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By Joseph Dispenza What is needed isn't simply more food; it's a serious dialogue on the concept of "enough." - Jean-Michel Cousteau Two apparently unrelated items floated by on the great river of the national news recently. At closer look, the items were not only related but actually two symptoms of the same alarming problem. The first headline, "The Fat War: Hope Amid the Harm," appeared above a story by Gina Kolata about the growing girth of Americans. "More than half [of Americans] are now overweight and nearly 18 percent are obese-more than 30 percent above ideal body weight," she wrote, citing new findings reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Kolata continued, "Every time it seems Americans can get no fatter, they gain a bit more weight. Experts foresee an ever-ballooning population gobbling ever-greater quantities of food while getting ever-less exercise." The other headline concerned a renewed interest in the hit TV quiz show of a few seasons back-"Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?"-and its copycats, one titled, appropriately and unapologetically, "Greed." "If this country is so rich," asks Frank Rich in the New York Times, "why are so many coveting the prosperity they already have?" Maureen Dowd noted in another New York Times commentary, this one about greed engendered by a ceiling-less stock market, "Once upon a time, money was an occasion for guilt. The robber barons who had exploited the poor would cleanse their lucre by buying great art or pouring it into charity; the Guilted Age. But now the only remorse that people feel about money is that they haven't made more." The answer to these questions about enough money, and to the previous puzzle about enough food, might be that we simply do not know when we are satisfied. Like those laboratory mice whose appetite switches were removed from their brains, and they kept eating until they passed out, we could be missing a critical part of our cultural brain: that part that declares "Enough!" One of my teachers was the centenarian pioneer of nutrition, Hazel Parcells (1889-1996). If you did the arithmetic, you calculated her age when she passed on-106. Dr. Parcells used to say that we are a civilization that is "overfed and undernourished." She meant that we are engaged in a feeding frenzy on empty calories, and we overeat because we can't get nourished. Her entire approach to holistic healing was based on getting truly nourished. She did not stop with the nourishment of the physical body, either, but extended the notion of nourishment into the emotional, mental and spiritual realms. We appear to be a culture that is overfed on junk-junk food, junk values, junk entertainment, junk politics, junk philosophies-and that is making us fatter and, at the same time, greedier. Fatter because the junk is rich in sugar but devoid of ingredients that will build health, and greedier because in a culture that defines itself in terms of consumption, we are forever craving the next thing. Our "Not-Enough" culture encourages us to think of ourselves as defective and incomplete in some fundamental way, and to consider bringing in things outside ourselves so that we can be complete. To do that, we have to buy those things, thus fulfilling our capitalist destiny. The trouble is, in this scenario, we can't ever be complete and full-we can never have enough-because if we do, the whole world we have created will end. And so, perceiving that we never have enough of anything, we become restless and unhappy. We become professional complainers. There must be a better way to live. Simply saying "no" to the "I can't get no satisfaction" (thank you, Rolling Stones) anthem of our culture is a good way to start living differently-and more sensibly. Asking ourselves if we really need the next toy, the next dollar or the next mouthful can bring about a dramatic personal healing in this area. And, since consciousness is one, whatever you and I hold in our individual consciousness is also held in collective consciousness. Things will change, if you and I change. On the brink of the new time that is coming upon us, let's consider being satisfied, totally and completely, right now and forever. The alternative is pretty scary. Not to acknowledge the fullness that we already enjoy is to dwell in the inferno of constant hunger and lack, where even, to quote the title of a recent popular film, "the world is not enough." Joseph Dispenza is an award-winning author, Atención columnist and co-founder of LifePath in San Miguel. You can read more of Dispenza's articles at www.lifepathretreats.com |