HEALING HANDS

Some hands can heal. This seems to be a miracle but is actually a physical process that takes place through bio-magnetic fields. Scientific research shows that bio-magnetic energy emanated by the practitioner resonates with particular molecules in the receiver and initiate a cascade of events that can stimulate the repair of cells and tissue.

Such healing effects are studied in differentiated ways. For instance, research presents evidence of certain frequencies emitted from practitioner’s hands that ‘jump-start’ healing processes in receivers.

Although scientific research strongly suggests that healing may be initiated, less certain is that everybody can sense the resonance and use it to ‘tune in’ to imbalanced areas by providing proper electromagnetic fingerprints. Able body-workers sense more and can develop brain rhythms that lead to stronger and more coherent magnetic fields which facilitate detection and repair in the receiver.

Biophysicist James Oschman has brought together evidence from a range of disciplines to provide an acceptable explanation for the energetic exchanges that take place in body-mind therapies. He addresses a growing interest in the role of natural energies in maintaining health and wellbeing. http://energymedicineuniversity.org/faculty/oschman.html

While solid knowledge is growing, much is still hypothetical and waits for scientific studies that can reject or confirm implicit beliefs and explicit statements.

~ Courtesy: Elise Pattyn

SCIENCE AND ASTROLOGY

It is scientific to say that without knowledge of scientific proof we cannot have an opinion, including about astrology. But a scientist would appreciate curious colleagues who take astrology as an object of study, just like chemists study molecules, economists study capitalism or physicists study gravity.

There is an endless number of hypotheses to be derived from the astrology books, tested and statistically analyzed. But even if a hundred hypotheses are rejected we can still not say that astrology has no validity because a much larger of number of hypotheses could be confirmed. On the other hand, even if a hundred hypotheses are confirmed we can still not say that astrology has validity because a much larger of number of hypotheses could be rejected.

The curious scientist may not only appreciate the testing of statistical relations between stellar constellations and human behaviors, but also value the physical research that increasingly confirms energy relations of different frequencies that occur at many levels, from the molecule to the universe, and may produce cause-and-effect relationships between the behaviors of stars and humans.

And the curious scientist, aware of what physicists have realized for long already, knows that cause-and-effect cannot explain everything that happens but that synchronicity sometimes replaces causal relations. For instance, in 1964 the scientist J.S. Bell, working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland, has found that the supposedly separate parts of the universe are in fact connected in an intimate and immediate way. It provides repeatedly tested proof that cause-and-effect thinking cannot explain everything.

The shocking news is that science has shown its own limitations. And even after half a century this conclusion is far from being understood in its consequences. The word synchronicity is the proper term to be applied here. The same word synchronicity may apply to what astrologers study.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem

PARADISE OR WISDOM

As fetuses and infants we live with subconscious illusions of total comfort, perfection, grandiosity, timelessness, limitlessness, centrality, almightiness and total control. We usually overcome such paradisiacal illusions only to a certain extent and ban, under pressures of the social and physical environment, other parts of those illusions to the back of our minds. Developmental psychology has been demonstrating those features since the 1970s.

Now, when conditions allow, those subconsciously remaining parts of infant illusions can grasp their chances, come back to the fore and infuse our feeling, thinking and acting. Growing wealth, social power, spiritual enlightenment, technology or car driving, for instance, can remobilize our undigested paradisiacal illusions, until real life unmasks our reappeared fantasies.

For quite some prominent people, overcoming the subconscious paradisiacal illusions of early childhood is just too hard. Instead of helping them to deal with reality on the ground, their fame or power inflated their illusions and made them derail, even to a fatal extent.

Exposed rapists such as IMF leader Dominique Strauss-Kahn and American TV hero Bill Cosby, or the  fatally addicted singer Amy Winehouse are recent examples.

Others, on the other hand, are fortunately in a position where they can honestly and courageously confront themselves with early paradisiacal illusions that are still lurking in them. They may even develop real wisdom.

SITUATIONAL AWARENESS: JUNGLE OR TEMPLE

Meditation calms down your racing mind, but is not meant to close yourself off from noticing what happens in yourself or depart for a dream in paradise. Meditation is meant to open yourself up and observe everything that happens, with all your senses and energy frequencies.

In that way, moments of meditation substitute the life that was permanently lived by our ancestors. They were constantly alert, always aware of details in their natural environment, with all their senses and energy frequencies relating to nature. For them, like for animals and plants, it was a matter of life or death to stay in contact with the environment.

That state can be called situational awareness. We have largely lost that capacity, at the cost of our health and natural recovery processes. While our urge to survive increasingly lost the need of situational awareness, this loss made us increasingly vulnerable for new diseases. But nowadays, attempts to relearn situational awareness are coming up and prevent those new diseases.

Now, to be certain, meditation was not only borne out of observational or relational impoverishment, or as a substitute for situational awareness. It came to add a second type of awareness, the awareness of awareness, the noticing that we notice.

Perhaps the challenge is to both recreate the old situational awareness for physical health purposes and further develop the consciousness of ourselves for spiritual health purposes, while considering that both processes have lots of inter-linkages.

http://origins.well.org/movie/

POSTMODERN EXTENDED FAMILIES

In the postmodern West we increasingly find children living in two households, one of their divorced mother and of one their divorced father. Not uncommon is that they meet children from the earlier marriage of their mother’s new man. Similarly their father may have a new wife with children from her earlier marriage and those children can also meet each other.

The children of those new partners may also live in the household of their other parent where they can meet, again, children of a new parent there. In  this way, chains of children meeting each other in different households arise.

It would be interesting to know how such kids adapt to the laterally extending family lines and how they bring their absorbed experiences into the wider world. As the new kinship system shows both more fragmentation and more integration, which is typical for postmodernity, this system may further contribute to postmodernity.

WOMEN AND THE OUTSIDE WORLD

Quite likely, women never ruled the ‘outside’ world. Matriarchal communities have been rare, whereas female figurines are shown to be unrelated to domination of either sex.

People in tribal societies, onwards from about 25,000 years ago, made small, voluptuous female figurines that are thought to represent nature, motherhood, fertility, creation, destruction or the bounty of the earth. Others believe these figurines were made by men to express their sexual longing for women.

Some believe the female figurines represent matriarchal or female-dominated society but there is no evidence for that belief, whereas in tribal societies women and men tend to only have a division of labor, with women mostly collecting plant food and men mostly collecting animal food, which remains unrelated to domination by either sex.

Furthermore, agrarian societies, from over the last 10,000 years, also made female figurines whereas these societies are clearly patriarchal or male dominated. Male dominance arose with agriculture with men gradually leaving the domain of hunting and pushing women out of control in the domain of plant food, although women kept working a lot in agriculture.

But we may not underestimate the indirect power of women if it comes to the ‘outside’ world. In the ‘inside’ world, women have a strong influence on what men do in the ‘outside’ world. As spouses and even more so as mothers they shape the behaviors of men, mostly along the lines of the particular cultures that women and men live in.

COMPUTERS, MANAGERS AND MERGERS

Three historical reforms blew through the company when I worked there before I could go for university studies. But they were far from the idealistic flower power, democratization,  decolonization and anti-racism movements of those revolutionary 1960s. Sure, the sixties brought revolution, but in the world of business revolution had other faces.

Most conspicuous for us, workers at Spaarnestad, leading magazine and book publishers, was the invasion of the computer. Reliable, respected bookkeepers were swept under the table or disappeared with heart diseases and stomach ulcers when the new wind demanded to adjust or perish, while others relished about the new opportunities provided by the dynamic computer department headed by Mr. Tuinman. I can still see him before me.

The second trend that emerged was the shift of emphasis from technical leaders to financial managers. Mr. De Goeij, a sophisticated printing engineer, got the smart economist Mr Emondts at his side, if not above him. Emondts rapidly transformed the company of technicians, writers and artists into a machinery geared towards pleasing the shareholders and paying bonuses.

The third change came when a series of mergers with other printing and publishing companies took place, Geïllustreerde Pers, headed by Mr Charles De Roy van Zuydewijn, being the largest partner. The new company came to be called United Dutch Publishers (VNU). The aim was to get bigger and bigger, with higher and higher positions for the managers, a not unattractive prospect for the leading negotiators. The managers physically cut the ties with the workers by leaving their buildings and settling as the central board of directors in a luxurious villa.

Predictably, the leaders shifted their interest from content matter to the selling and buying of companies at the international market. In fact, their focus moved from Holland to Wall Street. They sold the magazines for € 1.25 billion to the Finnish company Sanoma in 2001. For € 5.8 billion they bought IMS Health, a company that sells data for the sales of medicines to companies in the pharmaceutical and medical sector, if you can still follow me.

Sometimes I think back of those days in the sixties, when I did research on behalf of advertisers in VNU publications, clients that provided 80% of all income. The three new trends were introduced to us as refreshing and promising innovations, while many of us understood they might bring more alienation, uncertainty and income loss for workers and consumers than for managers.

                                        Spaarnestad directors Lucas, De Goeij and Emondts

 The Spaarnestad office building where I worked

                                       VNU head quarters in the rich village of Aerdenhout

EXPLAINING DUTCH CULTURE

Dutch tolerance and cooperation relate to water but do not, as is often said, come from living in low polders that frequently risk to be flooded. Polders are the result of a city culture that, in turn, derives from the culture of tribal groups canoeing around in the creeks and rivers here. They started to settle at dunes consisting of sand and pebbles transported from the mountains and deposited in the lowlands by those rivers. In their tiny dune villages, the tribal groups adjusted their typical culture of deliberation and cooperation to the new circumstances and some of them managed to survive by fishing in the water bodies and gathering and hunting at the seasonally drier lands. Gradually villages and towns developed on the higher sand dunes, while the marshlands were left uninhabited.

In later stages, agrarian societies developed in mainland Europe, with kings and emperors fighting wars with each other and subduing societies at the outskirts of their domains, including the present-day coastal provinces in the Netherlands. But their heavy armies, trained to battle on dry lands, found it hard to enter the wetlands. They either left the area to itself or met with losses and defeat if they tried to subdue the tribal communities here. Meanwhile the tribals interacted with the agrarian societies for trade and transport and acquired parts of those cultures that they found useful, while preserving key tribal traits. Their villages developed into towns thriving on maritime and river transport which, in turn, reinforce their capacities to defend themselves in military ways. The burgers of those towns also built the financial, technological and organizational capacities to turn the surrounding marshes and lakes into polders and start cultivating and inhabiting the new, fertile lands.

Unlike the European kingdoms and empires where hierarchy and intolerance was growing, in the towns of the Dutch coastal provinces tolerance, deliberation, cooperation, equality, freedom and independence were preserved. The group portraits of city guards and male and female regents of the seventeenth century, the Night Watch as the most famous one, tell the story of the relatively large equality and independence in the towns. This culture deserves not to be called ‘polder model’ but ‘burger model’. It is this burger model that is not the effect but the cause of collectively managing the polders.

SEE FAMILY LIFE TO KNOW SOCIETY

If we want to understand a society, let alone would wish to bring about certain changes in a society, there’s no need to ask for the national budget deficit, nor for the official government structure, important export products, turnover of corporations, employment figures, infant mortality rates, art forms or tourist resorts. We best ask for the prevailing kinship system.

Why? Because at home children learn how people relate to each other. These behavioral patterns they internalize subconsciously and, as adults, tend to reproduce the acquired behaviors in the wider society. That repetition is facilitated by other adults who have learned patterns of social relationships in more or less similar home situations.

The subconscious is crucial in the internalization and reproduction of behaviors. It is our subconscious brain that decides on what we think, feel and act. In this way, our subconscious makes us largely fit in with existing behaviors at school, at work, in politics, in the traffic, in enjoying art, and follow the media. Finally, our subconscious makes us behave at home, as adults in the family, in ways that we have learned as children. Even styles of deviation from those behaviors may have been picked up in childhood at home.

It is also because of the subconscious character of shared behavioral patterns that it is hard to bring about changes at will, both in ourselves and in others, let alone if there is a lack of motivation to bring about modifications.

PEACE AND FOOD

Again sleepless nights for many because of warfare and terrorism, but if we want to redress death and injury we’d better look at diseases. Oh, yeah, they are not in the news like bomber planes and terrorist attacks, but diseases can reach us easier and more lethally than warfare and lawlessness. Much easier.

About 60 million people die every year out of whom less than 5 million through violence, road traffic, suicide and the like. This makes diseases accounting for nearly 90% of all deaths in the world, each year.

Of course, we have to consider old age as a natural contributor to diseases. One way to bring in aging is by comparing countries. Worldwide, the average life expectancy at birth is about 70 years but average Africans do not live longer than 50 years and many others also do not reach 70.

The early arrival of their death comes from diseases, among adults, but even more so among children. They are vulnerable for diseases mostly because of malnutrition, and a lack of proper food is especially fatal for children. About nearly 7 million children under the age of five die each year.

But here and there is the mistaken belief that poverty cannot be alleviated while we can stop warfare by demonstrations, media attention and perhaps even by voting. Meanwhile, the reality is that both poverty and warfare are ongoingly produced by the established power structure. Therefore, the reduction of both poverty and warfare requires modifications in the established power structure.

To pursue such modifications, we may understand that we sometimes get too easily carried away by emotions and that governments, corporations and media feed on that tendency. In order to redress this tendency in us, we can reinforce our capacities to collect numbers and see proportions, so that we rank our priorities independently and sensibly. In the course of time, this power undermines the societal establishment that produces poverty and warfare.

PRIORITY BOMBING

The Islamic State killed about 1,000 people and more than 100,000 Kurds want to go back home, so the US chases Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, leader of the Islamic State, and bombs his terrorist army.

The Assad regime killed about 100,000 Syrians and more than 1,000,000 Syrians want to go back home, but the US does not chase Bashar Hafiz al-Assad, president of Syria, and does not bomb his terrorist army.

The Israeli government killed about 100,000 Palestinians and more than 5,000,000 Palestinians want to go back home, but the US does not chase Benjamin Netanyahu, prime-minister of Israel, and does not bomb his terrorist army.

NOW AND THEN

NOW AND THEN
Trying to simply forget the past is self-delusionary. It’s like intending to walk on three legs. Although it is not always a very welcome message, our behavior is guided by our subconscious and that is also where our history is stored. If we want to live without our history, we’d better learn to explore that subconscious and digest it, or it will go on guiding us, in ways that may be quite different from what we want to think or do. 
This contradicts the here-and-now approach that is emerging as part of the post-modern, a-historic, quick-fix, individualist happiness culture. But we can only let go of what we have acknowledged to the fullest extent. Here-and-now exercises can be of help if they guide us in bravely identifying our unwanted behaviors and either digest their subconscious origins or consciously step out of those origins. But anyway we have to learn dealing with the heat of our unwanted behaviors.

Well, it took a long while before humanity accepted that the Sun was not circling around the Earth, and quite a while before humanity accepted that climate change was a reality. Now we may need time to accept that we are guided by our subconscious. Of course, to deny that is expensive, but let’s be patient anyway.

http://www.apa.org/science/about/psa/2009/10/sci-brief.aspx

FADING IMAGES

As many parts of the world, the hills of Northeast India, hidden between Bangladesh and Birma, were once covered by virgin forests and thinly inhabited by tribal people. Rainfall was abundant, the diverse vegetation and the fertile soils retained the water and fed the rivers throughout the year. Women collected plant food without degrading the natural resources. Men burned strips of forest to rout game or prepare for one-time crops. The bands of people were small and the forests vast enough to not being depleted. Spirits were felt living in the trees and rivers, plants and animals. 

It was not the paradise of Adam and Eve. The forest was full of danger. Spirits could be unnerving. Customs were harshly maintained to preclude overexploitation of nature, regulate life in the village and keep warfare with neighboring tribes within limits. The sense of belonging and meaning of life fitted the natural and social conditions without question. It all contributed to survival of the communities. 

From elsewhere modernity comes. The nation-state army and other state organizations directed from Delhi took over from the British. Transferred technologies increases production. Allopathic medicine makes more people live longer. Farmers start to sell wood on the market and raise cash-crops over large stretches of slope, impoverishing the bio-diversity and the capacity to retain water. Slash-and-burn practices become disastrous with increased populations and shrinking forest areas. During monsoons water and top soils wash away. The dry seasons see less water seeping through and river beds dry up. Slopes of bare rock appear in the aftermath of modernity. 

Privatization of land, individual market operations, northern-based school education, returning migrants, the television - all undermine the old behavioral patterns. As social sanctions erode, including for sexual behaviors, promiscuity is on the rise and contributes to epidemic forms of AIDS. Civil servants of local origin, not used to the impersonal expenditure of public funds, keep the money for themselves and neglect the maintenance of roads and terracing of slopes. 

The surface of modernity is embraced; deeper tribal identity is vanishing. Along with the erosion of slopes, the sense of belonging, meaning of life, and respect for the self, others, nature and the spiritual world disappear. 

While here we joggled in our jeep over bad roads, the last discussions with villagers in mind, it dawned on me that I had been humming a particular song for a while. Nina Simone ever sang it. It was about an originally African tribal woman, losing her identity and self-esteem in the hostile and fundamentally different society of New York. In vain I tried to remember the text. Once back home, I found it. It goes like this:

IMAGES  

She does not know her beauty

She thinks her brown body has no glory

If she could dance naked under palm trees

And see her image in the river

Then she would know, yes she would know

But there’re no palm trees on the street

No palm trees on the street

And dish water gives back no images 

The tribals of Northeast India, as in many parts of the world, are heading for something similar. They lose their nature and they lose their soul. Modernity is a bridge too far. The image in the river is fading away.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMDQ6b_bEhs

HUMANITY SURVIVAL

Here is my ranking of what endangers the survival of humanity most. Like to rearrange the list?

1.     Depletion of ground water

2.     Depletion of fish in the oceans

3.     Deforestation

4.     Global warming

5.     Ocean acidification

6.     Processed food poisoning

7.     Decreasing plant resistance

8.     Pollution of ground water

9.     Pollution of surface water

10. Pollution of air

11. Pollution of soils

12.  Road traffic accidents

13.  Warfare

14.  Economic crisis

15.  Terrorism

16. Depletion of oil reserves

More than 70% of the groundwater stock is being withdrawn.

http://www.geowords.org/ensci/12/12.htm

Global fish stocks are exploited or depleted to such an extent that without urgent measures we may be the last generation to catch food from the oceans.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120920-are-we-running-out-of-fish 

A SENSIBLE SOCIETY

What happens in so-called democracies, let alone in dictatorships, is that new governments replace cabinet ministers and top officials, bring about some minor changes in the distribution of the national budget and let strong ministers and officials indulge in ego-trips.

A sensible society installs a government that solves or reduces the most important problems of that society. For that purpose, this society first makes an inventory of most important problems by consulting all citizens in such a way that the citizens come to understand how to identify main problems and the consultation results are processed in a priority list. There are plenty computer programs available to do that job.

How can we help citizens help identifying main problems in a society? First of all by thinking about criteria. For instance, is the number of people that yearly die in the traffic or because of suicide of more or of less importance than the risk that a terrorist attack takes place, or that the average income per capita decreases or rises. Again, there are plenty of techniques available to help citizens sort out such choices. Much depend on the skills of drafting proper questionnaires.

Once the priority list is compiled, the new government is to solve or reduce the listed problems according to the established priority. At the end of its term the government is to account for what they were assigned for. Just like it goes for sports coaches, a successful government may get another term or is replaced by another government.

DON'T BLAME IT FOR BEING MISUSED

Don’t blame technology for being misused.

Don’t blame money for being misused.

Don’t blame sports for being misused.

Don’t blame statistics for being misused.

Don’t blame psychology for being misused.

Don’t blame astrology for being misused.

Don’t blame the Bible for being misused.

Don’t blame the Koran for being misused.

Don’t blame the Torah for being misused.

Don’t blame communism for being misused.

Don’t blame capitalism for being misused.

Don’t blame politics for being misused.

Don’t blame sexuality for being misused.

Don’t blame social media for being misused.

Don’t even blame the misuse and the misusers.

Just try and improve the use.

HOME COMING

Nobody alive is absent or neutral. Yet, many professionals, though often for well-intending reasons, pursue an imaginary absence or neutrality of their person or ego. It goes for the psychotherapist, the questionnaire sociologist, the test psychologist, the fieldwork anthropologist which is my profession, economists more in tune with each other than with outside reality, physicists ignoring quantum duality¸ the medical doctor, the spiritual healer, the guru and the priest as well as it goes for the teacher, the police, the judge, the journalist and the official media. While having in mind scientific rules, the law, contracts, training, the Spirit, the God, the government, professional ethics or maintaining law and order, they try to be a proper scientist, a warm-hearted inspiration, a pure transmitter, a critical reporter or just ruler.

But since the 1960s it is increasingly acknowledged that professional objectives of being absent or neutral are impossible to realize. Even quite some gurus, pretending to be enlightened, are exposed as not having realized such enlightenment. It is therefore more realistic for all these professionals to, scaring as it may seem to be, openly acknowledge and discuss the personal signals we emit and the biases that guide our behaviors. It makes our work more complex but, contrary to earlier beliefs, also more trustworthy and effective when we leave ivory towers and holy mountains, and come back home where the people live.

In order to facilitate our descend into the real world, we may look into our early childhood. To the extent that in this period we have remained subconsciously unseen by our mothers, we may find it hard to manifest ourselves. To the same extent we may imitate the example of our mothers and imagine ourselves as personally absent or as absent among others in the common world. To maintain such imaginary absence, our professions provide a justification, but it goes at the cost professional quality. Personal introspection and social honesty would improve the effects of our professions.

RICH AND POOR IN THE FUTURE

It is not new that humanity has a gap between rich and poor and that economic growth may benefit both rich and poor but does not narrow the gap between rich and poor. Also not new is that since Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Antonio Gramsci, many authors have exposed economic inequality and called for protest. Notably after the Second World War a long train of other critical writers stood up: Mao Zedong, André Gunder Frank, Harry Magdoff, Ernest Feder, Teresa Hayter, Noam Chomsky, Arundhati Roy, Norena Hertz, Naomi Klein, Kishore Mahbubani, Thomas Piketti, Rana Dasgupta and Hervé Kempf, to mention just a few. Also not new is that their exposures and calls for action have in the long run not changed society.

INCORPORATED

New is that most of these authors are no longer seen as dangerous outcastes who have to be silenced or at least ignored. They are co-opted or incorporated by the dominant system and seen as part of the intellectual class. Many are regularly discussed in universities and in the media.

EQUALLY ROGUE

In the Non-West economic growth shows itself in a rogue character that has no parallel. In Jakarta, Shanghai, Rio de Janeiro, Mumbai, Lagos, Sao Paulo, Moscow, Delhi, Johannesburg, Beijing, Caracas, Bandung or Cairo there arises a generation of arrogant, aggressive, ultra-materialistic new wealthy people that unleash a savage type of capitalism. They benefit from both cheap labor at home and liberalization and privatization policies initiated by the World Bank and the IMF.

Meanwhile, this rogue capitalism is not only seen as an unavoidable stage in economic development as happened in the West, but is increasingly expected to not calm down, as in the West, and remain as it is. Along with this reality, the West, after a relatively 'calm' period, now breeds an equally savage type of capitalism. In this state, western capitalism gets closely related to its savage partners elsewhere while now operates on a more equal footing.

GROWING CARE

Along with the rise of global economic roguishness, protests are changing in character. They seem to transform from street marches, riots and outright physical violence, under the banner of class struggle and led by trade unionists, politicians, generals and guerilla fighters, to the undermining of the credibility of political systems and private corporations by growing information, including the use of social media. The awareness results in boycotts of political elections and questionable consumer goods.

Next to that, initiatives arise which focus on psychological and spiritual change at the personal level. Inner peace is hoped to divert attention to the rat race of the economic growth model and a growing care for the inner self, other people and the physical environment.

SCARCITY

So far, proclaiming that continued economic growth will ultimately destroy the planet and human life has neither stopped large masses of people from aiming at more consumption, nor stopped the ultra-rich from their roguish practices. The first key question is how long and in what ways economic growth will remain to be jointly embraced by the masses and the ultra-rich. The second key question is at what point in time a looming environmental disaster will make the roguish rich start reserving sparse resources for themselves. The third key question is whether the masses will let the gap between rich and poor grow further or finally start open fights with the roguish rich and narrow the gap.

NO MONEY FOR DEVELOPMENT

Why do I, after 40 years of experience with development work, not give money for such activities.

Small, personal initiatives by a western women or men aimed at distributing money or materials can benefit some poor people but create feelings of relative deprivation in others. Also, such distribution projects do not change the social structure and personal motivation that create or contribute to poverty. What is more, many of such projects divert energy and talent away from development.

Larger private projects invite for corruption once the donor and receiving organizers get established interests and tend to share more and more money and other benefits jobs among themselves. Large government-to-government programs show the same types of corruption. Also here, projects aiming at distribution of benefits divert energy and talent away from development.

To my mind, the best help that can be offered by westerners is to first of all get thoroughly familiar with the local society and the misery that may exist and learn to not escape from acknowledging or digesting such realities by emotionally motivated interventions. That means, first develop yourself.

Second, mature and wise people, perhaps more to be found among elderly than among youngsters, may stay for longer periods with local populations and support them in their search for feasible opportunities within the given reality by getting your feet on the ground.

There are good examples of experienced, retired couples ready to live for some years among poor people. Hardly any money is needed for such activities.

Now, imagine the situation wherein clean water is not available because upstream a chemical factory discharges industrial poisons or a large plantation applies agricultural chemicals with the result that, downstream, the river and the groundwater get polluted. Then the local victims face powerful companies, along with civil servants and politicians that are bribed or intimidated by such companies.

What the victims’ community may help is the long-term presence of reliable and experienced people who can support the community in their struggle against the polluting companies and responsible authorities. For such struggles not finances but skilful and persistent communicators are needed who contribute to the capacity building of the local population so that these local people can defend their interests better in the future.

PATRIARCHY

Both Hinduism and Christianity were reshaped by patriarchal establishments.

The patriarchal establishment of ancient Hinduism banned earthly realism and made people believe that the spirit rules over matter and that the hierarchical caste system is an unavoidable result of the afterlife and the before life.

The patriarchal establishment of ancient Christianity banned the free spirit as expressed by the gnosis and made people believe that spiritual experience is controlled by the church.

Hinduism brainwashed people into acceptance of inequality by cherishing the spirit. Christianity brainwashed people into acceptance of inequality by controlling the spirit.