Category Archives: Psychology

Metaphysics, Modern Living, Psychology, Spiritual Practice

The Good, The Bad and the Conundrum of Activism

4 Comments

The Good, the Bad and

The Conundrum of Activism

The Trigger: This article was triggered by an interview of Francis A. Boyle, Human Rights Activist and Professor of International Law on CHD TV. What we learn in this interview is that the U.N. banned the use of biological weapons in an International Convention adopted in 1971.The United States signed on in 1972 with both bodies of Congress voting for it. In 1989 the U.S. added to the International Law its own prohibition with the U.S. Code 175-an addition to the Terrorism Act! Code 175 says “whoever knowingly develops, produces, stockpiles, transfers, acquires, retains or possesses any biological agent toxin, or delivery system for use as a weapon shall be fined or imprisoned for life or any term of years”

So, it is a criminal offense to be developing these weapons with a maximum sentence of life imprisonment (the lawyers and politicians who drew up the act didn’t like capital punishment lol) And yet since at least the 80’s under Ronald Reagan American scientists have been doing exactly that and keeping it undercover! We can understand their justifications: ”The Russians and the Chinese are doing it so we musn’t get behind”. Excuses, excuses! This is VERY dangerous stuff. And at this point ,I am convinced that Covid-19 Sars 2 is a product of that research! And it could get worse!

The thought immediately came to mind:  ”How could people be so evil, so reckless, so self-serving? I guess I am still naïve! This kind of evil has been going on for a long, long time. The Romans crucifying people and throwing them to the lions. The medieval tortures like the Iron Maiden. The Jews led into the gas chambers. The list goes on and on!

I still remember Sheikh Nazim in Peckham , London during one Ramadan in the 80’s saying “We are now under the hegemony of shaytan” and thinking “I think he’s going too far”! And hegemony was a word that should have been outside of his TurkEnglish vocabulaty lol. But, no, he was absolutely right. And those wooly-minded thinkers like Steven Pinker (“The Better Angels of our Nature”) and their data-analysis approach are sorely out of touch. No news there lol!

So…can it really be that bad?! And the simple answer is “Yes!”. Besides the usual human rights abuses like those of the Uighurs in China, the Chinese harvesting organs from Falum Dung members(that’s a new one but not dissimilar to the Nazis doing “scientific” experiments on Jews and not so long ago the Japanese torturing Chinese and Korean opposition forces, we now have a new slew of evil habits.

Let us name a few. So we have researchers in the U.S. and then in China doing “gain of function” research and calling it vaccine research which it clearly wasn’t. We have American pharma companies, exempt from all legal liabilities, having public health authorities mandating their ”safe and effective” vaccines (which were neither) to the entire population. We have large institutions- private and public- including universities (no surprise there .New and critical thinking left those premises a long time ago.)We have prestigious medical journals blocking the publication of useful research into repurposed medications for treatment and instead publishing misleading research some of which was so bad they had to retract the articles themselves. We have decades of vaccine mandates for children without any placebo-controlled studies and no long-term research on their overall effects on children. The list goes on and on! Man’s creativity in the field of mischief is truly astounding! No lack of new ideas there.

Once our inner vision begins to see all this, we may well feel overwhelmed and hopeless. How could this be and what can we do about it?” we may well ask. In Islam we were recommended to go to the hills with our sheep when the Last Days were approaching! Are we there yet?! We may well be but before we all become forest dwellers and hermits ( but btw the forests are no longer safe either nor the water in remote areas. In the forests we now have a plethora of ticks and Lyme disease and some of the most remote lakes are so contaminated with heavy metals that there are no fish left!) So there is no real refuge left!

There may however be a simpler answer. We need to seriously remember that, in any case, we are only here for a temporary period. As I like to remind myself and others from time to time, “the fatality rate of Earthly existence is 100%!” Sorry for the bad news, but none of us is going to survive anyway! So perhaps we should be thinking of the after-life and how best to be right with our Creator. Nothing else will do and nothing else can be so beneficial. All the religions teach that more or less! As say the A.A. people: ” Let go and let God”. He (the Light of the Heavens and the Earth) is the only trustworthy protector. All the others are destined to fail.

But what I really wanted to address in this article ,since good and evil have been contemplated from the beginning of time, is the question of activism. This question emerges out of the observation of endemic evil and what do we do about. Many times in history social activism and political theories have tried to address and redress the problem. Perhaps the most obvious in recent history was and still is Marxism. According to that philosophy, the problem is the exploitation of the working class and the solution is “The dictatorship of the proletariat”. We see where that got us when we look at Russia and China and North Korea to name but a few examples.

But nowadays we have newer and more limited actors in the field of activism-like “Doctors without Borders” trying to help people in war zones and “Amnesty International” trying to protect political prisoners, and Greenpeace and other environmental groups trying to protect the planet. One thing that surprized me in my practice as a psychiatrist was that the clients I saw who were in intimate relationships with these N.G.O. types were some of the people who were most disappointed by their relationships. It made no sense! Good people, no? Amnesty International, Médecins sans Frontières-how could these be bad people! As I contemplated this conundrum, I realized what was going on. These N.G.O. types were ideologues-people of principle! Often their hearts were dead. In fact they were so insensitive that it took really gross abuses in their environment to be able to fell anything! It sort of made sense!

Btw, I have my own personal history with activism! It started with student newspapers in high school and university, continued with protests against Canadian complicity in the Vietnam war and ended with Marxist medical services in a Community Clinic. It is a long story that I will only be able to tell it adequately when I eventually write my autobiography. Inshallah. But let me highlight a few episodes that eventually led to my disillusionment with this approach.

While I was at the community Clinic in East End Montreal I participated in a legitimate strike at a company called Carter White Lead. Many of the  workers there   were actually suffering from documented lead poisoning. We had a toxicologist on board who confirmed the diagnosis. In my mind I still held the slogan of “the dictatorship of the proletariat”lol. That was our salvation!.Boy can we be delusional at times! As an example it took Sartre, admittedly a brilliant man, more than a decade after being made aware of it  to denounce what was going on in Russia at the time of Stalin . In the meantime he had denounced Camus who was his informant in this matter as “intellectually not up to the task of analyzing the subtleties of the Russian Revolution ”(paraphrasing here).I still know very intelligent scholars who are unwilling to denounce Stalin. Their names will remain anonymous lol

 

When I saw this “proletariat” at Carter White Lead, my gut reaction was: ”These people in charge of our government?! No, thanks!” I had my first breakthrough!

Then I went to China with a group of community workers. That was 1973 and the Cultural Revolution was still going on but well-hidden from our view. We went to a school and when one of my companions, a College teacher at the time, realized that the principal of the school was earning much more than the workers and he confronted the workers about this inequality (which went against all Marxist principle) they said it was alright. He literally had a melt-down and a few hours later had to be rushed to the hospital with acute pneumonia! If you ever needed a clear example of a psycho-somatic reaction, this was a spectacular one. This fellow’s entire world had fallen apart Many people lost their faith in Marxism after that trip! Some melted into the “soft left” like the N.D. P. in Canada . Others, like myself, left activism and politics for good!

The third event that closed the chapter on Marxism for me was a large meeting of leftists, unionists and hard-core Marxist Leninists under the umbrella of a Marxist Group called “En Lutte” . At the head table were all the major leaders of the left wing. And when I saw them, it was obvious. ”No way, José” This group would be far worse than the current government under Robert Bourassa at the time. That was the last straw .Bye-bye Marx.

Another paradoxical thing I realized during these events, and I believe it is still true nowadays, is that the left-wing leaders treated their intimate partners much worse than their conservative homologues! Doesn’t make sense, right?! They are humanists and progressives and yet in their relationships they are egotistical, unfaithful and hedonistic.

You can see the same phenomena in American politics! Compare how the Bush’s and Reagan were with their wives to the string of philandering Kennedy’s all the way down to the present iteration. Yes there were exceptions like Carter and Obama on the Democrat side and Trump for the Republicans. But “the exception confirms the rule” as they say. If you are a woman, I would stay away from progressives lol

There is so much more I could say but the two major points I really wanted to raise in this article were the state of the world -where evil reigns forcing us to adapt to it and the particular conundrum posed by the latest iteration of a Kennedy, in the person of RFKjr,

The latter has presented a particular dilemma for Truth-seekers like myself. On the one hand, I agree with almost everything he says. It is all well-documented and referenced and he is very careful to get the facts right. I agree with almost everything he proposes to do in getting rid of the “captured” health agencies and government institutions. Perhaps the only thing I disagree with is trying to run for the Democratic party. I am convinced they will run him out of the primary as they did with Bernie Sanders in a previous election . But RFKjr. is a very strategic person and may well be using the Democratic platform to gain visibility and then planning to run for a third or fourth party once the Democrats succeed in running him out of town as they are almost sure to do.

None of this is problematic for me! But what is seriously problematic is his “ghoulish” presence! There is something deeply wrong with this man and it has nothing whatsoever to do with his voice. I have tried to come to some convincing conclusion about what that is but for now it evades me. Could it be what he calls “the lust demons” which have been haunting his family including his father and two of his uncles going all the way back to his grandfather?! Or could it be unresolved substance use which he has apparently conquered (Btw I saw a similar thing in the famous Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers and then learnt that he uses Ayahuasca as a means of spiritual upliftment. Ok. Case closed there!)

But there may be another explanation-at least a partial one- which applies to many, many people-Activism!? You see the real problem of activism is that it focuses on the negative. Even though it is attempting to resolve the problems, it can easily become obsessed with them. I saw that in medicine and psychiatry as well. My first wife, a true California Spiritual seeker nlol, confronted me with that: ” That’s the problem with you psychiatrists” she said in a moment of fury. You are in love with neurosis” She had a point.

My own Dad, who was by no means an intellectual, had the same issue. Although he had some dyslexia, I believe, he was so interested in history and politics that he worked his way through the entire set of volumes by Will and Ariel Durant called “The History of Civilization”! His conclusion: “Man is worse than animals ”. That was his final statement about Reality! And despite the fact that his argument is well-taken, it ultimately led him in the wrong direction. My own direction is the opposite! I go, rather, by the statement of Sheikh Hashimi of Damascus. ”Fi kooli shay khairan”(in everything there is good)What a revelation?! God created us, He knows more than anyone else our foibles and our defects. He created us that way. And he will lead us to the right path, if we trust in Him and follow His guidance. If, on the other hand, we follow the god of our own minds we are doomed to failure and disappointment. I am still working on it. And I hope you will be inspired to do likewise. Salaams, Sufi Ibrahim

Metaphysics, Modern Living, Psychology

Herd Mentality and Education

Leave a comment

If the real goal of our educational system was not the stated one- of teaching critical thinking- but rather, as proposed by researchers like John Taylor Gatto ( may his soul rest in peace), to generate ” herd mentality” in the population, they have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams! In the field of medicine only the geniuses and sincere Truth-seekers like Andrew Wakefield and Paul Thomas and Pierre Kory and Paul Marik and Peter McCullough and a few others have been able to pierce the multiple layers of propaganda to see what is really going on. Kudos to the Rockefellers and Carnegies that financed this “revolution” in education. They will ultimately have to answer for their mischievous ways. For the rest of us, it is incumbent upon us that we systematically and thoroughly detox our minds and hearts from this academic poison! God be with us!

Psychology, Spiritual Practice, Sufism

The Four Klesas

Leave a comment

The Four Klesas and the Four Responses

The Buddhists have a lot of interesting classifications for states of mind. Most of them are completely consistent with Sufi Islamic principles and in some sense provide a unique and clear formulation that is “actionable” on the spiritual path. One of these formulations is  the 5 klesas.

The 5 klesas (obstacles to Enlightenment) are Attachment/desire, Aversion, laziness,agitation and doubt.For the sake of clarity I have reduced the list to four.I consider both laziness and agitation to be a derivatives of the others-laziness being a product of doubt and desire and agitation being a derivative of fear and anger.I  have also divided Aversion into its two distinct components of Anger and Fear.

So we are left with 4 klesas that we need to struggle against-Desire; Anger/upsetness; Fear/worry and Doubt. So here are the responses we can use as we come up against these four states on a daily basis. This is a formula for serious and effective spiritual struggle that can be done by anyone serious about their path.

1-Desire:

Response: This thought is a lie, a trick of my mind .Even if I managed to obtain the object I am wishing for,I would still not get the ultimate satisfaction it is promising!

2- Anger (upsetness):

This too is from God and has a purpose. How could this have been worse?Allah will bring this matter to its proper conclusion!

3-Fear/worry:

Allah is aware of everything that is happening including this. Do your “due diligence”, follow your inspirations in managing it and trust in God.Tawakultu aleyhi wa hua rabbal Arsh al Atheem.(Trust in god and He is the Best of Managers)

4-Doubt:

There is no Doubt. God Exists, He is aware of everything ,He is Just and He will bring it all to the right conclusion.

So try it out and see how much you can shift your consciousness with this simple formula!

Salaams, Sufi Ibrahim

 

 

3

Psychology, Spiritual Practice, Sufism

The “work” trap

3 Comments

Notes on the Spiritual Process

Asalamu aleykum,brothers and sisters. . It is so easy to slip in this way! Once we are solidly set in our goals, we may well be free from major sins like zina and alcohol and drug addiction. However the four klesas of desire, anger, fear and doubt are never far away and we have to be vigilant! That is arguably the biggest part of our work!

However, there is another danger that may be greater than either of the two aforementioned ones! And that is “ghafflat” ((negligence, unawareness) and ironically that “ghafflat” may be about what is perfectly halal or even obligatory! Like doing our work or our studies or taking care of our family . Good works, no?! Yes, but only within proper limits.

When I reflect on North American society ,and this is probably true in all “developed “ countries, there is only one virtue left! All the classic ones of piety and modesty and humility and obedience have been put aside. And all that is left is hard work. An excess of that is called “workaholism” in modern psychology. But it is much more common than many people think. For now, my definition is “any productive activity that sucks up all your energy(which may include getting to work and recuperating from work and preparing for work) and leaves your energy tank empty for your relationship with your Creator. More than 100 years ago the sociologist Max Weber wrote about this subject in a famous book called “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism”. However this problem now applies to all religions- not just Protestantism. In fact, because of the hegemony of the Anglophone culture first via Great Britain and now via the U.S.A. we could say we are all Protestants lol

So what do I propose here? We must certainly be vigilant. But I will go further and suggest a potential structural solution to this-in two parts. The first being basic Islam and the second being Sufi practices.

1) We have the salat five times daily. However, I would like to reframe this practice -less about obligation and more about opportunity-the opportunity to take a break from work and refocus on our relationship with our Creator (the spiritual project!). Forget about everything else-your worries, your deadlines, your finances) and at five points during the day commune with your Creator. And watch the effects!

2) Dhikr (Sufi practice).Set aside two time periods  in  24 hours  to do your dhikr practices. One of them  should be tahhajjud time and the other a time of your choosing. Some of the Sufis have suggested the time between Asr and Maghrib but that might not work for your schedule. So it could be in the evening-if you have the energy(remember we need to be honest with ourselves as well!).Or after your siesta in the early afternoon. Whatever works for you. The time interval could be anything from one-half hour(least amount to get benefit) to one and a half-half  hours(a total of 3 hours as recommended by the Tijani people and Kundalini Yoga alike).See what you can manage .Build this two-faceted structure into your daily schedule and commit to it -as you commit to your work deadlinesJust don’t slip into ghafflat because your ‘hal’ will definitely suffer for it.

Salaams, keepimg you AND me on our toes lol. Sufi Ibrahim

Holistic Medicine, Metaphysics, Modern Living, Psychology

Epistemology-Based Medicine

Leave a comment

Epistemology-based Medicine:

A Superior Formula to “Evidence-based” Medicine.

Everywhere one goes in the field of medicine, and in science in general, we find the term “evidence-based”. They are even trying to use the term in politics and business. And mostly, if it isn’t an outright lie, it’s almost invariably a manipulation. For one thing it is a theory that has never been tested-a kind of medical catechism! For those who say it’s too difficult to test, that too is a lie.

Here is the simple protocol in my own field of psychiatry. Take one group, the experimental group and require that all the physicians justify each decision on the basis of a published article in the peer-reviewed literature-especially the prestigious ones like The American Journal of Psychiatry or The Annals of Psychiatry or the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry or the British Journal of Psychiatry (plenty to choose from lol).Then have the control group use just what they already know, their previous clinical experience and their clinical judgment. Then compare the results in a relatively simple diagnosis- like Major Depression where the rating scales are both valid and reliable.

But, just like the vaccine-mandate issue, which took more than 30 years to study! in the obvious format(anti-vaxxers vs. full CDC protocol vaxxers) no one wants to do this simple design study. They are afraid of the results! Personally, I would predict that the results would be more or less equivalent. But it is also quite possible that the docs using the evidence-based approach would do less well because of the rigidity implied by the model. That would destroy the entire church of “evidence-based science”! And no-one wants that-least of all the McGill University “expert” who completely lost it on me when I dared suggested  this model. So much for objective science lol.

I first came in contact with this problem in the 1980’s when I was asked to teach a course on psychiatric research to the McGill Psychiatry residents. I came across a brilliant researcher who had reviewed the previous 10 years of psychiatric literature. What he did was study the career trajectory and theoretical biases of the lead authors (biological psychiatry, pharmacologically oriented, psychoanalytic and CBT mostly). Without reading the article he came to a conclusion about the authors’ preferred therapeutic approach. Not one of the published articles came to a conclusion contrary to what the bias of the lead author was expected to be! So much for objective science! And I am sure this is true in many other areas of medicine and science as well! Som what like asking a Democrat whether he would prefer Trump or Biden in the next election lol

In fact, there are many, many serious problems with this “evidence-based” approach. One of them was highlighted by a well-known researcher in ADHD who presented at the Canadian Psychiatric Conference ( I will protect her anonymity for now as we have to protect these brave, outspoken members of our medical community!). She stated clearly and courageously: ”Give me a break with evidence-based medicine! We will never have enough well-done studies to cover all the myriad decisions we need to make on a daily basis in medicine” Spot on! Bingo! In fact there are not enough resources in all the research funds available in all the world to do all those studies.

Other serious problems with “evidence-based” approaches include the following:

  • Ideological beliefs of the researchers
  • bias due to the funding of the research. This is probably the most universally recognized issue. Yet little is actually done about it.I know that at Psychiatric Conferences there is a ritualistic practice of citing all potential conflicts of interest. Then the presenter continues as if nothing he stated about his funding had any relevance! Pure and utter hypocrisy!

3) the constant statistical bugaboos of “selection bias” (look at the benzodiazepine studies in my field- almost all designed by anti-benzo activists) and “confounding variables” (no matter how much the researchers say they control for them!)

4) the difference between the study group( especially the exclusionary criteria )and the clinical groups where doctors have to treat every patient -not just selected ones. This was a big issue in psychiatry where research clinics had their set patient groups who were regularly used to test out new drugs. Psychiatrists were complaining that these groups didn’t correspond well to their own patient populations with multiple pathologies.

The list goes on and on..

In the end, these “gold-standard” studies are much less useful than most clinicians and researches believe.  In my estimation, anecdotal evidence- (so disparaged by the fundamentalist scientific mind-set) from patients and other clinicians are far more useful. But that is heresy in the medical, scientific world lol! And if there is heresy, there must be religion hiding under the layers of “objective” science!

Before we proceed to some possible solutions to this dilemma, I would like to add in another data point-another anecdote, actually a series of anecdotes.! When I was working as a full-time psychiatrist, I was called upon to be an “expert witness” for a number of my clients-mostly about salary insurance issues . I noticed something very counter-intuitive as I watched the court proceedings unfold. The judges seemed to understand what was going on with the patients much more than the “expert witnesses” who were almost all doctors! How odd?! These people had legal training but they understood more clinical reality than the people with medical training?!

I thought long and hard about that one and in a way this article is, at least in part, the fruit of that reflection. How could this be?! Then I realized that the judges were taking account of many variables that the doctors were not. They were listening to the patients and their relatives (disparagingly looked at as “subjective” by the scientific community), they were taking account of the individual reports (“anecdotal evidence” as the scientific-minded would be inclined to reflexly think)and they were listening( how unempirical- for those bound up in Scientific Materialism).And yet, they were coming to the right conclusions more often than not. And why is that? And here is the punchline! Their Epistemology was much better and more comprehensive than the docs. They were not burying their heads in the sand of “randomized controlled trials published in prestigious medical journals.” What a relief!

By this point, you are probably catching the drift of where we are going in this discussion. We need a new Epistemology in medical science. When a patient comes out of the doctor’s office and says: ”He or  she didn’t get at all what I was saying” we know we need a new approach. When the management of the Covid pandemic was so dysfunctional and chaotic, we know we need a new approach. And yes, there is a financial factor in all of it but in my estimation the ignorance factor is even greater than the greed!  If you can imagine that.

Before I get into what that would look like I want to share an iconic episode that occurred during my psychiatric practice. At one point I was seeing a lot of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome patients. We lived at the time in a cottage with an in-law extension from where I did my practice. The children were not allowed on the clinical side but one day the cat escaped to the clinic and my youngest daughter ran over to catch it in the waiting room.

When I had finished my day’s work, I went over to the other side and she asked me:  ”Daddy, who was that patient?” ”You know I am not allowed to tell you that, Sara , but why do you ask?” “She looked so sick”(she meant physically). I responded: “You are totally right about that(the patient in question had a cadaveric-green-gray colour to her skin tone)-but you know what is really amazing, Sara.? Two days ago, this lady went to see her G.P. and he looked at her test results and said: ”Madame, you are in perfect health. It’s all in your mind” As if that would help?!

So Empiricism has infected the entire enterprise of medicine so that contemporary doctors are no longer use their ears and eyes skilfully.. Instead they rely on blood tests and imaging! Which leads me back to the question of Epistemology .

What is this arcane Greek term anyway?! Epistemology is the Science of Knowledge. It refers to how you go about ascertaining what is true and what is real. Modernist Epistemology disproportionately favours Empiricism, “objective data” ,huge amounts of it preferably. And it loves statistical analysis and numbers. A recent article in the Lancet(a very prestigious medical journal) about Covid and its treatment had to be retracted because the data had been falsified. This is a rare event for peer-reviewed journals -until Covid at least! But the fraudulent researchers had tempted the editors with huge numbers (over 90,000 patients I believe). It was like candy to a baby. They were salivating at the numbers involved- like prospectors seeing a vein of gold in the rocks. Unfortunately, it turned out to be fool’s gold. Like a horny adolescent boy seeing a young lady with large breasts, the temptation was too strong lol!

Ok. Let’s get serious! What is the Epistemology I am recommending- for Medicine. It has to be much more comprehensive then it now is. The randomized placebo-controlled large scale studies could be part of the mix as well as non-randomized smaller studies( as were so useful in early Covid treatment) but both would have far less importance than they do now. Clinical experience is a far better indicator of what is going on. In my case, when a new psychopharmacological agent came out on the market after using it on 10 patients or less, I had a good idea of what it could do, what it couldn’t and what the problematic side effects were. The big numbers used in studies are used in order to generate statistical significance more than anything else. After all, how many times do you need to drink water to conclude that it relieves your thirst? Or how many friends do you need to question to feel confident that Puerto Vallarta is a good place to vacation in the winter lol?

On the other hand I once had a patient who was very preoccupied about which neighborhood in Montreal was the best place to live.So hev began his research. He visited them all, read all the data about the demographics, thought about it long and hard and eventually became very anxious and totally confused. Sounds like the management of the Covid pandemic to me. Too much information and too much data leads to confusion! The economists call this “the Law of Diminishing returns” The medical scientists haven’t caught on to that one yet. They still glory in large numbers!

My own spiritual epistemology has three doors: 1) hearing, 2) seeing and

  • feeling/intuition.

The Zen Buddhists have come to much the same conclusions. Yes doctors have to start being “mensch”(to use a Yiddish/German term) and stop being robots and bureaucrats applying pat formulas and algorithms.They have to learn to listen. Not to be dismissive of what patients are saying-especially if it doesn’t fit their allopathic, Aristotelian models. They have to learn to see subtleties-like the pigmentation on the skin of the aforementioned patient. In fact, if you read accounts of 19th century physicians and psychiatrists you will see that they were much better observers than doctors nowadays. They didn’t have all those lab tests and imaging studies to rely on.

And last but not least doctors have to develop their feeling functions and their intuition. With those three in place we should have a much more effective medical practice. And then we can then study, if we are still in doubt, whether that works or not lol. My bets are that both Hippocrates and Galen would be on board .And we would all be the better for it!

Salaams, the prodigal doctor, Dr. Ibrahim Kreps

Metaphysics, Modern Living, Psychology

Empiricism and Rationalism-The Two Scourges of Modernism

3 Comments

Empiricism and Rationalism-

The Two Scourges of Modern Times

( Why our Educational System fails us)

Preface. This subject is close to my heart! One of the most powerful triggers for my own spiritual journey was a confrontation about this very subject. Here is the backstory! Prior to my conversion to Islam, like all able-bodied Canadian males lol, I had girlfriends. One of my first girlfriends, while I was still at University, was an attractive, artistic, literary-minded young lady who had a problem with depression. While we were together she was seeing a psychiatrist who invited me in for a session. I am not sure why?! Maybe he thought I was part of the problem or maybe he thought I was part of the solution! God only knows.

Being a pure scientific type at the time ( how embarrassing lol?!) I refused -saying psychiatry was” pure  bunk” ( meaning no empirical basis) and there was no point. Boy, can life be ironic! Who would have thought at that point that I would spend 45 years as a psychiatrist later on?!

My girlfriend was legitimately pissed-off with me and went to see a good friend of hers-another artistic, literary type.to discuss the situation. When she returned, she looked me in the eye and said “Me and M. decided that you are a positivist”. I had no idea of what “a positivist” was but it felt like an attack at the core of my being. It turns out that “positivism” is one of the forms of Empiricism. Websters Dictionary defines “positivism” as “a system of philosophy basing knowledge solely on data of sense experience” Sound familiar?! Every “scientific expert” on the television or radio is a positivist and proud of it to boot!

Not my case fortunately! I took it on as a challenge and thought: ”O.K. I’m too stuck in the scientific mind-set. I’m going to investigate the arts(Spirituality was still very far from my mind at that point) And so I decided to take a sabbatical to explore the arts. I was in medical school at the time and everyone told me that McGill Medical school would never accept taking off a year for such exploration. But they did! And so my spiritual search had just begun. Boy can destiny  bring us to  places we never imagined! Alhumdulillah.

Let me continue with another relevant anecdote before continuing the exposition . Those who know me know that I love anecdotes lol. I even believe that there is more reality in anecdotes then in randomized, controlled studies. What a heretic?!

Once upon a time, we lived in a large single-family dwelling with an annex that had been used as an in-law suite and earlier on as a dentists office, I believe. I did my psychiatric practice from that annex and my children were not allowed to come there while I was working. Well…one fine day the cat escaped from the family side of the dwelling to the professional side. My youngest daughter ran over to bring the cat back and ran into one of my patients in the waiting room.

When I returned back to the family side after work, she asked me; ”Daddy, who was that patient? ”I answered; “you know I am not allowed to tell you that but why do you ask”. She responded: ”She looks so sick”. She meant physically not psychologically in that instance. ”Interesting that you noticed” I said. In fact that patient had what I call a “cadaveric”(green-gray) complexion. ”You know, ,Sara, that lady just went to her general doctor two days ago. He looked at her tests and her imaging studies and said: ”You’re in perfect health madam .It’s all in your head” As if that would help lol.

That is precisely what I am talking about in this article. That doctor was trained in Empiricism. ”Objective” testing(that’s what they call it!) showed that she was in perfect health. But she wasn’t! She was very sick. It just didn’t show up in the tests.

So where does this mind-set come from? You’ve probably guessed! From our schooling! As early as they can (Piaget says you can understand these kind of concepts at around 7 years of age i.e. grade two of elementary school. It starts soon after that although I am sure that if they could somehow integrate this thinking via a vaccine, they would start even earlier!

Let’s start with a definition here. Webster’s Dictionary  says: ”A search for knowledge by observation and experiment”. Please note that the experiment itself is based on observation and measurement. Basically what we are talking about is what is observable to the five outer senses. Everything else is discounted.

Nowadays we have a whole litany of terms that are more or less identical to Empiricism or derive from its philosophical perspective. They include “objective”, ”measurable”, ”scientific”, “evidence-based, ”data” ’facts”….The list goes on and on. Ultimately what is being underlined is that what counts, what is reliable is the “Outer”. Everything else is “subjective’ the biggest curse word in the Empiricist lexicon-the “s” word lol. Your feelings, your insights , your intuitions, your beliefs- forget it. They are all subject to distortion and error. Only the facts count! How many times have you heard that one recently lol?

( Btw for those who need philosophical references for these ideas , the Father of Empiricism was the English Philosopher named John Locke and the Father of Rationalism was the Greek philosopher Aristotle, probably more influential than any other philosopher in history as all the major religions of the West including Judaism, Christianity and Islam have adopted and integrated his ideas into their traditions. Matter for another essay!)

One of my favourite quotes on this subject comes from the famous Swiss psychoanalyst ,C.J. Jung: ”many scientific-minded persons have even sacrificed their religious and philosophical leanings( I would add their hearts and their souls!) for fear of uncontrolled subjectivism (The ‘s’ word lol in the Empiricist lexicon).By way of compensation for the loss of a world that pulsed with our blood and breathed with our breath( how unobjective lol)we have developed an enthusiasm for facts-mountains of facts far beyond any single individual’s power to survey( he hadn’t met the flood of modern-day barbarian hordes of statisticians lol)We have the pious hope that this incidental accumulation of facts will form a meaningful whole”.

Jung is also implying a reality which modern Empiricists and Statisticians have not yet understood! The latter believe that the more facts, the more data the merrier. After all it makes the statistical analysis” more powerful” they say. Yes, more powerful to detect insignificant differences. Actually there is a “law of diminishing returns” with respect to data. Too much data ends up confusing the picture rather than clarifying it. Ask the jurors in the O.J. trial about that one!

We witnessed a stark example of this phenomenon  in a study published early on in the pandemic in the prestigious journal The Lancet about hydroxychloroquine use in Covid. The numbers of patients were astounding1 Tens of thousands. The editors got all excited! Wow, such big numbers. Statisticians paradise! It was like a red flag to a bull or big breasts to a horny adolescent boy-irresistible. Only one problem. The data was fraudulent and the journal had to retract the article -something relatively rare in these “prestigious “ journals. But how could you blame them . The data wee enormous lol

The other side of this twin-horned demon of modernism is Rationalism-the ghost of Aristotle. Websters says: ”the principle or practice of accepting reason as the only authority in determining one’s opinions or course of action”. I think Websters is being kind here to the Rationalists. It should read: ”as the only authority from which to determine all of reality” That, at least, is what the Rationalists believe.

There are numerous terms we hear on a daily basis associated with Rationalism. Terms such as “The Age of Rationalism”;The Age of Enlightenment” (as if!); ”coherent”, ”consistent” (ever hear any politicians being accused of inconsistency? So what?!) ;”systematic”( another accusation to people of insight-your argument is not systematic”) “contradictory” (And so what again).Reality does not correspond to the laws of logic ! Only mental models do!

Time for another anecdote here. Oops anecdotes are haram(forbidden) in the scientific model as being too unreliable Too bad! I personally get more from anecdotes than from scientific studies and that is true of you, as well, probably. But you may not have seen through this element of Empiricist propaganda.

I was a student in a second-year philosophy course. Thank God our medical school program allowed us to study other subjects besides medicine! We were reading The Socratic dialogues. I was irritated by how compliant and obsequious the other interlocutors of Socrates were in these dialogues. I thought to myself: ”He would never get away with this in contemporary world.” So the paper I wrote was entitled “An Alternative Socratic Dialogue: A discussion between Socrates and American Joe” ( no connection to my original nickname Joey lol!).In this dialogue the simple American argued back in a persistent way so that the dialogue ended in a stalemate!  American Joe was not going to be a pushover like the other Socratic participants!

I was proud of my work. “How creative!” I thought. And I was shocked when the teacher gave me a grade of 65 (yes we used proper centiles in those days lol).When I looked for his comments it said the following: ”Your argument is not well-developed enough(i.e. not logical, rational enough).But that was the whole point, no? Old Aristotelians never die. They just lose their neuronal connections”!

Before exploring the implications of this philosophical premise and all its extensions in the modern world let me underline the “fatal flaw” here. Reason exists in one’s mind.  It forms mental models and plans based on this methodology. Then it tries to apply these models and plans to Reality. This poses the age-old “map vs. territory” problem. The map (or in this case the model) is never the same as the territory. It is always a pale imitation. And so is the model. Ever noticed how the models of both climate change and of the Covid pandemic never panned out?! But Reality never changes the mind of these believers.  And they have a lot of support-both moral and financial. The studies, the committees, the commissions, let alone the ideologues- they are all ready to hire an  applaud these modellers and planners! After all who needs Reality when you have convictions to replace it with lol?!

Now, we find examples of the applications of these two approaches all over the modern world-in medicine as in the example at the beginning of the text, in Law where for example the Supreme( read supremely logical!) Court of the U.S. argues that billionaires have the right to give as much money to election campaigns as they wish because this is “consistent”(another one of those ugly Rationalist words ) with the First Amendment of free speech. So in this case money is associated with speech! Only in America! But not really The Canadian Supreme(I like to say Supremely foolish  court) concluded that the “danse a dix” where the client was allowed to touch the stripper for an extra         five dollars was “consistent” with Cana dian values. Really?! Have we sunk that low in Canada?!

All that being said, I think that the Rationalists have had their most troublesome effects in the domain of religion. Once the theologians get to work with their logical extensions of scriptures one gets to all kinds of distortions , misunderstandings and conflicts. So the Jews become convinced that they alone are Chosen Ones, the Christians begin confusing God with His Creation( “the only begotten son of God” Really?!) and the Muslims conclude that a woman should only go outdoors in a tent lol. None of this is in the original revelations. All of this is a result of mind-productons i.e. a result of Rationalism! A lengthly article could certainly be written about how mental elaborations(read logic) have distorted the religious impulse but that will have to wait for a later time.

Now all the practical people( May Allah have mercy on them lol) are going to ask: ”So what do we do about it?” So as not to disappoint them, I will try to answer the question. But before I do I would like to share an insight I gained from the philosopher and mystic, Krishnamurti, whose works I read extensively and met in Ojai in 1973..He said that consciousness, awareness was enough. If you are fully conscious of something, it begins to change immediately. But that is too deep for most of us caught in the cause and effect paradigm. If you want to further explore that illusion ,you will have to shift from John Locke to his fellow countryman David Hume -one of the first non-mystical people to understand that cause and effect are not necessarily related to each other. Matter for a later discussion. We don’t want to ruffle your  ”scientific” mind-set too much at this point.

The simple answer to the inevitable question: ”So what do we do about it?’ is “ We develop an awareness of our inner world- the world of inner sight, of hearing the ring of truth, the world of insight and intuition and feeling”. This is no small matter. The schools have not figured it out yet. Some theorists would say they don’t want to because it would go against their agenda of producing submissive workers and citizens. I will leave these speculations for others, but it is clear that despite 50 years of research into other forms of intelligence beyond the scientific and the outward, they have not even begun to succeed at this most important project!

And yet, there are methods. Anna Freud proposed to set up group therapy for all the children in elementary school in London. To its credit, the British government actually considered it! (highly unlikely anywhere in North America especially now). But eventually it was refused because of the expense of paying so many competent professionals for the service. ”Mindfulness” would be another tool. Someone must have thought about integrating it into the academic curriculum but I still haven’t heard of any concrete examples(if you know of any please inform me) .Then there is art and music therapy. No, not art and music! That is still outward. Art therapy connects the art to your inner feeling states(your internal psychodynamics if you will) as does music therapy. And so our schooling systems are still putting out “inner world illiterates”. Instead of exploring ourselves we hear talk of A.I. (automated intelligence) and social media controls (as if?) and transhumanism(as if the answer lies in transcending our humanity rather than embracing it).

So we are far from the solution. Our best chance, in fact, is setting up our own homeschooling and experimenting with different forms of education. If we wait for our-large scale educational institutions to do anything different we are likely to end up in “Extinction Revolution” with Greta Thunberg and her woke transhuman acolytes lol.

A shout-out here for all attempts at home-schooling. It appears to be our only hope although it may already be too late. God help us!

Salaams, Sufi Ibrahim

 

 

 

 

                                                 

Islam, Modern Living, Psychology, Spiritual Practice, Uncategorized

Three Approaches to Ramadan Fasting

1 Comment

Asalamu aleykum, brothers and sisters. I have noticed over the years that fasters break down into three basic categories, the last one being the least popular but the most recommended. What else is new? The most common being the worst! So what are the three?

1-The Deniers affectionately known as the “mu mishkila “(What me worry?) people  . I met those people first in Damascus. The political situation was horrid. The tension was palpable in the air. But when you brought it up, without attempting to blame anyone, you got “the mu mishkila ” response. “We have some of the finest Islamic scholars in the world”(True). “We have some great Sufi tariqats-“True! What could possibly go wrong.?! Well, we all know where that led to- catastrophe! 100’s of thousands killed, millions displaced! Now, I am not saying the denial led to the catastrophe .But it certainly didn’t help. And once you are in denial, thus ignoring the cause, there is no way out! But catastrophe.

And now we have Zelensky of the Ukraine doing the same thing. The Americans warned him! “They are planning an invasion” they told him (There were already 150,000 troops at his doorstep) “What invasion. Don’t say that!” He reproached the Americans for their realism. And look where that led?!Deniers pay a very heavy price for their temporary delusional relief.

Now how does this play out with the fasting process? In many Muslim societies but especially amongst the Arab societies you get the following narrative: “Fasting, it’s so easy for me. I do everything I usually do except I don’t eat”  Easy-peasy. Really?! Well, first it’s their wives that out them: “Ahmad is in such a foul mood all the time he is fasting.” And its their bosses “My employees make so many more mistakes during this month”. What?! I thought it was so easy for them.

The first person that alerted me to this problem was a French-Canadian lady whose husband worked for the Canadian embassy in Morocco. They regularly noticed that their Moroccan Muslim employees became more irritable and more impatient while fasting. Gradually they learnt to be more careful in addressing them. You can be sure that confronted with this phenomenon the employees would be in complete denial: “Me, I am no different than usual. Better, actually because I don’t have to take breaks for eating”. Ya, right. The outsiders could see through their self-deception.

Btw in the hadith Ramadan is referred to as “the month of patience”. Think about it. We don’t have to be patient with things that are easy and pleasant.” Be patient with your well-behaved child” or” be patient with your delicious ice cream” Makes no sense, right? You have to be patient with difficult things. And Ramadan is difficult, make no bones about it! Mubarak for sure ,full of rewards in the hereafter, an order from Allah, for sure. But difficult, nevertheless- as are many of the edicts from our Lord.

I grew up hating denial.( The other side of that coin was that I had a strong inclination for Truth-regardless of the social influences around me.Still do, btw! My mother, may God forgive her and reward her for all her hard work raising us four rebels lol was a somatizer. She would get angry with one of us and get stomachaches after. When I would try to indicate to her  that the stomachaches were her emotional  reaction to our bad behaviour, we would get denial. “No its not that. I just ate too much lasagna at dinner.” Lol. My mom was not an overeater!

To indicate why this is important, I can tell you that at a younger age I too had stomacaches. Once again my mother would try to put it on the food! When I finally got into group therapy at the ripe age of 23 ,i understood the connection with my emotions during the stomachaches and I have never had any since! Except when I do eat bad food lol and get gastroenteritis. But NOT from emotions! So it makes a big difference when you stop denying! Then you can adapt and modify your behaviour and often enough solve the underlying problem!

Then I studied psychoanalysis and learnt that “denial is the most primitive defense mechanism of all!” And when I started researching the Arabic dictionnary I realized that denial and lying came from the same Arabic trilateral  root- k-dh-b. And Allah uses them almost interchangeably in the Quran. So this is important stuff!

There are so many manifestations of this denial mechanism but we can only mention a few here. Here is one that bothered me a lot during the pre-Covid period when I went to Jumaa prayer on a regular basis. Somewhere around the 25th day or so the Iman would get up on the pulpit and say something like:”25 days of Ramadan and it has gone by in the wink of an eye”. Really?! I don’t know what world this Imam is living in but it ain’t mine lol. Each day had its own particular struggle. At one point during almost every day it seemed like the fast would never end. Ever had one of those fasting days? That’s why our Prophet saws called it the month of patience. Maybe I missed the hadith where it says “Ramadan goes by in the wink of an eye” but I doubt it. Instead the Imam should be saying something like; “Congratulations on all your efforts. You are all doing a great job.” Like a good teacher trying to encourage their students or a good coach trying to spur his team on to victory.. That would be compassionate, that would be empathic. I think they need to add on a course in pedagogy and psychology in the Madrassas. But instead we constantly get the message that we are not doing enough! That is what drove the Catholics away from their Churches. Let’s not make the same mistake!

2– The Complainers (or in the vernacular the kvetches lol) These people go around the entire month complaining about their symptoms- much to the chagrin of the Muslims around them. They tell us about their tiredness ,their headaches, their lack of cognitive abilities and brain fog. The deniers hate them. “Stop that brother or sister, you are going to lose all your “ajr”(reward).”You will be rewarded for your sufferings on the other side” True- but that most often doesn’t take away the symptoms. It just makes the first person feel like you have no empathy or compassion. Instead of empathy you get guilt. The famous ADHD researcher Ed Hallowell called that the school of “shame, blame and humiliation”-apparently standard in most traditional societies!

Now the physical symptoms are an important part of the experience and need to be properly managed. For example one thing I learnt early on was that many headaches were actually ,in fact, caffeine withdrawal headaches. One of my convert friends got it so bad one year that he went to the emergency room thinking that he had meningitis! Until we figured it out. I watched my sheikh of the time, Sheikh Nazim breaking fast every day with a cup of tea and taking a cup of tea as the last thing in suhoor(pre-Fajr meal).Only later did I realize that he was managing his caffeine withdrawal that way. Now that is my regular practice-one cup of coffee at iftar and one at suhoor. And most often I will get away without the headache-especially if the fast is only 15 hours or less.

Here, I would like to tell another type of  story(a bad management story) to illustrate another aspect of the managing symptoms story .One year when I went to London for Ramadan- as I did regularly for many years-to be with my sheikh, I met  a young Irish convert from a very difficult background. He had had a father who was an episodic alcoholic with a very bad character. His father would get angry and throw him up against the wall when that happened. Due to multiple traumas like that -many of which gave him concussions, he developed grand-mal epilepsy! So at the beginning of Ramadan he came to consult with me as to how he should manage the fast. I suggested he should go slowly ,perhaps every second day at the beginning, He would hear nothing of it!

It seemed to be working well early on but during the last ten days ,his defenses broke down and he had a grand-mal seizure in the middle of the mosque during Tarawih prayer.There was a group of fanatics there- followers of someone we knew as Greensheikh. They were convinced that this was not a medical condition but rather a jinn possession and wanted to do an exorcism. Most of the attendees however, including myself, saw it for what it was-a neurological event that needed medical attention! A fight broke out between the two groups, a member of the Greensheikh group pulled out a knife and the police had to be called in(Very well-trained British cops I must say) In the end we accompanied the murid to the hospital but one of the “reasonable” group had to deal with a knife-wound to the hand that took weeks to heal after getting infected.. Such is the price of denial.

In fact, many of us know people that are unable to fast-because of diabetes or heart conditions or migraines and many other illnesses. So it must be acknowledged that fasting is a physiological stress. You have to in relatively good health to do it. So beware of deniers! They can be dangerous to your health and even to your life!

3-The Embracers; This is the approach I am recommending. Embrace ALL the Reality-the glory and upliftment and transcendent aspects of Ramadan(the states of Grace) AND the difficult parts. The openings may be brief and subtle. They may be evanescent and hard to capture at times. But they ARE there. What one of my shuyukh called “nafahat” (spiritual breezes).But don’t miss them. Enjoy them -like butterflies in the summer. If they linger, then you are truly blessed. The sufferings will be rewarded as well. So don’t let your physical symptoms distract you from the “barakat” of the month. It’s all good! Embrace it all! The physical symptoms can be managed -with compassion and wisdom-and the transcendent aspects can be savoured-especially if you can open your eyes and your heart to what is occuring on the inner planes. May Allah make this the best and holiest Ramadan ever. And if we don’t see the results on this side of the curtain we will certainly see them  on the other side ! Ramadan Mubarak and Ramadan Karim.

Metaphysics, Modern Living, Psychology

Is Western education making us stupider?

Leave a comment

Ukraine: War is brutal and horrible and primitive-always. But this war and the previous war on Iraq by America have something special about them! They are utterly stupid(and unnecessary).Both were entirely preventable. So why is that happening?!Why are we getting stupider(sorry Mr.Steven Pinker -you are lost in the “fog of data”).I have a theory. You know the way certain medical observers have noticed an increase in autism and ADHD since the advent of vaccines mandates in children Well ,I have noticed that the stupidity correlates quite nicely with the development of our Western education systems! The world has never been so educated!And yet it has never been so stupid?! Intriguing, eh? Give it some thought. God help us!

Metaphysics, Modern Living, Psychology

The Veil of Reason

Leave a comment

Watching the NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg(but this applies to almost all public figures!) Reason is a tool, often the primary one, that provides cover for cowardice, hypocrisy, self-interest and self-justification, insensitivity and sometimes outright misinformation. But we are taught in our highly-esteemed schools, to honour even to love it(reason) . If we seriously want to know what is happening we need to see beyond the veil of Reason. Sorry Aristotle lol but you have led us down the garden path. And even “garden-path” is a misnomer. It is the road to hell! As one of my Sufi teachers, Bawa Muhayideen, taught us “The road to hell is lined with beautiful posters”! What he didn’t say was that most of these posters-specifically the ones that don’t appeal to our desires- are impregnated with Reason! God help us!

Modern Living, Politics, Psychology

Woke strikes again-The Cost of Fuel!

Leave a comment
What is the real reason for the increase in fuel prices??…..Wrong! It’s not Russia?! It’s the woke hysteria around climate change! ( Btw we functioned for decades without any Russian oil!)Petroleum and natural gas production were curtailed all across the Western so-called democratic countries in the name of reducing the “carbon imprint”.And it takes a lot of time to get those production sources back on line. Many people warned them ,including Michael Moore and Chris Martenson and I am sure people more specialized than them ,from whom they got the insight.But no:“We need clean energy” was the mantra. Clean energy is not enough! May actually never be enough if we don’t radically change our lifestyle! But the theory must win out over reality in the world of woke! So misery wins out over peace of mind. That’s the Divine Rule. Follow theory and you get misery. Follow Reality and you have a chance at happiness. God help us!
Like

Comment
Share