Dr Matt’s Newsletter April 30th, 2023– What would Mother Teresa do? Part 6, RFK Jr for President, and yet another Near Death Experience.
Supporting healthy social interactions and diversity of health choices
Included in this week’s newsletter:
- Part 6 of Mother Teresa’s story: Responding to her critics
- Another Near Death Experience and a remarkable recovery from cancer
- RFK Jr’s candidacy for president: Sound bites and a “Five course meal”
Regarding politics “not as usual” and RFK Jr running for president, I have repeatedly stated that I am not Democrat or Republican and do not care what party you lean towards, either. If Ron DeSantis, Joseph Ladapo, and RFK Jr join forces I would be very happy, no matter what party they are in. However, they all need our support because the media and political powers are busy censoring and doing their best to “misinform” the public. My latest flash of insight? - A coin toss at the 50-yard line in RFK Stadium, right here in Washington DC, to decide who will be president and vice president 😊.
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Yours truly, one moment at a time.
Matt Irwin
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Today’s newsletter sections:
A New Near Death Experience: Anita Moorjani and her beautiful Eulogy for Wayne Dyer whose spirit is definitely still with us.
RFK Jr Presidential Candidacy – Two short “Sound bite” interviews and one “Five course meal” in his speech in Boston to announce his candidacy.
Music of the Week – One of my favorite Beethoven compositions, written when he was growing increasingly deaf, the first movement of his 6th Symphony.
Another story from Mother Teresa’s biography, “To Love and Be Loved” by Jim Towey: Critics who are often blinded by their own issues and who would be better served by examining the “log in their own eyes”, something we all benefit from, including myself...
Research of the week: postponed to next week: I plan a review of another major problem with HIV, its lack of spread in the past 40 years since it was first “discovered” in 1984. I previously covered a major problem with HIV on October 26th: the largest and highest quality study of sexual transmission found zero transmissions despite 282 combined years of follow-up, normal marital relations and inconsistent “safe sex” practices. This suggests that HIV cannot be transmitted sexually, and shows how the “germ vs terrain” issue has become incredibly imbalanced. The “terrain” can be a lot healthier physically, mentally, and spiritually.
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Near Death Experience of Anita Moorjani and her remarkable recovery from metastatic cancer
On February 2, 2006, Anita was rushed to the emergency room of Hong Kong Sanatorium hospital with widespread metastatic lymphoma that was shutting down her vital organs, and was only expected to have hours to one or two days to live. The lymphoma had been spreading in her body since her initial diagnosis in 2002, but she was about to have a spiritual experience that aided a remarkable recovery.
She wrote about her story in the book ‘Dying To Be Me‘ and has had many interviews and given many talks since then. I loved her book, but I do have one caution: It is not a recipe for how to heal yourself from cancer. This goal is definitely not up to us, and at some point all of us have a time to answer the call back to Spirit! However, her book is a great recipe for how to live your life “fearlessly”, as she likes to say.
Anita’s story may have never have come to light if not for Wayne Dyer, who saw that the world would benefit from hearing her. He tracked her down and encouraged her to overcome her fear of public speaking, to write her story in book form, and to gain confidence that she would not be seen as “crazy”.
After watching several of her talks and interviews, I found that the Eulogy for Wayne Dyer below expresses her views better, and also shows more clearly her confidence that no one actually dies. My avid readers are well versed in these spiritual experiences, covered in several prior newsletters. In one of my first ones I included a short video of Bruce Greyson that remains my favorite introduction to the topic. You can watch it again here.
RFK Jr Presidential Candidacy – Two short “Sound bites” and one “Five course meal”.
It would be nice to have a 15 to 20 minute summary of his positions, but the best I could find were either very short or very long. So below are a couple of short “Sound bites” and a rather complete “Five course meal” 😊
Sound Bite #1 – Campaign launch video
Sound Bite #2 – Brief interview on Tucker Carlson
They cover censorship, the Ukraine war, subsidies for “Big Agriculture”, subsidies for “Big Pharma”, and shifting to free-market support of small businesses, small farmers, the poor, and increasing the middle class. This interview may be one of the reasons Tucker was fired from FoxNews a few days later:
Five Course Meal – RFK Announcement Speech on April 19th in Boston
RFK Jr starts speaking at minute 34:50 of this video and one option is to skim to that point and then watch from there. He is different from most Democrats in that he recognizes that out of control government spending causes inflation, which he calls “A Tax on the poor”. Sadly, just as with many economic blunders, inflation caused by excess government spending and lockdowns is especially hard on the poor and makes it harder to help people who need it the most.
Music of the week – Beethoven’s 6th Symphony, First Movement. The “Pastoral Symphony” is meant to evoke the beauty of nature, and is a bit more peaceful than most of his symphonies.
Finally, section 6 from Mother Teresa’s biography, “To Love and Be Loved” by Jim Towey: Critics
When you do a search on YouTube for Mother Teresa, it is sad that some of the top hits are “fault finders”. Did Mother Teresa have faults? Of course she did! But the harshness of several critics actually shows more about how confused and disturbed they are, rather than being worthy critiques of Mother Teresa and her sisters who work and live in Missionaries of Charity homes around the world.
Some of the critiques are about problems that can occur in any large organization. Some sisters are unsuited to the work, and it is difficult for them to fit, like a “square peg in a round hole”. Some sisters who are promoted to positions of authority have difficulty managing the demands of their position. Many other reasonable issues and problems are expected to occur. However, the harshest critiques are sadly unrealistic and based in ignorance about Mother Teresa and about what is needed to help the “poorest of the poor”.
These harsh critics, when listened to in more detail, appear to be projecting their own psychological and spiritual issues. They critique Mother Teresa as a way to avoid much needed self-reflection. In psychology this is called “projection”, or more specifically “defensive projection”: attributing one’s own unacceptable traits, desires, and beliefs to another. This is something all humans do, including myself, and is another chance to look at the “log in our own eye” before judging others. How do we project onto others the psychospiritual issues that are actually within ourselves?
One example of these unrealistic accusations is that Mother sought out fame, fortune, wealth, and self-aggrandizement. Of course, this is a regular problem with spiritual leaders, but Jim Towey, who knew her quite well, counters these arguments easily with regards to Mother Teresa. For example, she did travel First Class on airplanes for the final twenty or so years of her life, but only after her presence in coach brought commotion and disruption. The airlines pleaded with her to sit in business class to help the airplane crew maintain order. Towey knew that her main goal was always a laser focus to help the “poorest of the poor”, especially those with illnesses that carry a heavy stigma like leprosy, tuberculosis, and AIDS.
Some critiques are about how she used her influence with famous people and world leaders. She wanted the Missionaries of Charity to be allowed to start new homes, and to continue working in existing ones, and this was often extremely difficult. Even in the USA there were fierce objections to homes for the poor. Would you want a home filled with lepers, people with tuberculosis, and AIDS patients in your backyard? Perhaps if you understood that those illnesses are not nearly as infectious as people believe you might welcome them. However, fear of infection is part of human nature, and these fears are easily inflated by people like Anthony Fauci. These “experts” sound calm and reasoned, but they are actually very similar to people who yell “Fire!” in crowded theaters, with a fleet of very expensive taxi’s outside that they own to “save" lives” as people leave.
In my April 15 newsletter I described the resistance to the Gift of Peace home in Washington DC. Local residents were extremely frightened, and some of them complained that the “AIDS virus” might spread to neighboring homes via mosquitoes, even though the Gift of Peace home sits in the middle of a 20 acre plot of land. This is the type of fear that causes abandonment and makes outcasts out of regular people like you and me.
Totalitarian countries were even more resistant to homes for people who are outcast and abandoned by society. This led to the complaint that she “cozied up” to totalitarian leaders and dictators in poor nations like Cuba and Haiti. Towey writes: “She agreed to these brief meetings because they were the price she had to pay for sisters to reach the suffering poor in Haiti and Cuba. Mother was determined to get her nuns into the places with the greatest need” (Page 152).
As one would expect from propaganda masters, Fidel Castro told her frankly that there were no poor people in Cuba. My sense of “dark-humor” makes me smile at this remark. Mother Teresa knew very well that this was false, and that every country has outcasts and people who are abandoned, especially if they have been diagnosed with a “super bug” like tuberculosis, leprosy, and HIV. More recently, in 2020, this happened to tens of millions of people diagnosed with covid-19.
The critics that bother me the most, however, are those with the incredible blindness and hubris to accuse the Missionaries of Charity sisters and brothers of not following enough Fauci-like germophobic protocols. Even though I know that few people realize how damaging these protocols are, it reminds me of people isolated in quarantine during recent years due to the “covid test”. These ritualistic protocols make caregiving extremely difficult, and harm both the caregivers and the people being cared for. They amplify the fear of illness instead of reducing it, especially the “personal protective equipment” (PPE) people wear. Many people clamored for this gear, and it may have allowed at least a minimal amount of caregiving to occur by frightened caregivers. However, it is an integral part of the package of harmful measures forced on people considered literally “untouchable”.
Mother Teresa and her sisters knew that sometimes wearing astronaut garb is the price you have to pay to keep helping people, and they were happy to accept gifts of clean equipment when offered. In India the poverty is still so severe that no one is offering such items, but in the US they can be accessed much more easily. In developing countries it remains more important to increase access to the extremely poor who are “hidden in plain sight”.
A similarly blind critique is that they didn’t use enough “modern medicine“ in their homes for the poor. These critics want them to use X-rays, CT scans, MRIs, blood cultures, spinal fluid cultures, etc. Just as with “PPE”, in India these resources were not available for the poor, and even routine medications like antibiotics could be difficult to obtain. The sisters were very busy getting people off the streets who needed food, clothing, shelter, and tender loving care much more than CT scans. The sisters had logged more than 4 million visits with people diagnosed with leprosy by the time Jim Towey first visited one of their homes in the 1980’s. Do these critics really think that more MRIs, CT scans, and bacterial cultures would have been a better choice?
In countries like the USA where hospitals are happy to see homeless and indigent people, the sisters are also happy to send their residents there when they appear to have an acute infection or health event. The Gift of Peace home in Washington DC routinely sends people for doctor visits and to the hospital if they are sick. However, many of the problems their residents have are not treatable, and once the hospital has done their best efforts, they are sent back.
This is exactly what happens with hospice patients I have been seeing in their homes as a hospice doctor for the past 19 years. People with extremely fragile health usually have multiple problems, not just one, and are sent home with most of the same problems they arrived with. This is even more common in the residents of the Missionaries of Charity homes: people who led an extremely hard life with much of it on the streets. That said, many people recover their health and live for years in their homes, well into old age. They are not forced back on the streets just because they have what we call in hospice care, “extended prognosis”.
One last critique deserves attention: the accusation that Mother Teresa and her sisters don’t really want to relieve suffering, just to promote their religion. It is true that she loved Catholicism, but she also stated “I love all religions… There is only one God and he has God to all”. Regarding helping people who were not the same religion as her, she wrote: “I have always said we should help a Hindu become a better Hindu, a Muslim become a better Muslim, and a Catholic become a better Catholic” (Page 164).
Next week I will share something that was especially painful for me to learn and understand: Mother Teresa had deep spiritual pain for most of her life, and often wrote that she felt “abandoned by God”. All of us have this kind of pain, of course, and it is not something we can control. However, despite the universality of human suffering, one doesn’t expect it to happen so strongly in a woman like her.