Sugar is a Poison!

As a teenager, I used to have two spoonful’s of sugar in my tea. As a rather physically lazy and large young man, I soon realised that I would put on weight (as a kapha body-type if using the language of Ayurveda!). So, I gradually cut down over six months to no sugar. After that, of course tea with sugar in tasted disgusting. 

Forty years later; I am now convinced that sugar is basically a poison and the most widely “pushed” drug in the world. It does more damage than tobacco, or cocaine. By sugar, I don’t just mean white sugar; I mean all types of sugars. That is all chemicals that end in “……ose”: glucose, sucrose, fructose, lactose, dextrose, maltose. Plus anything called syrup. It can seem natural, even wholesome like honey or unnatural like high fructose corn syrup. It is all more or less the same. It is all damaging. It is all highly addictive by hitting the dopamine reward centres in the brain. 

As an addictive drug, it is used to sell a staggering range of products; I can hardly call them foods. There are the obvious ones, like a can of soda containing 11 teaspoons of sugar; and there are the less obvious, like bottles of soy sauce where sugar is the second ingredient after water; or cans of baked beans and jars of peanut butter.  Many products that were, or could be, healthy like natural live yogurt are hard to find amongst the flavoured sweetened yogurts in most shops.

So depending on where you look for data the Average American now consumes up to 300 lbs of sugar a year. Four hundred years ago it was 2 lbs of sugar. The Ancient Romans and later people used sugar just to sweeten bitter herbal medicines. 

In fact; things are even worse than this. We think of fruit as natural and wholesome; but all the fruit we eat today has drastically changed through selective breeding from The Middle Ages. They have all been bred to have more sweet flesh.  Every market stall selling fruit proclaims that these are “sweet” grapes, or peaches or apples….And making fruit in to fruit juice makes it even sweeter and absorbed faster. Drinking a glass of pineapple juice gives your body a huge hit of sugar.

Medieval banana

Sorry, but it gets even worse. Our body converts starch and many carbohydrates in to sugar. This starts even in the mouth. I remember at school in science being asked to chew a piece of raw potato and in a minute or so getting the sweetness of sugar in the mouth.  As with fruit; the grains we now eat as bread and cakes are far from the ancient varieties. Some complex carbohydrates like puffed rice are converted more and faster than white sugar. 

Sugars and some carbs are fast becoming the primary source of calories in our diet. Sugar, not itself an opioid peptide, is known to increase brain levels of endongenous morphine and may produce metabolic products in the brain very similar to those produced by morphine. Fructose in isolated or concentrated form is highly toxic. Sugar is a poison. Not an acute poison like arsenic, but a chronic poison which over years promotes inflammation and diseases including cancer. It leads to obesity, heart disease and diabetes where the body can no longer cope with the sugar. It is an addictive poison. John Yudkin, a professor of nutrition published his book "Pure White and Deadly" nearly 50 years ago and was ignored.

The industrial revolution was able to happen because of the development of the steam engine which used coal as a fuel to power the machines and the development of easy sources of sugar which was the cheap fuel to power the workers in the factories. Now sugar is pumped in to everything to create addiction. This is quite deliberate and a merciless attack on the worlds population by big business. It completely dwarfs the whole of the illegal drug industry.

At the moment I am on a very low carbohydrate and no sugar diet and it is hard to go in to any small shop and in all the rows of shelves of products, to find anything I can eat at all; other that buy a bottle of water (and I am certainly not paying for something that comes out of taps!). The poorer the area the more shops are filled with products full of sugar, and carbohydrates. This is true throughout the world. Sugar and carbs are not necessary; my body is running perfectly well on fats and protein. Hiding in plain sight, in every corner shop is a blatant and successful attempt to enslave the world through addiction to sugar. 

Breast milk is sweet, so sugar gives us an artificial sense of comfort. Instead, we could seek the “sweetness of life”. If we are really adult (and consumer culture keeps us as needy children wanting the reward of sugar); then the sweetness of life comes from a deep connection to Self, to others and to Nature. This is the only real cure for addiction. 

Tonight is the start of Navaratri; honour and celebrate Shakti!

Tonight is the start of Navaratri a ten day festival to celebrate Shakti and the forms of feminine wisdom and virtue in our lives. 

The first three nights (tonight, to Friday) are in honour of Kali, the fierce form of the goddess who destroys impurities and the things that no longer serve us. She gives us strength and motivation and empowers us towards spiritual growth.




For the second part (Saturday to Monday) of the festival the goddess is Lakshmi who is seen as the Mother and is often seen as connected to spiritual wealth.  She is often depicted on a fountain of milk holding symbols of wealth and abundance. She can give us clarity.





Tuesday to Thursday nights the goddess is Saraswati who represents wisdom and knowledge. She is generally shown playing a rudra vina a stringed instrument as she is connected to music and the arts. She creates beauty and gives us wisdom.


On the tenth day (Friday 29th) all forms of the goddess are worshipped, sometimes in the form of Durga. 



So, find a woman and the goddess inside yourself (men and women) and honour her. Start with your mother, sisters, lovers.  Shakti creates all life; everything we can see comes from Her!

Heart and Mind

It is common in "New Age" beliefs to place the heart and the mind in opposition and say something along the lines of; heart and feelings are good: mind and thinking are bad. I have heard so many versions of this formula over the years. From a tantric perspective this is wrong. The Sanskrit word "citta" which is often translated as mind, is seen as the centre for both thoughts and emotions. It would be better translated as heart-mind as both are closely connected and give a limited sense of our self as a separate being. The heart-mind perceives duality and sees everything through the filter of good or bad; useful or not;  safe or dangerous. Thoughts and feelings are equally caught up in this evaluative, dualistic dance which leads towards desires or attachments and fears. Mostly they lead to fears; as we also fear the loss of what we are attached to. The only way out of this is to come to the subtle appreciation of awareness and how it creates its experience of reality in everyday life, moment-to-moment. Awareness of awareness fundamentally shifts that experience. This is non-dual tantra. Being caught in fears prevents tantra which is why traditionally tantra was the path of  virya or the warrior.  At a very ordinary level it is the denigration of the mind and thinking which leads to some of the vast irrationality that pervades public life at the moment. Donald Trump did not appeal to people's ability to think clearly!

Tonight is the start of Navaratri; honour and celebrate Shakti!

Tonight is the start of Navaratri a ten day festival to celebrate Shakti and the forms of feminine wisdom and virtue in our lives. 

The first three nights (tonight, to Friday) are in honour of Kali, the fierce form of the goddess who destroys impurities and the things that no longer serve us. She gives us strength and motivation and empowers us towards spiritual growth.





For the second part (Saturday to Monday) of the festival the goddess is Lakshmi who is seen as the Mother and is often seen as connected to spiritual wealth.  She is often depicted on a fountain of milk holding symbols of wealth and abundance. She can give us clarity.





Tuesday to Thursday nights the goddess is Saraswati who represents wisdom and knowledge. She is generally shown playing a rudra vina a stringed instrument as she is connected to music and the arts. She creates beauty and gives us wisdom.



On the tenth day (Friday 29th) all forms of the goddess are worshipped, sometimes in the form of Durga. 



So, find a woman, and the goddess inside yourself (men and women) and honour her. Start with your mother, sisters, lovers.  Shakti creates all life; everything we can see comes from Her!

The Politics of Fear or the politics of Vision

The Brexit debate has been dominated by fear.  Generally fear of immigration, economic fears or fear of rabid racists and bigots gaining power. Sadly it seems to be easier to influence people through fear than it is to influence people through vision.  This is simply because we are all affected by past trauma and restimulated fears.  Unless we can clear past trauma we will all stay stuck. 

So people like Martin Luther King or Gandhi, who proclaim a vision; inspire but in the end do not decisively lead.  My dream for this referendum was that Jeremy Corbyn,  a man of undoubted sanity, vision and ethics compared to most politicians and leaders would share a vision of this country welcoming of refugees and facing the world as an example of political, economic and environmental sanity, with; devolution of power,  and economics based on stability and fairness, not growth. A sort of Iceland and Norway combined with a touch of Costa Rica. 

The world is certainly safer with small independent countries rather than large power-blocks. Most of the world’s problems are global not regional; not even a region as big as Europe.  I am amazed how many people would rather play on fears or on personalities rather than on vision.  To say that you cannot be in favour of Brexit because many very unsavoury people are, is like me saying I can’t be a vegetarian because Hitler was.  There are ways of clearing trauma at an individual level and collectively. Such healing will be necessary after the referendum whatever the result.  

Why I will be voting for Brexit....

....because I am a citizen of the world,

.....because big power blocks cause more disruption on the planet than lots of small ones,

         (uniting the States may have stopped Texas invading Alabama but it created the USA)

.....because imperfect democracy is the best system we have got and the EU simply isn't democratic,

         (its not democratic because Hitler was voted in to power so they are suspicious of it );

.....because the only natural boundary for Britain is the sea; the next boundary is the planet;

.....because there is no natural entity called Europe; where is its eastern edge, Turkey, Jordan...?

.....because whatever happens we are still an island exactly the same distance off  mainland Europe;

.....because Iceland (not in the EU) has managed to jail the bankers, wipe out debt and has the fastest growing economy since 2007;

.....because Norway (not in the EU) is a very peaceful and civilised country without the extremes of wealth and poverty found in UK;

.....because larger aggregates of power increase complexity and are therefore anti-democratic;

.....because all the real problems are global not local and best tackled by global institutions like the United Nations;

.....because large power blocks increase alienation and therefore violence or apathy, 

            (how many people know the name of their MEP or understand anything about the European Parliament - it can't even propose laws).

In fact, the real issues are nothing to do with immigration or economics which all boil down to numbers.  It is about a vision of where we as a human race are heading and the institutions that can support that. Of course saying you are in favour of Brexit risks being seen to be alongside; bigots, racists, fascists, Little Englanders, people who want to live in the past, Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage and numerous other odious characters.

Europe probably needs the UK and if we leave it may collapse in chaos or become more fascist (in a rather bureaucratic way). If we leave then it is likely to strengthen intolerance at home rather than a global perspective. 

I hate the fact that the debate is so polarised into two side both of which I dislike as people and arguments based in fear. Voting on my vision for the world; I would definitely vote to leave the EU and want Britain to adopt the sort of policies that Iceland has.  Voting on a strategic basis about which lot I think are the least harmful, I'm unsure but on balance I think I will still vote to leave.

Dr. Wilhelm Reich

Reich died in jail in America nearly sixty years ago, after having most of his books burnt on the orders of the American government. As a young psychiatrist in Vienna, in the mid - 1920 he had been a brilliant pupil of Sigmund Freud and part of the inner circle in the growing world of psychoanalysis. Many of his ideas are in use today; often unacknowledged However, many distorted idea and rumours were circulated about him and his work during his life and after his death. 

I became interested in Reich's work in my late teens sensing that his connection of the body, energy,  sexuality, repression and political ideology were key. His book Character Analysis showed some of his approach; based in the early work of Freud. In 1933 he published The Mass Psychology of Fascism and soon after had to flee Hitler; ending up in the United State. You can listen to a recent radio interview on Reich. Click Here.


After he died, on his orders, all his papers and laboratory notes were all locked away for fifty years. They are now available and at last a film is being made which will give an accurate account of Reich and his ideas using his original notes. The film has been funded through crowdfunding. It has been shot and now money is needed to edit it. They have now got about half the money they need. I have made a small contribution. If you would like to do so then Click Here to go to Crowdfunding Page.