Opinions

Sometimes a cartoon says it all much more succinctly.






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Meditation

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Well before my dad died, he nearly died. Having been diagnosed with inoperable and in all other ways untreatable lung cancer, the highly paid specialist gave his treatment options as "have a family reunion, preferably within the next 3 months." (Gotta love specialists, they earn all those taxpayer dollars.) But he didn't die. Not then anyway, not until more than a decade and a half later. And not from cancer. What saved his life was meditation. Now I know just saying that might send the one or two readers who occasionally end up here by accident scurrying for another web page. But be assured, my dad at that time would have done exactly the same thing. He wasn't a hocus pocus man, he was a man who loved his science and engineering and traditional medicine. But given an apparent imminent demise he decided to give the Gawler approach a try, because what did he have to lose etc. This isn't about Gawler's own approach, although it's worth noting he was himself...
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Taste

One of my pet hates is the idea of 'opinion'. Opinion went from being a quite minor, useful idea to something much more sinister, and sinister not least because the bastardisation of the idea all gets carried out under the banner of incredibly noble principles. You'd be an idiot to deny that people have different opinions about things. No problem there. I guess most basically that means they don't agree on things - what music is good, what food is good, etc. If you want to use the word opinion to describe this basic fact, that people don't agree on things, then it's not a big deal. However things have progressed. Opinion has become a much bigger idea than that. Because added to "that's just my opinion" is now "it's all just a matter of opinion". Whoa there. Opinion is now not just one person's view on something, but something a lot stronger - things that people have opinions about have no value in themselves, except their great...
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Cancer

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A cancerous cell, going about its metastasising ways... Cancer. Even saying the word can make you gulp. Its one of the great killers, and for decades we've seen a desperate search for a cure. Treatment has always been a type of warfare - cut it out, blast it with chemicals and radiation. Cancer has fascinated me for years now, because it struck me that the assumptions we take into understanding anything, or more generally how we frame our understandings, is pivotal to how far we go with this understanding. So the assumption we've normally used with cancer is that it's like some foreign agent in our bodies, that needs to be found and killed. That assumption has spread into everyday usage in other areas too, we talk about corruption as a 'cancer' in our society, for example. Unfortunately the chemicals and radiation which are our weapons of choice tend to kill healthy cells in our bodies too, and lots of people who get this treatment end up dying as a result of it, no...
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