The Ashwin is a regular webzine for ΑΩ Labs' customers -- October, 2009 Edition Formatted to 800 pixel width in this issue. Related Links: Ashwin Archives Letters to the Editor - (Submissions)

Mediated Experience & The End
of the Pharmaceutical Age

"I began getting on to how degenerate things had really become in 1955 when I worked for the movie industry on Park Avenue in New York City. I met a man who began to show me the power of propaganda, (as in "Federal" Reserve System). Whoever penned the old saw about ... "the pen is mighter than the sword ..." really knew what he was talking about . . . I am well aware of the stranglehold of the FDA as well as the AMA (American Murderers Association). I appreciate very much the sacrifices that you have made. If I wasn't so advanced in age (83) I would leave the U.S. just as you have done. The general population here is so asleep you can hear them snoring out beyond Jupiter. Thanks ... again for what you are doing."
[ AO Customer -- name withheld ] [ 1 ]
Private Email to AO
October 27, 2009

Courtesy of Dees Illustration

"Most Americans spend their lives within environments created by human beings. This is less the case if you live in Montana than if you live in Manhattan, but it is true to some extent all over the country. Natural environments have largely given way to human-created environments.
"What we see, hear, touch, taste, smell, feel and understand about the world has been processed for us. Our experiences of the world can no longer be called direct, or primary. They are secondary, mediated experiences.
"When we are walking in the forest, we can see and feel what the planet produces directly. Forests grow on their own without human intervention. When we see a forest, or experience it in other ways, we can count on the experience being directly between us and the planet. It is not mediated, interpreted or altered.
"On the other hand, when we live in cities, no experience is directly between us and the planet. Virtually all experience is mediated in some way. Concrete covers whatever would grow from the ground. Buildings block the natural vistas. The water we drink comes from a faucet, not a stream or the sky. All foliage has been confined by human considerations and redesigned according to human tastes. There are no wild animals, there are no rocky terrains, there is no cycle of bloom and decline. There is not even night and day. No food grows anywhere.
"Most of us give little importance to this change in human experience of the world, if we notice it at all. We are so surrounded by a reconstructed world that it is difficult to grasp how astonishingly different it is from the world of only one hundred years ago, and that it bears virtually no resemblance to the world in which human beings lived for four million years before that. That this might affect the way we think, including our understanding of how our lives are connected to any nonhuman system, is rarely considered.
"In fact, most of us assume that human understanding is now more thorough than before, that we know more than we ever did. This is because we have (such) faith in our rational, intellectual processes and the institutions we have created that we fail to observe their limits."
Jerry Mander [ 2 ]

Years ago I was exposed to Jerry Mander's Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television [ 3 ] -- a penetrating set of polemics that outlines, from several vantage points, the dangers of television-watching and how the very medium itself is destructive and non-reformable.
Many unfamiliar with the work will laugh at the very notion . . . and I might well laugh, as well -- were it not for the fact that in the 30+ years since Mander penned his book, I have been able to observe the predictable outcome of avoiding the subject, which has become only more pronounced . . . and horrifying.
This month I focus on just one of Mander's arguments -- the first, in fact, of his book, as it would apply to medicine. Mander called it "The Mediation of Experience." [ 4 ]


As I detail extensively in Meditopia, one of the unspoken, rarely considered assumptions of modern medicine is that progress is made through the march of technology. The idea that technology is the cure for our problems is ubiquitous in modern life. If my cellphone breaks, I take it to a phone technician. If my car breaks down; a mechanic. For my Mac; a computer tech. For my refrigerator; a "frig" guy. If I lose internet, I summon the cable guy. If I lose power, my provider sends an electrician . . .
And what do I do if I get sick?
Well, that's easy. I just go to a medical technician . . . a medical doctor or similar practitioner, depending on my problem . . . someone who has a technical solution, a scientific answer, someone in touch with the latest discoveries in that field. Makes sense, doesn't it?
Sure, it makes sense . . . but that's only because we live in a mediated environment that shields us from the obvious . . . WE may live in world surrounding by technical man-made artifacts, but our bodies are not born of technology. They're born of nature. Only by living in a world that is so completely out of touch with nature could we be blinded to this self-evident fact.
The very foundation of modern pharmacology is based on a single principle that is as far removed from nature as one can imagine. It takes as Gospel that the healing arts can only find perfection through the search for discrete, chemical, molecular entities -- the vast majority of which cannot be found to exist within Nature herself. Moreover, these chemical entities must be unique and patentable . . . and they can only be discovered and sold by companies with sufficient capital (i.e. in the hundreds of millions of dollars per entity) to survive a vast bureaucratic maze, chock full of of regulatory bribe-takers, all working to prove that the chemical entity in question has at least some tangential effect on one or more disease conditions within the human body.
Only when all of these hurdles are negotiated can our entity -- which we are now permitted to call a medicine or a drug -- receive the imprimatur of official medical science.
More perverse still, modern pharmacology gives little thought to the long-term, ill-effects of the drugs to which it gives its approval. At Alpha Omega Labs we deal with cancer patients the world over, and in the vast majority of cases the damage created by one or more therapies to which the patient has been subjected is greater than the original disease for which the patient sought help to begin with. This brings to mind the observation of the late Neil Postman, namely, that inventors and promoters of technology "are always given to telling the Public the wonderful things their invention will DO -- always neglecting to disclose what their invention will UNDO." [ 5 ]


The first underlying principle behind the I Ching, the oldest and most reverred work of ancient Chinese philosophy, is that "when things reach their extreme, they revert to their opposite." An American observer might use the pendulum to make the same observation.
The scientific community, specifically as it manifests itself in the drug industry, is insanely out of control, reaching level of absurdity unimageinable in another time and another age. Mander himself used several examples in his book, even in the 1970's . . . such as a report from the New England Journal of Medicine that a team of doctors discovered that infant jaundice could be "cured by ordinary sunlight. This discovery led to a spurt of articles on the possibility that natural light might be healthy for humans. What a revelation!" [ 6 ]
Or other "scientific findings" which Mander notes, which the New York Times reported in a "six-month period in 1973":

• " A major research institute spending more than $50,000 to discover that the best bait for mice is cheese . . . or
• Another study which found that mother's milk was better balanced nutritionally for infants than commercial formulas. (That study also proved that mother's milk was better for human infants than cow's milk or goat's milk.)
• A third study . . . that a walk is considerably healthier for the human respiratory and circulatory systems, in fact for overall health and vitality, than a ride in a car. Bicycling was also found to be beneficial!
• A fourth . . . that juice of fresh oranges has more nutritional value than either canned or frozen orange juice
• A fifth . . . that infants who are touched a lot frequently grow into adults with greater self-confidence and have a more integrated relationship with the world than those who are not touched." etc. [ 7 ]

What is amazing, as Mander notes, is that anyone should have found it necessary to conduct these studies in the first place. It confirms that "human beings no longer trust personal observation, even of the self-evident, until it is confirmed by scientific or technological institutions; human beings have lost insight into natural processes -- how the world works . . . -- because natural processes are now exceedingly difficult to observe."
And it is in this environment that modern medicine has been allowed to evolve into pure, unadultered financial exploitation, for as Mander again notes, "Living within (these) artificial, reconstructed, arbitrary environments that are strictly the products of human conception, we have no way to be sure that we know what is true and what is not. We have lost context and perspective. What we know is what other humans tell us." [ 8 ]
And this is where the I Ching comes in.
All of my adult life I have been studying the many ways in which Western Civilization is "unsustainable." It is unsustainable because it has lost its natural mooring. It cannot stay alienated from Nature forever . . . just as the previous 26 major Earth civilizations that lived and breathed and died over the last 6,000 years. (I cover this extensively in Chapter 5 of Meditopia.)
The pharmaceutical paradigm, which brought upon us this "Great Age of Iatrogenesis," will pass away -- just as will the other components of our civilization to which it is tethered. And it is in that passing that members of humanity will then again be free to have a direct, primary experience of their world.

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