Stop RePeating By Karen Mcc

[RyanCoon]

I was listening to Generative Energy #5 today and Danny mentioned this article at 1:31:00 in. It's a great reminder. If anyone can find the whole article please share. Thanks!

 

[AllThingsPeat]

I posted her blog here Yesterday, actually. Take a look! A lot of great Peat wisdom

This reminds me of another great Peat quote from Karenmcc's blog (Danny has talked about this on some of the older podcasts for those who have not seen it):

Ray Peat Interviews Revisited

"the ruling classes, at best, define the ability to work efficiently and willingly as good health for the population as a whole. Privately, they often recognize that freedom, novelty, meaning and beauty are necessary for good health."

 

[AllThingsPeat]

Hmm that link only appears to have that interview and another one called "Organizing the Panic." The name of the original blog was "vision and acceptance," but unfortunately the site doesn't seem to exist anymore:

visionandacceptance.com

A shame if so. I recall there were more interviews with Ray in addition to these three

 

[RyanCoon]

Hmm that link only appears to have that interview and another one called "Organizing the Panic." The name of the original blog was "vision and acceptance," but unfortunately the site doesn't seem to exist anymore:

visionandacceptance.com

A shame if so. I recall there were more interviews with Ray in addition to these three

Yes I was bummed to see the website no longer existed. I used the internet archive to find it. Amazing tool!
Long Live Ray's loving impact on the world.

Stop RePeating | Vision and Acceptance

 

[RyanCoon]

Stop RePeating​

Karen Mcc
April 22, 2015

If you aren’t familiar with Dr. Ray Peat, he is a biologist that most notably writes in support of sugar. The tricky part about sugar is that both alternative medicine practitioners and western medical doctors are united on the same front of considering it unhealthy. People may be inclined to think, well if both sides of the coin agree on this one thing, then it has to be right. Sort of like when many republicans and democrats both agreed that Iraq was a threat to America after 9/11 because of weapons of mass destruction. We went to war with Iraq and a war has also been waged against sugar by health authorities.
Although one of the most powerful forces on the planet is human denial, you can only power through sugar cravings for so long before you are forced to ask if there is more to the propagated sugar story, and if so, who knows it. Many recovering low-carbers will readily acknowledge Ray Peat’s work in helping them to understand why they were having difficulties while being on a low carb diet
Dr. Peat has something else unique about him besides his writings on sugar, he is readily accessible to contact through emails. His writings are numerous and are also freely accessible. At the same time that he is approachable, his work can be elusive. People often debate his intended meanings much like you would hear the writings on Jesus debated. This is a good thing because it means Dr. Peat has left enough room in his writings for personal interpretation.
If you are reading this and want to learn more about this intelligent man, you may come upon chat groups that are also dedicated to learning more. You’ll come across the term “Peating” and it means something like: you only drink milk, eat certain fruits, and you avoid polyunsaturated fats with the religious fervor of a nun who avoids relations. You may find it all a little scary actually.
However I would like to throw my hat into the ring and weigh in on this, not to hurt anyone’s feelings but for the sake of discussion. Maybe it could be of some help to people. If “Peating” really is your intended goal, in order to have the complete experience of “Peating” you would have to continually keep the big picture in mind like he does. You would be of service to your fellow humans asking for nothing in return. You would study first-hand other scientists and philosophers and make interesting connections that give you a comprehensive view of life. You would also write and paint and have a strong connection to nature as well as value humor. That would be truly Peating.
You may also hear the term “Peatarian” but remember this, Jesus was not a Christian, Buddha was not a Buddhist and Ray Peat is not a Peatarian. Ray Peat is someone who stands for an authentic life, and who does not want to reinforce the imposed system. He recognizes our dignity and thinks we are capable of greater freedoms and a much fuller experience of life.
We are speaking of someone who wrote the following, “For Pavlov, the study of psychology or physiology without consciousness was simply crazy. Pavlov said that he studied nutrition to understand consciousness and the nervous system, because eating is our closest interaction with the world. Our brain is part of our digestive system. But eating has become highly institutionalized and influenced by our cultural beliefs. If people begin to think about the meanings of eating, they are beginning a process of cultural and philosophical criticism.“
He also wrote, “When a person is allowed to function freely as a goal-directed, questioning system, the formation of patterns in the brain will be spontaneous and appropriate, and orderly.”
So why then would anyone think that Dr.Peat wants to take on our interactions with the world for us and direct our eating? Why would someone who has done so many self-experiments and learned in various ways what is the best way to eat for himself deny us our journey and have us just take his word for it?
Dr. Peat does give people a starting place because many people ask for one. In many emails he’ll specifically write, “Have you tried such and such?” He never writes, “Go try such and such.” This is also someone who has written about how the culture affects our health with his recent newsletter quoting Maslow, “Sick people are made by a sick culture.” And this type of focus is not a one-time thing. Dr. Peat has spoken about the culture and the big picture in various articles, books and interviews.
So why does someone who is “Peating” focus exclusively on nutrients while trying to heal themselves when there are so many other moving parts? To only place an emphasis on nutrition and the minutia of nutrients makes a mockery of life and erodes the dignity of the human experience. There is so much more to humans than nutrients.
I feel Dr. Peat is old school, like teachers of the past* who would give their students an answer they were looking for, but the answer was only a bread crumb, only part of the truth. The true seekers would come back for more when they found the answer wasn’t enough. This was like a test, or a form of initiation. A way of discovering those who realize there is always more to any story. And if we don’t know the crumb is not the whole loaf, it can make us suffer greatly. We have to be ready for the big picture. And the “crumb test” lets those who are ready discover more and those who aren’t feel accepted where they are at.
I can’t blame anyone for trying to copy the path of someone who has done so many inspiring things. But like Joseph Campbell says, “If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s.” What any of the greatest thinkers and philosophers point you toward is yourself. Great men and women are not great because they are better than any of us. They are great because they point past themselves to the greatness that is in all of us.
Inspiration not imitation is the way. So take your last name and put an –ing after it and that is the only way we are all going to fit together as a whole. The only way we can move forward as a society is if we have authority over our own lives. Nutrition is a great starting place.

*As in India, centuries later, when a student approaches a teacher to ask the secret of immortal life, he is first put off with a description of the joys of the mortal. Only if he persists is he admitted to the next initiation. Hero With a Thousand Faces P.158
Graphic credited to Sean Bissell, who else.

 

[solomon]

Negation | Vision and Acceptance

Ray Peat Interview

Negation​

January 22, 2014
There is one concept that has altered my perception of life more than anything I have ever studied. Some people know it as “negation” others as “denial.” I have some ideas for future blog posts where I plan on referencing this theme more directly. Before that can happen, I feel negation needs to be explored and contemplated on its own with as little distraction as possible.

For some of you, this may be an introduction to the idea and I take this seriously. So I called in the big guns, someone who has studied the matter much longer than I have and has helped me to deepen my comprehension of it. I present the following to you, Dr. Ray Peat on Negation:

I think the concept is very simple in itself, but the problem is that it implies a cultural criticism that involves everything, biology, physics, politics, epistemology. Contraries, or different perspectives, can interact to eliminate error, in progressing. Negation is a human function that would stop the free advance of life and consciousness, opposing critical questioning and spontaneous understanding. The refusal to discuss a problem, and the many forms of censorship, and legal-economic systems that make whole courses of action impossible, are negations, that have their poisonous effects. Physiology reflects their poison, in all the ramifications of learned helplessness, restraint stress, the carcinogenic effects of work-school-media-religion-government.

Negation excludes or suppresses those complex processes of being,* and implants nothing but–at the most–obligation in their place. Undocumented aliens are negated simply, slaves and citizens are negated but with obligations. Religions tell people that their being is immaterial, a ghost that will be o.k. somewhere else forever, if they do their duty now. Having a false consciousness implanted by schools and television, labels and roles take the place of being. A sense of despair and impossibility is right behind the false consciousness.

Our surrounding context of language and culture is constantly distorting and misinterpreting anything which persists in moving toward a more expansive life. Knowledge, a physiological thing, is expansion, and as such is always clearing away errors; when people identify with error, they see knowledge as the deadly enemy, that must be destroyed.

Blake’s idea of the “intellectual fountain” was very different from the attitude of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche (where “Will” or assertion was the fundamental reality). Blake saw it as always flowing into new territory, discovering new things, enlivening the world that’s being discovered-created. When the organism is traumatized, it hardens, and stops developing, and wants to impose its moral hardness everywhere; assertiveness is the antithesis of perceptive life, and devises ways to negate it.

In an authoritarian culture, people want you to forget who you are, so they can implant themselves without resistance. Just recognizing your own presence, to attend to them fully, is something they don’t expect; it isn’t quite like Carl Rogers’ therapeutic presence, because it’s conditional–your conscious presence is the condition. Being present and able to listen (and question and understand)* is receptive and productive, and it can even be disruptive, but it’s very different from being assertive, because it’s always hoping to open up new possibilities, rather than imposing something carried along from the past. A priest is being assertive when he says you have to take it on faith, a physics professor is being assertive when he won’t justify his assumptions–where would physics be if your assumptions had to be plausible beyond a particular culture of physics? Much of their potential imagination has been invested in thinking of ways to keep you from questioning.

Physics, in the 20th century, has taken on the Nietzchean subjectivism, claiming to quantize/digitize everything. There is no digital nature, but assertive subjectivism has effectively written quantization into the constitution of science, and into the shadow of the humanities that remains in the corporate universities. Bits of “knowledge” are sold and hoarded, and people who would show that they are something other than knowledge are treated as vandals and worse–Aaron Swartz, for example.



A Little Boy Lost

Nought loves another as itself,
Nor venerates another so,
Nor is it possible to thought
A greater than itself to know.

‘And, father, how can I love you
Or any of my brothers more?
I love you like the little bird
That picks up crumbs around the door.’

The Priest sat by and heard the child;
In trembling zeal he seized his hair,
He led him by his little coat,
And all admired the priestly care.

And standing on the altar high,
‘Lo, what a fiend is here! said he:
‘One who sets reason up for judge
Of our most holy mystery.’

The weeping child could not be heard,
The weeping parents wept in vain:
They stripped him to his little shirt,
And bound him in an iron chain,

And burned him in a holy place
Where many had been burned before;
The weeping parents wept in vain.
Are such thing done on Albion’s shore?

A Poison Tree

I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.

And I watered it in fears,
Night and morning with my tears;
And I sunned it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles.

And it grew both day and night,
Till it bore an apple bright.
And my foe beheld it shine.
And he knew that it was mine,

And into my garden stole
When the night had veiled the pole;
In the morning glad I see
My foe outstretched beneath the tree.

Introduction.

Hear the voice of the Bard!
Who Present, Past, & Future sees
Whose ears have heard,
The Holy Word,
That walk’d among the ancient trees.

Calling the lapsed Soul
And weeping in the evening dew:
That might controll.
The starry pole;
And fallen fallen light renew!

O Earth O Earth return!
Arise from out the dewy grass;
Night is worn.
And the morn
Rises from the slumberous mass.

Turn away no more:
Why wilt thou turn away
The starry floor
The watry shore
Is giv’n thee till the break of day.

The Voice of the Ancient Bard.

Youth of delight come hither.
And see the opening morn,
Image of truth new born.
Doubt is fled & clouds of reason
Dark disputes & artful teazing.
Folly is an endless maze,
Tangled roots perplex her ways.
How many have fallen there!
They stumble all night over bones of the dead
And feel they know not what but care;
And wish to lead others when they should be led

 

[RyanCoon]

@solomon Wow. Thanks for sharing Ray's thoughts on negation. That is profoundly inspiring.

 

[NanMitch]

I was listening to Generative Energy #5 today and Danny mentioned this article at 1:31:00 in. It's a great reminder. If anyone can find the whole article please share. Thanks!
View attachment 45569

View attachment 45568

 

[NanMitch]

I was listening to Generative Energy #5 today and Danny mentioned this article at 1:31:00 in. It's a great reminder. If anyone can find the whole article please share. Thanks!
View attachment 45569

View attachment 45568

Thought of this when I read your excellent synopsis: “We all have a certain part to play in the world, and we have done enough when we have performed what nature allows.” Epictetus. Dr. Peat certainly attained this.

 

[Theta]

@solomon Who is the author of those poems?

 

[AllThingsPeat]

Yes I was bummed to see the website no longer existed. I used the internet archive to find it. Amazing tool!
Long Live Ray's loving impact on the world.

Stop RePeating | Vision and Acceptance

Ahh good call! I use that all the time; just slipped my mind. Coincidentally, I was at the board hearing in SF when the guy who made the wayback machine was awarded the key to the city in 2016. Weird lmao

 

[solomon]

@solomon Wow. Thanks for sharing Ray's thoughts on negation. That is profoundly inspiring.

@solomon Who is the author of those poems?

I believe William Blake