92Jul21 3:49 pm from SUN
No one nutrient is a problem. It's idiosyncratic (unique to the individual) and works at the chemical level. We all need to experiment for ourselves as to what works best with our metabolism, weight, lifestyle, etc.

   92Jul22 9:59 am from The Gregster
AND, we need an holistic approach. People get obsessed with protein or with vitamin E or cholesterol. WE ARE COMPLEX. NOT ALL NUTRIENTS HAVE BEEN DISCOVERED YET! Eat natural foods in their natural state and LIVE!

   92Jul22 1:09 pm from Roger Enright
Why is it called "holistic" and not "wholistic" since the latter seems more accurate?

   92Jul22 1:25 pm from Zeylan
Because he's using it in some bizarre religious context.

   92Jul22 2:52 pm from Cockroach
The idea of holistic health has a little merit, but the mysticists have completely changed its meaning.

   92Jul22 9:13 pm from fth
My dictionary doesn't seem to have the origins of holistic, anyone? Interesting definition though. holism: the view that an organic or integrated whole has a reality independent of and greater than the sum of its parts. There seems to be at least something to the Ayuraveda flavor of holistic medicine.

   92Jul23 12:30 pm from Kappa Fox
Although, in a way, it is true. The Human consciousness has a reality that is totally greater than the sum of a bunch of cells. Humans are very holistic, by their very nature.

   92Jul23 2:48 pm from Roger Enright
It is definitely true that the sum can be greater than the individual parts. Look at any machine or computer. But the key to holism is that it asserts that this whole HAS A SEPARATE REALITY, that the reality which applies to the cells of the brain doesn't apply to the whole brain, or that brain's consciousness. That doesn't make any sense!

   92Jul23 7:42 pm from colin
"holo" is from the Greek, meaning "totally."
     For sure.
     A hologram has the total picture in every fraction of storage space. "Holocaust" = "totally burnt."

   92Jul23 from Death Penguin
Exactly. And "hollow" comes from the same roots, and originally meant "completely empty." And "hello" derived from the same etymology also, and at first meant "completely empty."

   92Jul24 3:48 am from SUN
Yeah, I've heard waving to someone you're approaching (Hello!) was a way of showing that you were unarmed, a medieval practice I believe.

   92Jul24 9:21 am from Kappa Fox
Well, Roger, in a way, there is a different reality to humans as opposed to the individual cells: The intellectual reality. Like what we're doing right now. We see ourselves as conversing, having discussions, talking about abstract ideas and concepts, when in reality all we're doing is just typing stuff on a computer. The real world occurs; it takes an intellectual standpoint (and separate reality) to make sense of it.

   92Jul24 6:33 pm from Roger Enright
Huh? How does reality apply differently when I am typing than when I am at work with a client? What is your evidence of a second reality, and how come the original one no longer applies? Why the dichotomy?

   92Jul24 7:41 pm from colin
I think Kappa means that in the real world, various separate events happen, and they have no connection except in the human intellect. In the real world, all that happens is that I type words at my house, and sometime later they appear on the screen at your house. Our "contact" takes place in a virtual reality, and not in the real world.

   92Jul24 8:20 pm from SUN
If all Kappa is saying is that we're communicating electronically, why doesn't he say that. And since it's so obvious, why does he bother? Perhaps because that's not what he's saying. Maybe he's intending to say what he actually has said: that he considers the mind to be a supernatural process, an apparently different dimension adjoining the one where his fingers are typing. He's expressing the standard body/mind dichotomy that makes so many people feel alienated from reality, floating abstractions out of touch with their bodies and its senses.

   92Jul24 10:59 pm from Death Penguin
I don't agree with that dualism. I think the "mind" is just a bunch of subtle physico-chemical processes. The problem is that we don't know which cells to stimulate to get the right responses yet. What do you think, SUN?
     I got a slightly different interpretation of Kappa's message. I thought he was saying that from our point of view, this is like a conversation we're having. But in a sense it's really not, since we enter our messages then go do other things. People can respond hours or days later, and yet there's still a feeling of continuity to it AS IF IT WERE a real conversation. So there's the experiential reality, which is DIFFERENT FROM the more objective, abstract reality.

   92Jul25 1:02 am from Kappa Fox
Colin's the one to get what I was saying. Here, I'll paraphrase what I said: As I type here, In one reality I'm just a big sack of chemicals that are moving in some weird way, reacting with other chemicals (in this case, the plastic of my keyboard), which, through other reactions, has some effect somewhere else (i.e., [YOUR MONITOR]).
     The actions of chemicals, have meaning, however, but only in a higher, separate reality: The reality of our consciousness, thus demonstrating the holisticness of the human person.
     Example: The sentence "The boy jumped over the dog" in one reality is just a bunch of phosphors that are the result of physical processes. In another reality it summons as image (the very act of summoning an image is another property of this second reality) of a child doing a little jumping.

   92Jul25 10:00 am from fth
It seems to me that you guys are all using the word 'reality' in different ways.

   92Jul25 10:45 am from SUN
FTH: Precisely, that is the root problem here. What is needed is a recognition that ANYTHING that exists is real, that reality is that which exists -- whatever it is that exists. Thus, there is only one reality, and it is everything that exists, whether we know about it or not, care about it or not, or can even imagine it or not. What exists, exists, independent of our consciousness. Our consciousness is internal too, and an integral part of reality. If we abuse our consciousness, we are not abusing reality, merely our teeny tiny part of it -- i.e. ourselves.

   92Jul25 11:30 am from Roger Enright
And the mind is an integral part of the body. Simply because one is conscious does not mean the mind and body are unintegrated. There many things the body can do to influence a human unit, and there are also a great many things that the brain/mind can do to influence the unit. But there is no need to place one artificially "above" another, simply because one is conscious.

   92Jul25 12:24 pm from Kappa Fox
What I am saying is that our consciousness (I don't want to get into another discussion of whether or not consciousness exists or not. For the moment, I'll assume it does...<whoa...>) is actually a separate reality from what the physical reality is.
     Imagine an image of a cube.
     Now where does that image reside? Definitely not in the physical reality, there is no physical picture of cube anywhere in your head. Instead, the image resides in a conscious reality, which is where we think. That second, higher (or at least different), reality is what leads me to conclude that the human organism is very holistically organized. Take away a human's organized structure, and the physical reality is much smaller compared to the reality that we live in by having an organized structure to our cells (a brain).

   92Jul25 1:10 pm from Death Penguin
Kappa, that image of brain corresponds perfectly to physiological processes.
     The quirky thing about your picture of multiple realities is that you call each one a "reality." If that's legitimate, there could be zillions of different "realities" for each act. You can conceive the cellular level as a reality, the cognitive level, the sometimes quite distinct emotional level, on and on, all as different realities. Then you could easily take it a step further to different people's perspectives constituting different realities, but then were sliding into solipsism.
     Recognizing that anything that exists is REAL, Sun, demands also the recognition of different kinds of status that we refer to casually as levels of reality. Hallucinations are real, but they're real hallucinations, not real perceptions of actual things. When we say everything is real, we have to be careful, as I'm sure you realize, to ask, Real WHAT? As for the statement that what exists exists independently of our consciousness, that depends. What about fantasies, emotions, intuitions, individual thoughts, things of less certain ontological status like that? Without our consciousness they do not exist. And what about things like coups? Is it a coup without our consciousness? Well, it's a certain person or a group of people displacing another person or group of people generally in a coercive way, but there's nothing about it that naturally MAKES IT a coup. What makes it a coup was our demarcation of the word, and words being entirely within our control, purely artificial, the events COUP-NESS hinges on our consciousness. In fact, the status it has as independent from earlier events and subsequent events, in other words its limits as a single event, is also reliant on our consciousness.

   92Jul25 1:25 pm from SUN
No argument from me that there are concepts of consciousness (hallucinations, perceptions, etc.) and there are states of consciousness. And one man's concept or state exists INDEPENDENT of another man's awareness/consciousness of it. Nor do definitions exist in a different reality. One man's definition exists in his head/consciousness/awareness until he communicates it to others. Definitions are contextual, and broader contexts legitimize broader definitions. However, it is the referents in reality that make our definitions useful or not. If our definitions are arbitrarily formed and/or used (without constant reference to reality), then they are useless for us as well as others. Definitions are constructs of consciousness, but are not thereby free of reality, free to be abused, free to be nonsensical and still function as definitions. Consciousness is a relationship to reality, not a process independent of and devoid of reality. Don't destroy your consciousness by dichotomizing yourself, cutting yourself off from the biological and cognitive roots.