Devra Davis - The Secret History of the War on Cancer - from the preface

 Press, an MIT professor and former science adviser to President Jimmy Carter, was a seasoned diplomat and not a person I would ever play poker with, even if I knew how. He nodded as I told him of my plans and then said gravely, “It had better be a good book.”

I replied, “I guess they think it will be. They’re offering me more than half my annual salary. That’s quite a lot for a first-time author.”

“It had better be a really, really good book,” he said.

I didn’t understand. “Of course they expect it to be good,” I said. “So do I.”

“Well,” he explained, “it had better be, because you won’t be able to work here after you write it.”

He quickly added, “Of course, I’m not telling you what to do. That is completely your decision.You are free to do whatever you want. I’m just telling you that you can’t write a book critical of the cancer enterprise and hold a senior position at this institution.”

Frank Press had achieved positions of eminent authority by dint of remarkable diplomatic skills and impeccable timing. We were then living through a period that would later be termed the Reagan Revolution. The nation’s leaders bragged of lessening the power of government across the board. Under the charismatic but underestimated President Ronald Reagan, the White House set up an ambitious program aimed at easing the burdens of regulations across the board. Proposals to expand government’s control of anything, even cancer-causing agents in the environment, had little chance of survival.

At about the same time that Press offered his reflections on my proposed book project, I got some friendly advice from a man who was temporarily running the National Institutes of Health. He called me into his spacious office overlooking what was then the green campus of the NIH.

“This work you’ve been publishing on cancer patterns is pretty interesting.

You know, I started out my career interested in the environment and cancer.

I’m pretty sure that some of the lung cancer we see in women in southwestern Pennsylvania, where you come from, has something to do with the environment. I actually tried to do a study on that when I started out doing research, but I decided against it.”

“What made you change your mind?” I asked.

He leaned back in his chair and put his hands atop the back of his head, rocking in thought. “You ever hear of Wilhelm Hueper?”

I shook my head.

“Hueper started out like you. Lots of good ideas about the environment. He thought the exclusive focus on smoking would lead us away from other causes of cancer that were far more deadly. He was railroaded out of here. He wasn’t the easiest fellow to work with and rubbed lots of people the wrong way, but not necessarily for the wrong reasons. I decided after seeing what happened to him that I was better off sticking to basic research. Somebody like you should think about that.”

I did. I stayed with NAS for a decade, working with some of the most talented experts on some of the most fascinating and challenging problems in science at the time. We put out more than two dozen thoroughly referenced NAS reports, every one of which struggled to gauge evidence of the ways the world in which we live and work affects our health and environment.

Whether about smoking in public spaces or the chlorination of drinking water, each volume navigated treacherous and uncertain waters, and each ended with the familiar message: we need more research before we can be sure. I watched the maturing of the science of doubt promotion—the concerted and well-funded effort to identify, magnify and exaggerate doubts about what we could say that we know as a way of delaying actions to change the way the world operates.

How did we get to this point? Since its formal launch more than thirty-five years ago, the war on cancer has been fighting many of the wrong battles with the wrong weapons and the wrong leaders. Officially declared by President Nixon in 1971, the American effort aggressively targeted the illness but left its myriad causes untouched. Less than a decade after the famed U.S.

Surgeon General’s report of 1964 indicted tobacco as a cause of lung cancer, the president announced a national attack on cancer. Left off the table completely were tobacco, radiation, asbestos and benzene—materials that for decades had been well understood to be hazardous.

Years before any modern industrial nation started an official war on the disease, in the 1930s, researchers in Germany, Japan, Italy, Scotland, Austria, England, Argentina, the United States and France had shown that where people lived and worked affected their chances of getting cancer.5 Hueper published a sweeping synthesis of industrial, pharmaceutical and natural sources of cancer—at an especially inauspicious time, right after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.6 The war against those things that cause cancer has always been hampered whenever nations have traded metaphorical wars for real ones.

If some scientists had figured out nearly a century ago that the world around us affects the chance that we will develop cancer, why have we made so little headway in controlling these causes? My goal in this book is to explain when, how, why and by whom the spotlight has been kept away from many of the things that produce cancer. I will show how two radically different sets of standards have been applied to learning how to treat the disease on the one hand, and figuring out what produces it on the other.

Where animal studies on the causes of cancer exist, they are often faulted as not relevant to humans. Yet when studies of almost identical design are employed to craft novel treatments and therapies, the physiological differences between animals and humans suddenly become insignificant.

Many people think that the reason large numbers of us no longer die from infectious diseases is the miraculous breakthroughs of scientific discovery.

Not so. In fact, the decline of epidemics in the nineteenth century had nothing to do with breathtaking scientific advances; all of these came much later.

Deaths from germ-fed contagious diseases began to ebb long before microscopes or drugs could find or kill them. This decline happened because dirty water, crowded housing, rotten food and dangerous jobs became much less common in developed nations. As a result, diphtheria, typhoid and tuberculosis claim far fewer lives in industrialized nations today than at any time in human history.

While some may question whether filling the world with iPods and text-messaging has made us better human beings, none can question that other achievements of modern life have allowed us to live longer and better than our grandparents. If medicine didn’t vanquish lethal epidemics of the past, surely today the story is more nuanced. New medications and fast-paced information technology undoubtedly afford us the capacity to confront new ailments, like looming pandemics of bird flu, providing that governments don’t lie or cover up early reports.

But what about cancer? Can modern medicine, with its reliance on finding and treating diseases one at a time, alter the ways that the disease presents itself? We know how to cure relatively rare cancers, like those of children.

We have made spectacular advances against many forms of the disease.

That’s why in the U.S. alone, there are more than 10 million cancer survivors.

Why, then, are the rates of many forms of cancer increasing, especially when fewer people are smoking?

The complexities of the real world make unequivocal evidence on the causes of cancer in humans quite hard to come by. In truth, there is much bona fide scientific uncertainty about such a complicated illness. The existence of this doubt is easily exploited. Since World War II, whenever and however information on the cancer hazards of the workplace and the environment has been generated, it has typically been discredited, dismissed, or disparaged.7 The tobacco companies’ long struggle to obscure and muddy findings on the dangers of cigarettes, successful for many decades, serves as the model.

Other, larger industries, following Big Tobacco’s lead, continue to use a combination of deceptive advertising, sophisticated scientific spin and strongarm politics, and have been even more successful: they remain mostly unscathed to this day.8 Scientists who tackled industrial causes of cancer often found themselves facing subtle and sometimes not so subtle warnings.

Those who resisted pressure to back off often found their funding cut.9 In some cases, scientific research was stopped in its tracks, and many careers, like Hueper’s, were derailed. 10 In retrospect it seems clear that Frank Press was correct about many things.

It’s not enough to write the right book. The world has to be ready to listen.

I’m certainly not the first person to try to shine light on the lopsided nature of the effort against cancer, nor am I unique in commenting on the arrogance of environmental policies. But there are signs that the world may be more ready to listen.

The modern critique of our failure to ferret out and act on preventable causes of cancer goes back more than four decades, to Murray Bookchin and Rachel Carson. 11 Valiant but little heeded efforts were mounted right before or during the Reagan Revolution by Larry Agran, Sam Epstein and Janette Sherman.12 In 1996, Robert Proctor published a book called Cancer Wars, adopting the title from my own waylaid effort at the time.13 He chronicled the successes of the producers of tobacco and other cancer-causing materials in crafting scientific doubt about their hazards and the politically problematic efforts of the Carter administration to rein in tobacco and industrial chemicals. 

14 Sandra Steingraber drew well-deserved attention with her haunting, sometimes humorous books Living Downstream and Having Faith —the latter about becoming a mother as a cancer survivor in a world full of chemical risks.15 Mitchell Gaynor, one of America’s top oncologists, lambastes environmental and industrial sources of cancer in his recent works.

16 More recently, David Michaels, Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner have used original industry records to detail the duplicity of researchers and companies in keeping the dangers of a number of industrial materials hidden.17 While some of these works got critical accolades and even made it onto public television and radio, their impact on public policy has been limited.

One of the reasons I allow myself to think the time is right for this book is the response from the business community. As word got out about my intentions, I began to hear from people I’d never met and others I’d never imagined were sympathetic. They offered me stories I’d never heard before and documents I could never find in libraries or government dockets, some of which form the bones of this book. I thought I had a pretty fair notion of what went on behind the scenes, but I was stunned by what I found out.

How To Be Naturally Healthy

 

“Health is not something bestowed on you by beneficent nature at birth; it is achieved and maintained only by active participation in well-defined rules of healthful living…” Henry Bieler

The health policy guidelines developed and issued by the WHO are recommended for implementation by all Member States; they therefore have the ability to affect the health of the entire world population. It may be assumed from the magnitude of this responsibility that the WHO possesses a thorough understanding of the problem it purports to be able to solve; it may also be assumed that the measures recommended for the treatment and prevention of illness are not only appropriate but are also safe and effective; these would however, be mistaken assumptions. As the discussions in this book have demonstrated, ‘modern medicine’ does not possess a thorough understanding of the nature of illness and has failed to correctly identify all of its causes. They have also demonstrated that the measures employed to treat and prevent disease, namely medicines and vaccines, are not only inappropriate, they are neither safe nor effective.

Although modern medicine is claimed to be founded on evidence-based science, it is abundantly obvious that it has failed to solve the problem of illness; this can be demonstrated by a substantial volume of evidence that shows ill-health to be a problem that continues to worsen rather than improve. It is clear that medicines and vaccines do not heal and prevent disease; but the problem with these measures is not merely their lack of efficacy. There is a large and growing body of evidence that shows pharmaceutical products to be toxic and therefore inimical to health, not supportive of it.

The main reason that ‘modern medicine’ has failed to solve the problem of illness is because it operates from the basis of fundamentally flawed theories; yet the medical establishment refuses to revise these theories, despite their obvious flaws.

In common with all other problems, that of ‘illness’ can only be solved by understanding its nature and correctly identifying its real causes. People can only be restored to good health when the causes of ill-health have been eliminated and therefore cease to exist; as indicated by Herbert Shelton who explains that,

“…full recovery cannot be expected so long as cause remains.”

As stated in the Introduction to this book, health is the natural state of the human body, but achieving and retaining good health requires people to take certain actions. The main actions involve making conscious decisions, firstly, to avoid, or limit, exposures to the factors that adversely affect health and secondly, to increase exposures to the factors that improve health. In other words, it requires people to actively participate in ‘healthful living’, as explained by Dr Henry Bieler in the quote that opens this concluding section of the book.

Although most people trust the medical establishment as the ‘authority’ with respect to illness, especially in the treatment and prevention of disease, this is, unfortunately, a misplaced trust for reasons that have been discussed throughout this book. It must be emphasised that authority is not synonymous with ‘truth’. Authority, when not based on truth, can impede progress and even prevent the discovery of truth; as indicated by a saying attributed to Albert Einstein,

“Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.”

It is likely that, at the beginning of this book, most readers would have considered the information in this book to have been controversial; it is however, appropriate at this juncture, to repeat the saying attributed to Arthur Schopenhauer,

“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”

It is sincerely hoped that, having reached the end of this book, you, the reader, will have attained the third stage and recognise the ‘self-evident’ nature of the information it contains. It is also hoped that, with your new understanding of what really makes you ill, you will feel you are now in possession of the information you require to make truly informed decisions about your healthcare.

from: What Really Makes You Ill?

Why Everything You Thought You Knew About Disease is Wrong

Dawn Lester & David Parker

Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon - from foreword

 Sprinkled throughout these pages is the ominous specter of the military/intelligence complex, and perched quite literally atop Laurel Canyon was the top-secret Lookout Mountain Laboratory, which seems to be McGowan’s grand metaphor for Dr. Strangelove having a bird’s-eye view of the nascent hippie movement, treating it as though it were a petri dish brimming with a lethal biological weapon that could be unleashed in meticulously monitored increments. Indeed, many of Laurel Canyon’s rock ’n’ roll idols had former incarnations steeped in the world of military/intelligence operations. Jim Morrison, aka “the Lizard King,” was one such example. Mr. Mojo Risin’ didn’t much like to talk about his parents and was even known to tell reporters that his parents were dead. But as it turns out, Lizard King, Sr. was not only alive and well, he just happened to be the commander of the US warships that allegedly came under attack by North Vietnamese torpedo boats in the Gulf of Tonkin, sparking America’s napalm-fueled bloodbath in Vietnam.

Frank Zappa, another major mover and shaker of the Laurel Canyon scene, was certainly the raddest of the rad, so surely he couldn’t have had any connections to the military/intelligence complex… right? Not exactly. According to various accounts collected by McGowan, Zappa was a pro-military autocrat who didn’t really resonate with the counterculture’s peace and love vibe. Like the Lizard King’s dad, Zappa, Sr. was a cog in the intelligence community’s dark machinations; Francis Zappa was a chemical warfare specialist with a top security clearance at Edgewood Arsenal near Baltimore, Maryland. Some readers might recognize Edgewood as the location of ominous mind control experiments conducted by the CIA under the rubric of MK-ULTRA.

Guilt by familial association has the potential to be an ill-fated formula for speculation, but McGowan relates accounts of Laurel Canyon luminaries whose own hands were possibly awash in the blood of the military/intelligence complex. Consider, for example, “Papa” John Phillips, who penned the smash hit San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair), imploring thousands of runaways to make bacchanallaced pilgrimages to the City by the Bay. The son of a Marine Corps captain, Phillips was among the more prominent fixtures of Laurel Canyon who had a particularly interesting interrelationship with the military machine.

Rock superstar Stephen Stills was the cofounder of two Laurel Canyon dynamos—Buffalo Springfield, and, of course, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Surely then hippie icon Stills couldn’t possibly be enmeshed in the military-intelligence complex? Maybe, maybe not. The progeny of yet another military family, Stills spent chunks of his childhood in El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Panama, where the US has a history of spreading a genocidal form of “democracy.” And McGowan has sifted through accounts of Stills actually confessing to running around the jungles of Vietnam in the early 1960s—anecdotes generally dismissed, as the author notes, as drug-fueled delusions.

Tales of drugs, unbridled debauchery and full-tilt depravity are often populated by ethical eunuchs whose elite deviance yields to particularly malignant appetites, and the people calling Laurel Canyon home were no exception. McGowan introduces us to aging beatnik Vito Paulekas and his “Freaks,” a dance troupe of Dionysian goddesses who accompanied Vito to the LA nightclubs where the fledgling Laurel Canyon bands were playing their early gigs. In addition to saturating the dance floors with sultry young nubiles for emerging bands, Vito was also a purveyor of teenage girls for the up-and-coming rockers. McGowan also comments on Vito’s swift exodus to Haiti, for reasons explained herein.

Vito Paulekas certainly isn’t a household name, but he was far from being a fringe player on the Laurel Canyon scene, where he and his Freaks mingled freely with rock ’n’ roll’s burgeoning royalty. McGowan collects anecdotes suggesting that Vito may have played a key role in the formation and early success of the Byrds—though his name is conspicuously absent from the autobiographical tome of Byrds co-founder David Crosby. We also find Vito in a string of low-budget films, and in a cameo appearance on one of rock’s first concept albums: Zappa’s Freak Out! Vito’s parental skills, however, left a lot to be desired, as evinced by the very mysterious and bizarre death of his young son, Godo.

Further excavating the idolatry of his youth, McGowan encounters Laurel Canyon fixture Billy Bryars, a male madam and gay porn entrepreneur. Bryers was investigated for trafficking child pornography in the 1970s, whereupon his stable of male hustlers began coughing up the names of frequent flyers at his bordello, the most notable among them being super freak G-man J. Edgar Hoover and partner Clyde Tolson.

The 1960s was a “revolutionary” epoch not only in music but also in Hollywood, and McGowan discusses the symbiosis between the Laurel Canyon music scene and Hollywood’s “Young Turks,” with the box office phenomenon Easy Rider providing a salient nexus between Laurel Canyon rockers and Hollywood upstarts. Many of those upstarts, including Warren Beatty, Peter and Jane Fonda, Jack Nicholson, Candice Bergen, Marlon Brando, Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate, Peter Lawford, Dennis Hopper, Ryan O’Neal, Mia Farrow, Peter Sellers, and Zsa Zsa Gabor, were among Papa John and Mama Michelle Phillips’ circle of friends.

Also making the rounds in Laurel Canyon was America’s favorite psychopath, Charles Manson. And Charlie and his “Family” weren’t just a peripheral flock of crazed killers among the Laurel Canyon sovereigns; to the contrary, the Family mingled with many of the Canyon’s rock stars. Manson even laid down tracks in Brian Wilson’s home studio, stunning the likes of Neil Young. “He had this kind of music that nobody else was doing,” said Neil of Charlie. “I thought he really had something crazy, something great. He was like a living poet.” Charlie also impressed Terry Melcher, the Byrds’ first producer and a major force in sculpting the Laurel Canyon music scene. Melcher also recorded Manson, finding him to be a much more amicable character than David Crosby.

Manson’s homicidal lieutenant Bobby Beausoleil also had some impressive moves as a guitarist—and an occultist. Beausoleil played in a number of forgotten bands that had an occult topspin, one of which even opened for Buffalo Springfield. Bobby eventually landed a gig as a rhythm guitarist for the Grass Roots, which later transmuted into the Laurel Canyon band Love.

McGowan also touches on the grisly “Four on the Floor” or “Wonderland” murders, which left notorious drug dealer Ron Launius and three of his gang bludgeoned to death on the floor of a house on Laurel Canyon’s Wonderland Avenue. Launius dealt drugs to Laurel Canyon’s aristocracy, as well as to porn star John Holmes, then in the twilight of his career. Holmes also befriended LA crime boss/club owner Eddie Nash, who he then betrayed, with fatal consequences.

Truth be told, the Manson and Wonderland Murders were merely spatters on Laurel Canyon’s blood-drenched tapestry. In the pages of this fascinating book, McGowan chronicles tale after tale of suicide and murder, while delivering readers to a web of sinister synchronicities. Ultimately, it is up to the reader to decide whether Laurel Canyon, in its heyday, was the counterculture haven portrayed by other chroniclers of the era, or whether it was the epicenter of intrigues whose ripple effects are like the aftershock of a nuclear bomb.

Nick Bryant

The Solace of Fierce Landscapes by Before C. Lane - extracts

Over the last half-decade I’ve found myself physically and symbolically attracted to fierce landscapes in a way I haven’t entirely understood. I’ve been driven to the desert mountains of New Mexico on many occasions, as well as to Mount Sinai in Egypt and dry stretches of the Negev in Israel. Such places symbolize much of the pain, and also the healing, made possible by wilderness. Thoreau was right: “We need the tonic of wildness.”2

This love of unsafe terrain has led me also to the study of desert and mountain imagery in the history of the Christian apophatic tradition. The apophatic way, familiarly known as the via negativa, is a tradition in spirituality that rejects all analogies of God as ultimately inadequate.3 God is greater than any language we might ever use to speak of God. Ironically, however, in the history of this tradition a few lean and spare landscape images have frequently been employed to challenge the very use of images themselves. These include the desert, the mountain, and the cloud—porous, “aniconic images” used, on the one hand, to question the overconfidence in words that sometimes characterizes the theological enterprise, and, on the other hand, to suggest metaphorically the deepest, virtually indescribable, human experiences of pain and joy.4 These landscape images derive their energy from the archetypal experience of Moses in the desert at Sinai. They recur repeatedly in mystical writers of the apophatic tradition, from Gregory of Nyssa to Thomas Merton.

This book makes no claim to be a thoroughgoing historical-critical study of the apophatic tradition. Nor does it offer an ethnographic analysis of specific cultural understandings of desert and mountain environments. What it attempts, instead, is something of a performance (rather than a mere description) of apophatic spirituality, inviting the reader’s entry into those rare events of “apophatic fusion” that sometimes occur in human life—when we’re driven like Moses to wonderment, beyond the distinctions we ordinarily make between subject and object, ourselves as knowers and that which we seek most passionately to know.5 Mystics have continually resisted defining their subject of discourse, insisting that God is ever beyond language, even beyond their “experience” of God. “Rather than pointing to an object, apophatic language attempts to evoke in the reader an event that is—in its movement beyond structures of self and other, subject and object—structurally analogous to the event of mystical union.”6The book, therefore, invites the reader into several of the pivotal texts (and contexts) out of which such events of vulnerability and union have repeatedly been generated in the history of the tradition. Its purpose is to allow these texts (and this terrain) to engage the reader at a deep level of personal risk, through the intimate involvement of the interpreter’s own voice in the process of saying and unsaying what is otherwise wholly unavailable to discourse. Only at the periphery of our lives, where we and our understanding of God alike are undone, can we understand bewilderment as occasioning another way of knowing.

Mine is a highly textured, multidimensional reading of the apophatic tradition. Its narrative structure draws heavily, with a naked honesty at times, from my own experience. I simply don’t know any other way of doing it. Yet this unusually personal involvement of the author in his research raises important hermeneutical questions.7

The self-implicating character of research in religious-history-writing is increasingly a subject of current debate.8 Reluctantly or not, the academy continues to probe the permeable boundaries between critical scholarship and lived experience. Walter Brueggemann distinguishes between the “scribes” who stringently maintain the integrity of a text, permitting it to linger in the ongoing life of a tradition, and the “agents of the imagination” who periodically allow the text to explode into new meaning, recovering its ability to startle in a way that necessarily moves beyond critical insight.9 Brueggemann himself embodies both tasks in his own work as a scholar. I, too, am interested in the scribal labor of attending to texts and the settings in which they are read, but in this particular study I function more as an agent provocateur, daring to let the text “explode” in my own hands in the process of offering it to the reader.

I write as a self-identified Christian, though one burned out (like a lot of people) on shallow religion. I’ve found more life, risk, and daring in the church’s ancient traditions of prayer than in what’s available in most contemporary spiritualities.

*

Desert and mountain places are often associated with the “limit-experiences” of people on the edge, people who have run out of language in speaking of God, people whose recourse to fierce landscapes has fed some deep need within them for the abandonment of control and the acceptance of God’s love in absolute, unmitigated grace.

The reader is drawn up the slopes of Mount Sinai above Saint Catherine’s monastery, into the lonely cells of desert fathers and mothers in ancient Egypt, up remote canyons in the high desert country of New Mexico, into a small and solitary room in Jerusalem, along corridors in a Saint Louis nursing home where my best teachers have been “desert Christians” who perceive abandonment not only as loss, but also as grace.

*

This intimate connection between spirit and place is hard to grasp for those of us living in a post-Enlightenment technological society. Landscape and spirituality are not, for us, inevitably interwoven. We experience no inescapable linkage between our “place” and our way of conceiving the holy, between habitat and habitus, where one lives and how one practices a habit of being.4 Our concern is simply to move as quickly (and freely) as possible from one place to another. We are bereft of rituals of entry that allow us to participate fully in the places we inhabit.

We have lost the ability even to heed the natural environment, much less perceive it through the lens of a particular tradition. Modern Western culture is largely shorn of attentiveness to both habitat and habitus.5 Where we live—to what we are rooted—no longer defines who we are. We have learned to distrust all disciplines of formative spiritual traditions, with their communal ways of perceiving the world. We have realized, in the end, the “free individual” at the expense of a network of interrelated meanings.

*

The intention of this book is to explore a particular habitat that has exercised extraordinary influence in the history of Christian spirituality: the lean and austere terrain of the desert mountain.

Why has such a landscape so often gripped the Christian imagination? What habitus gives it meaning? The apophatic tradition’s spare way of thinking draws energy from the imaginal poverty of a dry and barren land. The via negativa finds symbolically written across a frugal desert topography all of the emptiness necessary for beginning a life of prayer. As Michael Ondaatje puts it in his novel The English Patient, “A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands knowing it is something that feeds him more than water.”7 This book does not argue that apophatic thinking is inevitably linked to a desert or mountain setting. Ideas are never rigidly rooted in geography. Yet the symbolic terrain preferred by teachers of the apophatic way is inevitably a land that is stingy, uncluttered, and empty.

Given my own particular attraction to desert terrain, I have to ask myself four questions in beginning this work: What sort of spiritual experience (what habitus or pattern of prayer) do I bring to the desert as a way of interpreting it? Do I fool myself in thinking the desert is able automatically to grant me spiritual insight? How do I participate in the construction of the desert as a work of the human imagination? Finally, what personal risk is required in exploring this nexus where desert geography and spiritual growth converge?

*

The Desert Habitus of Contemplative Prayer

My own approach to desert experience is formed, in large part, by a fledgling practice of contemplative prayer, rooted in early desert writers such as Evagrius and John Cassian. These desert Christians practiced a particular habitus, a way of ordering one’s life around silence which was shaped by the desert-mountain terrain in which they lived. Calling themselves to a poverty of language and self, as well as goods, they plowed ground for the later growth of the apophatic tradition.

Denys Turner summarizes the historical development of that later tradition as an interplay between metaphors of ascent and inwardness, mountain and desert realities, the story of Moses meeting God on Sinai and Plato’s allegory of the cave, intersecting biblical and Neoplatonic themes.8 But the desert experience of silence was the soil out of which everything else eventually grew. The habitus of the early desert Christians allowed them to read from the landscape itself a particular vision of God, a conception of the human self, and a discipline necessary for the joining of the two. Through subsequent development in the tradition, it came to be articulated as follows:

1. God is a desert whose fullness of glory is hidden from human sight, known only in an unknowing and risking of love.

2. The self is a desert that must be stripped and made empty before God can be found at its center.

3. The realization of God’s love at the heart of one’s being is inseparably related to ascetical and liturgical performances (which are themselves suggested by desert experience).9

This “habit of being” outlines a model for growth in the spiritual life drawn from the desert itself, suggesting a pattern of behavior passed on in the community’s history through its teachings on contemplative prayer.

*

In the practice of contemplation, one comes eventually to embrace an apophatic anthropology, letting go of everything one might have imagined as constituting the self—one’s thoughts, one’s desires, all one’s compulsive needs. Joined in the silence of prayer to a God beyond knowing, I no longer have to scramble to sustain a fragile ego, but discern instead the source and ground of my being in the fierce landscape of God alone. One’s self is ever a tenuous thing, discovered only in relinquishment.17 I recognize it finally as a vast, empty expanse opening out onto the incomparable desert of God.18

*

For that matter, much of the experience I try to share in this book is, at its deepest level, inaccessible. I am not able to distill from either my mother’s encounter with death or my own exposure to desert-mountain terrain any universal insights about the wonder-evoking power of fierce landscapes. I am left, ultimately, at an end of language, having nothing more than my own emptiness to report, though gradually coming to recognize emptiness itself as a profound and wonderful gift.

This is a book that attends at last to what Sherlock Holmes once described as the problem of the dog barking in the night, referring—of course—to the curious matter of the dog’s not barking in the night. Sometimes the absence of sound and meaning, where normally most expected, may be itself full of significance.26

 *

A bedouin story from the Sinai peninsula underscores the idea that what one brings to the desert—one’s personal way of seeing it, even of walking through it—is crucial to the way one understands it. A Westerner entering the desert beyond Nuweiba once asked an English-speaking bedouin how far it was to the nearest oasis. The man did not respond. “How far is it to Ein El Furtaga?” the traveler asked more loudly, distinctly mouthing the words. But the bedouin still said nothing. Shouting his question a third time into the man’s face, and receiving only silence yet again, the traveler finally shook his head and started walking away. “About four hours!” the bedouin then called out, in answer to his question. “Why didn’t you tell me that the first time?” the Westerner asked. “I couldn’t say,” the man responded, “until I knew how fast you were accustomed to walking.”55 

*

In his Seven Pillars of Wisdom, British adventurer T. E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”) wrote of his years in the Hejaz along the Red Sea. In the naked desert’s night, he said, “we were stained by dew, and shamed into pettiness by the innumerable silences of stars.” He found in the desert something that cut to the bone, reducing his soul to a thinness he would spend the rest of his life trying to recover. Despite a Eurocentric romanticism he never overcame, his description of desert life suggests the leanness sought by early desert Christians. “The desert Arab found no joy like the joy of voluntarily holding back. He found luxury in abnegation, renunciation, self restraint. He made nakedness of the mind as sensuous as nakedness of the body.”58 The mystery celebrated by the apophatic tradition is precisely this sensuous “nakedness of the mind” before God. It is where I have to begin this book.

The Search for Silence

Many people have searched for silence; it is an ancient and a universal quest. It pervades the whole of human history: Hindus, Buddhists, Taoists, Pythagoricians and, of course, Christians, Catholic and perhaps even more Orthodox, have felt the need for and the benefits of silence; and this desire has been felt beyond the spheres of the sacred and the religious. I lack the skills, consequently, to describe it in its totality. Yet I cannot completely ignore something that is fundamental to a history of silence in the West. I shall confine myself to certain quests for silence made in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Those who have subsequently felt the desire for silence have referenced them, explicitly or not.

Silence was at this period seen as a necessary precondition for a relationship with God. Meditation, interior prayer, indeed all prayer, required it. Since antiquity, the monastic tradition had transmitted an ars meditandi which emerged from the cloisters in the sixteenth century and which then constituted an internal discipline accessible to the laity. Onto this was grafted the ancient moral philosophy, that of Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, for example, with which the humanists were familiar. This led to advocacy of a struggle against distraction, a concentration of the attention, a meditative quest closely dependent on silence. This process, which led to the wide dissemination of the silent oratio interior that has been so well described by Marc Fumaroli, is crucial to a history of silence.

In 1555, the Jesuit father Balthazar Alvarez wrote a treatise with the title Tratado de la oración de silencio. He believed that the oración de la presencia de Dios, the ‘prayer of the presence of God’, made it possible to accede to the oración de silencio, ‘the prayer of silence’: ‘Then, in the heart, everything is silent, nothing disturbs it, it is the silence in which one hears only the voice of God who instructs and reveals’; this is why one must welcome him ‘in silence and in tranquillity’.1The Dominican Luis de Granada proposed a method of inner prayer which would influence people as diverse as Charles Borromeo and Philip Neri, founder of the Oratory. It consisted of imagining an ‘inner, silent picture’ of the ‘visible and tangible features of an act in the life of Christ’. ‘A veritable conversation between the sinful self and the sacred scene’ could then begin, and Christ and the other persons in the picture, by their gestures and their looks, ‘silently appeal for a reflection on the self’. Such an inner prayer, constantly repeated, would create, he believed, a habitus of ‘silent movements’ which would penetrate all actions.2However, it is the thinking of Ignatius Loyola that had the strongest and deepest influence at this period. His message was based on silence. ‘God bestows, God trains, God accomplishes his work, and this can only be done in the silence that is established between the Creator and the creature’; ‘he who approaches his Creator and Lord and who reaches him’, he is someone who lives in silence.3

Living in Manresa, in Catalonia, Ignatius Loyola spent seven hours a day in interior prayer. At mealtimes, when he ate with others, his custom was never to speak, although he listened, in order to use what was said by the guests as material for the encounter with God that would follow the meal.4He saw the spiritual exercise as a way of meditating, of praying, of examining one’s conscience and of engaging in the ‘contemplation of place’. This required silence, which happened naturally during the ‘exercise of night’. One example will help us to understand this exercise performed in silence and which allowed the imagination free play: when eating, said Loyola, ‘let him imagine he sees Christ our Lord and His disciples at table, and consider how He eats and drinks, how He looks, how He speaks’.5

In a long text on the different ways of praying, Ignatius Loyola spelled out how one should match words to breaths in order to achieve consolation and conquer the desolation provoked by evil spirits. These, he said, enter the soul ‘with noise and commotion’, whereas the good angel enters peacefully and ‘silently’.6This brings us to the mystics. John of the Cross, describing the tranquil night, formed of calm and of solitude in God, emphasizes the importance of silence in mystical rapture. ‘In the calm and silence of night and in this knowledge of divine light, the soul discovers . . . a certain correspondence with God.’ A sublime musical harmony is established, which ‘surpasses all the concerts and all the melodies in the world’, and this music is called by the soul ‘silent music’ because it is ‘a calm and peaceful knowledge, without sound of voices, and therefore one enjoys the sweetness of the music and the tranquillity of the silence’. Further, ‘even though that music is silent to the natural senses and faculties, it is sounding solitude for the spiritual faculties’.7

Later, he describes the benefits of contemplation of the ‘hidden and secret wisdom of God’: ‘[W]ithout sound of voices . . . as in the silence of quietness of night, apart from all that is sensible and natural, God teaches the soul.’8 In a word, the silence of the spirit is a necessary condition for God to enter the soul. It ‘cancels all rational and discursive activity, thereby enabling direct perception of the divine word’.9We may also, in discussing silence and mysticism, consider the experience and writings of St Teresa of Avila, in particular her description of the ‘castle of the soul’. Here, God is reached only in silence through the ‘ears of the soul’, at night.

The Carthusian rule was based on silence and solitude, completed by a specific book-based education. This, writes Gérald Chaix, made it possible to adhere (inhaere) to God ‘with all one’s heart, with all one’s soul and with all one’s might’.10 The exterior silence which features in the Carthusian rule and practices is simply a means of reaching an interior silence, that of the mind (mens) and of the heart (cor). Purged of all worldly imagination, the mind then thinks solely of God. Though only a procedure for attaining this relationship, the exterior silence imposed by the rule, like solitude, must be scrupulously observed. So also must the renunciation of the study of eloquence in favour of reading works that taught silence and devotion. Gérald Chaix concludes that this ideal of solitude and silence, though perfectly adapted to the age of the Reformation and Counter Reformation, was subsequently found increasingly baffling, and the Carthusians appeared ‘fools for God’.11In the seventeenth century, as the external world turned away from silence, two notable personalities gave it a major role in the practice of contemplation: Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet and, more radically, the abbot of Rancé, the reformer of la Trappe. The former repeatedly emphasized in his works the grandeur and the necessity of silence. Bossuet based his exhortations on a passage from the Apocalypse: when the angel broke the Seventh Seal, there was a profound silence in heaven and, during it, ‘the angels paid tribute to and venerated the supreme majesty of God. What does this mysterious silence which the angels created in heaven mean?’ he asked. That ‘every creature, whether in heaven or on earth, must hold their peace, and refrain from speech so as to adore and venerate the grandeur of God.’ Hence he urged: ‘Every so often, be silent, in imitation of the angels’;12 ‘you will never regret having remained silent’.13In this exhortation intended for the Ursulines of Meaux, Bossuet maintains: ‘It is only in silence and in the avoidance of useless and distracting speech that [God] will visit you through his inspirations and his grace, and that He will make his presence felt within you.’14 Exhortations of this type were a leitmotif of his preaching. He recalled the words of St James, who asked that everyone be quick to listen and slow to speak.15‘There has to be perfect silence and recollection to hear internally the voice of God’;16 and again addressing the Ursulines of Meaux: ‘one loses much through the absence of silence’,17 the desire to speak deflects from God. In religious houses, ‘the absence of silence leads to all the faults against charity’.18 Except when responding to Pilate, Jesus, during his Passion, ‘maintained a perpetual silence’ – imitate him, urged Bossuet. Where does it come from, this intense eagerness to speak, he asked? It prevents introspection.19Vivid examples reinforced these messages. In the ‘Second Panegyric upon St Benedict’, Bossuet wrote that, in the solitude of the ‘horrible and frightful [desert] to which he withdrew, an awful and terrible silence [prevailed], which was interrupted only by the cries of wild beasts’.20 It was to encourage him to shun the licentiousness of his youth that God gave him ‘an uncultivated and uninhabited land, a desert, a silence, a solitude . . . a dark and awful cavern’.21 Later, St Bernard, having renounced the world at the age of 22, become ‘extraordinarily enamoured of secrecy and solitude’, reflecting that the Cross had closed the mouth of Jesus, said to himself: ‘I will condemn mine to silence.’22 At Clairvaux, when some monks found the ‘long and horrible’ silence of the monastery too harsh, Bernard told them that, ‘were they to think seriously about the rigorous examination the great Judge would make of their words, they would not have much difficulty in remaining silent’.23In his ‘Meditation on Silence’, intended for the Ursulines of Meaux, Bossuet is more specific. There were, he believed, three types of silence: ‘the silence of rule, the silence of prudence in conversation, and the silence of patience in affliction’.24 In thirty years, Jesus spoke only once in the Temple. ‘If he said not a word, it was to teach us to remain silent.’25 In the monastic orders, the rule fixed the times and hours of silence. Some even ‘maintained a perpetual and profound silence, and never spoke’. The founders of orders had believed ‘that silence cut out many sins and faults’. They had also ‘foreseen that devotion and the prayerful spirit could not exist without silence’.26 Silence was necessary, lastly, to maintain charity, peace and union among the brothers and sisters alike. Whoever wished to reform a monastery, he added, must begin with silence and banish the ‘desire to communicate’.

To practise the silence of prudence was to avoid the faults against charity, and to demonstrate a ‘wise discretion’. To practise the silence of patience was to ‘suffer in silence under the eye of God’; because ‘it is silence that sanctifies our crosses and our afflictions’.27 One should to this end reflect on the attitude of Jesus during the flagellation and the crowning of thorns. It had been said that Christ was the ‘victim of silence’. He had demonstrated and consecrated this during his Passion.28 Silence protected against anger, it was the best way to conquer the passion of vengeance and it was a way of overcoming the ‘desires of curiosity’; and, Bossuet concluded, ‘by faithfully keeping silent, you will be victorious over all your passions’.29At Soligny, the abbot of Rancé introduced and insisted on silence, to which he devoted his 29th constitution. Many messages of Bossuet echoed the views of Rancé, his friend. The abbot believed that silence went with solitude, which would, without it, be vain. Silence was part of the spirit of penitence and it sanctioned separation from men. It was a sign of rupture and detachment. It was a precondition for forgetting the self, proof that bodily concerns had been put aside. Above all, silence was a precondition for prayer, it was a preparation for listening to the divinity. It facilitated spiritual exercises and access to other languages than speech: that of the interior, that of the hereafter, that of the angels.

Rancé also argued that silence favoured meditation on the vanities. It made it easier to measure on a daily basis the passage of time. It anticipated the silence of the tomb. It prepared, consequently, for eternity, which wiped out time. It was this that made Chateaubriand regard the silence of Rancé as terrible, in its length and its depth. On the point of death, the abbot cried: ‘I have only a few moments to live; the best use of them I can make is to pass them in silence.’30 He was true to his word.

from: A History of Silence From the Renaissance to the Present Day

by Alain Corbin

The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths

It is said by men worthy of belief (though Allah’s knowledge is greater) that in the first days there was a king of the isles of Babylonia who called together his architects and his priests and bade them build him a labyrinth so confused and so subtle that the most prudent men would not venture to enter it, and those who did would lose their way. Most unseemly was the edifice that resulted, for it is the prerogative of God, not man, to strike confusion and inspire wonder. In time there came to the court a king of Arabs, and the king of Babylonia (to muck the simplicity of his guest) bade him enter the labyrinth, where the king of Arabs wandered, humiliated and confused, until the coming of the evening, when he implored God’s aid and found the door. His lips offered no complaint, though he said to the king of Babylonia that in his land he had another labyrinth, and Allah willing, he would see that someday the king of Babylonia made its acquaintance. Then he returned to Arabia with his captains and his wardens and he wreaked such havoc upon kingdoms of Babylonia, and with such great blessing by fortune, that he brought low his castles, crushed his people, and took the king of Babylonia himself captive. He tied him atop a swift-footed camel and led him into the desert. Three days they rode, and then he said to him, “O king of time and substance and cipher of the century! In Babylonia didst thou attempt to make me lose my way in a labyrinth of brass with many stairways, doors, and walls; now the Powerful One has seen fit to allow me to show thee mine, which has no stairways to climb, nor walls to impede thy passage.”

Then he untied the bonds of the king of Babylonia and abandoned him in the middle of the desert, where he died of hunger and thirst. Glory to him who does not die.

From Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Andrew Hurley, Penguin Books, 1998, p. 263-264.

Concerning marionettes and automatons

Concerning marionettes and automatons—the decline in that direction is preceded by loss. Th is hardening is well depicted in the folktale about the glass heart.

The vice that has become commonplace leads to automatism, as it did so terribly in the case of the old prostitutes who became pure sex machines. Something similar is emanating from the stingy old men. They have sold their souls to material things and a life of metal. Sometimes a particular decision precedes the transition; man rejects his salvation. A widespread vice must be the basis for the general transition to automatism and its threat to us. It would be the task of the theologians to explain this to us, but they are silent.
*
During these past years, solipsism has emerged as a particularly difficult hurdle in the evolution of my thought. This is not only a product of isolation, it is also related to a temptation to embrace misanthropy, a trait that one cannot resist strongly enough in oneself. When surrounded by these crowds who have renounced free will, I feel more and more alienated, and sometimes it seems as if these people were not even there or that they were merely specious outlines constructed of half-demonic, half-mechanical materials.
*
The details included a passage about alcohol that I liked. Long quotations without sources are included claiming that the irresistible attraction of alcohol is not caused by physical enjoyment, but by its mystical power. It is thus not depravity that leads the unfortunate man to it, but rather hunger for spiritual power. Drink gives the poor and uneducated what others derive from music and libraries: it provides them with enhanced reality. It leads them from the edges of reality into its innermost workings. For many, this narrow zone in which they experience a breath of air is a place close to the realm of inebriation. Consequently, people make a considerable mistake in thinking they can combat drunkenness as a species of gluttony focused on liquid.
*
Concerning self-education. Even if we are born with infirmities, we can rise to remarkable levels of health. The same is true in the realm of knowledge. Through study you can liberate yourself from the influence of bad teachers and from the prejudices of your age. In a completely corrupted situation even the most modest progress in morality is much more difficult. Here is where things come down to fundamentals.
*
After 1918, Rozanov died in a monastery, where he is said to have starved to death. He remarked of the Revolution that it would fail because it offered nothing to men’s dreams. It is this that will destroy its structures. I find it so appealing that his hurried notations came to him as a sort of plasmatic motion of the spirit in moments of contemplation—when he was sorting his coin collection or sunning himself on the sand after his bath.
*
Just as the Trojan War has become the mythical model of every historical war, the tragedy of returning soldiers and the figure of Clytemnestra constantly recur. A woman who hears that her husband is to be released from prison camp sends him a little parcel of delicacies as a love token. In the meantime, the man returns earlier than expected and discovers not only his wife but also her lover and two children. In the prisoner of war camp in Germany, comrades divide the contents of the parcel and four of them die after consuming the butter she had laced with arsenic.

from the book A German Officer in Occupied Paris The War Journals, 1941-1945 (European Perspectives A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism) by Ernst Jünger

Borges at Eighty - some extracts

BARNSTONE: I have some questions. Maybe wordy, but your answers won’t be.

BORGES: They will be laconic, yes?

BARNSTONE: We know that consciousness resides in every other human being, yet we possess an awareness of only our own mind. At times we wake, as it were, to a puzzling knowledge of the mind’s separate existence.

BORGES: Well, but this is a question on the nature of solipsism, no? Now, I don’t believe in solipsism, because if I did I’d go mad. But of course it is a curious fact that we exist.

At the same time, I feel I am not dreaming you, or, let’s put it the other way, that you are not dreaming me. But this fact of wondering at life may stand for the essence of poetry. All poetry consists in feeling things as being strange, while all rhetoric consists in thinking of them as quite common, as obvious. Of course I am puzzled by the fact of my existing, of my existing in a human body, of my looking through eyes, hearing through ears, and so on. And maybe everything I have written is a mere metaphor, a mere variation on that central theme of being puzzled by things. In that case, I suppose, there’s no essential difference between philosophy and poetry, since both stand for the same kind of puzzlement. Except that in the case of philosophy the answer is given in a logical way, and in the case of poetry you use metaphor. If you use language, you have to use metaphors all the time. Since you know my works (well, let the word go at that. I don’t think of them as works, really), since you know my exercises, I suppose you have felt that I was being puzzled all the time, and I was trying to find a foundation for my puzzlement.

*

BARNSTONE: In Cincinnati when an admirer said “May you live one thousand years,” you answered “I look forward happily to my death.” What did you mean by that?

BORGES: I mean that when I’m unhappy—and that happens quite often to all of us—I find a real consolation in the thought that in a few years, or maybe in a few days, I’ll be dead and then all this won’t matter. I look forward to being blotted out. But if I thought that my death was a mere illusion, that after death I would go on, then I would feel very, very unhappy. For, really, I’m sick and tired of myself. Now, of course if I go on and I have no personal memory of ever having been Borges, then in that case it won’t matter to me because I may have been hundreds of odd people before I was born, but those things won’t worry me, since I will have forgotten them. When I think of mortality, of death, I think of those things in a hopeful way, in an expectant way. I should say I am greedy for death, that I want to stop waking up every morning, finding: Well, here I am, I have to go back to Borges.

There’s a word in Spanish, I suppose you know. I wonder if it’s any longer in use. Instead of saying “to wake up,” you say recordarse, that is, to record yourself, to remember yourself. My mother used to say Que me recuerde a las ocho “I want to be recorded to myself at eight.” Every morning I get that feeling because I am more or less nonexistent. Then when I wake up, I always feel I’m being let down. Because, well, here I am. Here’s the same old stupid game going on. I have to be somebody. I have to be exactly that somebody. I have certain commitments. One of the commitments is to live through the whole day. Then I see all that routine before me, and all things naturally make me tired. Of course when you’re young, you don’t feel that way. You feel, well, I am so glad I’m back in this marvelous world. But I don’t think I ever felt that way. Even when I was young. Especially when I was young. Now I have resignation. Now I wake up and I say: I have to face another day. I let it go at that. I suppose that people feel in different ways because many people think of immortality as a kind of happiness, perhaps because they don’t realize it.

BARNSTONE: They don’t realize what?

BORGES: The fact that going on and on would be, let’s say, awful.

BARNSTONE: Would be another hell, as you say in one of your stories.

BORGES: Yes, it would be, yes. Since this life is already hell, why go in for more and more hell, for larger and larger doses!

BARNSTONE: For two hundred years?

BORGES: Yes. Well, of course you might say that those two hundred years don’t exist. For what really exists is the present moment. The present moment is being weighted down by the past and by the fear of the future. Really, when do we speak of the present moment? For the present moment is as much an abstraction as the past or the future. In the present moment, you always have some kind of past and some kind of future also. You are slipping all the time from one to the other.

BARNSTONE: But obviously you have great moments of pleasure during your life.

BORGES: Yes, I suppose everybody has. But I wonder. I suppose those moments are perhaps finer when you remember them. Because when you’re happy, you’re hardly conscious of things. The fact of being conscious makes for unhappiness.

BARNSTONE: To be conscious of happiness often lets in an intrusion of doubt.

BORGES: But I think I have known moments of happiness. I suppose all men have. There are moments, let’s say, love, riding, swimming, talking to a friend, let’s say, conversation, reading, even writing, or rather, not writing but inventing something. When you sit down to write it, then you are no longer happy because you’re worried by technical problems. But when you think out something, then I suppose you may be allowed to be happy. And there are moments when you’re slipping into sleep, and then you feel happy, or at least I do. I remember the first time I had sleeping pills. (They were efficient, of course, since they were new to me.) I used to say to myself: Now hearing that tramway turn around the corner, I won’t be able to hear the end of the noise it makes, the rumble, because I’ll be asleep. Then I felt very, very happy. I thought of unconsciousness.

*

BORGES: But of course, I live in memory. And I suppose a poet should live in memory because, after all, what is imagination? Imagination, I should say, is made of memory and of oblivion. It is a kind of blending of the two things.

BARNSTONE: You manage with time?

BORGES: Oh yes. Everybody who goes blind gets a kind of reward: a different sense of time. Time is no longer to be filled in at every moment by something. No. You know that you have just to live on, to let time live you. That makes for a certain comfort. I think it is a great comfort, or perhaps a great reward. A gift of blindness is that you feel time in a different way from most people, no? You have to remember and you have to forget. You shouldn’t remember everything because, well, the character I wrote about, Funes, goes mad because his memory is endless. Of course if you forgot everything, you would no longer exist. Because you exist in your past. Otherwise you wouldn’t even know who you were, what your name was. You should go in for a blending of the two elements, no? Memory and oblivion, and we call that imagination. That’s a high-sounding name.

*

BARNSTONE: Recently you spoke about having experienced, twice, moments you would call timeless, mystical. Would you be willing to speak about the unspeakable?

BORGES: Yes. Two timeless moments have been given me. One came through quite an ordinary way. Suddenly I felt somehow I am beyond time. And the other came after a woman had told me that she couldn’t love me and I felt very unhappy. I went for a long walk. I went to a railway station in the south of Buenos Aires. Then, suddenly, I got that feeling of timelessness, of eternity. I don’t know how long it lasted, since it was timeless. But I felt very grateful for it. Then I wrote a poem on the railway station wall (I shouldn’t have done that!). The poem is still there. So I’ve had the experience only twice in my life. But at the same time, I know people who’ve never had it and I know people who are having it all the time. My friend, a mystic, for example, abounds in ecstacies. I don’t. I’ve only had two experiences of timeless time in eighty years.

BARNSTONE: When you are in time—

BORGES: I’m in time all the time.

BARNSTONE: The other ninety-eight moments of your life, there’s the time of your mind, of dream, and then there’s the external time, the clock time, the measured time. You talk and write very much about time.

BORGES: Time is the essential riddle.

 *

BORGES: When I am unhappy—and I allow myself to be unhappy now and then—I think of death as the great salvation. After all, what on earth can it matter what happens to Jorge Luis Borges? I’ll see him no more. I think of death as a hope, a hope to be totally blotted out, obliterated, and I can count on that, and I know that there is no future life, no cause for fear or for hope. We shall simply vanish and that’s as it should be. I think of immortality as being a threat, but in fact it will never achieve anything. I am sure that I am not personally immortal. And I feel that death will prove a happiness, since what better thing can we expect than forgetfulness, oblivion? That’s the way I feel about it.

What makes a tale utopian?

 Just what, then, makes a tale utopian? It is the blending of things that cannot blend, the going beyond limitations, the drawing of unjustified conclusions from premises that clash. The rule, A posse ad esse non valet consequentia ("A conclusion from the possible to the actual is not valid") is not respected here. But when we examine such a utopia, a technological novel, for instance, we find that it utopian nature does not lie, as one might think, in the technical theme which the author develops. A writer who tells us of cities with moving streets where every house is a perfect residential mechanism, every roof has an airport, every housewife receives provisions in her kitchen through an unfailing system of tubes; who assures us that these cities are built of a substance which glows gently in the dark, and that the silken garments worn there are made from refuse, or from cottage cheese – that writer is not yet truly utopian. For all this, whether it will be achieved or not, lies within the possibilities of technical organization. We are content to state that such contrivances are possible, and disregard for the time the question of what would be gained if such a state were reached. The tale becomes utopian only when the writer leaves the sphere of technical organization – when, for instance, he tries to make us believe that these cities are inhabited by better and more perfect human beings; that envy, murder, and adultery are unknown; that neither law nor a police force is needed. For in so doing he steps outside the technical scheme within which he is spinning his fantasies, and combines it in a utopian manner with something different and alien which can never be developed out of the scheme itself. This is why Bellamy is more of a utopian than Jules Verne – the latter sticks closer to the technological scheme. A social utopian like Fourier believed in all seriousness that, if only his theories were accepted and applied, the very salt water of the sea would turn into sweet lemonade and the whales would cheerfully harness themselves to the ships. Thus he ascribed to his ideas power mightier than the song of Orpheus, and this even after his model community, La Reunion, had broken down. Such exuberance of the mind is ridiculous, unless one happens to be among those who are ruined by it.

From Friedrich Georg Jünger's The Failure of Technology

The machine organization gives nothing – it organizes need

Why does the contemplation of machines give us such pleasure? Because they manifest the fundamental form of man's intelligence, because before our very eyes this constructive and combining intelligence masters and amasses power, because they win a ceaseless triumph over the elements which they beat down, squeeze, and forge. Let us enter the workshop, then, to see what goes on.

The impression we gain as we observe technical processes of any sort is not at all one of abundance. The sight of abundance and plenty give us joy:

they are the signs of a fruitfulness which we revere as a life-giving force.

Rooting, sprouting, budding, blooming, ripening, and fruition – the exuberance of the motions and forms of life – strengthen and refresh us. The human body and the human mind possess this power of bestowing strength.

Both man and woman have it. But the machine organization gives nothing – it organizes need. The prospect of vineyard, orchard, or a blossoming landscape cheers us, not because these things yield profits, but because of the sensation of fertility, abundance, and gratuitous riches. The industrial scene, however, has lost its fruitfulness; it has become the scene of mechanical production. It conveys, above all, a sense of hungriness, particularly in the industrial cities which, in the metaphorical language of technological progress, are the homes of a flourishing industry. The machine gives a hungry impression. And this sensation of a growing, gnawing hunger, a hunger that becomes unbearable, emanates from everything in our entire technical arsenal.

When we enter a factory, be it a cotton mill, a foundry, a saw mill, or a powerhouse, everywhere we get the same impression. The consuming, devouring, gluttonous motion racing through time restlessly and insatiably, reveals the never stilled and never to be stilled hunger of the machine. So obvious is this hunger that even the impression of concentrated power which we receive in the centers of heavy industry cannot overcome it. In fact, it is strongest in these centers, because precisely here we find the greatest greed for power. And the rational mind which stands behind the machine and keeps watch over its automatic, mechanical motion – it too is hungry, and hunger follows it everywhere. It cannot shake off hunger; it cannot free itself from it; it cannot be stilled, however hard it may try. And how, indeed, could that be possible! This mind itself is consuming, gluttonous, and it has no access to riches; it cannot conjure up abundance. No effort of ingenuity, not all the inventive power that is brought to bear here can do it. For rationalization only sharpens hunger and actually increases consumption. This growing consumption is a sign not of abundance but of poverty; it is bound up with worry, want, and toil.

It is precisely the methodical, disciplined effort leading to the perfection of the technical processes which destroys the basis for the hopes that certain groups place in this perfection. Progress in its present rapid advance creates an optical illusion, deceiving the observer into seeing things which are not there. Technology can be expected to solve all problems which can be mastered by technical means, but we must expect nothing from it which lies beyond technical possibilities. Since even the smallest mechanical process consumes more energy than it produces, how could the sum of all these processes create abundance?2 There can be no talk of riches produced by technology. What really happens is rather a steady, forever growing consumption. It is a ruthless destruction, the like of which the earth has never before seen. A more and more ruthless destruction of resources is the characteristic of our technology. Only by this destruction can it exist and spread. All theories which overlook this fact are lopsided because they disregard the basic conditions which in the modern world govern production and economics.

In every healthy economy the substance with which it works is preserved and used sparingly, so that consumption and destruction do not overstep the limit beyond which the substance itself would be endangered or destroyed.

Since technology presupposes destruction, since its development depends upon destruction, it cannot be fitted into any healthy economic system; one cannot look at it from an economic point of view. The radical consumption of oil, coal, and ore cannot be called economy, however rational the methods of drilling and mining. Underlying strict rationality of technical working methods, we find a way of thinking which cares nothing for the preservation and saving of the substance.

What is euphemistically called production is really consumption. The gigantic technical apparatus, that masterpiece of human ingenuity, could not reach perfection if technological thought were to be contained within an economic scheme, if the destructive power of technical progress were to be arrested. But this progress becomes all the more impetuous, the larger the resources at its disposal, and the more energetically it devours them. This is shown by the concentration of men and machines in the great mining centers where the mechanization of work and the organization of man are most advanced. The rationality of technology, so impressively displayed here, becomes intelligible only when one has understood the conditions on which it depends. Its concomitant is waste and contempt for all rationality in the exploitation of the resources on whose existence technology depends, as the lungs depend on air.

Where wastage begins, there begins desolation, and scenes of such desolation can be found even in the early days of our technology, in the era of the steam engine. These scenes are startling by the extraordinary ugliness and the Cyclopean power which are characteristic of them. The machine invades the landscape with destruction and transformation; it grows factories and whole manufacturing cities overnight, cities grotesquely hideous, where human misery is glaringly revealed; cities which, like Manchester, represent an entire stage of technology and which have become synonymous with hopeless dreariness. Technology darkens the air with smoke, poisons the water, destroys the plants and animals. It brings about a state in which nature has to be "preserved" from rationalized thinking, in which large tracts of land have to be set apart, fenced off, and placed under a taboo, like museum pieces. What all museum-like institutions make evident is that preservation is needed. The extension of protected areas, therefore, is an indication that destructive processes are at work.

Mining centers, in particular, are the focal points of organized pillage, where the riches in the earth are exploited and consumed. Human pauperization begins with the proletarization of the masses, who are indoctrinated to factory work and kept on a low level of existence. The exploitation of the factory worker (about which socialism is indignant only so long as it is in the opposition) is an inevitable symptom of the universal exploitation to which technology subjects the whole earth from end to end.

Man no less than ore deposits belongs to the resources subject to consumption by technology. The ways in which the worker tries to evade this exploitation – associations, labor unions, political parties – are the very methods which tie him forever closer to the progress of technology, mechanical work, and technical organization.

The obverse side of technology is a pillage which becomes constantly better organized; this must not be overlooked when one speaks of technical progress. True, we have made a technical advance if by means of artificial fertilizers we succeed in squeezing uninterrupted crops out of our overburdened plough and pasture land. But this advance itself is at the same time the consequence of a calamitous deficiency, for if we did not have the fertilizer we should no longer be able to feed ourselves at all. Technical progress has deprived us of the free choice of nutriment which our ancestors possessed. A machine which trebles the output of a previous model constitutes a technical advance, for it is the result of a more rational design.

But for this very reason it also possesses a more intense consuming and devouring power. Its hunger is sharper, and it consumes correspondingly more. In this way, the whole realm of the machine is full of a restless, devouring power that cannot be satisfied.

(...)

 If two thousand years hence there should still be archaeologists – which is rather unlikely – who were to undertake excavations, say, in Manchester, Essen, or Pittsburgh, they would find but little. They would discover nothing as enduring as Egyptian burial chambers and classical temples. For the stuff with which the factory system works is not aere perennius (“more lasting than bronze” – Horace). These archaeologists might even be surprised at the paltriness of their discoveries. The earth-spanning power of technology is of an ephemeral kind – a fact easily overlooked by those engrossed in it.

Everywhere it is threatened by decay, given over to decay, and decay follows upon its heels all the more insistently and closely, the faster it marches on towards new triumphs.

The machine does not create new riches. It consumes existing riches through pillage, that is, in a manner which lacks all rationality even though it quickly employs rational methods of work. As technology progresses, it devours the resources on which it depends. It contributes to a constant drain, and thereby again and again comes to a point where it is forced to improve its inventory and to rationalize anew its methods of work. Those who deny this, claiming that it is the wealth of new inventions which made the existing apparatus obsolete, are confusing cause and effect.

from Friedrich Georg Jünger's The Failure of Technology

The world without silence

Nothing has changed the nature of man so much as the loss of silence. The invention of printing, technics, compulsory education—nothing has so altered man as this lack of relationship to silence, this fact that silence is no longer taken for granted, as something as natural as the sky above or the air we breathe.

Man who has lost silence has not merely lost one human quality, but his whole structure has been changed thereby.

Formerly silence covered all things: man had first to break through the covering of silence before he could get close to an object, and the silence protected even the thoughts he wanted to think himself. Man could not throw himself directly at things and ideas: they were shielded by the silence surrounding them, and man was protected from moving towards them all too quickly. The silence was stationed in front of things and ideas. It was there objectively. It was encamped there like a defending army. Man moved slowly and quietly towards ideas and things. The silence was always present between the movement from one idea to another, from one thing to another.
The rhythm of the silence punctuated the movement.

Every movement become a special act: the silence, the primitive rock of silence had to be removed before one could move forward. But then when one had arrived at an idea, one was really there with the idea, and the idea or the thing really existed for the first time. The concrete reality was, as it were, created in the direct personal encounter with man.

Today man no longer moves deliberately to ideas and things. They are absorbed into his own emptiness, they rush at him, they swirl around him. Man no longer thinks, he has his thinking done for him. Cogito, ergo sum has been replaced by cogitor, ergo non sum.

The earth was once no less occupied than it is today, but it was occupied by silence, and man was unable to seize everything in it as it was all held fast by silence. Man did not need to know everything: the silence knew it all for him. And as man was connected with the silence, he knew many things through the silence.

The heaven of silence no longer covers the world of ideas and things today, restraining them with its weight and pressure. Where it used to be there is now an empty space, and things are as it were drawn up by suction into the space where the silence used to dwell. Things are exposed, uncovered and pressing upwards. More and more things are constantly pushing their way upwards, and that is the real ‘‘revolt of the masses””, this rebellion of things and ideas that are no longer held down by the pressure of silence.

Man is not even aware of the loss of silence: so much ıs the space formerly occupied by the silence so full of things that nothing seems to be missing. But where formerly the silence lay on a thing, now one thing lies on another.  Where formerly an idea was covered by the silence, now a thousand associations speed along to it and bury it.

In this world of today in which everything is reckoned in terms of immediate profit, there is no place for silence. Silence was expelled because it was unproductive, because it merely existed and seemed to have no purpose.

Almost the only kind of silence that there is today is due to the loss of the faculty of speech. It is purely negative: the absence of speech. It is merely like a technical hitch in the continuous flow of noise.

There is still perhaps a little silence; a little is still tolerated. Just as the almost completely exterminated Indians are still allowed a little living space in their miserable reservations, so silence is sometimes allowed a chink of space in the sanatoria between two and three in the afternoon: “An hour of silence” and in the “two minutes’ silence’ in which the masses must be silent ‘‘in remembrance of...’ But there is never a special silence in memory of the silence that is no more.

It is true that silence still exists as a true silence in monastic communities. In the Middle Ages the silence of the monks was still connected with the silence of other men outside the monastery. Today the silence in the monasteries is isolated; it lives literally only in monastic seclusion.

from the book The World of Silence by Max Picard

Andreas Moritz - Cancer Is Not a Disease - Its a Survival Mechanism - Introduction

 

What you are about to read may rock or even dismantle the very foundation of your beliefs about your body, health and healing. The title, “Cancer Is Not a Disease,” may be unsettling for many, provocative to some, but encouraging for all. This book will serve as a revelation for those who are sufficiently open-minded to consider the possibility that cancer and other debilitating disorders are not actual diseases, but desperate and final attempts by the body to stay alive for as long as circumstances permit. It will perhaps astound you to learn that a person who is afflicted with the main causes of cancer (which constitute the real illness) would most likely die quickly unless he actually grew cancer cells.

In this work, I provide evidence to this effect. I further claim that cancer will only occur after the body’s main defense or healing mechanisms have already failed. In extreme circumstances, exposure to large amounts of cancer-producing agents (carcinogens) can bring about a collapse of the body’s defenses within several weeks or months and allow for rapid and aggressive growth of a cancerous tumor. Usually, though, it takes many years, or even decades, for these so-called “malignant” tumors to form and become diagnostically noticeable. Unfortunately, basic misconceptions or complete lack of knowledge about the reasons behind tumor growth have turned “misaligned” cancer cells into vicious monsters that have no other purpose but to kill us in retaliation for our sins or abusing the body.

However, as you are about to find out, cancer is on our side, not against us. Unless we change our perception of what cancer really is, it will most likely resist treatment, particularly the most “advanced” and commonly applied methods. If you have cancer, and cancer is indeed part of the body’s complex survival responses and not a disease, as I suggest it is, you must find answers to the following important questions:

What reasons coerce your body into developing cancer cells?

Once you have identified these reasons, will you be able to remove them?

What determines the type and severity of cancer with which you are afflicted?

Since the body’s original genetic design always favors the continuance of life and protection against adversities of any kind, why would the body permit self-destruction?

If cancer is a survival mechanism, what needs to be done to prevent the body from taking recourse to such drastic measures of self-preservation?

Why do almost all cancers disappear by themselves, without medical intervention?

Do radiation, chemotherapy and surgery actually cure cancer, or do cancer survivors heal due to other reasons, in spite of these radical, side-effect-loaded treatments?

What roles do fear, frustration, low self-worth and repressed anger play in the origination and outcome of cancer? 

What is the spiritual growth lesson behind cancer?

To deal with the root causes of cancer, you must find satisfying and practical answers to the above questions. If you feel the inner urge to make sense of this life-changing event (cancer, that is) you will greatly benefit from continuing to read this book. Cancer can be your greatest opportunity to help restore balance to all aspects of your life, but it can also be the harbinger of severe trauma and suffering. Either way, you will discover that you are always in control of your body. To live in a human body, you must have access to a certain amount of life-sustaining energy. You may either use this inherent energy in a nourishing and self-sustaining way or in a destructive and debilitating way. In case you consciously or unconsciously choose negligence or self-abuse over loving attention and self-respect, your body will likely end up having to fight for its life. The main issue is not whether you have cancer but how you perceive it.

Cancer is but one of the many ways the body tries to change the way you see and treat yourself, including your physical body. This inevitably brings up the subject of spiritual health, which plays at least as important a role in cancer as physical and emotional reasons do.

Cancer appears to be a highly confusing and unpredictable disorder. It seems to strike the very happy and the very sad, the rich and the poor, the smokers and the non-smokers, the very healthy and the not so healthy. People from all backgrounds and occupations can have cancer. However, if you dare look behind the mask of its physical symptoms, such as the type, appearance and behavior of cancer cells, you will find that cancer is not as coincidental or unpredictable as it seems to be.

What makes 50% of the American population so prone to developing cancer, when the other half has no risk at all? Blaming the genes for that is but an excuse to cover up ignorance of the real causes or lure people afflicted with cancer into costly treatment programs. Besides, any good genetic researcher would tell you that such a belief is void of any logic and outright unscientific.

Cancer has always been an extremely rare illness, except in industrialized nations during the past 40-50 years. Human genes have not significantly changed for thousands of years. Why would they change so drastically now, and suddenly decide to kill scores of people? The answer to this question, which I will further elaborate on in this book, is amazingly simple: Damaged or faulty genes do not kill anyone. Cancer does not kill a person afflicted with it! What kills a cancer patient is not the tumor, but the numerous reasons behind cell mutation and tumor growth. These root causes should be the focus of every cancer treatment, yet most oncologists typically ignore them. Constant conflicts, resentment, guilt and shame (known as stress), for example, can easily paralyze the body’s most basic functions, and easily lead to the growth of a cancerous tumor.

After having seen thousands of cancer patients over a period of three decades, I began to recognize a certain pattern of thinking, believing and feeling that was common to most of them. To be more specific, I have yet to meet a cancer patient who does not feel burdened by some poor self-image, unresolved conflict and worries, or past emotional conflict/trauma that still lingers in his subcon-scious mind and cellular memories. Cancer, the physical disease, cannot occur unless there is a strong undercurrent of emotional uneasiness and deep-seated frustration.

Cancer patients typically suffer from lack of self-respect or worthiness, and often have what I call an “unfinished business” in their life. Cancer can actually be a way of revealing the source of such an unresolved, inner conflict. Furthermore, cancer can help them come to terms with such a conflict, and even heal it altogether. The way to take out weeds is to pull them out along with their roots. This is how we must treat cancer; otherwise, it may recur eventually.

The first chapter of this book provides you with profound insights into what cancer really is and stands for, seen from a physical perspective. It is an understanding of cancer you may never have come across before. This new and yet timeless comprehension of cancer allows for new approaches targeted at actually healing the causes of cancer instead of merely fixing its symptomatic manifestations.

Chapters Two and Three deal with the physical and emotional/spiritual causes, respectively. For clarities sake, I have tried to separate these categories, although I am very much aware that such a division is arbitrary and non-existent. I have done this for one purpose only: to emphasize that healing the causes of cancer must include restoring one’s physical, emotional and spiritual wellbeing. 

Leaving out just one of these factors would undermine the chances of full recovery and eventually lead to the recurrence of cancer (most medically treated cancers reoccur). At least, such an incom-plete approach would seriously affect one’s mental and physical health and, foremost of all, one’s state of happiness. The following statement, which runs like a red thread through the entire book, is very important in the consideration of cancer:

“Cancer does not cause a person to be sick; it is the sickness of the person that causes the cancer.” To treat cancer successfully requires the patient to become whole again on all levels of his body, mind and spirit. Once the cancer causes have been properly identified, it will become apparent what needs to be done to achieve complete recovery. This is the subject matter of Chapter Four.

It is a medical fact that every person has cancer cells in the body at all times in his life. These cancer cells remain undetectable through standard tests until they have multiplied to several billion.

When doctors announce to their cancer patients that the treatments they prescribed had successfully eliminated all cancer cells, they merely refer to tests that are able to identify the detectable size of cancer tumors. Standard cancer treatments may lower the number of cancer cells to an undetectable level, but this certainly cannot eradicate all cancer cells. As long as the causes of tumor growth remain intact, cancer may redevelop at any time and at any speed.

Curing cancer has little to do with getting rid of a group of detectable cancer cells. Treatments like chemotherapy and radiation are certainly capable of poisoning or burning many cancer cells, but they also destroy healthy cells in the bone marrow, gastrointestinal tract, liver, kidneys, heart, lungs, etc., which often leads to perma-nent irreparable damage of entire organs and systems in the body.

The poisons of chemotherapy drugs alone cause such severe inflammation in every cell of the body that even the hair follicles can no longer hold on to the strands of hair. A real cure of cancer does not occur at the expense of destroying other vital parts of the body. It is achievable only when the causes of excessive growth of cancer cells have been removed or stopped. This book is dedicated to dealing with the causes of cancer, not with its symptoms. Treating cancer as if it were a disease is a trap that millions of people have fallen into and they have paid a high price for not attending to its root causes.

RACIAL SENSITIVITY: ‘DIFFICULTIES’ WITH THE CONCEPT OF AVERAGES

  ‘But Some Blacks Are Extremely Intelligent!’ 

On a visit to America in 1986, a well-educated friend responded to my view that blacks were on average less intelligent by saying, ‘But some of the blacks working in my office are extremely intelligent!’. But of course I wasn’t saying that no blacks are smart but only that fewer were, indicating how people can act as if they don’t understand the concept of averages. 

As applied to individuals this creates presumptions: if I had to guess who was smarter, this random white or this random black, it would be rational to pick the white; but in any given case I could well be wrong. Most people understand this , but when it comes to ‘sensitive’ issues common sense flies out the window. 

Furthermore, whatever the average difference, there must be an overlap, i.e., blacks who are more intelligent than many (or even most) whites. That this (random) white is probably more intelligent than this (random) black is one thing; but that he must be is something for which I cannot imagine any possible grounds. 

Philosopher Talks Sense, Journalist Nonsense I came across this from a well-known British philosopher, Anthony Flew: 

... the fact that I belong to some set which is on average less this or more that than another set, to which you belong, carries no implication that I, as an individual, am less this or more that than you. … [As for] the correspondent who told [Arthur] Jensen that “If the group is to be labelled intellectually inferior, I, as a member of that group, am also inevitably and automatically labelled”, his argument was … fallacious. [The reference is from Arthur Jensen’s Genetics and Education (1972, p.15). The entire quote is from “‘Education against Racism’: three comments”, by Anthony Flew, Journal of Philosophy of Education, vol. 21, no. 1, 1987, p.136.] In The Race Gallery (1996), Marek Kohn, discussing The Bell Curve, writes (p.115): 

... what counts [Herrnstein and Murray say] is an individual’s capabilities, and an individual of any ethnic group may have a high IQ. Many critics did not feel that this was an adequate solution to the racial intelligence question. ‘What’s the difference between thinking that the black male next to me is dumb and thinking there’s a 25 per cent chance that he’s dumb?’ [meaning that there’s a 75% chance that he’s not dumb] asked Alan Wolfe, one of twenty commentators given space in The New Republic after Andrew Sullivan’s decision to publish a piece by Herrnstein and Murray caused almost his entire editorial staff to revolt. 

While I might not expect an uneducated African adolescent to understand probability (which is what this amounts to), I certainly would of someone writing in The New Republic. If this man Wolfe is really such an imbecile that he cannot understand this simple statement of probability, then he should look for a new line of work, because he would truly be a disgrace to his profession – indeed, to almost any profession.

Gedaliah Braun

Foreword to the book Inventing the AIDS Virus - by Kary B. Mullis

 

IN 1988, I WAS WORKING as a consultant at Specialty Labs in Santa Monica, setting up analytic routines for the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). I knew a lot about setting up analytic routines for anything with nucleic acids in it because I had invented the Polymerase Chain Reaction. That’s why they had hired me.

Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS), on the other hand, was something I did not know a lot about. Thus, when I found myself writing a report on our progress and goals for the project, sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, I recognized that I did not know the scientific reference to support a statement I had just written: “HIV is the probable cause of AIDS.” So, I turned to the virologist at the next desk, a reliable and competent fellow, and asked him for the reference. He said I didn’t need one. I disagreed. While it’s true that certain scientific discoveries or techniques are so well established that their sources are no longer referenced in the contemporary literature, that didn’t seem to be the case with the HIV/AIDS connection. It was totally remarkable to me that the individual who had discovered the cause of a deadly and as-yet-uncured disease would not be continually referenced in the scientific papers until that disease was cured and forgotten. But as I would soon learn, the name of that individual—who would surely be Nobel material—was on the tip of no one’s tongue.

Of course, this simple reference had to be out there somewhere. Otherwise, tens of thousands of public servants and esteemed scientists of many callings, trying to solve the tragic deaths of a large number of homosexual and/or intravenous (IV) drug-using men between the ages of twenty-five and forty, would not have allowed their research to settle into one narrow channel of investigation. Everyone wouldn’t fish in the same pond unless it was well established that all the other ponds were empty. There had to be a published paper, or perhaps several of them, which taken together indicated that HIV was the probable cause of AIDS. There just had to be.

I did computer searches, but came up with nothing. Of course, you can miss something important in computer searches by not putting in just the right key words. To be certain about a scientific issue, it’s best to ask other scientists directly. That’s one thing that scientific conferences in faraway places with nice beaches are for.

I was going to a lot of meetings and conferences as part of my job. I got in the habit of approaching anyone who gave a talk about AIDS and asking him or her what reference I should quote for that increasingly problematic statement, “HIV is the probable cause of AIDS.”

After ten or fifteen meetings over a couple years, I was getting pretty upset when no one could cite the reference. I didn’t like the ugly conclusion that was forming in my mind: The entire campaign against a disease increasingly regarded as a twentieth-century Black Plague was based on a hypothesis whose origins no one could recall. That defied both scientific and common sense.

Finally, I had an opportunity to question one of the giants in HIV and AIDS research, Dr. Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute, when he gave a talk in San Diego. It would be the last time I would be able to ask my little question without showing anger, and I figured Montagnier would know the answer. So, I asked him.

With a look of condescending puzzlement, Montagnier said, “Why don’t you quote the report from the Centers for Disease Control?”

I replied, “It doesn’t really address the issue of whether or not HIV is the probable cause of AIDS, does it?”

“No,” he admitted, no doubt wondering when I would just go away. He looked for support to the little circle of people around him, but they were all awaiting a more definitive response, like I was.

“Why don’t you quote the work on SIV [Simian Immunodeficiency Virus]?” the good doctor offered.

“I read that too, Dr. Montagnier,” I responded. “What happened to those monkeys didn’t remind me of AIDS. Besides, that paper was just published only a couple of months ago. I’m looking for the original paper where somebody showed that HIV caused AIDS.”

This time, Dr. Montagnier’s response was to walk quickly away to greet an acquaintance across the room.

Cut to the scene inside my car just a few years ago. I was driving from Mendocino to San Diego. Like everyone else by now, I knew a lot more about AIDS than I wanted to. But I still didn’t know who had determined that it was caused by HIV. Getting sleepy as I came over the San Bernardino Mountains, I switched on the radio and tuned in a guy who was talking about AIDS. His name was Peter Duesberg, and he was a prominent virologist at Berkeley. I’d heard of him, but had never read his papers or heard him speak. But I listened, now wide awake, while he explained exactly why I was having so much trouble finding the references that linked HIV to AIDS. There weren’t any. No one had ever proved that HIV causes AIDS. When I got home, I invited Duesberg down to San Diego to present his ideas to a meeting of the American Association for Chemistry. Mostly skeptical at first, the audience stayed for the lecture, and then an hour of questions, and then stayed talking to each other until requested to clear the room. Everyone left with more questions than they had brought.

I like and respect Peter Duesberg. I don’t think he knows necessarily what causes AIDS; we have disagreements about that. But we’re both certain about what doesn’t cause AIDS.

We have not been able to discover any good reasons why most of the people on earth believe that AIDS is a disease caused by a virus called HIV. There is simply no scientific evidence demonstrating that this is true.

We have also not been able to discover why doctors prescribe a toxic drug called AZT (Zidovudine) to people who have no other complaint than the presence of antibodies to HIV in their blood. In fact, we cannot understand why humans would take that drug for any reason.

We cannot understand how all this madness came about, and having both lived in Berkeley, we’ve seen some strange things indeed. We know that to err is human, but the HIV/AIDS hypothesis is one hell of a mistake.

I say this rather strongly as a warning. Duesberg has been saying it for a long time. Read this book.

Kary B. Mullis

Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1993