perfectly normal to react to bad news and events with sadness, dismay, shock, horror etc. To not do so would be unhealthy. But to wallow in self pity, replaying a crisis over and over is unproductive and downright pathological. The healthy approach is to identify the problem, get help if necessary, decide on a solution and implement it.

Don't wallow in Negative Self-Talk. Flick that switch! 

Conspiracy Theory Checklist

□ The Earth Is Flat
□ The Moon Landings were faked
□ UFOs come from inside Hollow Earth (yes I know, how can it be hollow if it's flat, ha ha ha)
□ Chemtrails sterilise the population and make us sick
□ The Illuminati and/or New World Order runs the world
□ Tinfoil hats prevent your mind being read by others
□ 432 Hertz (cycles per second) is the only correct pitch for A4; the A = 440 Hz reference point is an evil invention of the Nazis designed to make everyone weak, feeble and gullible. That's why all normal music is so terrible.
□ Green Lizard Men from Outer Space control society
□ Cultural Marxism created the Hippie Movement
□ HAARP weapons cause earthquakes and cyclones
□ Anti-vaxxers like Andrew Wakefield are stool pigeons used to make Big Pharma look good
□ The Beatles songs were all written by Theodor Adorno
□ Elvis is still alive and living in Japan/Mexico/Morocco
□ All religions are mind control devices
□ 9/11 was orchestrated by the US government
□ JFK was assassinated by the CIA
□ Global Warming is man-made and we're all gonna die unless we do something about it
□ The Bermuda Triangle is a black hole
□ Freemasons are evil
□ Donald Trump is the Anti-Christ
□ Fluoride is put in tap water to lower our intelligence
□ AIDS was created by the Church to punish homosexuals
□ Tinfoil hats protect your brain from cosmic rays
□ Heavy Metal music is a tool of Satanism
□ Marijuana is illegal because it frees your mind
□ Vegetarians don't get enough protein
□ Uri Gellar can't masturbate because he loses his erection when he rubs his penis
□ Alien abductors love faeces hence all the anal probing
□ John Lennon was assassinated because he was about to  expose that the Beatles were fake, used lookalike doubles, and couldn't actually play or sing. Oh, and Paul is dead
□ Anyone can buy a TM mantra and become God
□ Margaret Thatcher is an alien, so is Julian Assange
□ Hitler was a vegetarian and an animal lover, he was the first to make smoking in the workplace illegal, campaigned for better worker's rights (all true).The CT is that he was set up and the Holocaust was the work of the SS (the Schutzstaffel of Nazi Germany) done secretly behind his back. Not a very polite thing to say in front of holocaust victims.
□ The Internet is spying on you - Big Brother is real
□ Television, media and radio are covert government brainwashing operations. So are newspapers, magazines, all social media and the internet. Wikipedia is a misinformation tool, owned and controlled by atheistic white supremacist pornographers
□ World Championship Wrestling is rigged (yes, we all know that one! More a conspiracy fact than a theory)
□ Every conspiracy theory is right on the money.

No such thing as a useless weed!

[updated 8th August] weed, def. "any plant growing where it is not wanted". This certainly does not mean it is useless - just that it's in the way as far as the intended use of the garden/plot/field/area of land.

Italy was created (unified) in 1871; before that it was roughly 1,400 years since it was last in one piece – as the Holy Roman Empire. In between were a lot of wars where the Spanish, French, Austrians, Normans, Celts, Goths, Byzantines, Lombards, even the Muslims took over parts (Sicily). Captain Cook found Australia in 1770 (he wasn't the first). Columbus landed in America in 1492 (he wasn't the first either) [that sort of twisting of historical facts is called Eurocentricism, where they bend the truth to make European Christians appear superior].

But before then, here's a list of stuff that is uniquely indigenous to the Americas and had never been seen in Europe... or India... (amazing how little time it takes for something to be adopted as traditional cuisine!). Just picture, before 1492 most of these New World foodstuffs had ever been seen anywhere else in the Old World... including tomatoes, which are not 'Italian' by any stretch of the imagination...

Nightshade family:
Tomato
Potato
Capsicum
Chilli pepper
Tobacco (there is wild tobacco elsewhere eg Australia but it was introduced)

Legumes, grains, pseudo-grains:
Lima, pinto, kidney beans
Corn, sweet corn
Quinoa
Amaranth
Chia
Manioc (or cassava)
Chocolate
Vanilla
Cocaine
Quinine
Tonka beans

Fruits, nuts, seeds, other:
Pineapple
Strawberry
Agave
Cotton
Passionfruit
Papaya
Cranberry
Blueberry
Huckleberry
Guava
Peanut
Cashew
Pecan
Sunflower
Sweet potato (not yams from Afro-Asia)

Cucurbits:
(although - this category is not exclusive to the Americas. Different species of gourds, melons and squashes are found separately in both the Old and New Worlds ie. Eastern and Western Hemispheres)

Pumpkin (also known as winter squash; there are gourds, squashes and melons native to Asia that are similar but different)

Zucchini aka summer squash, courgettes etc

Gourds (some gourds are also from Africa and India ie calabash, possibly by seeds floating across the sea either way; exact origin unknown)

Note# Melons - muskmelons, cantalope, honeydew, etc were one of the few things actually introduced by Columbus INTO the Americas! (watermelons are African, not American) Known sometimes as the Columbian Interchange, here is a list of introduced species going both ways.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbian_exchange


[How I love globalisation! Now, all you lurid greenies take one step back and calm down. It's all a part of Nature, ffs. Stop thinking "invasive species", "weed infestation" and "non-indigenous". If you don't assimilate, acclimatise and evolve, you won't survive. The geographical separation of species is mainly a post-Ice Age recent phenomenon. In terms of Earth's history it is a blink of the eye, yet you are crying out sacrilege. Nothing is going to stop the intermingling of continental flora and fauna. Whatcha gonna do, impose quarantine on the whole damn planet? Get Real! Globalisation is unavoidable.]

Westerners think of curry as being too hot but that is only a recent invention. For thousands of years before chilli was introduced there were two main kinds of pepper - the black/white/green/red (Piper nigrum) one which we are all familiar with, used often as a seasoning after the dish is prepared/cooked; and the long pepper, Piper longum, hotter and usually added at the beginning, fried in ghee.

The third - the extremely hot chilli pepper - wasn't introduced to India (by the Portuguese) and Europe (Cristoforo Colombo was actually Italian and his voyages to the Americas were financed by the Spanish Government!) until post-Columbian days. All three peppers have different reactions to bodily functions. Chilli is the most useless medicinally (apart from caosaicin as an analgesic) as it causes bowel irritation and profuse perspiration, more suited to inducing remedial sweating in equatorial climates. The other traditional peppers however have great nutritional properties, adding enzymes that aid digestion and therefore assimilation of nutrients.

It is important to acknowledge that simple condiments like salt and pepper go a long way in providing health benefits besides their welcome taste (the body's senses in accord with Brahman, the Universal Whole). Salt (NaCl or sodium chloride) provides the essential component of gastric juice (HCl or hydrochloric acid - the hydrogen component comes from water H20) and the peppers provide the enzymes (reactive agents) that break down the complex molecules like proteins into smaller amino acids that can be absorbed by the wall of the gastrointestinal tract.

The gut wall is a semi-permeable membrane which has tiny pores in it, filtering out large molecules and allowing smaller ones to pass through into the bloodstream. Ideally the size of these is about 9 to 12 Å (Angstrom = 0.1 nanometres). Leaky Gut Syndrome is a hypothetical condition (I have done the polyethyl glycol PEG400 test and failed healthy pore size). Gut health is maintained by beneficial bacteria who repair damage to membranes and attack the culprits. Incidentally, Caesarian babies miss out on this vital flora which is passed from mother to child in the vagina. As a result, Caesarian children have much higher rates of gut-flora-deficient-related diseases like diabetes, obesity, attention deficit disorder, hyperactivity, food allergies etc - contentiously, perhaps even coeliac disease, autism, schizophrenia!

Modern medical research is currently conducting studies into the role of the microbiota - the fad word is microbiome, the living environment of the bacteria - and only now starting to connect the dots. Dr Andrew Wakefield, the much maligned vaccination scapegoat first made this connection in the 90s when he drew attention to violation of the blood brain barrier as a result of trauma to the gut. Whether or not his methods were unscrupulous is besides the point. He made the connection between gut bacteria/blood brain barrier/mental health, and that's all that matters. I doubt he'll ever be recognised or reinstated because that would be like the medical profession admitting that they'd killed their own bastard son.

He's not totally crackers, though. ABC Nightlife interviewed Dr Michael Moseley the other night, who is pretty much repeating the same things - just uncredited to Wakefield. The basics are that there are thousands, millions of microbiota that inhabit the gut and affect health. In Andrew Wakefield making that initial connection, especially regarding the potential blood brain barrier, much of the information has been lost. Moselely seems to be more or less backing up Wakefield's original findings - yet unrecognised and uncredited. The ABC says they're gonna put up a podcast soon of their conversation, but I can't find it yet. It takes more than 3 days to put up a podcast and 2 weeks to rescue a soccer team stranded in a cave. Yet God created the whole Universe in 6 days and then found time to take a break. And they put a man on the moon in 1969. Ha ha.

Anyway, back to the point of this post. It's amazing to think that it's only in the last couple of hundred years that we have been able to embrace "GLOBAL" as a concept. Before then it had no meaning. Think about it. They thought there was nothing over the horizon.

Or did they? Sailors knew from centuries of observing distant ships sink and disappear over the horizon that the Earth was curved, a Globe. Columbus had absolutely no fear that they would sail off the edge of the world. The fabricated lore that the earth was flat is mostly a myth and was never prevalent. How to confuse the masses, pretend that humans evolved from apes, invented fire and the wheel, and then moved on to discovering God.

My giddy Aunt, what a load of hogwash!

108 cycles per prana = 432Hz

You may quote me: "I have gravitated towards a digital keyboard because I find it easier to push buttons to switch temperaments than use a saw and hammer on my other instruments".

How many 432ers know that before 1834 there was no way to measure cycles per second? The whole concept of A = 432 Hz as some sort of musical magic (a right-brained fantasy) is based on a supposed connection between pitch, Vedic numbers, Pythagoras's Music of the Spheres, and the Western system of measuring pitch in Hertz values which are cycles per second. Hertz or Hz references were completely unknown to the Grand Masters of Classical music who predated 1834, often by centuries - Vivaldi, Handel, Bach, Hayden, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Mendelsohn, Chopin. None of them used the same pitch for tuning or if they did, it was by sheer accident. 'A' could have been anywhere between 425 and 450 and they wouldn't have even known its reference value. Claims that Vivaldi used 432 Hz are just nonsense! 

At first I, too, thought that the "second" was arbitrary, nothing but yet another human construct. It turns out that it may not be after all. But it still doesn't make a clear-cut difference without exceptions.

Upon inquiry I was surprised to find a correlating time unit in... wait for it... Vedic cosmology, also connected with 108, 432, etc.  Without going too far into the philosophy, the Vedas are held to be composed - not by humans - but by God or empowered persons (specifically Vyasadeva aka Vedavyasa - I guess for those of Abrahamic faiths, somewhat like Moses and the Ten Commandments). So, in Hindu, Jain and Buddhists' etc minds, the time unit used wouldn't be considered arbitrary at all, but on the contrary, "God-given".

There are several Kala (Vedic time) systems depending on what time periods you are measuring - the blink of an eye, a breath, a day; a month, a year, the manifestation of the material world. Their system of diurnal timekeeping is different yet similar enough to end on a proportionate unit. To start with they divide the day not into 24:60:60 hours:minutes:seconds but with 30 and 2 (to begin with) to get a muhurta then a ghati or danda of 24 minutes.  From here it varies from system to system. One I used divides a muhurta of 48 minutes into 30 laghu of 96 secs, then by 15, 5, and 3 down to the respective units of a kashtha of 6.4 seconds, a kshana of 1.28 sec and a nimesha of 426 milliseconds.

Straight away I'm thinking it may not take much juggling to convert 1.28 into harmonic equivalents of the frequencies we are dealing with (read: "want"). Instead of cycles per second we now have cycles per kshana. Surely if we are going to use the "sacred geometry of the Vedas" as a basis for our magical thinking then our pitch will have to be based on the orbital frequency of the Earth and a pure tuning system like Just Intonation instead of Equal Temperament, using cycles per kshana instead of cycles per second (cps or Hz)!

Turns out not much of it makes sense. Drat!

432Hz = 552.96 cycles per kshana; and 256Hz = 327.68 c.p.k.

Not bad, close to a C# and an E respectively. Sort of.

So, using 432 cycles per kshana what do we get? (Comparisons are to note values from 432Hz ET)

432 cpk = 337.5 Hz (halfway b/n a G and an F#); and

256 cpk = 400 Hz (somewhere b/n G and G#).

Forget it! However, if we use another system (I have no idea what they're called) based on 30:2:30:2:6:10 we get a better result. Incidentally that ratio is 1/3600th, showing promise for whole integers, common demoninators, etc that 432ers fancy. The previous system is 1/3375ths, probably why it went nowhere as far as the results we are looking for... 426 milliseconds ain't gonna cut it.

For want of a better name, the muhurta-ghati-kala-pala-prana-vipala (30:2:30:2:6:10) method gives either a prana of 4 seconds or a vipala of 0.4 sec. It should be obvious that by using the larger prana unit of 4 seconds, all we are in fact doing is changing the octave. This, and only this, is where the connection with the Western second to the Vedic prana kicks in - 432 cycles per prana becomes A6 @ 1728Hz, the A two octaves higher. 

It also becomes apparent that to use the smaller vipala for calculations as it means you are converting by 2/5ths which will lead nowhere, eg:

432Hz x 0.4 sec (1 vipala) = 172.8 cpv (cycles per vipala), so for the same pitch referenced in Vedic terms instead of the Western 'arbitrary' second:

432Hz = 172.8 cpv (F? 171.4)

512Hz = 204.8 cpv (G#? 203.9)

Again referenced to A=432Hz ET. But if we reference to Just Intonation with C = 256:

432Hz = 172.8 cpv (F? 170.6)

512Hz = 204.8 cpv (G# exactly - finally, a direct hit!)

Close, but... nah, nothing like the results we get converting the frequency of the Earth's orbit around the Sun into cycles per seconds: 1 ÷ 31556925.250732 = 0.0000000317; which raised to the 32nd octave = 136.1Hz, EXACTLY C# in the A=432Hz Equal Temperament scale - the so-called Om note (ॐ)!

By the way, do you know how traditionally they used to tune up (Indian musicians) before a concert? They set pitch to the singer – what ever it is, it then becomes the shadja. Fair dinkum. Now, THAT is truly ARBITRARY! Legend also has it that the shadja (the root note, usually around C#) is found by the "orchestra guru" meditating on the Heart chakra which supposedly vibrates to the Earth's orbital frequency. He then hums it and the ensemble tunes to that. Hard to believe I know but in days of yore they lit fire sacrifices with mantras, not matches.

Conclusion:

108 cycles per prana = 432Hz; but it doesn't make a lot of sense with the Indian scale which is based on the Shadja!

This is hard to put into words succinctly. When we use the prana unit, a conflict arises when trying to establish a correlation between natural harmony and the vibrational frequency of 432Hz tuning using Vedic units of time measurement and 'Sacred Geometry' i.e. the 'magical properties' of whole integers such as 256 and 432. These represent C and A in the Pythagorean Temperament but are derived from the arbitrary Western second. Trying to use Vedic units of vipala, kshana, etc. however, it completely breaks down.

Yet another conflict arises where although Pythagorean (and derivatives thereof - the ONLY temperament with A & C @432 & 256) uses whole integer ratios, it actually sounds pretty terrible imho (unlike JI which also uses whole integer ratios but has pure thirds and is very harmonious despite its wide 4ths and narrow 5ths). Equal Temperament based on A=432Hz sounds a lot better than PythT but then every note in the scale is technically out of tune with the A - vibrating on a frequency that does NOT harmonically concur, causing beating.

Even if we do use the prana unit, which corresponds with A=432Hz frequencies (being a few octaves higher) and the traditional Indian method of tuning (of which Just Intonation and Ptolemaic Intense Diatonic Scale are mere simplifications) it breaks down again -depending on which 'magic number' 256 or 432 we chose as C or A - because a C of 256 gives an A of 426.6; and an A of 432 creates C = 256.9 (close, but again, no cigar! Remember we're talking about harmonics converging via whole integer ratios etc).

It is at about this point that I leave the desk and wander over to my keyboard and play some soothing chords in meantone. Ahhh, I just love those pure thirds!