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Ancient Wisdom for Modern Times This book takes a radical look at why wealthiest society in history is producing a culture where degenerative disease, emotional stress and social discord are the norm. It explores how our modern enchantment with technology and unlimited economic growth creates a gap between our everyday actions and our true human potential. By focusing on the relationships between Humanity to Nature and Health to Culture, Food to Health and Health to Emotion Mr. Tara presents a vision of how daily actions can create a world that works for everyone. Natural Body / Natural Mind challenges the values of science, religion and the marketplace with a passionate appeal to compassion, common sense and the wisdom of the heart.
- Paperback: 176 pages
- Publisher: Xlibris Corporation (11 Nov 2008)
- ISBN: 1436327350
- Product Dimensions: 22.6 x 15.2 x 1 cm
Excerpt From Book's Introduction
As a young boy growing up in Northern California, I was blessed with the opportunity to hike and camp in the woodlands of the Sierra Nevada and coastal ranges and to roam the rugged coastal cliffs and beaches. One of the highlights of every winter was when my father would take me to cliffs to watch the salmon returning to the river of their birth.
The rains would come, and the rivers would start to swell, and the salmon would gather off the coast. Standing on the cliffs, we could watch them swirl the water, silver in the reflected sun. They were coming back to renew the cycle of life. That they returned each year was miraculous and exciting. When the rains finally broke through the sandy mouth of the river, they would stir and leap into the silt brown waters to finish their journey. It never failed to make my heart race. It is a great sadness that my children and grandchildren will never see that sight.
The river has been altered from its former path. It has been widened and made shallow. Its banks have been dozed into levees to withstand an imagined flood. It is filled with grasses and algae—dank and unwholesome. The fish have been killed.Most of those coastal rivers are dead now. All the government studies in the world will not bring them back.
I do not know whether my daughters and sons will be able to hold their children's hands and watch the owl at dusk or the fox in the thicket. I do know that if they can't, their lives will be reduced in a very fundamental way. How we value nature says much about who we are. It speaks directly to the way we live our lives and the significance we place on our actions.
It has become all too common to say that the despoiling of our environment is the price of progress. If this is so, we need to ask what this supposed progress has brought us. If we are healthier, then why do we need ever-increasing numbers of hospitals and more drugs in order to function? If we are happier, why do more and more people complain of stress, and why are an escalating number of children prescribed with antidepressants?
Human history presents a sad portrait of our collective behavior. For every simple act of kindness, beneficial discovery, or creation of beauty, the scale is tipped dramatically by acts of brutality and stupidity on a massive scale. The we claim to admire the most. There is a deep disconnection between our stated humanity and our collective action.
Attempting to understand and explain this gap between our higher ideals and our most repellent actions has been the driving force behind religion, philosophy, and psychology. The troubling nature of our collective dementia has never before been this close to a critical breakdown. This collapse is not simply the result of new technologies of violence, escalating pollution, or increasingly sophisticated methods of political and economic suppression. The crisis we face is the suicidal destruction of the planet we inhabit. We are burning down the house and have no place to move.
The scope of this disastrous situation and the speed of its development create a special urgency to face the consequences of our actions and to alter the behavior that created them. We cannot solve the problems of unwise political, economic, and technological decisions with the same mind-set and through the same institutions that created them in the first place. A different way of thinking is required, thinking that may lead us to truths that are not only inconvenient but also exceedingly uncomfortable. The good news is that the challenge we face could provide us all with an astounding opportunity to transform human life on the planet in a beautiful way.
This book is about how our ideas, habits, and actions affect personal, social, and environmental health. I have tried to show the connection between these elements that are often separated by convention but not by fact. I have drawn on both ancient and modern sources since the roots of the problem are not new or simply a failure of modern technology but speak directly to our defining values. The foundation of the dilemma lies in our lack of a philosophy of life that serves to guide us toward healthy solutions. While modern medicine, science, and philosophy are good at reducing problems into discrete packets of data for analysis, it is the ancient ways of understanding that can provide better instructions of how to use this information wisely.
I make several assumptions that the reader should be aware of. The first of these assumptions is that our daily thoughts and actions have a profound effect on our health and well-being. We know that our diet, our environment, and our emotions are intimately linked to health. The second assumption takes us a step further. It is the notion that our state of health reflects our personal and cultural attitudes regarding human identity and our relationship with nature. The issues of personal, social, and environmental health are really only one issue. They are stages in the continuum of life process. When dysfunction is present in any stage of this continuum, the effects ripple out and infect the whole process.
Faced with the reality of increased sickness in individuals, nations, and the planet, we are forced to look clearly at the social institutions and cultural forces that resist a remedy. This sickness is not a conspiracy by hidden forces, but it is an act of protecting the status quo regardless of the results.
For 40 years, Bill Tara has been an advocate of a Natural approach to health care. He was vice-president of Erewhon Trading Co, one of the first major distributors of organically grown foods in America in the 1960's and has been active in the Natural Foods Movement
in both America and Europe.
Bill began his educational work in 1967 teaching in Boston and establishing Macrobiotic centers in Chicago and Los Angeles.
In 1975 he established the Community Health Foundation and the East West Center in London, England where he served as Executive Director till 1980.
This center was the largest and most active alternative health center in Europe and served as a model for other organizations worldwide.
He was a co-founder of the Kushi Institute and together with Michio Kushi developed the first full curriculum for Macrobiotic studies and Counselor Certification.
Bill has served as chairman of 7 international Macrobiotic Congresses in both Europe and North America.
Over the years he has been interviewed on numerous television and radio programs, submitted expert testimony to the American Congress on diet and disease and is the author of Macrobiotics and Human Behavior and editor of Your Face Never Lies by Michio Kushi.
He has been invited to present seminars on Macrobiotics, Natural Health Care, Deep Ecology, and Mind / Body Medicine in over 20 countries.
Bill has served on the faculties of the Kushi Institutes, in England and America, the Kiental Institute in Switzerland and Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, USA.
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