FARMING, BIRDS & DRAGONS!

Welcome to Friday (or Saturday in the South Pacific),

I had a productive day working on my very large slide show for the film project I’m currently engaged in.

We’ve had a string of technical challenges with our camera and related filming technology. We found that even though we are using a top notch digital camera, once we compress the video files for internet and on-line use, the image goes fuzzy when expanded to full screen mode.

The result is that we’ve had to investigate and round up larger storage cards for the camera so we can film in high-definition. Once we tested the high-definition format, we found that even when the images have been compressed for web and youtube formats, the image is clear as a bell when expanded to full screen.

I’ve used the downtime to fine-tune my many presentations we are filming. I’m very excited to be releasing this information.

One of the presentations I’m filming is a publicly accessible on-line course on how to identify and address the issues of fungal and parasite infections.

These are very challenging, as they rob the health for a large percentage of the world population today, yet, the medical system is dismal at best when it comes to addressing the actual causes of such problems.

I’ve carefully worked my presentation into a mini-course that both teaches people what factors lead to chronic problems with fungal infections and parasite infections, and I share many accessible, highly effective methods for managing these challenges.

If you are not currently on the CHEK Institute’s mailing list and would like to be notified when the new e-learning course on fungal and parasite infections is available, you can go to www.chekinstitute.com and sign up for the CHEK Institute news letter. That will put you on the list to be notified of new releases.

I managed to get into the gym after a great tai-chi session and do some deadlifting, cable pulling, wood chops, dumbbell squat-curls, and Swiss ball supine lateral ball rolls in circuits.

That left me feeling intact and vitalized for the day! I finished my day with another lovely tai-chi session in the evening before I began working on some business planning mind-maps.

I hit the sack about 9:00 PM so I could get an early start today and write this blog before beginning a full day with clients today.

LEGITIMATE FARMING CONCERNS!

We are in some very interesting, and unfortunately dangerous times in the evolution of humans  and planet. In my book, Under The Veil Of Deception, What Uncle Sam Isn’t Telling You About Organic Food and Farming, I cite a lot of research showing the very damaging impact commercial farming is having on our environment, and ultimately on our individual health and vitality.

Not only are commercial animal farming corporations farming animals very unethically, literally immorally, they are loading these animals with all sorts of toxic foodstuffs to save money and fatten them quickly so they can be brought to market faster.

Animals are sold by the pound and they don’t do body fat percentage checks on the animals to determine how much of the animal is useful flesh vs. fat. Therefore, the faster they grow the animals and the fatter they are, the more money they make from the animals.

Corporate farmers are well known to use food additives such as sewage, dead animal parts, saw dust, plastic chips and other things that boggle the mind.

Animals are often fed the grains that have been rejected for human consumption due to high levels of mycotoxins. Mycotoxins are produced by the fungus infecting the grains and are extremely dangerous toxins.

So dangerous in fact, they are used in biological warfare to create weapons.

When these grains are fed to commercial farm animals, the animals can’t process the toxic load and their bodies (like all animals and humans) store the toxins in body fat to protect the glands, organs and nervous system of the animal.

Most of these animals are so sick that they have to use huge amounts of antibiotics and steroids to keep them alive until they slaughter them.

The result is that when you eat such animals, you get a concentrated dose of the toxins stored in their bodies, which naturally increases your own toxic burden.

The medical drug companies that manufacture drugs for humans also manufacture them for the veterinary industry as well.

Therefore, the sicker they can keep the animals and humans, the more drugs they sell!

When you consider that in the year 2002, there were 2 BILLION pounds of pesticides sprayed on our crops, eating commercially farmed produce only adds to the toxic burden of the body and again, increases visits to medical doctors and with that, the sales of dangerous drugs that don’t treat the cause rises.

This game has been going on since about 1945 and there seems to be no end to the escalation in the use of dangerous farming methods and related chemicals and drugs.

But that isn’t all. Commercial farming corporations have been sited as some of the most highly polluting of all when it comes to our water supplies.

The amount of bird traffic in the regions of commercial fields is much lower than naturally farmed regions or in nature where there is no human influence.

The farming methods being used also completely destroy the top soil, which we are running out of now, and dangerously so.

Commercial farming waste and runoff has been the death of many rivers world wide. According to the website American Rivers.org :

• More than 50% of wetlands have been lost or destroyed nationwide in the past century.
• Nearly 40% of the rivers and streams in the U.S. are too polluted for fishing and swimming.
• Thirty percent of the native freshwater fish species in North America are threatened, endangered, or of special concern.

Not to mention that researchers have found these same dangerous chemicals in the ocean and correlated them with mass die-offs of animals in the ocean.

I suspect most of you have seen news reports where dolphins, whales, seals, sea lions and birds are laying dead on the shore.

In addition, reports I read from the British Soil Association showed that as much as 25% of the greenhouse effect can be directly attributed to commercial farming!

An additional concern here is that paradoxically, these large farming corporations flood the market with cheap, garbage, toxic foods, which people that don’t know any better buy. They think they are saving money!

The result is that many local farmers and farmers markets have gone out of business because people don’t want to pay the prices for “real food.”

That’s alarming! They don’t realize that the savings they gained eating toxic garbage are just diverted into paying huge medical expenses and living a life of disease!

Additionally, most governments have subsidy programs that bail these large corporations out when they have financial debt issues; all the while the small farmers go out of business and get no government support.

But it’s worse than that! This allows the large farming corporations to buy up all the small farmers land at pennies on the dollar, which is bringing small farming essential to sustainable community agriculture into near extinction!

A couple years ago, while I was researching these issues, I found statistics showing that the number one rate of suicide in the world was now among small farmers.

A huge number of the farmers that committed suicide were farmers from India. They had fallen for Monsanto’s tricks and used genetically modified seeds.

Not only did Monsanto’s seed produce low yields, once you’ve used their seeds, you can’t get any more seed without going to them.

If a farmers GMO seeds blow onto another farmer’s plot who’s farming naturally, they often get sued for theft of Monsanto’s seed technology!

Many farmers have been put out of business this way! This is very scary and dangerous stuff and at large, people are completely passive and/or uninformed.

Below is information about how you can stop the secret farm bill and share your concerns with the government.

PLEASE, take a moment and send your concerns and voice your opinion about shifting subsidies to the local small farmers before we are into this thing so deep that all we can do is watch nature, and each other die a slow, ugly death to:

Stop the Secret Farm Bill!

Tell Congress to Vote to Cut Corporate Welfare Not Hunger and Sustainable Ag Programs!

The current Farm Bill is set to expire and be re-written in 2012.

We have an opportunity now to press Congress to cut farm subsidies for the rich and enact agriculture reforms that would create jobs, clean up the environment, strengthen sustainable local food systems and make healthy food available to everyone.

That is, if the budget-slashing Super Committee doesn’t hijack the process and write a Secret Farm Bill to protect the interests of companies like Monsanto, Cargill, and ADM.

Please go to: https://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_24260.cfm

It’s very easy and a worthy use of your time and energy if you care about your health, your children’s health and the planet’s health!

RUMI – WHAT A BIRD

Your kindness
keeps sending forth
favors and offers,
secretly,
without anyone knowing.

Then suddenly,
the egg hatches.
The bird of meaning flies away,
and what a bird it is!
Even the phoenix would expect good luck
from its shadow.

O Husanmeddin,
you write and praise him,
in spite of all your sorrows,
adding beauty marks
to the face of happiness.

The end of the rope
may have slipped from your hand,
but don’t worry.
Shamseddin’s hands would put
anklets on your feet.

Ref: The Forbidden Rumi – The Suppressed Poems of Rumi on Love, Heresy, and Intoxication
Translations and Commentary by Nevit O. Ergin and Will Johnson (p.31)

PAUL’S COMMENTARY

I love(!) this Rumi poem. This collection of poems is quite special to me because it clearly shows that Rumi was not a traditional, orthodox Muslim.

In fact, Rumi taught that to know God, you must become a heretic! Meaning, you must go beyond words written in books, beyond imposed rules and regulations to truly experience God.

This set of poems was very hard for the translators to get their hands on because the Turkish government didn’t want people (of the Islamic faith) to actually know what Rumi really had to say about (their) organized or orthodox religion.

If you really want to get to the core of Rumi’s teachings, this book really exposes you to the bravery and depth of Rumi.

It would have been exceedingly dangerous to walk the streets expressing his poetry this way in Rumi’s era! Let’s look into this beautiful poem:

Your kindness
keeps sending forth
favors and offers,
secretly,
without anyone knowing.

PC: Rumi is reminding us that any genuine act of kindness, be it toward nature, humans, or otherwise, is secretly spreading love and adding life to live, whether anyone else knows it or not.

Such acts are authentic expressions of our love. Love is a boomerang!

Then suddenly,
the egg hatches.
The bird of meaning flies away,
and what a bird it is!
Even the phoenix would expect good luck
from its shadow.

PC: When we learn to live love, even in the inner-sanctum of our own mind, or the secret ventures into nature, the garden, or out in the streets, we cultivate a relationship with our own soul.

Once that relationship is established, one realizes that God has been patiently waiting for them within.

With this realization, one understands that thinking and trying to figure out life and love with the ego-mind is like trying to drive a car with only two wheels on it!

The “bird of meaning” is the product of the soul’s wisdom, not the intellectual mind.

Once one realizes that the meaning of life is to live and love, there is a natural release of the ego mind and an increasing ability to trust and be present with the moment.

To see and feel things as they really are without projecting the ego’s fears and biases onto people, places and things. And what a joy it is when that moment arrives in our lives!

O Husanmeddin,
you write and praise him,
in spite of all your sorrows,
adding beauty marks
to the face of happiness.

PC: Here Rumi is saying that when we are loving enough to keep loving amidst the challenges typical of human life, we are adding beauty marks to the face of happiness.

We are being brave enough to express the deeper truths of the timeless, love and beauty.

The end of the rope
may have slipped from your hand,
but don’t worry.
Shamseddin’s hands would put
anklets on your feet.

PC: Here Rumi is referring to his Master, Shamseddin, who brought him to enlightenment; that story of how Rumi met Shamseddin is told beautifully in The Drowned Book – ECSTATIC AND EARTHLY REFLECTIONS OF BAHAUDDIN THE FATHER OF RUMI, by Coleman Barks and John Moyne, Translations of The Essential Rumi.

What Rumi is essentially saying is that if for any reason the rope (life, living, loving) slides from you hand, Shamseddin will put anklets on your feet.

He means that if you have a real Master as your teacher and guide, they will always catch you “if you let them”!

Rumi is expressing his love and gratitude for his own Master while telling you the truth of being guided by someone who is truly whole, enlightened.

Don’t worry though, if you don’t have an enlightened Master to follow (for which there are very few alive today!), there are always “angels” in our lives who’s intuition is guided by Divine Love and they will be there when your intentions are pure.

THE JADE DRAGON RETURNS!

Some of you got to meet the one and only, and most lovely Jade Johnson at the recent CHEK Conference in San Diego.

I’ve been working with Jade and her CHEK Practitioner, Warren Williams to get her ready for the upcoming 2012 London Olympics.

I’ve embedded the lovely interview she did with Troy Casey, The Certified Health Nut below that you may enjoy.

It’s a chance to learn a little about the life and challenges of an elite, Olympic athlete. Jade is a world-ranked Long Jumper.

You can also enjoy following Jade and Warren’s blog and learn about many cool training and mental-emotional development methods at: www.jadedragonreturns.com

Here is a neat little interview for you:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvSX1yhpHuk

Well, I hope you are motivated to make some changes to how you shop and eat, and are inspired by Rumi and Jade

I hope you all have a beautiful weekend!

Love and chi,
Paul Chek