Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema
If your ear gets clogged does it mean that you are trying to avoid hearing something that you don’t want to hear? If you have a cough that won’t quit, could it be that you are “barking” for the world to pay attention?
Everybody knows that illnesses come from “germs” that we “catch.” You fly on a plane with a hundred other people and breathe their exhaust. 
You hang around a kid with green stuff coming out of his nose and soon you have green stuff coming out of your nose. But then, strangely enough, one day you go for a run in the rain, jump on a plane and later stop to wipe a few runny noses of strangers in the airport and come through just fine. What’s going on? Why do illnesses show up at certain times and not at others?
Could be that your mind is playing a role in the illness drama.
The term psychosomatic was coined in 1860 to define a disorder having physical symptoms, but originating from mental or emotional causes. This sounds like the illness I used to stay home from school. The symptoms included sore throat, dizziness and dementia and the cause was usually an upcoming test.
Can the same be said of a “real” illness? Can you heal with a shift in attitude? Consider this: If you think the same thought again and again it becomes a feedback loop in your mind. What if that feedback loop was not limited to your mind? What if you are programming your body as well without realizing it?
Louise Hay, a writer and lecturer, believes we’re programming ourselves to be ill or well. We have a choice. She claims to have cured her own cervical cancer by using affirmations and concluded that the cause of the cancer was her unwillingness to let go of resentment over a tragic childhood.
Hang on, before I lose you here, we need to track back to where Hay originally got her ideas. She read metaphysical essays by 1920s-era authors like Frances Scovel Shinn, who said that positive thinking could change people’s outward world. She also read the founder of the Religious Science movement, Ernest Holmes, who taught that positive thinking could heal the body.
At the time of these writings doctors were still administering whiskey as a painkiller. Medicine has changed a lot since then. But people haven’t evolved much. (Whiskey still works as a painkiller.) It’s intriguing to consider what attitudes Hay says contribute to illness. A sampling:
- Abdominal cramps, she says, are about fear, and “stopping the process.”
- Knee troubles are expressions of pride and ego.
- Post-nasal drip represents “Inner crying. Childish tears. Victim.”
- Stiff neck is the expression of unbending bullheadedness.
She even says that you might catch poison ivy when feeling defenseless and open to attack. My personal “BS” meter hits the red zone on that one, but I have to admit that Hay is giving us a tool to take control of our own wellness. She and others like medical intuitive Dr. Mona Lisa do not offer cures, but they suggest that the ability to heal has a lot to do with the way your mind interacts with your body. Could it be that the metaphysical religious thinkers of the 1920s may have pointed to a healthier future for everyone?
Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema
“The river isn’t dirty, it’s your mind that’s dirty.”
I was watching the waters of the Ganges flowing through the town of Rishikesh, India. I’d heard that the Sadhus, or holy men, said those words about the river to explain why the holy Ganges looked like a garbage dump. I must have been really enlightened that day, because with vision better than Superman’s I could see the E. coli, the hepatitis A, B and C, the typhoid and cholera and dysentery swirling downstream.
I was trekking a glacier in Patagonia, Argentina. The only sign of life was an ink black beetle walking carefully on blue ice. My Super Vision was also working that day. 
I scanned the vastness all around, intoxicated with the way the ice ripped into the sky. I saw no disease of any kind, not a single speck of trash anywhere. That’s because if you bring trash there you also have to take it out. If the Argentine park rangers find that you’ve left any, they will unsheathe their ice axes, dig a grave for you and dump you in; I think that’s the rule, anyway. The ice is so clean that you can mix it with whiskey and drink it down, using it to jump start your heart so you are able to walk the trail back to the boat that circles icebergs, to the little bus bouncing on a gravel road, to your room where you will finally be warm again.
“The river isn’t dirty, it’s your mind that’s dirty.”
Was the voice of that holy man trying to tell me that there’s no such thing as “pure” perception? Sometimes your eyes don’t see what they’re seeing? Could I have been distracted by all the noise and chaos that is India?
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This is where science comes in handy. It can measure stuff, and researchers at Montana State University have concluded that the Ganges contains untreated sewage, cremated remains, chemicals and disease-causing microbes.
“The Ganges has become the kind of place where genetic material could transfer between pathogens and create new pathogens.”
– Dr. Tim Ford, Montana State University
Scientists can also measure how fast glaciers are melting in Patagonia and elsewhere, documenting climate change. So you might conclude that human perception, filtered by memory and experience, won’t get you far when trying to prove anything. For example, if you come from a dirty place, India may look clean to you. If you come from a noisy place, Patagonia may seem unbearably still. Without objective measurement, you get into “everything is relative.” Messy business.
Spiritual folks will tell you that faith helps you experience the unseen. (“Is that the face of Jesus on my bathroom wall?”) For the science-minded, this notion is easy to dismiss. But this is tricky territory. Some scientists are doubting whether we can really measure anything objectively – that the consciousness of the investigator changes the outcome, for one thing.
When science meets spirit, when objective measurement meets faith, could it be that boundaries of both science and spirit are going to be changed?
That makes my mind spin, and thankfully I notice I’m over 500 words – but I will continue this thought in another blog. No matter what the Sadhu says, I’m not going in the Ganges.
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Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema
I went to yoga the other night. The room was filled with so many acolytes their yoga mats were about a micron apart. It was like boarding the subway in NYC during rush hour and getting an intimate view of your neighbor’s armpit. Only in yoga it’s more exciting because the people are half naked and their sweat flies on you when they flail. That class lasted about 45 seconds for me. I had to leave. I don’t do flailing.
After suffering from downward dog withdrawal and getting a $61 parking ticket (“And things were going so well!”) I had plenty of time to reflect on the valuable lessons learned. This is kind of a game we play, trying to extract a valuable life lesson from every event no matter how annoying. (“A bee stung me on the ass. What valuable lesson can be extracted from that?”)
Why was I annoyed enough to bail out of that class? Well, for one thing, I have issues
with sweaty strangers violating my personal space. But I also don’t like cults of personality.
Some people actually come to a yoga class for the yoga, but a male teacher can become popular and female students will don the appropriate Lululemon yoga gear and crowd into his classes, never admitting out loud that they have a crush on him. Movie stars get people to buy tickets, usually not directors or scripts. Cults of personality. Charisma is king. 
But Arnold Schwarzenegger’s charisma isn’t enough to run this state, and charismatic people like Tony Robbins or Suze Orman can seem to me to be style over substance.
Let’s face it, though, charisma is a powerful force – maybe even a hit of life force. It can draw people in, pay the bills, get your message across and your cause followed.
I don’t care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members.
–Groucho Marx
Groucho aside, most people want to be members of something. They like leaders to help them join the tribe. Yoga people are their own tribe, and Vegas gamblers, and Michael Jackson fans. In Seth Godin’s book Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us, he describes how connecting with others is a powerful tool for shaping consumer desire and even changing the world. He and others have pointed out that your tribe has nothing to do with geography, your religion or blood type. It can be fellow Facebook users, Syrah lovers, devotees of Nike running shoes or iPods. In a fragmented world we look to tribal leaders. Charismatic leaders, like Steve Jobs of Apple, can really drive a consumer brand into becoming a movement. There’s that word again: charisma. Maybe it’s the mojo in leadership. Maybe, despite myself, I’m going to extract a lesson out of that crowded subway car of a yoga class.
Thing is, there’s more yoga being done because of charismatic teachers. Apple has inspired a generation of designs that matter. Charismatic social entrepreneurs like Jacqueline Novogratz fund the businesses of the poor by first listening and then building supportive communities around local entrepreneurs. Charisma, backed up with a plan, can really change the world. Ok, I get it. Just stay out of my space in yoga class.
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Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema
A good friend commented recently about the passing of newsman Walter Cronkite, wondering if journalism was going the way of blacksmithing. Well, you can be sure of this – there will never be another Walter.
I was in a network meeting the other day, and the executive running it was explaining that during the Jurassic Era of television, there were only three networks. His group of young listeners was surprised. “Only three?” With only three networks on the air, Walter, Johnny and Barbara were oracles and earth-shakers. Walter told us that Kennedy and King were murdered. Johnny walked in the footsteps of Allen and Paar. Barbara broke barriers. Different world now. Mostly because of technology. We’ve lost a lot, but gained links to remind us what Paar and Allen did. We’ve seen the rise of the citizen journalist.
Citizen journalists, some with zero credentials, perform the most simple and powerful journalism: Show up, look around, tell what you see.
During the Paleozoic Era, when I was an intern with no credentials writing for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, I wrote with Bic pens and typed on Selectrics and the best part of the job was showing up and saying, “I’m from the newspaper. Tell me who opened fire first.” (Remember, this was Texas.) The only thing I could do was tell a story using black type on white paper – about as basic as basic could be.
News reporting today is like a guy who can’t have sex with a gal unless she’s wearing high heels and a wig. (No, this is not a confession.) Everybody knows news is tarted up now. Fair enough – to succeed, you have to be fascinating 24/7. Steep slope.
Yet some aren’t playing that game. Got a news story you think is worth investigating? You might find the money to do it by posting on Spot.us. The editors at The New York Times say they might publish one if it gets a go. There’s ProPublica, a nonprofit investigative reporting unit that has delivered some big stories.
Are the only journalists icons like Walter? Somebody with a journalism degree? There’s debate about whether bloggers are fake journalists, cutters and pasters really. And how’s Twitter’s news authority? According to Twitter these people are dead: Jeff Goldblum, Harrison Ford, George Clooney, Miley Cyrus, Natalie Portman and Ellen DeGeneres – struck down by tragic accidents. (This just in: they’re not dead.)
Citizen journalism isn’t perfect. There’s something unsettling about the best newsman being a comedian. Bottom line is you can’t place absolute faith in journalists anymore. That’s why there will be no more Walters like Cronkite. You didn’t need to fact check a guy like Walter, you trusted him. The man was on TV, in black and white at first, the very soul of credibility. Now that everybody’s got their own mic, you have to fact check everybody. You need to know their motivations and who’s paying them. You have to be your own Walter.
Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema
The robots might have taken over already. There’s enough artificial intelligence out there to write this blog without human intervention. Computers can already beat chess masters by brute computational force. And look! Google Translate can change this into Norwegian: Google oversetter kan oversette denne bloggen. Vel, I kan probably måken thaten up mysefen withouten any programvare. But anyway …
For a ReelzChannel segment we did recently, we interviewed Dan Burrus, the author of Technotrends. He made this somewhat scary point about texting: When we text on our phones we have adopted a machine language, behaving more like tippy-tappy automatons than talky, expressive people. Maybe, click by click, we’re edging closer to world robotic domination. But maybe not. Machines need us to type because they’re still too dumb to understand us when we talk – try saying “radio on” to the voice-actuated thingie in your car and it will likely respond “ejector seat ready – prepare to exit.”
Voice recognition glitches aside, robots are trying to do more than ever. Dr. Monika Hagen thinks robots should be able to heal us. She’s been researching robotic surgery at the University of California, San Diego.
“The field is exploding. More and more robots are being sold and more and more procedures are being performed with these robots.” — Dr. Monika Hagen.
Dr. Hagen is developing procedures like minimally invasive abdominal surgery. You move controllers that look suspiciously like a video game and the robot makes the cuts. Don’t try this at home – you do need training.
If you want to worry about something, try this: Robots are already learning how to build themselves. How long before they build very sophisticated versions of themselves – enough to become self aware? When a computer becomes aware of itself you could say it achieves consciousness. After that happens, what’s the only difference between you and your laptop? A soul. When machines become self aware it will likely push us toward forging a new definition of the soul and a new quest for scientific proof that it exists uniquely in humans.
Remember the movie “21 Grams?” The title comes from the belief that the body loses 21 grams as the soul leaves the body. The number comes from research conducted in 1907 by Dr. Duncan MacDougall. He made a special bed built upon scales. He placed patients who were dying on it and measured what happened when they expired. Unfortunately, his results were wildly inconsistent – only one of his six test subjects lost 21 grams at death. But people want to believe in the soul – so much so that they want to believe it has an actual, measurable weight. It’s not very scientific, but it is poetic and intensely human. It will be a long time before any machine comes up with a belief system like that.
Or as we say in Norwegian, Det vil være en lang tid før maskinen kommer opp med en tro systemet sånn. (Thanks, Google Translator.)
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