Note to Readers: This is an excerpt from yesterday’s subscriber edition of Planet Waves. Judith Gayle will not be writing this week; her Political Waves column will resume next week. –efc
Wednesday night I had dinner with a friend who’s an experienced homeopath and teacher, helping me fill in some gaps in my studies. He was describing what homeopaths call the cancer miasm: that is, the whole thought form and energy pattern associated with the disease cancer. We Americans live in what may be the most carcinogenic society on Earth, and homeopathy proposes that this is as much about our mentality as it is about toxins in the food and water.
Even mainstream medical practitioners note that one thing many cancer patients have in common is the habit of suppressing their emotions, but homeopathy is describing something other than an individual state. And it is describing how individual states of mind are an aspect of the larger culture. My friend described the cancer miasm as being about a psyche gripped by intractable ideas; that is to say, a mind that will not budge. This is the essence of fundamentalism, a mode of thinking that currently has the United States Congress and thus the world economy by the throat. Everyone on the majority side in the House of Representatives pretty much agrees that any raising of additional revenue is out of the question, and that they’re going to cut benefits from people living on government pensions they paid into for decades.
Note that I am talking about a psychic state described by homeopathy and not conventional medicine; there is some relationship, and it’s not necessarily direct (though it can be). It influences everything from our politics and social behavior to our food production methods. We all struggle with the miasms of our whole society and our family, not just the individual ones we have. This is territory not embarked on by conventional medicine, which deals only in dose-response relationships and only rarely addresses mental or emotional states — or their effects. We happen to live in a carcinogenic society that produces cancer in nearly half of all people, but which struggles even more with the thought and behavior patterns of the cancer miasm.
Within the fundamentalist movement, there are fixed ideas about sex (don’t talk about it), abortion (murder in all instances), birth control (now also considered murder) and homosexuality (no way, Jose). All unions are bad, government is bad, taxes are bad, regulations are bad, and on and on, ad nauseam. Note carefully (it is not that hard to see) that nothing is being created except chaos. There is no plan to make, to build, to improve, to develop; the only goal is to control people (mainly through sex and private relationships) and eliminate the government’s role in the process of creating civilization. This philosophy of government is a disease process: cancer of the mind.