Conceptualización del Modelo de Control de Producción

Today, very few people have peaceful minds.

Because the modern diet is so extreme, many people have the ency toward either schizophrenia or paranoia. However, these tend-encies are reversible through a change in daily diet and way of life, as the following cases illustrate.

Recently, I met a businessman whose schizophrenic daughter had been confined in a mental institution in Boston. She was 23 years old and had been in mental hospitals for several years. When her parents came to see me, they both started to cry. They asked if macrobiotics could possibly help her. As it was, she faced the possibility of spend-ing her whole life in a mental hospital.

I asked to see her, and two days later, they brought her to see me.

She came in with a bottle of cola, and while we talked, she would oc-casionally take a sip from it. I told her parents that this was the cause of her problem. Of course, together with soft drinks, other extreme foods were also contributing. I recommended that they start gradually changing her diet toward macrobiotics. Because she had consumed a large volume of sugar and soft drinks for so many years, it was necessary to use a more gradual approach, taking several months to make the transition.

Her parents followed my recommendation. For the first two months they took food to her in the hospital, and then were able to cook for her in a private apartment. After several months, she became com-pletely normal. Three months later she got a job. A year later she was managing a store and had become very happy.

In another case, a 28-year-old man was paranoid and fearful of everything. He felt as if he was always being threatened. His father was a very successful businessman, and was very worried about him.

His parents had separated many years earlier. Finally, the father asked for my help. After talking with him, I arranged for the son to stay for a while in a macrobiotic student house in Boston. T h e son became much better once he moved in and started to eat well.

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However, after several weeks he began sneaking out to eat pizza and hot dogs. He started having the same problems again. After several days of good eating, his condition became more relaxed, and he started to become more normal. After a week of eating well, he went out and binged again, after which his old symptoms returned. It took three to four years for him to recover and become completely normal. This frequent binging caused his recovery to be slow, and his experience highlighted the need for a macrobiotic rehabilitation center. After six months to a year, many of the people in such a facility would become normal. It would be unnecessary for people to spend their whole lives in a mental institution.

Many people in mental hospitals take medication every day for years and even decades. These cases are very unfortunate, because there is an easier way to solve these problems. T h e same is true for crime and other types of uncontrollable behavior. These problems are often the result of depression, schizophrenia, paranoia, or combinations of these.

If people with these conditions begin to eat according to macrobiotic principles, antisocial behavior will diminish and their minds will become more peaceful and harmonious.

Instead of offering a cure for their conditions, however, we label them criminals and punish them. They are confined in prison and are fed hamburger, steak, candy, coffee loaded with sugar, spices, and soft drinks. Naturally, their thoughts and behavior continue in the same pattern. Macrobiotics offers a way to escape from this cycle. T h e stories in this book tell of prisoners from different parts of the world who took responsibility for their health and behavior and changed toward a new life.

T h e macrobiotic approach offers new hope for the seemingly un-solvable problems of crime and mental illness. T h e stories that follow, for example, show that recovery from schizophrenia and other mental disorders is possible by changing daily diet and way of life. These stories were published over the last several years in the East West Journal.

Triumph Over Schizophrenia

I hated life on that February day in 1972 when upon returning to my Manhattan, Kansas, apartment I found, outside the door, a stack of cookbooks left to me by a friend. I haven't seen her since, but her simple act of kindness, her gentle gift of used cookbooks, saved my life.

Among the cookbooks was Zen Macrobiotic Cooking. When I saw it there along with the half dozen vegetarian cookbooks, I thought:

"How strange." I knew for sure I was in no shape to become a Zen monk let alone one sitting in a sterile kitchen laboratory meditating on the microbiological aspects of food. However, fortunately during those days the stranger something seemed, the more I was drawn to it. So I ignored the "normal" vegetarian books and sat down with the macrobiotic book and read.

How odd it all seemed to me then, lonely and desperate, on that bitter winter night reading about brown rice, buckwheat, azuki beans, yin-yang, and a peaceful healthy life. Ah, yes, a healthy life. For me, at that time, whenever I read about a normal productive life it seemed like a dream, something foreign and far away. It was, I thought, as inaccessible to me as time to a dying man.

My life was a mess. It would have been hard to imagine one more unbearably shy than I. Who could have guessed that behind my calm exterior there was such a cutting and constant heartache ? T h e longing for companionship was always intense, and my fear of opening up to others made the days dark and the hours grind by. Sometimes I would wander the streets for hours, my mind submerged in Thorazine, the tranquilizer I had been taking for years.

Late at night I would walk the streets of Manhattan and imagine that behind the lighted and curtained windows there were friends and lovers I would never know. Sometimes my mind went wild and I would hide for days not knowing who or where I was. No one under-stood why I was this way, not the psychiatrists, or my parents who suffered so much abuse from me. I was a lazy and unambitious college student, frittering away my days, too frightened by life to learn anything.

On one of those sad and drifting days, I happened to wander into the local health food store. I saw on a corner shelf a little bottle of Chico San tamari soy sauce, its label faded from many months of

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ting in the sunlight. I remembered reading about tamari in the macro-biotic cookbook, so I bought the bottle and a small bag of brown rice.

That night I cooked my first macrobiotic dinner. I'll never forget the rice, a pathetic patch of undercooked kernels drowning in a brown bog of tamari. I thought, " T h i s is good?" T h e food tasted terrible, but strangely, after that dinner, I became fascinated by macrobiotics and continued to experiment with the limited variety of available macrobiotic foods. It was there, in that bleak basement apartment on a rusty two-burner hot plate, that I began the education that would turn my life around. At the time I didn't know of the incredible heal-ing qualities of macrobiotics, but I would learn.

I soon became bored with undercooked rice and tamari, however, and I returned to my regular food. In May of 1972 I returned to my parents' home in Kansas City. Bored, depressed, groggy with Thora-zine, I sat in my room looking at my future like a blind man at a silent movie. At night I wrote and rewrote suicide notes, and planned over and over how to do myself in. Luckily I never put the plans into action.

One day in June while glancing through the newspaper I noticed, to my surprise, an ad for a local macrobiotic cooking class. Uncharac-teristically, I called and registered for it. When I arrived at the loca-tion where the first class was to be held, I found myself overwhelmed with anxiety. I got back in my car and left, but a voice inside said,

" G e t back there! You must do it!" So I returned.

Patricia Atkins was an excellent teacher on that first day of class, explaining everything so carefully. What she said about food and health made sense. On that day I was served a delicious macrobiotic meal, the result of the cooking class. Sitting there with the class members, I felt very strange. It was the kind of moment that comes only once in life. I thought, " T h i s is what will change me. I don't know why, but I have found it." I had never felt that way before. In that moment I knew that simple and delicious food would be the key to my recovery. I hadn't been looking for any kind of cure, I wasn't a dabbler in health food routines, I was simply there at a cooking class and the keys to my recovery were given to me without asking.

Over the years I have learned many lessons about macrobiotics, and I made many mistakes at first. I tried to quit the Thorazine

im-mediately, but I couldn't. T h e body needs time to adjust to a new way of eating, especially if one has been taking strong medication for a long time. I learned to eat a balanced diet of whole grains, vegetables, beans, fish, sea vegetables, and fruit. This helped my body to adjust, and after one year I was able to completely stop the Thorazine.

Along with showing me the need for good food, macrobiotics has brought me to an understanding of the spirit of life. I have been shown how to express my thanks and the importance of this expres-sion everyday. I have learned to pray. And for all who suffer from frustrating and confusing states of mind I pray every day.

T h e P e t e r H a r r i s S t o r y by T o m Monte (reprinted from East West Journal, September, 1980)

In a Boston restaurant, Peter Harris is sipping bancha tea and talking about his former bout with mental illness. It was nine years ago that the 28-year-old Boston artist manifested symptoms of schizophrenia and was institutionalized for six months. Now fully recovered, he talks about mental illness with the hard, crisp insight of one who has been to hell and back: he knows the landscape.

"Mental illness," he says, "is like cancer: its a life growing inside your head that is alien to your own life. It's constantly throwing up images which you have no control of. And every day this life is grow-ing, constantly spreading to other parts of your existence." And like cancer, Harris considered his own greedy pet a part of life despite its being a source of discomfort. It was after graduation from high school that he started taking drugs: "I took lots of drugs," he says. " L S D , mescaline, marijuana. Ironically, attempting to resolve conflict in this way actually increased it," he recalls now.

As his relationships with others began to degenerate, Peter began to feel a powerful sense of alienation, the feeling that he was separating from the rest of humanity. Looking back, he notes that he was becom-ing more in tune with the vibrational world, the world of images, than he was with the material world; however, the images were chaotic, and still he was taking the drugs. "I realize now that I was going toward biological degeneration," he says.

When the two attendants in white coats came for him, Harris didn't

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fight them. He went with the flow; a voice from deep inside was telling him to surrender and everything would be all right. Once in the hospital, he withdrew inside himself. Other than periodic injec-tions of Stelazine, a major tranquilizer, he received no medication while in the hospital.

Just after graduating from high school, Harris had read a book about macrobiotics. T h e information stuck with him and now, in the hospital, after the doctors had offered him the opportunity to cook for himself, he began eating brown rice, vegetables, beans, and sea vegetables.

His mother brought him the necessary staples, and often she cooked a macrobiotic meal for her son. "Slowly, I started to feel better,"

says Harris. "I began to feel stronger, more willing to be a part of the outside world." It wasn't long after he had started macrobiotics that Harris began to let down the walls that he had constructed around him for protection from what seemed like an ever-intruding world.

After six months in the hospital he left and didn't go back. For the past nine years, grains and vegetables have been his principal foods.

Today Harris is married and a father. He made peace with his parents and many of his friends a long time ago. From a medical point of view, Harris has been cured of schizophrenia for years. However,

"there's really no absolute level of mental health," he says. "You just go about taking on bigger challenges in life."