Milk

Intriguingly, in a world where we’re happy to drink poo-brown fizz without knowing its ingredients, take pills because we’re told to, and eat the flesh of animals we’ve never met, last week some people were grossed out that women in New Zealand have been sharing breast milk.

Wet nurses are nothing new. Besides which, in these modern days, with breast

Image credit: Mary Cassatt

pumps, packaging options and those new-fangled freezers, surely the ick factor is rather reduced? The non-related baby is not actually latched on to the unrelated mother’s breast. Or is the reaction more about some fundamental sense of betrayal: we believe mums are there, body and mind, for their own. Not for anyone ‘other’.

Mother’s milk: the very definition of trust, and comfort food. Does the notion bring up primal fears of disloyalty and abandonment?

Photo credit: Alamy

Or maybe they’re just worried about health issues. You don’t even know the other woman, what if she has…the Black Plague? What if she eats junkfood, drinks like a fish, snorts P?

Well what about you? We all eat such crap these days, and who knows what's in our drinking water (if we even drink water), we breathe in carbon monoxide, VOCs and particulates every day: we're all toxic.

With all the toxins in human breast milk, maybe your baby would actually be better off on cow’s milk. Or formula, made from cow’s milk, but with all the water processed out. That way you can buy it in a tin, and add some water back in. Makes total sense.

Cows eat grass after all, and in New Zealand they live outdoors, not in battery farm environments. Reassuringly bucolic and traditional. Natural. But wait: there’s actually not enough pasture to go around anymore, what with the 4.9 million cows grazing in NZ these days. So in reality they don’t get much grass. Now they eat mainly PKE – a palm oil by-product, imported from countries like Malaysia and Indonesia where the environment is being thoroughly trashed in order to grow this lucrative cash crop.

Still, might as well get your kids started on palm oil early, it’s in virtually every processed food product these days.

But while we’re busy being grossed out by food produced by someone else’s body,

Photo credit: Telegraph

let’s recap. How much of your food today was, actually, someone else's body?

And when it’s normal for adults to drink milk made by another species, what, exactly, is so gross about a baby drinking milk that was produced by another human?

All that we see or seem

‘The Secret’: omg. You can get anything you want, with the power of your mind. Your thoughts can control reality, affecting events in the physical world outside your mind. Because the whole universe is energy, and you are fundamentally energy yourself.

It’s a cheerful idea that’s made its author a lot of money, which rather proves her point, except that the universe is made of energy and matter.

Meaning, if you want to have any effect on events in the physical world outside your mind, you’ll have to get up off your arse and do something about it. Write a best-selling pseudoscience book, for instance.

But it’s no secret that the world inside our minds is where we really live, so the way

Scientific diagram. Image credit: Erich Stauffer

we think is critical to our quality of life. And if we reframe the ‘law of attraction’ slightly, it does hold true, kind of.

Not so much that angry people attract events to themselves that will make them angrier (with the ‘frequencies’ they’re giving off). Just, whatever event occurs will make them angrier, no matter what it is. Or as my father used to say, “even if it was good you wouldn’t like it.”

And naturally if you’re of a happy disposition, you’re more likely to look at developments – whatever they may be – through a lens of positivity. You Pollyanna, you. Frequencies though? Do your thoughts give off energy that influences objects and events around you? Let’s see you bend that spoon.

This week Elon Musk, tech entrepreneur and multi-planetarian, advised that we are unlikely to be living in, like, actual reality. For real. Statistically speaking it’s way

Image credit: Zephyr76

more likely that you and I are merely avatars in a complicated virtual reality game, which makes sense if you consider how much we all live in our heads these days. What better than a game that you can play sitting in a chair, plugged in to a gadget, where instead of say, rambling the virtual world having wild adventures and brandishing medieval weaponry, your character is just sitting in a virtual chair, plugged into a virtual gadget, &c.

I guess it’s no more or less a waste of time than dreaming you're a butterfly.

This week too researchers found that the universe is expanding rather faster than expected, indicating that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in Rhonda Byrne's philosophy. Though it fits in nicely with the ancient Hindu belief that the universe itself is only the dream of a god, and we live inside an endless cycle of the death and rebirth of our world, as the god dreams, and wakes, and dreams again.

Meantime I long since wrote my own self-help book, which is an easy read for any god or avatar, the size of a matchbox and only three pages long. Obviously I could make a fortune, which really would be helping myself, in the grand American tradition. But in the interests of attracting more kindness, compassion and generosity into my own life, here you go – it’s a gift. My Guide to Life.

Image credit: Ike no Taiga

Unemployed? Get a job. 

Feeling sick? See a doctor.

Always tired? Go to bed.

Sweet dreams.