The ten celestial stems generate the five elements, which in turn generate three yin energies and three yang energies.  The three yin energies and the three yang energies combine to generate the six energies of Heaven, six energies of Earth, and the six energies of man.  ( Nei Jing)

In classical thought, there is a relationship between the influence of the moon and the menstrual cycle.  The moon influences the way energy flows throughout our bodies.  It controls patterns of fertility and affects the psychological and emotional body.  The correlation to the moon as the yin or feminine body, means that the moon has more effect on the female of the species, who is yin predominant, then on the male.  Correct treatment of the menstrual cycle includes inclusion of the staging of the moon, according to the Stems and Branches school.  Improper treatment may injure the body and fluids.

When the moon is newly appeared, the blood and energy of man begin to generate in the wake of it, and the wei qi starts to operate with it;  when the moon is full, the blood and energy will be prosperous and the muscle will be firm and substantial;  when the moon is dark, the muscle of  man will be emaciated, bu this time, the channels and collaterals asthenic, the wei qi is gone, and the body is left alone.  Therefore when pricking, one must adjust the blood and energy along with the condition of  heaven.  Nei Jing

These organ systems, such as the Kidneys, could describe the theoretical framework of the time line of a women’s reproductive life.  Cosmological time was applied to the body and substances like blood could be tracked through its waxing and waning in the body in relation to natural phenomena.  This fluctuation could also then be differentiated if pathology or function was disrupted.  This differentiation later progresses into Chinese Medicine diagnostics and treatment principles. The cosmological factors would be considered as well as the energetics of the body and more particularity the procession of qi through the 6 stages.  Disruption in one of the consecutive divisions might create excess and/or deficiency at another division.  Thus a disruption at one stage of the Chinese biological clock, will create a relation at another as the natural progression of qi and blood is disturbed.   This imbalance can create a chain reaction within the organ systems, manifesting in disruption of normal processes such as the menstrual cycle.

A patient of mine recently asked me what I thought of the below chart.  This gender predictor makes its way around most every baby blog/website out there along with comments from people about its effectiveness.  So, I have been conducting a bit of a private study the last year comparing the conception dates and maternal age of  my patients and the chart.  What I have found is that around 60-65% of the time the chart is correct.  I’ll post more on this subject in a few months, when a full year has concluded since I have been calculating statistics.  In the meantime, what is your experience, if any with the chart?  I should mention, it was correct in the determination of the gender of my baby!

Keep track of your menstrual cycle.  Right it down!  There are many new phone apps out there that make this easier then ever but the old fashioned way of marking it on your calendar works just as well.  The important thing is to be consistent.  Having a history of your cycles is a valuable tool by which to determine future fertile times.  Tracking can also help point out days when emotionally and physically you might need to cut yourself some slack. (I will address how to balance PMS in a later post.)

Eat right.  Pretty simple task in theory but when it comes down to choosing an apple over a cupcake, we all know who usually wins.  Proper nutrition, which consists mainly of whole foods, fruits and vegetables, organic dairy and free ranged meats and seafood, provides the building blocks for healthy blood supply.  Women tend towards blood deficiency and the increasing lack of quality produce and food contributes to this deficiency.

Exercise, but not too much.  It’s difficult to find the right balance of physical exercise.  Your muscles and brain are dependent on healthy blood supply.  When you exercise rigorously, blood circulates throughout your entire body.  It feeds your muscles, tendons and ligaments.  The more you exercise, the more proactive you should be with how well you supplement the energy you expend.

Don’t burn the candle at both ends.  Exhaustion seems like a pretty common part of modern day life.  But borrowing from your reserves will only leave you lacking in the future.  Especially if you think you might put off motherhood till later on.  Make a regular sleep schedule and unstructured time a part of your day to day life.

Take a break from oral contraceptives.  Many people I work with have been taking birth control for up to 15-20 years. When it comes time to conceive, it can take some time for your body to start a regular menstrual cycle on its own if you have been taking oral birth control pills.  It is a good idea to let your body remember how to cycle on its own from time to time using other forms of contraceptives such as condoms.

Have a healthy sex life.  All of the above mentioned points contribute to a healthy libido. Taking care of your self feels good.  When you are well rested, exercising and eating well, you tend to have more sexual energy.  When it comes to preserving your fertility for the future, being in touch with libido is a very important tool.  The less sex is on your mind and the more it feels like a chore or work, the more you need to slow down, take a look at the overall picture and take steps to rebalance your life. Exhaustion is a major factor in a lowered sex drive.

The problem with the emergence of modern psychedelic medicine was that there was no contextual practice to process what emerged and (therefore) that it was illegalized. We now have at our disposal legal substances and practices that elicit psychedelic and psycho(ana)lytic experiences as well as a method for incorporating permanent change. And we should endeavor to make all healing medicines legal. But substance, set, and setting is still the key to the psychedelic equation and to healing. We will see how this can be applied.

“Choosing Joy: Liberating the Drive to Live and Beyond”

Open Seminar by Dr Scott Von. An Extensive Ongoing Seminar (free and open to the public)

The purpose of the open seminar is to stimulate contemplation and discussion concerning cultural and clinical practice for the broadest spectrum of the public. This serves as an event in itself and to introduce and augment the clinical, research, and training work done at New Clinic and Analytica. Generally held on the First Friday of the month but check schedule for dates and themes.

Today with the focus on “evidence based medicine” and the isolation of specific pathological and curative factors we tend to lose sight of this broader understanding of disease and healing – even within the field of Oriental Medicine. Heiner Fruehauf describes how the Maoist development of modernized TCM – “Traditional Chinese Medicine” – eliminated this classical understanding and asserted that mind was but an epiphenomena of matter, much like the Western conception of materialist science and medicine. Western medicine’s recent return to the focus on mind as important in disease and cure of the body was inevitable not just because of its ineradicable nature but because of a change in the social and physical environment in which psychosomatic disturbance has become the primary factor in disease. Wilhelm Reich demonstrated epidemiologically as well as clinically how psychosomatic and neurotic diseases had already replaced environmental and epidemic diseases as primary cause in modern societies by the dawn of the Nineteenth Century.

Several hundred years ago, doctors in modernizing industrial societies already began to diagnose the growing pathological disturbances of the nervous system in “neuraesthenia,” “psychaesthenia,” and “hysteria,” but it was Freud who synthesized this social change into an elaborate theory and practice in the Twentieth Century. It is only now that Oriental Medical doctors in the East are being confronted with the same thing as these countries continue to modernize. But as Elisa Rossi has demonstrated, classical Oriental Medicine has a rich vocabulary for understanding and treating the mind or Shen in all its forms.

The Shang Han Lun is a theory of “cold damage.” Beyond the specific ideas of cold weather this can be conceived as “cold” shock or trauma (as confirmed by Craig Mitchell in his commentary on the classic). In this case a patient can suffer a severe shock which has not left her and is now compromising her life at a serious level.

The method of the classics is to release trauma which has penetrated the being through the energetic zones along a specific course of development. This is just as true for psychic shock as it is for physical pathogenic factors. Following a classical approach for example, one can give a patient “Si Ni Tang” from the Shang Han Lun for cold shock which has penetrated to the deepest level of the shao yin zone of the heart and kidney energy. In TCM this is also the formula for yang collapse. Caiping Tang in her classical research on clinical applications discusses how “Si Ni Tang” – and fu zi – can be used to treat psychic shock. Similarly aconite (fu zi) is used in modern homeopathic medicine equally for physical cold-induced disease and psychic shock.

The Shang Han Lun describes how when pathogenic factors penetrate to this level there is a lassitude and desire to curl up and hide from the world much as a patient in this state might wish to do: to sleep late and stay in most of the time. This condition is described as yang collapse. The patient would experience this on a psychic level though it might not be apparent on a physical level. She would have no desire or will and could not think or express herself.

This is not a very large formula but the dosages do not need to be as strong as in classical times as we are not fighting major external cold but energetically and psychically trying to remove external pathogenic shock which has become chronic as cold yang collapse in the shao yin zone. We can see here the roots of homeopathic understanding as the Nei Jing states that the treatment should be as subtle as possible, and that the stronger the formula the more it must be ceased when the patient has already started to get better yet before the process is complete.

Acupuncture too is excellent for releasing trauma but it must also be used appropriately. When treating the meridians with acupuncture one is literally treating the spirit as well. Nevertheless one can use point combinations which focus on the psychoemotional and mental aspects as well as creating intent for the transformative process. Acupuncture can be used homeopathically to bring on an encounter with the stuck trauma and an opportunity for release, rather than coercing the body allopathically to reverse the symptom.

When patients feel better after the treatments they gain hope and a desire to engage in the process of transformation. If you engage in the dialogue and exchange signifiers which give new meaning to life, eventually they begin to understand their condition better and want to explore the history of trauma as well as the deeper roots of it. This can lead to a psychoanalytic exploration of one’s condition and life. For me this is an opportunity to return to the calling of the Nei Jing to treat the shen or spirit directly with “tong shen ming” as Ted Kaptchuk inspires us to do in his re-reading of the classics. It is often a slow process but what is more precious than creating space and time in the current era. One may be very reluctant to come to full consciousness about the past, as of course this means mourning loss and psychic pain. We inevitably encounter new levels of grief as our condition changes but we become more clear and alive. One may be able to return to the world to work on oneself and begin a process of deep healing. The prognosis in this case is very difficult as change only happens very slowly but I believe over time with devotion we can emerge from trauma in a new state of being.

The classic texts of Oriental Medicine describe how pathogenic factors enter the bodymind and follow pathways to different energetic zones and organs. We might add to this as well different spiritual or mental complexes. Our own prenatal constitutional jing and shen factors may leave us vulnerable to external factors and where they end up in our bodymind. Similarly the physical and psychic traumas of our postnatal life often remain unhealed and can be triggered by similar external factors. This is what Freud calls the repetition compulsion in psychic disease. Instead of merely seeing this as a pathology we could see it as a new opportunity to heal an old trauma. In that case we need not suppress the symptom but release the deeper root of the problem.

It is my experience that classical Oriental Medicine is excellent for treating acute trauma and chronic residues of this. If we look more closely we may find that much chronic disease is but what is left over of acute disease mistreated in the first place. Trauma penetrates deeper into the body along a series of stages and levels and is likewise healed along certain pathways. The Nei Jing recommends to guide matter along its course of development. This has been echoed thousands of years later in modern homeopathic medicine and the law of disease and its cure developed by Samuel Hahnemann, as well as in the psychoanalytic theory of mental disease and cure developed by Sigmund Freud. Little did they know that the roots of this understanding were already in the classics.

References

Ilza Veith (ed) Nei Jing
Jing-Nuan Wu(ed) Ling Shu
Craig Mitchell (ed) Shang Han Lun
Guohui Liu (ed) Wen Bing (Warm Pathogen Diseases)
Heiner Fruehauf “All Disease Comes from the Heart” (American Acupuncturist V. 43)
Craig Mitchell “Analysis of Classical Works” ACTCM Seminar 2/08
Caiping Tang “Scholastic Schools” ACTCM Seminar 6/08
Ted Kaptchuk The Web that Has No Weaver
Ofer Baranovitch Stages, Levels, Envelopes: Integrating Classical Models
Mark Seem Bodymind Energetics
Elisa Rossi Shen: Psycho-Emotional Aspects of Chinese Medicine
Sigmund Freud Outline of Psychoanalysis
Wilhelm Reich The Cancer Biopathy
Samuel Hahnemann Materia Medica

Thank You

Any particular “reality” is a contraction of the infinite – which is why there is no reality – only realities or worlds. And no logic only logics. The logics or rules of the game which found these worlds are axiomatic – they are decided as an event – and thus are not separate from the very foundational existence of these worlds. One can only excavate them after the fact through the micropolitics of analysis – but an analysis submitted to Lacan, Foucault, and Guattari until it is unrecognizable as a church.

What Lacan calls the object a is an excellent example of a founding event inaccessible to the logic of the particular world (in this case a human one) built on this. In category theory mathematics this is called a central object which determines the relational logic of identities and differences of a particular world or neighborhood or set. Badiou removed the transcendental from the ontological absolute outside above and placed it in the absolute inside local where it founds the phenomenological appearance of a world.

An event is the dissolution of solidity of the rules of a particular set which opens this contraction onto the infinite real expansiveness of pure possibility, potential, or power. The infinite is void or nothing because it is no-thing. It is not a thing or set. In a Hegelian sense then, the real or void is spirit or negation of thingness and identity, and to the extent that this remains within the human it is his negating, voiding, spiritual action which continues to open closed sets or things to the real of power (in the Nietzschean sense). Thus with the “end of history” and the “death of God” we have the overman or beyond-human free spirit – for the power to destroy is the power to create.

In fact this is the real meaning of karma. Karma is usually interpreted from the limited point of view of cause and effect in terms of reward and punishment. But one can really only understand the meaning of karma with access to the transpersonal, holographic, or synchronistic world of creative destruction or the will to power. Steiner saw that Hegel and Nietzsche had taken philosophy and human experience as far as it could go to the brink of the true meaning of karma in the free spirit when he wrote his book on the “Philosophy of Freedom.” To move beyond is to become other than human but actually to fulfill the movement of spirit which Hegel could only see as human or the will to power or eternal return by which Nietzsche tried to grasp this inhuman experience. While this experience had always been open to certain fortuitous cases through human history, Hegel and Nietzsche were harbingers of the time when rapid technological evolution would force the species as a whole to confront the dissolution of its world. Deleuze and Guattari simply updated the story of the onset of “Capitalism and Schizophrenia,” but few grasp the true meaning and gravity of the current situation.

While the baroque is a particular historical period or world which demonstrates some of these characteristics, it is also a recurring period in cyclical process which manifests such a creative destruction woven of infinite play. I have often counterposed the baroque to the postmodern as two forms of aftermath to an event (such as modernity). While the postmodern is marked by a cynical nostalgiac cool (cold) defense mechanism, the baroque is marked by ironic acceptance, open pathos and infinite regeneration which looks much like Nietzsche’s concept of the eternal return of history as a playground of myth and mask. For in the end all of these different worlds are only multiple versions of the infinite void which is only experienced as lack or no-thingness in a world of appearance, but which recalls us to the real which – as Deleuze and Guattari would say – is not absence but pure presence, potency, and potential.

Hegel’s attempt to resolve the subject/object dualism is the same task that Advaita Vedantists, Zen Buddhists and other nondualists have attempted throughout “history.” What is novel is the stress on history and the idea of man as a whole completing this task. Is it necessary for man as whole to complete this task for it to be complete?

The unfolding of Being as objective natural space by means of Negation as subjective historical time so beautifully recapitulates the whole trajectory of philosophy (and of man), we could only wonder what would be left other than Bataille’s “unemployed negativity,” or the “painful tooth in Hegel’s mouth.” If the first is Europe in the 30s or America in the 70s catching a glimpse of this real, then the second is the symptom by means of which we as a species keep avoiding the end.

Enter Freud the scientist discovering this symptomatic state by which the master-slave dialectic is carried on beyond war and even beyond political economy toward (what Hegel and Marx could not foresee) the question of meaning itself – the individual myth of the neurotic and the real-imaginary-symbolic war of a body-mind in turmoil.

Even this individual myth of the neurotic is quaint in comparison to the post-60s emergence of “techonology and nihilism,” the pure war of adult toys trying desperately to outrun the void.

The working bourgeois who is slave to capital is now (also) the castrated subject dialectically revolving around desire and repression in a fashion-oriented society of the spectacle, “Japanized” into petty wars of “snobbery,” hipsterism, and the “art world” filled with anything but artists – pseudo-subjects traded on the market of “objective” beauty, style, and fame in which the stakes change every 15 minutes because of course nothing is true (only cool) even as their biopathic bodies betray them to the false surprise of everyone around.

The question: is this divided subject of the “unconscious” inevitable or is there an end to analysis in which Freud’s Drive and Lacan’s Desire of the Analyst provide an answer to Hegel.

If Man is the negation/subtraction of infinite multiple Being, then Spirit is the self-conscious negation/subtraction of infinite multiple being.

If Man disappears at the end of History, he does not sink back into the natural space of being. Rather he mutates like a butterfly into what he always was (becoming) – Spirit – and the natural world of Being is taken up into this Spirit which is nothing other than the infinite multiple and its other name, the void, as what continues to negate that which appears. The body and its natural environment is taken up into the spirit-man as the voiding animal who has consciously and voluntarily introduced death into his existence.

The Warrior is not (only) the working bourgeois become citizen of the absolute state, but the divided subject become spirit-man living the drive as creative simulacra, the sinthome as desiring production, the sovereign of nothing, the zen samurai without a lord, the overcoming of man in the ubermensch – and its world is neither global psychoanalytic communism, nor animal night, nor the city of god but … the advent.

Alain Badiou “Logics of Worlds”
Georges Bataille “Sovereignty”
Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari “A Thousand Plateaus”
Leonard Cohen “Beautiful Losers”
Philip Dick “Valis”
Marguerite Duras “Destroy She Said”
Pierre Klossowski “Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle”
Rudolph Steiner “Philosophy of Freedom”
Wilhelm Reich “Cosmic Superimposition”

This refers to Nietzsche’s project of eternal return as affirmation – and creative destruction as affirmation – rather than negation as critical disjunction and separation. “And-and-and” rather than “either-or.” This is a mathematical concept of the continuum as distribution of intensities and affirms the failure of Cantor’s continuum hypothesis to be tamed by discrete countable constructible sets. We are left with the infinite multiple and its various sets which appear as worlds – seemingly discrete components but actually rearrangements of relations of elements. But these elements themselves are only further relations so all that actually appears are relations of relations of…the infinite multiple or void – the empty set. The will to power as open intensity is real or infinite while the intentional singularity or sovereignty is an expression or appearance of this infinite but it is “no thing” – it continues to participate in the infinite intensity even as it appears to have singular existence.

Our ontological error – which becomes moral, scientific, aesthetic, political, clinical error – is to signify – to become slaves to things as meaningful – including self, world, and god – rather than participating in process – expressionism in philosophy: simulacra as creative manifestation of intensity in an eternal return, refrain, or miming of the intensity itself.

The end of dualism shows us that the void is the infinite and only stops at the one, the two, the three, and the many along the way – that being is becoming and that matter is form. The dialogue between Alain Badiou and Gilles Deleuze recapitulates a dialogue initiated by Plato and Aristotle which can now be resolved with reference to the mathematical-poetic biophysics of Wilhelm Reich’s Orgonomy and Rene Thom’s Semiophysics (not to mention the Surrealism of Bataille, Artaud, Breton, and Duchamp).

Along with analytic philosophy, scientific and poetic analysis, we leave behind the theological content of psycho-analysis and follow only the topological diagrammatic formation of schizo-analysis until we are left with analysis itself which subsumes philosophy, psychology, medicine, theology, ethics, politics, physics, metaphysics, mathematics, poetics – and in the place where poetics and analysis meet, the sovereign subject or event invents analysis anew each time, for all analysis is lay analysis and is signed by the proper name: Freudian Analysis, Lacanian Analysis, Joyceian Analysis, Duchampian Analysis, Nietzschean Analysis, Deleuzeian Analysis…

1. From the very beginning no-thing is.

2. There is void – empty set – potential, also known as substance – matter – continuum – the infinite infinite or infinite multiple.

3. Within the continuum of matter, a difference of relations of relations of this matter is what is called form, and form containing matter is an act(ualization) containing potential or an event which creates a set defined only immanently – generically – as what it is.

4. This event installs a set of relations of relations of matter (or empty potential – void) to itself by virtue of form.

5. This act of form-ation or per-form-ance installs a topological analytic object a, central object, or transcendental regime (a=c=t) axiomatically and locally.

6. Thus there is no One but only ones and the void is thus no lack or absence (from some-thing) but a pure affirmation of being becoming.

7. All events – or sets – remain topologically linked to the “ontological” infinite substance-matter-void while appearing as “phenomenological” things.

8. Thus the continuum of Number (or numericity) appears as discrete numbers, the Real appears as Imaginary-Symbolic structure, the ontological appears as the phenomenological.

9. Philosophy has nothing left to do other than analyze the axiomatic appearance and disappearance of sets, forms, worlds, or events – actualizations of the potential – finite numbering of the infinite – topological diagramming.

10. Analysis is.