Category: neuroscience

reflections from Indra’s Net, etc.

in habits I trust

With my room in a flu(mmo)x of books, towers of dishevelled documents, magazines, unhung decorations and an underwear drawer down to its last pair of trunks … I would have said previously that things are in disarray, but now I see that things are in a formative state ~ and that things, all things always, are in a formative state, as in always forming and reforming, never settling into one state or another, and as I type this I feel the relief that comes with beginning to know this at a deeper and deeper experiential level.1

I am still settling in at home, and I feel I have the time to be patient because there is a relatively secure future here. (I say “relative” because who knows what might happen.) Also I trust myself and the universe and I feel the universe trusts me because it senses that I am sensing that I am it.

I am of the universe in the same way a wave is of the ocean, not separate.

I deepen into becoming an instrument of this divine oceanic reality, and I am equipped to accommodate anything that happens, whether I like what happens or not.

I realised recently that I am not the boss of reality and I have been saying this jokingly to friends, but I mean it. [5.55]

Reality is the boss, and there is very little I can do to influence the untold number of events that unfold on its watch. But I watch what I can, and what I can influence is how I respond to events. By training myself to respond constructively to everything I observe, I form new mental, emotional and behavioural habits that are more and more wholesome every day.

In habits I trust.

I am piecing together some ideas that interest me very much about the (w)holistic importance of being responsible for my (and only my) mental, emotional and behavioural habits.

These ideas are grounded in the #dharma, sustained by near-constant mindfulness and #meditation in all action, and increasingly backed by #neuroscience, which makes me feel all boisterous and joyful because these ideas (when and only when applied) lead inexorably to the experience of something called sukkha (in Buddhism, and probably many other things in the world’s many spiritual traditions), which means “genuine happiness”.

Not fleeting happiness, not pleasure conflated with happiness.

Genuine, abiding contentment with all that is, without the overlay of judgement saying, “This is good, now I am happy,” or “This is bad, now I am unhappy.”

These (w)holistic ideas about personal responsibility have profound implications for collective wellbeing and long-term sustainability (a healthy world arises out of healthy minds) but their application does start with the individual. If the individual is lucky (as I am) to meet with what we all deserve, they will have the support of a community that understands these implications at least on some level,

and this collective support is what turns individual awareness and responsibility into a bonafide superpower. #sangha

These ideas have some very cool names … Indra’s Net (thanks Marc) … the morphogenetic field or morphic resonance (thanks Rupert Not Murdoch) … the holographic universe (thanks Einstein, Michael Talbot, et. al.), the #dharma … and are exemplified by the saying, “A rising tide lifts all boats” (thanks Pierce ~ may we discover together that JFK did indeed lift this from the Bible, and that maybe the Flood is actually a metaphor about a time in Biblical history when a flood of awakening wiped out swathes of ignorance in the psyche of humankind, because we know … or at least, strongly suspect … these episodes of collective awakening come in waves through history and can never really be talked about directly, so: metaphor to the rescue).

I don’t have the time or the desire to elaborate further on these ideas at the moment, because I have a group meditation to attend in 9 … 8 minutes. For now it will be enough to share the Serenity Prayer.

May I ask you to leave your notes below ~ as always, my intention for sharing these thoughts is to stimulate dialogue. If public dialogue is not your jam, get in touch directly here. If commenting on WordPress is a laborious chore because you don’t already have an account, please share this post with your comments on the socials, because it’s a dialogue we sorely need to help us transition from the doldrums of modern civilisation into whatever form is next.

  1.  I say “flu(mmo)x” because the confusion comes from within me (who is flux), not from within the state of my room, which is also in flux, but not necessarily confusing. ↩︎

on Exercising my Right to Hold a Shonky GP Accountable

I am submitting a complaint to the Office of the Health Ombudsman today, after a shonky GP tried to swindle me into what I am calling “tic-tacs for kick-backs”, meaning anti-depressants I don’t want or need.

I have been meaning to do this for a while, but have had so much other shit going on lately (mostly good shit), but after a second sleepless night filled with pre-occupations about said shit, I decided while making coffee that this is what I would spend my pre-meditation time doing, because:

  1. maybe it will leaven the burden of carrying this complaint-intention around and begin to lift the resentment I feel every time I remember that this situation happened
  2. as a bystander and citizen, I feel a duty to report this knuckle-head so that other vulnerable people might not become his prey in future
  3. after doing this I might be able to start working on letting-go of some of the shit language I use to think about and describe this fellow, who I understand is just trying to find happiness, albeit in the “wrong objects”, namely, financial wealth ~ and then sometime later I might be able to start opening myself to more-generous assumptions through the diligent application of forgiveness

I was going to link here to my Google Review of this GP, but for now I think it’s prudent to not point so blatantly at his privacy (does he get the benefit of privacy if he is running a public private practice?), lest I pull an avalanche of defamation bullshit onto my own head.

I am so legally naive that I don’t even know the differences between things like defamation and slander. My intention here is not to unnecessarily injure this GPs reputation, but to make people aware that they might want to exercise caution if approaching this GP. I formerly identified as something of a citizen journalist, and this activity and post is I guess a hangover from those days.

I am not going to post here my cautionary-tale Google Review, but I am going to post my (de-identified) complaint to the ombudsman, because I’m curious to know what others think of the reasoning I’m doing here.

I am 99% convinced that this bloke has a whole-arse method that he rolls out whenever he sees a vulnerable person walk into his clinic, and yet I am clinging desperately to the idea of holding my convictions tentatively because:

  1. I like what Bertrand Russell said about not being opinionated
    1. The essence of the liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held, but in how they are held: instead of being held dogmatically, they are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment.
  2. I want to retain my belief, for now, that humans are inherently good, despite this illuminating post I found on Twitter recently, which challenged this belief in a way that sounds legit

So here is the guts of the complaint:

I am new to the Logan/Springwood area, and needing a new regular GP, I went to Dr Doo-not-much for sleep support, expecting a melatonin prescription perhaps.

He tried to prescribe me anti-depressants, without answering my questions about what the prescription actually was (I had to ask a nearby pharmacist to explain what he had prescribed me).

I also asked to start a Mental Health Care Plan (which I maintain with all my GPs as a preventative measure) and he tried to tell me that a MHCP was pointless because I would just get “talk therapy” and what I really needed was a diagnosis.

This is untrue ~ my last MHCP therapist is a Somatic Experiencing practitioner, but Dr Doo-not-much wouldn’t listen to my experience of finding my own Medicare registered therapists.

He referred me to a nearby psychiatrist, and explained to me that he has a “deal” with them to get cheap diagnoses.

The biggest red flag though: on my second and final appointment, Dr Doo-not-much knocked a whole stack of inbox trays off his desk and proceeded to blame everything except his own elbow for the stack falling.

This guy is super dodgy, and really shouldn’t be practising. If he cannot accept accountability for knocking something off his desk, how can I trust him to be responsible for the known side-effects of the powerful pharmaceuticals he tried to swindle me into taking!?

He told me to take those anti-depressants (without telling me that’s what they were) for a couple of weeks until my sleep stabilised!

If I hadn’t had the wherewithal to enquire with the pharmacist or the confidence to self-advocate, I would have been sucked into this guy’s ruse to get me hooked on anti-depressants for kickbacks, and would have had to taper.

I have been managing depression symptoms for 20+ years with lifestyle changes and have never needed pharmaceutical medication.

I know my health history, and I know my needs.

This guy was so frenetic and conceited that he wouldn’t listen to me when I tried to tell him I know my own history of recovery from mental illness.

He has also not released my results from tests performed for a foot injury after nearly 3 weeks of waiting after another GP requested them.

I am genuinely concerned that this guy is harming patients by prescribing them anti-depressants without proper education: if he prescribed them to me within 2 visits, without conducting so much as a mental-health questionnaire, then who else is he prescribing them to!

On the complaint form the Office of the Health Ombudsman ask “What do you want to happen?”, so I said:

I would like Dr Doo-not-much to be investigated to see what he means by having a “deal” with a local psychiatrist, because if this man is funneling people through a dodgy psychiatrist to get them diagnosed and prescribed unnecessary pharmaceuticals for profit, then this is serious malpractice and he could be causing a lot of short- and long-term harm for his own financial gain.

And I am attaching a second PDF with the formal complaint form, documenting reflections that occurred to me after completing that form:

I went to Dr Doo-not-much for both sleep support and to start investigating why my foot injury was still giving me trouble after getting stitches for a laceration resulting from stepping on a sharp rock. 

When I told him the symptoms (pain and swelling, some months after the stitches were removed) he tried to prescribe me anti-biotics before even beginning to print the referral for blood tests that I had asked for, to see if there was an infection.

I informed Dr Doo-not-much that I was reluctant to take anti-biotics unless absolutely necessary. When he asked me why, I informed him that I didn’t want to mess with my gut bacteria unnecessarily.

Dr Doo-not-much brushed this off, and told me that anti-biotics were a good preventative measure against infection. 

A preventative measure against infection forming inside a wound that had already healed on the outside?

This just didn’t make sense to me, and after completing the accompanying PDF I began to suspect that this might be part of Dr Doo-not-much’s nefarious method: prescribe anti-biotics to ruin a patient’s gut bacteria, making them susceptible to depression, and attempting to render them dependent on powerful mind-altering pharmaceuticals by simultaneously prescribing them anti-depressants. 

I am trying (not very hard) to avoid emotive language here, but the truth is I felt and still feel that my trust was profoundly violated by this doctor, and I am genuinely concerned that he is rolling out this method on the daily to people who are less able to self-advocate than I am. 

I have been similarly coerced in psychiatric wards and it’s just really not cricket ~ this kind of practice is profoundly unethical and harmful, and I hope that this complaint will be investigated thoroughly by an objective party who is not so thoroughly embroiled emotionally in whatever is going down at this GP clinic. 

I am genuinely open to suggestions that I am just being paranoid here, but I am equally open to hearing whether others observing this post would draw the same conclusions from the behaviours I observed.

I know that “tic-tacs for kick-backs” is a thing, but I always held the belief that something like this would never happen to me.

Let me know in the comments below, or contact me directly through this website or the socials.

Much appreciated if you got this far through the post!