Obesity, last summer, the summer before, the coming summer and Siddha Yoga

I am obese. According to the BMI. I am at 31.7. Last summer I got down to 180. The summer before that my weight was up at 240 a lot of the time and I needed insulin for my diabetes. I am now at 221 but I get little exercise, don't have much of a social life. So, I eat a lot. And do homework. People fear social relationships seems to me. They don't want to get too close. They fear clinging and restrictions of their freedom, men talking about love and all that shit. I used to drink and smoke. I quit smoking 22 years ago. But I began to eat more and developed diabetes, type II. My weight then was 265. I got down to 205 but I think I owe some of that to the use of the controversial diabetes drug Rezulin. I don't know. I went back to school then, in 1999 and got weak in my dieting. It's  hard to explain why. I would say some of it was lack of reward. Little applause. I got work then for the first time in a long time but I was very lonely, too, still just living with mom. Dad had died in 1992. Subconsciously I missed friends. Beyond the subconscious my 2 big brothers just never talked to me anymore. My mom used to call me her son as if I was the only son she had. I had not expected nor ever heard of this kind of divide in the family. I had hated my father and much of my father's large southern family. I had trouble in college staying with the present, the zen spirit. I reflected on a self that was overweight and not very handsome or intelligent. Although I was praised, I was not sure the praise was real. I had moved from New York to Florida, from the Burbs to the Farm and I wondered at the standards though if I had anybody seriously looking they would see I wasn't doing that damn well. lol Ah, well, on with it. Don't let this worry. I may lose some pounds again without the struggle I went through last summer working with two young black men who didn't take to all that Zen shit. Loved Jesus and the other loved Beer and the synthetic pot. It was difficult last year. Of late I got into it at the meditation center. I do think there was fear I was going to drag those black boys in there to meditate and some of those girls (almost all girls, one boy besides me, 21) wouldn't really dig it. Well, those guys wouldn't understand the protocols. It's hard to get people in there anyway but this one girl spoke to me about belching. I have that acid reflux and I think I had  been taking Nexeum but they changed me over to generic Prilosec and I think I belch more with the later. I think the Nexeum was gentler and it irritated a younger woman that I belched often. So, I stopped going. It has made me blue and also made me think about what it really is I want from Siddha Yoga. Am I trying to impress people? What's the thing here I have been doing it for over 30 years. What do I want from it? So many arguments over it. But it's not about winning an argument. It's about what is inside me. What is inside of everyone. But especially me.

Shri Guru Gita

Shiva, the manifestation of the Lord worshipped in Siddha Yoga is the speaker of most of Shri Guru Gita. He is also the seer of the mantras. Beloved Parvati also speaks. They are the only two speakers. I have been chanting Shri Guru Gita for over 30 years. Not daily but I've hung in there with it. It's like a favorite rock and roll record for me, or rock and roll singer. I am beginning to understand it is a sacred text.

A link I found today may interest you as it does me. http://www.svaroopavidya.org/site-svaorg/index.php/the-library/written-materials/shree-guru-gita-project

As well as this http://www.babachants.com/GuruGita.pdf

Lakshmi

Sally Kempton writes about the Goddess Lakshmi in her new book Awakening Shakti. She speaks of the danger of being enraptured of material wealth. Mahalakshmi is called yogamaya in the text Mahalakshmyastakam Stotram. It's important to find the subtle source of wealth. Sally speaks of Lakshmi's shadow energy when we see greed and people making money their God and so forth.

It's a good book. I would go out and buy it but Barnes and Noble doesn't have it in stock. There are 2 copies in the Alachua County Library system. One at the main library and one out in Micanopy. Funny, I was just driving out there the other day. I do that sometimes, I just drive.

Big Brothers, Big Sisters

Wow! What an organization, huh? Did you notice when you grew up that big brothers no longer gave a damn about you? It was likeyou were an extension of their egos. Now it was for you to marry, accomplish something and so forth. You were on your own. No more listening to music they played or wearing the clothes they wore. It was all up to you. MAKE YOUR OWN CHOICES. That was a phrase mom embraced and it sounded good but you didn't know who was listening in or watching you. Are  you going to choose smoking marijuana, well, then the police were there to bust you? Were you going to be gay? Well, then the church and the bros would have some moral questions for you. Choices. MOM was going to let you make your own choices. Trouble was I already had and had been doing so for quite a while. I was 23.

Study this, or That

So, I've read about cannabis use and schizophrenia. What about meditation and schizophrenia, especially under the guidance of an adept or realized one. I guess TM would be the first they would use. What about Krsna Consciousness? Are there spiritual masters working with schizophrenia? I recall a woman who worked with AIDS, Ma Jaya Sati Bhagavati. She was in Yoga Journal. Had a friend got angry with Yoga Journal for a color drawing on its cover showing Baba leading his disciples off of a cliff. Baba stayed aloft but the disciples fell. The drawing was on the order of something from Back to Godhead. You know their wonderful art. It was like a pastel. It was ridiculous. Yoga Journal was/is big on hatha yoga and all the physical yoga things but they are not much on the philosophy of the living masters or the unity of all religious philosophy. That's why I don't read it.
I wonder if any schizophrenics follow Gurumayi. I wonder how many have had her Darshan and received Shaktipat.

Marijuana and Schizophrenia from Abnormal Psychology (14th ed, Butcher, James N. 2010

People with schizophrenia are twice as likely as people in the general population to smoke cannabis (van Os et al., 2002). This has prompted researchers to ask whether there is a causal link between cannabis abuse and the development of psychosis. A methodologically rigorous study of conscripts to the Swedish army shows that, compared to those who had never used cannabis, young men who were heavy cannabis users by the time they were 18 were more than six times more likely to have developed schizophrenia 27 years later (Zammit et al., 2002). This association also remained even after people who had used other kinds of drugs were removed from the statistical analysis.

Other studies have now replicated this link (Arsenault et al., 2002, 2004; Fergusson et al., 2003; van Os et al., 2002) and highlighted early cannabis use as being particularly problematic. For example, Arsenault et al. (2002) reported that 10.3 percent of those who used cannabis by age 15 were diagnosed with signs of schizophrenia by age 26, compared with only 3 percent of the controls who did not use cannabis. Taken together, the research findings suggest that using cannabis more than doubles a person’s risk of developing schizophrenia at a later stage of life. They also point to adolescence as being a critical developmental period with respect to schizophrenia.

A major methodological concern in studies of this kind is whether people who are in the early stages of developing psychosis are more likely to use cannabis. If this were the case, cannabis use would simply be a correlate of schizophrenia and not a cause. However, even after childhood psychotic symptoms are considered and accounted for statistically, cannabis use has still been found to be a predictor of later schizophrenia (Fergusson et al., 2003).

Of course, the vast majority of people who use cannabis do not develop schizophrenia. So can we predict who is at higher risk? Using a large population sample, Caspi and colleagues (2005) have reported that people who carry a particular form of the COMT gene (one or two copies of the valine or val allele) are at increased risk for developing psychotic symptoms (hallucinations or delusions) in adulthood if they used cannabis during adolescence. In contrast, using cannabis has no adverse influence on those who have a different form of the COMT gene (two copies of the methionine or met allele). This is an exciting finding because it illustrates the importance of gene × environment interactions in the development of schizophrenia (see Figure 13.12).

Why should the val allele of the COMT gene be a risk factor? We still do not know. However, the finding is provocative because the COMT gene (which you may recall is on chromo-some 22) codes for a protein that plays a role the breakdown of dopamine. One of the active ingredients of cannabis (called THC) is also thought to increase the synthesis of dopamine. We further know that cannabis makes symptoms worse in patients who already have schizophrenia (D’Souza et al., 2005). So again, we have evidence of the importance of dopamine in schizophrenia and of the problems associated with cannabis use, although how everything fits together remains to be discovered.

Finally, we note that new research is showing that cannabis may actually accelerate the progressive brain changes that seem to go along with schizophrenia. Rais and colleagues (2008) collected brain scan data from 51 patients with recent-onset schizophrenia and 31 healthy controls. Nineteen of the patients were using cannabis (but not other illicit drugs) and 32 patients were not. When MRI scans were conducted again 5 years later, the patients who had continued to use cannabis during this time showed more marked decreases in brain volume relative to the patients who did not use cannabis. The changes in gray matter (brain cell) volume in the healthy controls, cannabis-using patients, and patients who did not use cannabis over the 5-year period are shown in Figure 13.13. Although both groups of patients lost more brain tissue over time than the healthy controls did, loss of brain tissue was especially pronounced in the patients who used cannabis. The conclusion is obvious. If you have schizophrenia, cannabis is probably very bad for your brain.

.

A post from my class journal in Psy 381 at ARgosy, Abnornal Psychology

I get thrown on due assignments. The work has become stressful to me as there are no breaks like in
normal college, one class just comes right on the heels of the other. I know no one else attending the
school nor in my major though I think that might just serve as a distraction to success. I was kind of
a devotee of Ganesh and I still follow him on Facebook but I worry about success. I really do. A girl, just
a girl, drove me off of the meditation center by aggressively speaking to me about my belching. I have
acid reflux. I would happily give that I hadn't prepared very well for that night, Shivaratri as she would
have liked. I forgot about it and didn't have time to dress nicely. I thought it wouldn't matter. The center
looks like a neat freak went crazy with it and I often don't have time to even wash my clothes. I stayed
a little long and I think we just don't get along naturally. I'm not a Lynyrd Skynyrd fan as I think she
may well be. So, I can't even recite texts with her in my mind's eye as it were.

I think I had undiagnosed depression for may 20 years from the 70's the 90's relieve only by being 
allowed Siddha Yoga and then to go to school to study some IT. People are backwards here and don't
believe in psychology but if the state will pay for some menial form of it they will go for it. That's how
I got to see a shrink at the Alachua County Mental Health Clinic in 1979. My association there was
very slow, 5 minutes every 2 weeks. It was a couple of years before I was able to see a counselor who
would even acknowledge there was a thing called meditation and God consciousness and I was allowed
some speaking to him for a while until he finally cut it short. The Siddha Meditation Center keeping moving
around in Gainesville, Florida sometimes completely hidden. It's founder Baba Muktananda died in 1982
and I am sorry if that's news to you. I used to think there was naturally a magazine associated with such
organizations but not so. There was one for a while called Siddha Path and that was closed after Baba
died and a new publication called DARSHAN created in 1988. My momma let me subscribe to that. I
subscribed to a video series by the same name and looked forward to every tape and magazine that 
arrived at my door, always hungry for more but the center only convened 2 days a week for about an
hour and a half at each time. Sometimes there were Intensives and courses but they cost a lot of money
and all I had was what my mom lived on, a social security check that when she died in 2007 as bringing
her $1300 a month. How could I spend $500 on an Intensive. Why didn't I have a job. I felt intensely guilty
and I had no social attachments, no guys, no girl friends but it was better than in 1978 when those recesses
were at their maximum. It was liked the world had ended in 1978. In fact I even thought of myself as the
expected Avatar, the Messiah, Buddha, Imam Mahdi that was to come. Me, a lonely man living with his
mother and father in a rural Florida town. I fantasized that somehow this had to do with my father's dying.
My hated father, by my step-brother and step-sister, my aunt and uncle and I think even my mom but
sometimes excepting my real brother and his wife, stood in the way of my becoming the expected Buddha
or Christ's reappearance. When he died then all would be well. I lived with that fantasy through many
years of non-world as I would call it. No buddies, no activities. The mental health clinic was happy to give
me sleepers to avoid the truth, to avoid everything and I slept over 12 hours a day I will bet but of course
I had masturbation. I was a grown man and despite my religious reality I was into wild bisexual imaginings.
Always though those fantasies had been dashed to the ground by women I was lucky enough to bed, if you
will in the 70's. 
I was real lonesome throughout the 80's with all kinds of idealistic views and no help on getting work. Finally
in the late 80's and early 90's I got a little serious. I took a writing course, a course in management
and supervision . I just wanted to build a resume because there was no cavalry to the rescue. Finally in 
1992 my father did die. With that the bank book opened a little wider. I was allowed to use the car without
asking. Later mom actually gave me the car and gave up driving herself which depressed me. Mom was
a great light hearted woman and I loved the idea of her going to town, Gainesville, to get groceries. She
bought organic which cause some controversy in the conservative rural southern town of Melrose in which
we lived. 
My involvement with Siddha Yoga seemed to lead my back to the world. I wanted cable TV. We hadn't had
any but the antenna, 2 or 3 stations. We had no VCR until I needed one to watch Gurumayi's videos in 
the DARSHAN video series. I started watching baseball on ESPN and then I bought a computer in 1996. To
get e-mail. I thought I could e-mail the Master and get some of the difficulties I was having at the center 
cleared up. Boy, was I wrong. She didn't even have a website much less an e-mail address. I spent hours
on the computer at political discussion boards like Mother Jones' Live Wire. I took community ed. classes
in making web sites. I loved html. People on the discussion boards got upset when I used it in my discussion
posts. When I talked about God consciousness, yoga and the like they treated me like I was involved in a 
cult, like Applewhite's waiting for a spaces ship. They were dry political minds who counted it all as religion.
I found one friendly woman on the Live Wire discussion board who cared about my troubles. Her name was
toad woman. She was from around Baltimore, MD. Her brother was a veteran of Vietnam and had suffered
some traumatic events there and at home. And life went trudging along. Now money being needed for all
kinds of things computer instead of Siddha Yoga. 
Ah, but life is so complicated.