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Home Vs. Hospital: Everyone Loses

Traditions are cornerstones in any society. They develop out of what are usually common-sense responses to common needs. Usually, the needs are basic and deeply felt, and the responses are simple, becoming more sophisticated and complex as time passes and the society evolves.

Taking Responsibility

You want to give birth to your child naturally. You want childbirth to be a positive experience. You have read about, talked about and surely thought about the labor and birth that lie ahead. Maybe you have taken childbirth classes to prepare yourself.

Blood, Sweat And Tears

Photographs of birth capture what an intense physical event it is: lots of grimacing, blood, nakedness and sweat. A film can transmit much of the emotion of the experience: pants, groans and cries, the anxiety and the joy.

The Eye Of The Needle

The small gathering of students listened with a quiet awe to the wizened professor. Research techniques had become very sophisticated. They were about to travel on a series of levels within the volunteer lying smiling on the surgery table. She looked a little embarrassed.

Natural Birth: From Whiskey To Lamaze

It wasn’t long ago when all births were “natural” home deliveries. The birth of a baby was a common family affair attended by husbands and midwives for the most part. It was the exception when a doctor was present.

The Culpable Cadaver

The author of an article I recently read took up the task of listing the twenty worst news stories of 1975. Despite the evidence produced it was a very amusing business, as indeed, any post-mortem of such atrocious fare would have to be to make it palatable.

In The Web Of Illusion

The Tibetan Wheel Of Life

The Tibetan Wheel of Life is a graphic representation of basic Buddhist philosophy. Though some say it was drawn first by the Buddha, historians say that it originated in India around the second century A.D. as a means of exposing an illiterate people to the Buddhist ideas of reincarnation and the cause of suffering.

In The Eye Of The Beholder, Or Death Is What You Make It

First of all, let us consider the fact just mentioned. There is no separate, indivisible, specific point of death. Life is a state of becoming, and death is a part of this process of becoming.

Rehearsal For Dying

Is there a way to practise, or rehearse, for the supreme adventure none of us can avoid taking — dying? Plato thought so — in fact he defined philosophy as the art and knowledge of dying — and modern-day parapsychology shows the way towards what Grosso calls “an experimental science of death.”

Transformative Experience

A determining characteristic of a transformative event is its immediate, absorptive, focalizing power. It dominates and literally becomes the field of awareness. In one overwhelming moment of being, a pattern is perceived and imprinted, providing the awareness with a model for unitive functioning.