Taking pleasure in things that are bad for you.

Switched

Related:  Fareed Zakaria | The Homeless Blogger
Related: Your Body Doesn’t Lie: Amazon.com
Related: Sanpaku – Wikipedia

Music:  The Beatles, “Here Comes the Sun”

Script:

It’s the William Tell Show.  I call myself William Tell; you can call me Bill.  Thank you for including me in your world.  I hope today we’re all celebrating Liz Cheney’s keeping her leadership position in Congress.

I sat, smoking, on the kiosk outside the casino, at the intersection of Bayard and Russell Streets.  This couple pulled up in a gray SUV, and stopped to wait for the light.  They had both windows open, and they were both eating something.  Looked like ice cream sandwiches.  I said, “When they’re done, they’re going to throw that trash right out the windows.”  I wondered how I had taken such an instant dislike to them.  Maybe they had dark auras.  They had music playing, but it wasn’t loud enough for me to tell whether I liked it or not.

I said, “Maybe they’re switched.”

“Switched” refers to a state of taking pleasure in things that are bad for you.

The concept comes from a book by Dr. John Diamond entitled, Your Body Doesn’t Lie.  It made quite a splash when it was first published, in 1979.  I bought my copy in 2004.

Diamond sets forth a system to identify body movements and environmental influences that strengthen or weaken the body.  It’s not scientific, in that all the measurements depend on the subjective perceptions of the practitioner.  There’s no way to design double-blind experiments.

One of his first examples pertains to honey versus sugar.  He found that a teaspoon of honey will tend to strengthen a person, but a teaspoon of refined sugar will weaken the person.  This is, of course, completely in line with all the New Age, touchy-feely political correctness of the time.

He says that one should not wear or hold any piece of metal that crosses the body’s centerline; unless the metal piece extends all the way around one’s body.  So if you wear a necklace, for example, it’s important that it be metal all the way around.

He makes a distinction between what he calls “heterolateral motion” and “homolateral motion.”  Heterolateral motion is like normal walking:  the right arm and left foot both move the same way at the same time, and vice versa.  In homolateral motion, one may have both arms moving the same way at the same time, or the right arm and right leg moving the same way at the same time.  Obviously, one of these is more natural than the other, and he insists that heterolateral motion is healthier than homolateral motion.

So, some time later, when I decided to start lifting weights, I bought dumbbells instead of barbells.  With a barbell, you’ve got this — bar of metal — that you’re holding across the centerline of your body; and you also have homolateral motion going on.  With dumbbells, you have a separate weight in each hand, and you’ll normally alternate lifting between left and right arms.

Let’s take a break.

[Commercial break]

We’re back.

I will link to a blog post that included this passage.  Quote:

Diamond sets forth that the life force passes through the body along fourteen meridians.  If a person is deficient in the life force in a specific meridian, that weakness can be communicated to others.  By a psi dynamic known as “sympathy” (He does not mention this by name.), on encountering a needy person, the naive observer will seek unwittingly to supply the other’s need.  The result is that the observer becomes deficient also in the same meridian.

Such communication can occur in  person; via appearance, as in a photograph or motion picture; or by sound of voice, whether live, recorded, or broadcast on radio or TV.

End quote  For example, the book has a chapter about an imbalance of the eyes, called sanpaku.  Marilyn Monroe, John F. Kennedy, and Abraham Lincoln all had it.  I myself have it.  Diamond says that gazing at the eyes in the photo of such a person, will induce weakness in the viewer.

As to music, Diamond emphatically condemns what is called the “stopped anapestic beat.”  This is basically the rhythm pattern you find in The William Tell Overture, that opens every episode of my show; only, in rock, it’s a bit slower.  It’s everywhere in rock and roll; this is basically what makes rock, rock.

Diamond said he observed dancers in a nightclub.  When healthy music is playing, he said their body movements will be heterolateral.  When unhealthy music is playing, he said their body movements switch, becoming homolateral.

As I recall, he said that The Beatles are healthy, but The Rolling Stones are unhealthy.

I recall seeing reports that the stopped anapestic beat is the exact opposite of the normal rhythms of the nervous system, so that listening to this music introduces confusion into one’s neurology.  In researching that, this past week, all the references I find lead straight back to Diamond.  The claim was widely publicized, but he’s the only one who ever made it.  There is o corroborating research by others.

What does all this tell me, in terms of practical life from day to day?  I don’t have time to micro-manage my environment.  I can’t control what music they play in Royal Farms; I can’t preoccupy myself with avoiding eye contact with people who are sanpaku.  It is enough for me to gain my strength from choosing to love the people around me.

Obviously, today we want some healthy music.  I can’t think of anything healthier than “Here comes the sun,” by the Beatles.  So, that’s it.