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OverWeight - Obesity -African Holistic Health

Overweight is a bodily reaction to a faulty diet. In other words, overeating causes weight gain.Fat accumualates arounf the gut because it is weakened by non-foods. However, the reason for overeating must be wholistically olved or else overweight will continue. Excess weight (fat) is actually extra cells the body has to maintain

These cells are homes for toxic waste. It is also a waste of bodily energies. The fat tries to insulate the weak organs by keeping their low energy production protected. The fat increases as the organs' functions decrease.

Fat, becomes a storage place for waste and inhibits the cells' abilities to regain health.

The appestate (appetite control mechanism) can be imbalanced by emotional stress, physical shocks (dis-eased organs) and spiritual causes. Cases of overweight due to glandular disorders are infrequent, whereas cases of malnutrition due to faulty diet are the majority.

Undernourishment causes deteriorated organs to accumulate fat as a means of disposal of cell waste and toxins. This begins to choke the healthy cells, decrease cell life and alter the path of blood food supplies.

The body has to increase its food to the fat and decrease its food to healthy cells . Fat is another symptom of starvation (lack of vital nutrients) and dis-ease.

SUPPLEMENT
Vitamin A, B complex, B6, B12, C, Niacin, E, and D. Also, calcium, Choline, magnesium, zinc, inositol, lecithin, kyolic, Brewer's yeast.

HERBS
Saffron, Licorice root, Black Chaparral, Irish Moss, Chickweed, Kelp, Echniacea, Fennel, Mendrake, Sassafras, Gotu Kola.

FOODS
Pomegrnate, Karamboa, papaya, cherry, orange, grapefruit, lemon, cabbage bottoms, celery. All fresh fruits and vegetables, No junk foods.

AMINO ACID
Orithine, Arginine, Phenylalanine

GLANDULAR
Pituitary, Thymus

HOMEOPATHIC
Calc. Phos.

Reference:African Holistic Health; llaila O. Afrika

The Serpent and the Rainbow-Calabar Hypothesis

I enjoy trains, and in South America whenever possible I rode them, sitting on the open ends, savoring the waves of tropical scents that the passage of the train whipped into an irresistible melange. By comparison to those creaking Latin caravans, so alive in human sweat and wet wool, smelling of a dozen species of crushed flowers, American trains are sadly sterile with a heavy atmosphere that makes the air taste used. Still, therhythm of the rails is always seductive, and the passing frames race by like so many childhood fantasies alive in color and light.

By leaving New York, it was not to the train that I owed my strange sense of release. I questioned my reflection in the train window, puzzled by a range of inexpressible feelings and ideas. " The frontier of death"- it was that phrase of Lehman's that haunted me most, pulling me back from the borders of sleep, leaving me alone in an empty train car measuring the passing night by the periodic shuffling of the conductor's feet.

Kline and Leham. I weighed their words, groping for hidden meanings or clues, but kept returning to the bare facts of this case. A poison sprinkled across a threshold was presumably absorbed through the feet. If true, this implied that its principal chemical constituents had to be topically active. From descriptions of the wondering zombis, it appeared likely that the drug induced a prolonged psychotic state, while the initial dose had to be capable of causing a deathlike stupor.

Since in all likelihood the poison was organically derived, its source had to be a plant or animal currently found in Haiti. Finally, whatever this substance might prove to be, it had to be extraordinarily potent.Knowing very little about animal venoms, I reviewed the toxic and psychoactive plants I had become familiar with during my six-year association with the Botanical Museum. I thought of plants that could kill, and others that could lead one past the edge of consciousness. There was only one that even nominally met the criteria of the zombi poison.

It was also the one that during all my investigations, and through all my travels, I had dared not imbibe-a hallucinogenic plant so dangerous that even Schultes, for all his stoic experimentation, had never sampled. It is a plant that has been called the drug of choice of poisoners, criminals, and black magicians throughout the world. Its name is datura, " the holy flower of the North Star."

My tired thoughts broke into fragments that landed on a distant night, cold and clear as glass, in the high Andes of Peru. A brown dusty trail curved past agave swollen in bud and rose to an open veranda flanked on three sides by the adobe walls of the farmhouse.

Against one wall sat the patient, alone and strangely solemn. He had been a prosperous fisherman a season ago, before the current shifted and the warm tropical waters came south to strangle the sea life of the entire coast. As if conforming to some bitter law of physics, his personal life had mimicked the natural disorder: his child had taken ill, and then his wife fled with a lover. In the wake of these events the poor man disappeared from his village, only to reappear a month later, a simulacrum of death, naked and quite insane.

For two weeks the Curandero had sought in vain to divine the source of such misfortune. With his inherent eye for the sacred he had laid out the power objects of his altar-stone crystals, jaguar teeth, murex shells, whale bones, and ancient huacas that rose methodically to touch an arc of colonial swords impaling the earth.

In nocturnal ceremonies he and the patient had together inhaled a decoction of alcohol and tobacco from scallop shells carefully balanced beneath each nostril. Invoking the names of Atahualpa and all the ancient Peruvian kings, the spirits of the mountains and the holy herbs, they had imbibed achuma, the sacred cactus of the four winds.

The curandero's son had led the madman on mule on a slow passage high into the mountains to bathe in their spiritual source, the lakes of Las Huaringas. All to no avail. The visions had come, only weak and incomprehensible, and even the pilgrimage to the healing waters had done little to free the deranged man from his stubborn misery.

It was left for the curandero to work alone, to seek solution in a stronger source, in some supernatural realm that might break a normal man. It was a solitary task, and leaving his patient sitting alone, he slipped away, walking with a stoop, sheltered by a worn poncho and an enormous hat that covered all of his face save his chin, which protruded like the toe of an old boot.

He would engage a different set of visions-confusing, disorienting, unpleasant-and he would approach them not as a man of knowledge who might interpret and manipulate his spirit world, but rather as a supplicant who in just touching the realm of madness unleashed by the plant might attain revelation. It was a frightful prospect to relinquish all control, to lose all sense of time and space and memory. But he had no choice, and he approached his task with resignation, like the bearer of an incurable disease.

He retreated into a small stone hut, sealed by a broken door that turned his movements into vertical slices of light. I peered through these cracks at his shadowy figure moving in purposeful, increasingly smaller circles, the way a dog does before it beds down for the night. Once on the ground, he removed his hat, revealing a vaguely distorted face-distended blue-black lips and an elephantine nose that drooped precariously toward his mouth.

The flesh had collapsed on his cheek-bones, his eyes were lost in shadow.He sat quietly, accepting but not acknowledging the ministrations of his assistant, who carefully arranged a bed, a large basin of water, and a small enamel bowl of dark liquid.

The assistant came out and took his place discreetly to one side of the door. He beckoned me to join him, and I moved close. We remained still, peering into the dark room, our breathing silenced by the light wind falling on the tin roof.

The curandero clasped the enamel bowl as a rural priest might hold a chalice, with his whole hands, firmly and without grace. Nodding first to the four corners of the hut, he drank slowly, deliberately wincing slightly and only once before draining the vessel. Then he sat profoundly still, with the calm that invariably follows such irrevocable acts.

Reference: The Serpent And The RainBow: Wade Davis

King Leopold's Ghost-Walking into Fire

" I shall Not Give Up The Chase"
On january 28, a quarter-century after Tuckey's failed expedition, the man whowould spectacularly accomplish what Tuckey tried to do was born in the small Welsh market town of Denbigh. He was entered on the birth register of St. Hilary's Church as "John Rowlands, Bastard" - an epithet that was to mark the boy for the rest of his life, a life obsessively devoted to living down a sense of shame. Young John was the first of five illegitimate children born to Betsy Parry, a housemaid. His father may have been John Rowlands, a local drunkard who died of delirium tremens, or a prominent and married lawer named James Vaughan Horns, or a boyfriend of Betsy Parry's in London, where she had been working.

After giving birth, Betsy Parry departed from Denbigh in disgrace, leaving her baby behind in the home of his two uncles and his maternal grandfather, a man who believed a boy needed a "sound whipping" if he misbehaved. When John was five, his grandfather died, and the uncles immediately got rid of their unwanted nephew by paying a local family half a crown a week to take him in. When the family asked for more money, the uncles refused. One day the foster family told young, John that their son Dick would take him to visit his "Aunt Mary" in another village.

The way seemed interminable and tedious.... At last Dick set me down from his shoulders before an immense stone building, and, passing through tall iron gates, he pulled at a bell, which I could hear clanging noisily in the distant interior. A sombre faced stranger appeared at the door, who, despite my remon-strances, seized me by the hand and drew me within, while Dick tried to sooth my fears with glib promises that he was only going to bring Aunt Mary to me.The door closed on him and, with the echoing sand, I experienced for the first time the awful feeling of utter desolateness.

Six-year-old John Rowlands was now an immate of the St.Asaph Union Workhouse. Records of life at St.Asaph's are generally covered by a viel of Victorian euphemism, but a local newspaper complained that the master of the workhouse was an alcoholic who took "indecent liberties" with women on his staff.

An investigative commission that visited the workhouse in 1847, about the time John Rowlands arrived, reported that male adults" took part in every possible vice", and that children slept two to a bed, an older child with a younger, resulting in their starting" to practice and understand things they should not." For the rest of his life, John Rowlands would show a fear of sexual intimacy in any form.

Whatever John may have endured or seen in the workhouse dormitory, in its schoolroom he thrived. Foe his achievements he won a prize Bible from the local bishop. He was fascinated by geography. He had an unusual ability to mimic someone else's handwriting after studying it for a few minutes. His own penmanship was strikingly graceful;his youthful signature was stylish and forward-leaning, with the stems and tails of the letters sweeping dramatically far above and below the line.

it was as if, through his handwriting, he was trying to pull himself out of disgrace and turn the script of his life from one of poverty to one of elegance.

One evening, when John was twelve, his supervisor " came up to me during the dinner-hour, when all the inmates were assembled, and, pointing out a tall woman with an oval face, and a great coil of dark hair behind her head, asked if I recognized her.

"No, sir,' I replied.

"What, do you not know your own mother?'

"I started, with a burning face, and directed a shy glance at her, and perceived she was regarding me with a look of cool, critical scrutiny. I had expected to feel a gush of tenderness towards her, but her expression was so chilling that the valves of my heart closed with a snap."

Adding to his shock was the fact that his mother had brought two new illegitimate children to St. Asaph's wwith her, a boy and a girl. Some weeks later, she left the workhouse. For John, it was the latest in a chain of abandonments.At fifteen, John left St. Asaph's and stayed with a succession of relatives, all of whom seemed queasy about sheltering a poorhouse cousin.

At seventeen, while he was living with an uncle in Liverpool and working as a butcher's delivery boy, he feared he was about tobe turned out once more. One day he delivered some meat to an American merchant ship at the docks, the Windermere. The captain eyed this short but sturdy-looking young man and asked,"How would you like to sail in this ship?"

In February 1859, after a seven-week voyage, The Windermere landed in Nerw Orleans, where the young newcomer jumped ship. He long remembered the city's fascinating array of smells: tar, brine, green coffee, rum, and molasses. Roaming the streets in search of work, on the porch of a warehouse he spied a middle-aged man in a stovepipe hat, a cotton broker, as it turned out, and approached him:"Do you want a boy sir?"
The cotton broker, impressed by John's only reference, the prize Bible with the bishop's inscription, took on the Welsh teenager as an employee.

Soon afte, youn John Rowlands, now living in the New World, decided to give himself a new name. The procedure was gradual. In the 1860 New Orleans census, he is listed as "J.Rolling." A woman who knew him at this time remembered him as John Rollins: "smart as a whip, and much given to bragging, big talk and telling stories."

Within a few years, however, he began using the first and last name of the merchant who had given him his job. He continued to experiment with middle names,using Morley, Morelake, and Moreland before finally settling on Morton. And so the boy who had entered the St. Asaph Union Workhouse as John Rowlands became the man who would soon be known worldwide as Henry Morton Stanley.

Reference:Adam Hochschild

The Children of the Sun - Asia - 5

But suddenly the black, overthrew the Umayyad, the great Persian empire of the Sasanians, and defeated the Roman legions of the lower empires. one burst of enthusiasm , it was but a flash, and these black-skinned warriors went forth to conquer the world.

The result of this human convulsion was the total destruction of the northern empire and the establishment of the Abbasid caluphate. This vast empire extended from the Indus to the Atlantic and from the Caspian to the cataracts of the Nile. The capital was removed from Damascus to Bagdad, from which center radiated all that was grandest in Arabian history.For five centuries the caliphs of Bagdad reigned and their rule marked the beginning of a Moslem as opposed to an Arabian empire.

As an English authority speaking of this period, says: " It seemed as if the whole world from caliph down to the humblest citizen suddenly became students, or at least patrons of literature. In quest for knowledge men traveled over three continents and returned home, like bees laden with honey, to impart the precious stores which they had acumulated to crowds of eager disciples, and to compile with incredible industry those works of encyclopediac range and erudition from which modern science in the widest sense of the word, has derived more than is generally supposed."

It was under the rule of these dusky sovereigns that the Aribian Nights were compiled and rewritten, the Rubaiyat composed, that Hafiz flourished, and that the Romance of Antar was created.

Let me speak a moment of the Romance of Antar. I have searched in vain to find it quoted in any American book, although it is the greatest lyric poem of Arabia. Can it be because the hero describes himself as being black and swarthy as an elephant? Stranger still, Antar was not an Arabian born, but a negro slave, yet is chosenn among the Arabs as the fullest expression of their own ideas of a hero.

Even in the cities of the Orient today the loungers in their cups never weary of following the exploits of this black son of the desert, who in his person unites the great virtues of his people, magnanimity and bravery, with the gift of poetic speech. It is the Arabic romance of chivalry and to it is due the spread of romance and chivalry throughout medieval Europe.
 

Note, too, fact that Mohammed was of these black Arabs. When he appealed to the Arabians he called himself and " Arab of the Arabs, of the purest blood of your land, of the family of Hashim and of the tribe of Quryah." It was the family of Hashim that founded the House of the Abbasids, and thus are we brought face to face with the fact that a third of the world's greatest religions was founded by a man in whose veins flowed black blood.

This is one reason why Mohammedanism is so strong and will ever remain strong among the races of Africa.The religion preaches absolute equality and one of the precepts of the Koran reads, "If a negro is called to rule over you, hear him and obey him, though his head be like dried grapes." From what has been written of the Jews and Hindus it will readily be seen that the African is now as he was in the dawn of history, the founder of religion.

The spread of Mohammedanism included the whole of North Africa and, in time, penetrated Spain. It found Spain a desert and a wilderness and turned her into a garden of beauty. Never before nor since has she seen such glory as was hers when the Moors reached Toledo, Seville and Granada, the most beautiful cities of Europe. Cordova became the educational metropolis of civilization, Seville became the literary center of the world, and Granada was the triumph of wonderful architecture.

Spain was never anything until these Africans, Negroes if you will, made her a land of flowers, wine, music, art, beauty and love. Her history is all of them-the record of their glory and their fall.She became exquisite in the warm sun of Islam and withered away when the northerners conquered her. Read Draper's Intellectual Development of Europe and you will get some idea of the vast influence which these swarthy people exerted upon the civilization of Europe. To them was due the Rennaissance.

As this ends the survey of Asia. Fify years ago one would not have dreamed that science would defend the fact that Asia was the the home of the black races as well as Africa, yet it has done just that thing. Now when we gaze ypon the ruins of Assyria's palaces or stand in wrapt wonder before the fallen winged beasts which garded her gates: when we stand silently upon the spot that once was babylon and ponder upon the mighty walls built by this grand and wonderous mistress of the Euphratean plain or reverently uncover before the tumbled pillars of sanctuaries built in the long ago to forgotten gods:

When we marvel at the depth of love and the majesty of grief that built the Taj Mahal or scan the perfumed literatures of India and Persia and Arabia, let us not forget that the secret, like the secret of all things wonderfully and aesthetically beautiful, lies with Africa, the mother of civilization and of nations.

Reference: Children of the Sun: George Wells parker