Pharmakeia

The word "pharmaceutical" comes from the Greek word pharmakeia, meaning "witchcraft, magic, the use of spells and potions of magic - often involving drugs", and, my personal favorite, "poison". So, etymologically, "pharmaceutical" basically means "tricking you into taking poison". That pretty much sums up my experience with the pharmaceutical industry, anyhow.

We've all been enchanted. The hair loss problem is right in front of us every day, but we can't see it because we are under a magic spell. Pharmakeia detaches us from our observation, experience, access to divine wisdom, and innate healing power. We bow down to the medical authorities, and seek their advice. They tell us that our problem is genetic and hormonal. It's because of these things that we can't see, feel, or sense in any way. It's disempowering. As a result, we desperately beg these (lower case) gods for their magic potions. We'll pay anything. And when it inevitably doesn't work, we'll ask for more magic potions. We can't stop taking their pharmakeia. We're under their spell.

How do we break the spell? Simply, look in the mirror. Look at people with and without hair. Look and observe the common features. It's obvious. The only humans with male pattern baldness are adult men, babies, and toddlers. They all have the exact same thing in common - head shape.

ROUND! All of these humans have round, bulbous, and even bulging foreheads, and they all have the same strange growth pattern at the hairline. Several of these toddlers are even girls, including mine (bottom row, left). That is strange because the "scientific" name for male hair loss disease is androgenic alopecia, which means "male hormone driven hair loss". The fact that a infant female, who probably doesn't have many male hormones, or hair sensitivity to male hormones, can grow hair in the exact same pattern as an adult man with "male hormone driven hair loss", is really strange.

Now compare the head shapes of those babies, toddlers, and men with round foreheads and male hair loss growth patterns to babies, toddlers, and men who have full and straight hairlines. The difference should be obvious.

FLAT! All of their foreheads are FLAT. Notice how there is no such acute curvature in the forehead or any bulginess. Rather, their foreheads are flat, broad, and contour sharply to the sides of the head.

Flat foreheads grow straight hairlines. Foreheads with acute lateral curvature that bulge out a bit, do not. The shape of the head determines the hair growth pattern on every human, at any age, no exceptions. Using that simple observation, which anyone is capable of doing without an advanced degree in biochemistry or genetic science, it's pretty easy to figure out what's going on.

These are the facts easily verified by our own observation, experience, and inference: (1) Toddlers can have bulging foreheads and male pattern baldness growth patterns, (2) adult men can have bulging foreheads and male pattern baldness growth patterns, (3) there are no older children who have male pattern baldness growth patterns, and (4) people with flat foreheads do not have male pattern baldness growth patterns. Therefore, the logical conclusion is that the shape of the skull, for reasons that will be theorized on this website, undergoes a metamorphosis from round and bulging in toddlerhood, to flat and contoured in later childhood, and then back to round and bulging again for certain men after puberty. And there is something about that combination of roundness and bulginess that causes the male pattern baldness growth pattern. That's it! Or, at least, that's 80% of it.

I will go into much more detail in regards to all the ways in which a man's skull can bulge in grotesque ways in the skull expansion section on this page. As for why this change would even affect the hair growth, or lack there of, I will touch on that too, but my theories on that subject are described in the most detail in the Etheric Confusion Hypothesis section on the Etheric Body Page. If you do not know what the hell an Etheric body is, or how and why this skull change occurs only in adult men after puberty, then continue reading; because that will be the main subject of the discourse on this webpage.

Male pattern baldness is the main subject of this website, but the main theme is that we need to start to use our senses again in order to recognize the obvious. Changing skull shape in the pathology of male pattern baldness is entirely within our capacity to discern from simple observation, and should form the basis for the interventions aimed at keeping and growing more hair. This means that we don't need to find the gene or block a hormone that we can't ever see, touch, feel, or sense in any way. Rather, we need to just need to use our unique human ability to look around, see what's going on, and figure stuff out. That's Alchemy.

Alchemy, is a science based on human observation. The ancient philosophers theorized that all the practical wisdom that they needed to learn while on the Earth came from careful observation of the Earth, how things work on the Earth, and through our experiences on the Earth with this infinitely wise and perfectly designed sensory vessel that we call a body. They didn't need to do biochemical isolation or mass spectrometry to find chemical compounds that need to be blocked from binding to other chemicals, or whatever, because all the answers to the mysteries of this realm are fully within the capacity of our senses and reasoning to discover. To do engage in the micro-biology fetish of modern day would be, at best, a waste of time, or, at worst, leading you to reach erroneous conclusions about how life behaves on the Earth.

Material science has detached us from the true wisdom in our experience and observation. We're so focused on Atom (the Adam of Science), along with all of the other micro-particles that have no meaning to us and no way to observe, understand, or even prove to ourselves that they exist, that we can't see the truth. And most of the time, the truth is blatantly obvious. If a female baby has male pattern baldness, it's not male hormones or male hormone sensitivity. If a male has a male pattern baldness as a toddler, then doesn't as a more mature child, and then does again after puberty, then it's not random genetics turning on, then off, and then back on his sensitivity to male hormones. That's delusion. That's pharmakeia. None of it makes any sense. When you get past all of the fancy science words, the degrees, the expertise, the titles, the authority, and you look at what's actually going on and think about it, then you realize how ridiculous, and wrong, modern science is about just about everything.

This website is dedicated to resurrecting the old ways of medicine. Our world needs to break free from the spell that has been cast on us by this witchcraft that we call modern science, and begin to use again our own experience and observation as a guide to reclaim our greatest gift from God - unlimited healing potential. The ancient alchemists respected the healing power of the human body, and understood it as more than just a physical form. They understood how everything inside of us is also outside of us, at work, in nature, providing life, healing, and balance to the Earth. And from this perspective, we can do more than heal - we can transform. This a science unlike anything we were taught in school. It's real, practical, and gives purpose to our existence. So, what is Alchemy?

Alchemy

Somewhere in my education, I got the impression that Alchemy was some sort of archaic form of Chemistry where these delusional ancient pseudo-scientists, out of sheer ignorance and/or greed, foolishly believed that it was possible to turn cheap abundant lead into valuable gold with frog potions, magic, and other mystical silliness. It was prime example of how misguided humanity was in their vain efforts to understand the Earth before the monolith of advanced technology and modern scientific exploration could inspire some intellect in our primitive ancestors, who were doing little more than banging bones on rocks, scientifically. Clearly, now I suspect that something close to the complete opposite of that is the truth. If you made it to this section after reading the last one, then you may suspect the same, as well. Or, as the Cheshire Cat says in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, "You must be mad, or you wouldn't have come here." So, what really is Alchemy?

Alchemy is a seven step transformation process to elevate the essence of a substance based on the energetic properties of seven common metals and their corresponding planet (as defined as a "wandering star"). Each metal and planet represents a specific phase in the transformation process. Here it is:

Theoretically, this is how you would turn lead into gold. I don't know if anyone has ever actually done that. I'm open to anything. But this does have applications to things like plant medicines, where the idea is to separate and isolate the healing component of the plant from the toxic and inert components, and then purify and exalt that healing part into a potent medicine. In more metaphysical context, it can also serve as a guide for our own transformation. Maybe we want to separate, purify, and elevate the good parts of us. If so, it is necessary to go through the alchemical process, stage by stage.

Alchemy, and other ancient natural philosophies, also provide an alternative framework in which to analyze disease and other bodily phenomenon based on principles of nature, which is the kind of thing that appeals to me these days. It's why I made this website. I'm going to try to use my rudimentary, but rapidly expanding, understanding of Alchemy to figure out why we have patten hair loss, and what we are supposed to do about it.

Alchemy puts hair loss into this context of transformation, which adds some importance and mystique to the whole situation. Transform into what? Am I supposed to do this? Is that hard? Yes! It's a challenge. Transforming yourself is not easy. If it just took a few little tweaks or tricks, if it were just a matter of getting a couple bio-hacks from some jerk on YouTube (youtube.com/@hairlossalchemy), then everyone would be turning their lead into gold. There would be so much gold that it wouldn't even have value anymore. There's a reason gold is so valuable, and it's because not everyone is willing to do what it takes to attain it.

I'll get into principles of Alchemy in more detail throughout this webpage. There's a lot of other ancient wisdom I need to cover too. It's all interrelated though. For now, just be aware that Alchemy starts with Saturn - darkness, the first stage; where the fire of calcination starts to burn away at our old selves. We have to first be willing to let go of who we are, everything we believe, and everything about us. That requires motivation. It requires pain.

Wouldn't it be nice to bang your toe into the sharp corner of an open door and not have the area hurt like hell for 30 seconds or so? I do this about once a week on baby stuff in the house. It's infuriating. Why do our bodies do that to us? What if we grab something hot or cut ourself with a knife? Not pleasant. But, it's probably a good thing that we feel the pain. Otherwise, we'd keep our burning our hand on the hot skillet or not realize for a while that we are bleeding profusely.

When we damage our bodies, our body alerts us by feeling pain to help us figure out what we are doing to harm it, how to stop harming it, address any immediate care needed in the area of the damage, and maybe take precaution going forward in a similar situation. This serves to minimize the total damage done. Otherwise, we would have to wait until we see our burned blistered inflamed hand and then deduce that the cast iron skillet that we touched earlier must be culprit, after recounting recent events. It's much more efficient, rather, to feel excruciating pain immediately in the area, and then let go on instinct.

Instincts are fast. Thinking is slow. We can deduce that the thing that we were holding was piping hot later, after our hand is off of the piping hot thing. Seconds are precious in these instances. The pain and instinct connection takes a fraction of a second. It's efficient. It's effective. It would even be dangerous to live without it. I'd say there is no better system possible to guide us to live as healthy of a life as possible than feeling pain.

It is easy to identify the source of your pain when it is a stab wound or stubbed toe. Not so much, and controversial, when it is a chronic neurological disorder like anxiety, depression, or a physiological condition like asthma. Often, if not always, these ailments are attributed to body dysfunction and/or genetics, and are treated with pharmaceutical drugs to relieve the symptoms. Don't try to claim otherwise or suggest alternative treatments, because that will really offend some people. However, what if that premise is incorrect? What if any form of suffering or disease is just a variant of the body's pain-instinct system trying to alert us to the fact that we are harming it somehow? The implication of that is taking drugs to suppress our pain (symptom) would result in continuing to do harm to ourselves.

Why are there so many chronic diseases? Maybe it's because we're not stopping whatever we are doing that is causing the harm. Maybe our bodies are working just the way they should; and, by chronically alerting us via "symptoms", they are trying to help us figure out what we are doing to harm it. What if it is even deeper than that?

Rudolf Steiner said that "wisdom is crystallized pain that has been overcome and transformed into its opposite." If that is true, then every disease that we feel, from something as pesky as the common cold to something as grave as cancer, and, of course, to even something as seemingly vain and cosmetic as male pattern baldness, would present an opportunity for us to learn something important and improve ourselves in a meaningful way. To be satisfied with symptom relief would be a forfeit of such an opportunity. This is the perspective that I have adopted in my approach to male pattern baldness, as well as other ailments. I think it is worthwhile to do so even if you don't totally believe in it. In any case, it's better than taking the drugs. I can attest to that.

I used to be normal, sort of. At the very least, I used to eat out, snack, wear sunscreen, use dish soap, brush my teeth with tap water, and of course have full confidence in and admiration for the wonders of modern medicine. Male pattern baldness (MPB) changed all of that.

If you have never read "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand, it's basically an economics textbook crossed with one of those erotic lonely housewife romance novels (not that I'm anti-housewife). Anyway, one of the characters kept repeating the line "check your premises" throughout the excruciating long book. It was in the context of something not really working out the way it was expected to. I didn't think much of it at the time (circa 2011), but the line kept repeating in my head throughout the years - "check your premises", "check your premises", "check your premises". I didn't realize that someone was trying to tell me something.

The premise on which I based my initial MPB treatments (circa 2006) was that MPB was caused by a testosterone derivative called DHT that is overproduced in the scalp due to genetics, by way of evolutionary anomaly or defect. This hormone doesn't kill all the hairs at once. Rather, it kills them slowly, and in a specific pattern. It only kills hairs that are genetically sensitive to DHT and only when they become sensitive according to some genetic clock. Pretty air tight logic. It convinced me at the time, anyways. So, based on the premise that it's all genetic and I have no control over this destructive force in my body, I took the following drugs for the given number of years.

I tried all sorts of combinations of these drugs, and even some other things not listed here. None of it worked. I didn't regrow any hair. It didn't even stop my MPB from progressing, at least not long-term.

The first year on minoxidil, when I was 21 yrs old, went okay. I didn't regrow any hair, but at least my hair looked better - for a while. After a year and a half I eventually realized that my hairline was still receding. So, then I got some Nizoral shampoo. It's anti-fungal! It helps block DHT! I used it for 6 months - it didn't help. I kept using it though. Then, I got on proscar (1/4 cuts). That seemed to help for about 2 months. Soon after, I noticed my hair getting worse. So, I got Nizoral 2%, and a laser-comb - nope, and nope. Out of FDA treatments and on to the off label and experimental stuff. I think I got tricomin next and then spironolactone cream. Then, maybe I started messing around with dutasteride a few days a week to supplement the proscar. I remember having a lot of trouble holding minimal amounts of fluid in my bladder then. Hour long plus car rides were a problem.

Anyway, this continued on for another 8 years, or so. I rarely stopped using treatments once I started. Rather, I kept hoping that I just needed this one more thing and everything would start to magically work synergistically. However, the situation was becoming more and more hopeless as I was running out of chemicals and combinations thereof to try. I was also trying to augment the effectiveness of the stuff by, for example, derma-rolling with various needle lengths and frequencies in combination with minoxidil, and drinking grapefruit juice with finasteride to increase absorption. Meanwhile, I was always scouring the hair loss forums for a combo that I hadn't tried yet, or a detail that I had missed. I truly believed that modern science was the only option I had, until I checked my premises.

In January of 2019, I set out to do a 30 day paleo diet challenge. Maybe it was the rationale behind the diet that I bought hard into, or the brain boost that I got from eating copious amounts of red meat, cholesterol, and saturated fat. But, the idea occurred to me that maybe MPB was not natural at all - maybe it wasn't genetic. Rather, maybe it was just a symptom of modern living. Instantly, I had a lot more options.

I had raw inspiration, but not have much of a knowledge base to act on. I really had no idea what I was doing or why I was doing it (maybe I still don't). My first thought was that sugar caused hair loss. Haha. So, silly! I still don't eat sugar. In fact, I don't eat much plant food in general (especially in the winter). While I no longer believe that poor diet is a root cause of MPB, in my experience, dietary interventions do help. Check out the Physical Body page for more information on my experience with the connection between diet and MPB. I'll also come back to it later on this page. It's the intervention that I have the most experience with because that 30 day paleo challenge stretched into 6+ years of elimination dieting.

So what, then, is the root cause of MPB? - It's complicated. We need more of a basis for understanding health and disease. For that, we need to understand the Earth that we are living on (or in), and the two forces that are always present in all of nature.

If you like science, then you are going to hate the rest of this website. Science used to be called "Natural Philosophy" back when it wasn't so dull and dogmatic. As I mentioned earlier, the impression that I got is that the ancient natural philosophers didn't care what an enzyme co-factor was, or whatever. Rather, they intently observed nature and made connections between what occurs in the Heavens, on the Earth, and in our bodies. I have been leaning on the wisdom of the ancient natural philosophers for my understanding of MPB because (1) I tried the science crap and it didn't work, and (2) it's way more interesting.

Science sucks the fun out of life. It breaks everything down to meaningless micro-particles to the point where you become disconnected with your body, your soul, and the rhythms of the Earth. I think a lot of it is total bull crap too. You can't even have a novel idea. Everything has to be a peer-reviewed study based on a peer-reviewed study, and anything contrary to the science authorities is heresy and dangerous "misinformation". It's a religious cult. It's dogma. That is to say, there is not going to be much science going forward. So, I'm not going to be referencing any peer reviewed research studies or talking about TGF-4 hormone receptors. I'm sorry if that's your "jam" (Side note: I hate people who use the word "jam").

One of the fundamental principles that the natural philosophers observed was the Polarity of Nature. The Earth has two governing forces. There is a MALE force and a FEMALE force, and they are always striving for balance. The yin-yang symbol, referred to as "The Great Principle" in Traditional Chinese Medicine, illustrates this concept. The symbol represents how nature is always flowing from one pole (male) to the other pole (female), and back, on repeat, for eternity. And the two little dots represent how the seed of the opposite pole is always within the other. For example, Summer peaks and then flows back to Winter. The moon gets full and then wanes back to new moon. Daylight peaks at solar noon and always flows back to midnight, and vice versa. There is never stagnation. The Earth is always in flux from one pole to the other, maintaining rhythm, a cycle within a cycle within a cycle. We are no different. We go from birth to death, wake to sleep, work to rest, in-breath to out-breath, all of the way down the chain. The microcosm is the macrocosm. As above, so below. That is "The Great Principle".

Harmony occurs when the opposite energies are in balance, and disorder occurs when they are not. Imagine if there were only Summer and no Winter. The sun would beat down on the Earth, the trees would never shed their leaves, the soil would not have the opportunity to rest and regenerate, everything would keep growing growing and growing until all of the resources were used, the soil was dried up, and the Earth was burnt out. The same is true for us.

Try staying awake for a few days straight, or only breathing in. It doesn't work out. In both cases it will be very uncomfortable, and you'll eventually pass out. The discomfort is to alert you to the fact that you're doing something stupid. And the passing out is like system override to bypass your authority, which the body has lost confidence in, and restore the natural rhythm. It's like our bodies, along with just about everything on the Earth, have been programmed to strive for balance, and there are these built in mechanisms that force everything back into balance when one force becomes too exuberant.

From this perspective, health occurs when there is balance, and disease is what we feel when there is not. Under the guidance of this presumption, ancient healers sought to identify and facilitate the body's natural inclination to correct imbalances when diagnosing and treating disease. For example, Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) practitioners diagnose yang (male) and yin (female) excesses and deficiencies in different organs based on symptoms.

Does this apply to all illness? Does it apply to MPB? For argument's sake, let's assume it does. Let's say MPB is caused by an imbalance in one of the two fundamental forces. Since it's called Male Pattern Baldness, my guess is that it's caused by a male imbalance. Why? Where? How could that even have an effect on hair? Let's look at the circulatory system for some clues.

I never read that book. If I had to guess, it's probably 90's, new age, unhelpful drivel (I'm working on being less critical). The title is at least somewhat rooted in ancient wisdom though. It is an allusion, perhaps by accident, to the two Earth forces, Alchemy, and Greek and Roman Mythologies.

Mars and Venus do represent masculine and feminine forces. Contrary to the impression we get from the book title, though, it's not that we are like aliens or either have one force or the other in us. The force corresponding to our biological sex does tend to dominate, and even cause problems, but both forces are are present in us at all times. They are the battery on which nature runs. They provide the positive and the negative charge, the anode and the cathode, the energy giving and the energy receiving ends. Both are necessary to complete the electrical circuit and sustain the system. Our circulatory system, which gives life to our entire body, is actually named after the male-female battery. That is a testament to the significance of the polarities and our need for balance.

ARTERIES AND VEINS

The planet Mars was named after Ares, the god of war in Greek Mythology. He represents aggression, courage, and strength. Our arterial system was named after "Ares", this archetypal masculine figure. The arteries are the energy giving part of the circulatory system, the positive charge. They give strength to our body. Similarly, the planet Venus was named after Venus, the Roman goddess of love. She represents beauty, harmony, and romance. Venus can only be seen just before dawn and just after sunset, the romantic times of the day. The venous system is named after this archetypal feminine figure. It is the part of the circulatory system that is energy receiving. It's the negative charge. It nourishes us in a different way. It receives information from our body parts in regards to what they need and carries that information back to the heart, which listens and adjusts nutrient content, accordingly.

Mars and Venus are part of the alchemical sequence, but they are not the only planets that represent male and female characters. The Sun and the Moon represent the divine masculine and feminine, respectively. However, they come at the end of the alchemical process, after the male and female energies have been balanced and refined. Mars and Venus, rather, are the third and fourth phases, respectively. They come in the middle of the process. Perhaps it is for their lack of refinement that Mars and Venus were chosen to represent the male and female parts of the circulatory system, because the diseases that males and females tend develop in the circulatory system do seem to take on the personalities of their respective archetypes.

Men suffer from disease in their arteries, the male part of the circulatory system. In particular, we tend to develop sclerosis in the arteries. Mineral deposits narrow the arterial walls and cause blockages. It's a disease of too much hardness in the area of the body named after a hard, tough, and aggressive warrior god, who might have tendencies to be a bit too hard, tough, and aggressive. Females, by contrast, develop problems in their veins, the female part of the circulatory system. Varicose veins is a disease of too much softness. Veins become so weak and sluggish that they can't push blood back to the heart. The result is that these parts of the body, usually in the legs, become tender, painful, and inflamed. This occurs in the part of the circulatory system named after a beautiful and soft love goddess, who may be a little too soft (and lazy) for her own good sometimes.

IRON, AGGRESSION, AND ARTERIOSCLEROSIS

Iron and Copper are the metals that are associated with Ares and Venus, respectively. They carry the energetic charge of their respective archetypes and seem to, iron in particular, play a strong role in the development of these diseases. In regards to iron, no male or female will show any signs arteriosclerosis or varicose veins before puberty, when the iron levels of males and females diverge. Men experience a slight increase in iron, and females (even ones who are not menstruating) experience a slight decrease at this age. The result of this deviation in iron levels is radical sexual dimorphism and susceptibility to unique circulatory system diseases.

Mainstream modern medicine still attributes development of arteriosclerosis to a combination of dietary cholesterol and hereditary factors influencing the amount and behavior of cholesterol in the blood. As a 40 year old male with a robust family history of high blood pressure (including females), who eats spoonfuls of beef tallow with bites of salty burger and raw steak each meal, and has a blood pressure around 120/80 every time I measure it, I highly doubt that cholesterol has anything to do with heart attacks. Iron is a much more interesting culprit. For one, females show strong immunity to arteriosclerosis, and other cardiac events, compared to adult men, UNTIL they stop menstruating. Menstruation is a free monthly blood-letting service performed by the amazing female body. Blood-letting reduces iron levels in the blood. Likewise, men who donate blood regularly demonstrate a similar immunity to this disease. Therefore, iron purging seems to keep the circulatory system healthy. Why?

The alternative science explanation for iron's role in arteriosclerosis is better than "cholesterol is just bad", but still not that helpful, because it's still rooted in "science". I'll address it, anyway. At the very least, it's an interesting comparison because there is an overlap with the more insightful alchemical explanation. Pardon me for boring you over the next paragraph.

So the alternative scientific explanation goes, which may be true, but I really don't know: Iron is the metal that is found most abundantly in our bodies. It provides the vehicle, hemoglobin, that is needed to transport oxygen to our body parts. It is also found in the arterial plaque that builds up along the walls in a narrowed artery. So, iron seems to be a double-edged sword in that it is both necessary for sustaining life in our body, but also seems to have a role in causing narrowing of the arteries. One possible explanation for iron's independent influence on the propensity for heart attacks is that iron causes oxidative stress in its unbound form. This damages blood vessel tissue, akin to rust damage, which the body seals with a cholesterol based plaque to prevent blood leakage. Cholesterol is an important nutrient in cellular repair, hence it's presence in the arterial plaque. There are two ways to prevent this sort of oxidative damage. The first is by blood-letting, which reduces the total amount of iron in the blood, and the second is by having adequate amounts of dietary copper, which has and affinity to bind to iron in its unbound form. Done! Thank goodness that's over.

There are two things that align with Alchemy in that explanation that I like, even though it's all sciency. One is that cholesterol is there to help, rather than being a genetically triggered poison. The other is that copper has a neutralizing effect on the potential harm that iron can do. The whole copper binding to unbound iron thing might be valid, I don't know, but it gives you the impression that the body just needs copper supplementation and we're all good. I don't like that. I think arteriosclerosis has more of a story. I think that the disease is a manifestation of a deeper problem. Alchemy can get to the deeper issue.

As mentioned, Copper is the metal that corresponds to Venus, and thus has strong feminine energy. From an alchemical perspective, Copper would provide the soft feminine energy in the circulatory system needed to balance out the aggressive hard male energy of Ares in the Iron. In this model, it is not the oxidative effect of Iron that is the problem, so much as the aggressive energy that pairs with it. Is that silly? Or is it realistic that a man who eats the healthiest diet possible, stays physically fit, and regularly donates blood, but who is also stressed out and angry all the time, can still die of a heart attack? I think so. I don't even think that is controversial to claim. So, maybe both arteriosclerosis and varicose veins can be explained in terms of aggression and Iron, or lack there of.

Our heart is an emotional organ. It's management of the the circulatory system often reflects our disposition. For example, when we get angry, what happens to our blood pressure? - It goes up! Who gets more angry, males or females? - Males. What about adult males vs. pre-pubescent males? - Adult males. Who has the most iron of all of these people? - Adult males. Men become more aggressive naturally after puberty, when iron levels increase, and this dispositional change could impact the forcefulness with which blood circulates through our arteries. This overly aggressive blood flow in the arteries would likely create more wear and tear on the arterial walls.

Everything wears out from use. The body has to have a system for routine repairs. Also, it's not like the body can just shut down lanes of the arterial freeway to work on these repairs. So, it probably has to do some patchwork to cover the area while it's repairing the tissue. What materials does the body have on hand that's strong enough with which to coat the interior of the arterial walls and withstand the pressure of moving fluid? A mix of hard calcium and sticky cholesterol would make for a good cement. So, in this model, the body is being smart and using the calcium and cholesterol patchwork as a temporary bandage while the wall tissue is being repaired; because a patched up, albeit, narrower arterial wall is better than a blood leakage. The blockages, then, are the result of the circulatory system being overloaded with need for this type of patchwork, due to excessive wear and tear from overly aggressive blood flow, ALL because we have some emotional imbalance that is causing poor health outcomes. That's helpful. It gives me an idea of what to work on.

Another interesting explanation is that arteriosclerosis may actually be the result of the body's NEED for more aggression in the blood flow. Perhaps the problem is that, due to a dietary fat insufficiency, ironically, the blood flow in the circulatory system is too weak. The reason being is that the heart does not actually pump blood, but rather is a hydraulic ram that manages fluid that circulates due to an osmotic gradient in the fat nutrient differentials in the blood going out compared to the blood coming back. The heart not being a pump is another topic altogether, though. Anyway, if you have a hose that has weak flow due to poor pressure, what would you do if you couldn't increase the pressure at the source? The only way to increase the pressure would be to get a hose with a smaller diameter. Part of the body's infinite wisdom is an understanding of basic physics. So, the body coats the interior walls of the arteries with a cholesterol and calcium to IMPROVE circulation. Interestingly, iron is found in that plaque. What does iron supply? - I don't know. Is it a binding agent? Or is it there to supply aggression? Maybe it just makes the plaque flakey so it can be removed easily. After all, this is supposed to be a temporary intervention until the wall lining has healed or diet has been improved.

MPB AND SCLEROSIS

What does any of this have to do with MPB? For one, men who go bald are 50-60% more likely to develop coronary artery disease, according to a few studies. Who knows if that is true or not. But, it's a curious claim anyhow and worth investigating. The more curious connection, though, is how no males develop MPB before puberty, nor do males develop arteriosclerosis before puberty, nor do females develop varicose veins before puberty, when iron levels increase and decrease in males and females, respectively

When the iron event occurs, males get much harder (denser bones, broader stature, significant muscle mass increase) and more aggressive (competitive sports, pursuing women, willing to challenge authority, fighting, training), and are susceptible disease defined by too much hardness (sclerosis) and aggression (high blood pressure). Females, by contrast become much softer (significant increase in body fat percentage) and less aggressive (lose interest in competitive sports in favor of social bonding activities), and then can develop disease defined by too much softness (inflammation) and not enough aggression (sluggish blood flow up to the heart from legs). Varicose veins is one such "softness" disease that females are prone to develop. Another is osteoporosis. Arteriosclerosis is one such sclerotic (hardness) disease that males develop, another is Male Pattern Baldness.

MPB is a sclerotic disease in two unique ways: (1) A German physician named Frederick Hoelzel gave an account of his findings after doing about 80 autopsies in a medical correspondence in 1942, noting that men who suffered from MPB had varying degrees of calcium deposits in the foramen and cranial sutures of their skulls, whereas men with hair had no such deposits. And (2), the skulls of men with MPB continue to grow, or expand, in various parts of the skull, in grotesque ways, well after a mature adult skull size and shape has been achieved.

Sclerosis is a natural hardening process in the body. Sometimes areas of the body need to be fortified, like a broken bone, and sclerosis is the process of depositing minerals in such an area of need. Sclerotic disease is when there are mineral deposits, or other forms of hardening, in areas of the body where it is inappropriate or no apparent need. In that way, sclerosis is misunderstood by modern medicine, because, if the body is doing it, there must be a need.

There is no obvious need for a skull foramen or cranial suture to undergo significant calcification in adulthood. It does not happen to females and males with hair. Nor is there an obvious need for the skull to bulge and expand in different areas. How would that improve survival? Rather, it's evidence of an imbalance. Old traditions of Rites of Passage for pubescent boys provide some clues as to how and why this imbalance might emerge.

RITES OF PASSAGE

The modern cultural remnants of the practice of rites of passage around the age of puberty are the Catholic Confirmation Sacrament and the Jewish Bar Mitzvah, where boys and girls, during puberty, go through some religious scripture study and processional training to perform their part in a ceremony to celebrate the passage into adulthood. However, traditionally, ancestral cultures would test the fortitude of their young males with more dangerous and grueling challenges. For example, boys were, and still are in some areas of the world, sent out into the wilderness to survive on their own for months without any contact with their family or village. In another rite, boys have to go on a several day long hunt with the men of the village, but cannot eat anything for the duration of the hunt. Furthermore, they still participate in the killing, processing, and cooking of the animal, not to mention the cleanup and hauling of the hunting gear.

Some of these rites may be cruel by our standards, but to these tradition peoples, it is a necessity. It is necessary for both the health of the community, and the health of the boy. And it is not until puberty that men are put through these warrior training rites of passage, when we get an influx of the spirit of a warrior from iron.

Iron carries the spirit of Ares and gives us the physique and disposition of a warrior. Without any change in diet or exercise, we get these massive warrior bodies, relative to our juvenile ones. No working out, just iron. It's better than steroids (don't take steroids). We now look like warriors. We also have more aggressive energy. Wrestling, football, and rugby are heavy contact sports that we don't really play until after puberty. And these are sports that females RARELY want to participate in. Also, as a former high school and middle school teacher, I can attest that a boys aptness to be defiant, aggressive, and confrontational radically changes from 7th to 9th grade.

The purpose of the old rites of passage was to take this new aggressive energy and properly direct it in a positive way towards building confident, resilient, disciplined, self-reliant, and fearless men. Otherwise, that energy can be redirected in negative ways. Iron draws our energy inwards. Men become less communicative, less expressive, and more contemplative after puberty. For women, it's nearly the opposite. A male teenager is four times more likely to commit suicide than a female one. Why? We don't express ourselves. Negative feelings fester inside of us, and never get out. That's not good. How might this occur?

We are given the warrior spirit at puberty, which yearns for us to become strong and confident men. This can only be accomplished by facing danger and overcoming our fears. But, our culture does not value or is not willing to properly cultivate these qualities. And when that warrior energy is not exercised, and we surrender to our fear, then that aggressive energy gets diverted to fuel emotions of disappointment, resentment, and anger. It creates an imbalance in the male energy, which will manifest as sclerotic disease later in life. And almost immediately, it will start to expand our skulls.

Males with MPB have differently shaped skulls than men, and other humans, without MPB. This has not been scientifically studied by a team of university trained researchers and published in a major medical journal - it's just true. Men with full hairlines have flat foreheads. Men with receding hairlines have round foreheads. Notice how much flatter and broader the forehead is on the man with no MPB.

This is true for any human, of either sex, and of any age. For example, my 1.5 year old daughter has a male hair loss pattern. Compare the shape of her forehead to the shape of a boy who is about the same age and has thick hair and a full hairline.

Once again, the human with the better hair is the one with the flatter forehead. Cassandra, my daughter, has a forehead that bulges out, is very round, and gradually curves to the top of her skull. The boy, by contrast, has a vertical forehead that is flat and contours sharply, at his hairline, to the top of his skull. The result is that Cassandra has a higher hairline and cannot yet grow hair on her temples.

Cassandra doesn't have "androgenic alopecia". Her lack of hair is not due to by genetic sensitivity to male hormones. She's a baby girl. She doesn't have male hormones, if those even exist. And she doesn't have alopecia. It's not hair "loss". Rather, her hair is growing in. In fact, over the next few years, her hair will thicken and she will eventually grow a full hairline, guaranteed. But, for now, she has a classic male hair loss pattern, and it's because of her current skull shape.

Skull shape determines hair growth pattern at any age for any human. In fact, no one actually has "hair loss". Rather, we all have hair growth patterns that are relative to our current skull shapes, which can change over time. Some toddlers will have MPB growth patterns, but their skulls will flatten out in later childhood and their bald spots will fill in. However, for some boys, after puberty, our skulls begin to round back out and we develop a pattern "loss" consistent with the degree to which the contours of our skulls have been eroded.

SKULL CONTOURS

The contours of the skull are where the shape changes direction to a different section of the skull. For example, the forehead contours at the hairline, which marks a change in direction that separates the forehead from the top of the skull. The forehead also contours at the edges of the forehead to the sides of the skull. Hair likes to grow on skulls with sharp contours. Here is an example of a well-contoured skull hair, and exceptional growth as a consequence.

When a sharp contour has been replaced by gradual rounding, hair ceases to grow in that area. You will notice, if you look for it, that men, without very much hair left at all, have almost no skull contours. Rather, the skull gradually slopes from the forehead to the sides of the head and from the forehead to the crown of the head. You can't tell where the forehead ends and where the other parts begin. The result is a head shape the appears spherical or dome-like, like this.

Hair, for whatever reason, does not like a gradually curved surface on which to grow. If the middle of your forehead gradually curves to the crown of your head, then you will not have a hairline anymore. These examples of men with such foreheads and no hairlines.

Notice how there is no sharp change in direction of the skull at where you would expect the hairline to be. This is a grotesque skull feature that no human with a full and thick hairline also has.

HOW DO SKULL CONTOURS CHANGE?

The contours of the skull are eroded due to growth in certain areas of the skull during adulthood. That is, the skull grows outward, creating a bulge formation in that area. The bulging creates a more gradual curve from the forehead to the sides of the head, and from the forehead to the top of the head. There are four areas where this can occur. The two areas that expand outward for any man with MPB is the crown and the forehead. Less frequently, the sides and forelock can bulge, as well.

CROWN EXPANSION

Bulging at the crown causes the most hair loss at the top of the head, and the most hair loss overall. Here are some photos of completely bald men with severe bulging in the crown area.

The bulging at the crown erodes the natural contours. Notice how, for the man on the far left, that there is barely any distinction between the sides and top of his head. If it were not for the stubble there, then it would be difficult to identify where the side of his head ends and the top of his head begins. And for the guy in the middle, I just have no clue. These are torpedo heads. There are no more contours. The head gradually slopes from the ears to the tip of the conehead.

Compare that skull shape to someone with minimal or no MPB. The men, below, have sharp skull contours. There is a clear and sharp angle to the skull that differentiates the sides from the top of the skull. In addition, the skull curvature is smooth and gradual. There is a wide arch to the top of the skull with minimal or no bulging.

FOREHEAD EXPANSION

In addition to the crown, the foreheads of MPB sufferers will bulge out as well. This creates more lateral curvature in the forehead, which affects the shape of the hairline, creating the "receding" pattern.

In the photos below, the guy on the left has a very round forehead. If you look carefully, you will notice that his forehead shape goes in above the eyebrow ridge and then subtly bulges back out. The result is a round, contourless forehead, and a receded hairline. The poor guy in the middle is just 17 years old, and he has a severe bulge in his forehead. This bulge is wreaking havoc on his hairline at a young age, pushing it back and pinching in as it creates more lateral and longitudinal curvature in the forehead. The guy with no hair loss on the right, rather, has a very flat forehead, with no bulging, minimal curvature, and contours sharply to the sides of his head. The result is a ridiculous hairline to the extent that he is shaving back his widows peak and temple hairs to get a styled straight hairline.

My forehead shape is very similar to the guy above on the left, and so is my hairline. Here is a photo of me from below to help see this subtle forehead bulge from an angle where it is more pronounced. I would bet that guy's forehead looks very much like mine, from this angle.

Bulging and roundness in the forehead is a bad combination for hair growth. This is verified by identical toddler and baby skull features that result in hair growth patterns that are exactly the same as adult men with receding hairlines.

The roundness to and bulge in the forehead is impacting the presence of skull contours at the hairline. There is no sharp change in direction at where you would expect the hairline to be. Rather, there is gradual rounding and sloping in the temple area, and from the middle of the forehead to the start of the very high hairlines.

Here are more examples of expansion in the forehead region in men. Notice the similar forehead bulging to that of the girl from the previous set of photos on the far right.

It looks like a giant bubble is growing on their faces, right where their hairlines used to be. Also, notice the gradual curvature from the middle of the forehead to the top of the head. The change in direction of the skull at the hairline is gone. No more contour. Again, the more your head gradually curves to the top of your skull, then the higher and more non-existent your hairline will be.

Compare the skulls shapes of these men to those of these women. Notice that, while they differ in regards to the slope and length of their foreheads, there is no bulging in the forehead region.

The lack of bulge results in a more gradual lateral curvature, and therefore no pattern loss at the hairline. However, it should be apparent that the woman with the flattest and most vertical forehead has the strongest hairline.

The photos of these women also illustrate an important principle of hair growth, which is that the hair at the hairline requires a certain amount of flatness in the top of the skull, i.e. being near parallel to the ground, and/or significant directional change in the shape of the skull, in order to grow. For the woman on the far right, with the sloping back forehead, she has a high hairline because the skull doesn't get flat until far back on her skull. Whereas, the woman on the far left, while her hairline is not very parallel to the ground where it starts, there is a sharp change in direction in the shape of her skull there. Hair on the top of the head, for whatever reason, likes flatness and sharp changes in direction of the skull on which to grow.

If you have a "receding" hairline growth pattern, then your skull lacks flatness and a sharp change in direction in the receded areas. You can verify on your own skull how you have hair where the top of your skull is flat enough of a shelf to rest a chest board piece on it. And where your temples have "receded", the curvature of your skull is sloping and rounding steeply down your face, like forehead. Essentially, where your hairline once was, is now part of your forehead.

In the photos below, take note of the curvature in the frontal part of the hairline for Jude Law, and that bro I found on reddit. If you put a chess piece on those receded temples, would it sit or fall off? If you dropped a bead of water, would it rest or roll off? What about if you placed it in the middle where they still have hair? What about Robert Pattinson's flat hairy temples?

Receding temples are much more acutely curved, and sloping down the face, than non-receding temples. Jude Law's curvature is the most acute, his temples are the most sloped, and his hairline is the weakest. Notice that all men have hair in the flattest area of their skulls at the hairline.

The sloping temples is usually a consequence of growth in the middle of forehead, which gets pushed outward. You can see how the forehead region narrows and curves from a bird's eye view of this guy with a receding hairline. The photo besides him is of a 1 year old girl, who also has this bulging in the forehead region. Note the identical skull shapes and hair growth patterns from this angle.

From this angle you can see the forehead getting pushed out, which creates a tapering shape. This is a gradual widening from the forehead to the maximum width of the skull, located in the back third region of the skull. This is poor contouring. Hair likes a skull with a broad forehead that changes direction at near maximum skull width. Any bulging or outward growth in the middle of the forehead will negatively impact that contour, and thus your hairline.

SIDES AND FORELOCK EXPANSION

Forehead and crown bulging is ubiquitous among men with MPB, but there are two other areas where bulging can occur. It could be that the center forelock area of the skull is getting pushed out. The old joke for guys with MPB is that your hairline is running away from your face. For these guys, it's kind of true, in the upward direction.

And the other less common area of expansion is at the sides of the head. The skull kind of pushes out above the ears, as with the guys below. Note that they still have round bulging foreheads and crowns too.

SKULLS CHANGE AFTER PUBERTY

All adult men with MPB have some degree of bulging in their foreheads, crowns, sides, or forelock. These bulges correspond with rounded and non-existent skull contours that are defined clearly on people who have no pattern loss. Toddlers and babies, of both genders, often have a bulge in their forehead, and they will also have classic male hair loss growth patterns if their forehead bulge impacts the contouring of their skull, that usually being significant lateral curvature.

None of these men, babies, or toddlers, had or will have such skull features as children between the ages of about 4 and 13. Rather, their skull shapes did or will look much more like this:

So, for some reason, our skull shapes are often round and bulgy in the forehead during infancy, then always flatten out in later childhood, and then, for some men only, begin to bulge out again in the forehead, as well as a few other locations, sometime after puberty. That is to say, the skulls of men with MPB change over time. And the degree to which your MPB has progressed correlates exactly to the degree to which your skull has expanded and the sharp contours that, once bordered our forehead, sides, and top of the skull in youth, have been rounded and eroded.

Clearly there is a connection between skull bulging/rounding and MPB growth patterns. But, why? Why can't hair grow on a dome-like contourless skull, or a temple that is sloping much more steeply on a forehead that has expanded out?

THE BLOOD-FLOW HYPOTHESIS

As far as I am aware, all of the "holistic" and "alternative" hair loss theories are centered around poor blood-flow being the culprit for hair loss, whether the are aware of skull expansion or not. The proponents of this theory, without exception, recommend massaging, red light therapy, micro-needling, and various oils to break up "fibrosis" and stimulate blood-flow to the area. However, most of these proponents can't explain WHY some scalps experience poor blood-flow and in a specific and progressive hair loss pattern. Skull expansion provides a plausible explanation for how that blood-flow impediment might occur.

The major arteries that deliver blood to our skull run along the perimeter of the scalp. Our scalp perimeter hairs receive robust blood flow due to their proximity to these major arteries, and, not coincidentally, we do not experience hair loss in this region. However, the top of our scalp has no such major arterial blood vessels. Notice how the diameter of the blood vessels get smaller as they branch out to the top of the skull. It's a thin and delicate capillary network that delivers blood to the hair on the tops of our heads, where any slight adverse change in the environment can significantly hinder blood flow to the region. In addition, it's the area furthest from the heart in the vertical direction, against gravity.

Flat foreheads, sharp contours, and short distances from the sideburns to the front of the forehead are features that put the least amount of strain on the thin branches of the temporal and supraorbital arteries. When the skull bulges out and curves severely over areas like the temple region, that could stretch or compress those delicate blood vessels on the top of the scalp. Such would impede blood-flow to the follicles in the affected areas and, thus, weaken them through malnutrition. As the skull continues to change shape, more hair follicles are strained and stressed, resulting in a progressive hair loss pattern.

MY ALTERNATIVE HYPOTHESIS

It's plausible that "the blood-flow hypothesis" is valid, since a small, flat, and vertical forehead seems like a straight shot to the hairline for those supraorbital arteries, which is why you can get one of those ridiculous subzero norwood scale hairlines with the baby hairs on your forehead with such skull shape. In addition, given how many temporary "success" stories I have seen with people using minoxidil, a vasodilator, with or without microneedling, there probably is a blood-flow factor. Even after quitting minoxidil and going all-natural, I was convinced of that blood-flow was the culprit for many years. However, now I have some questions that lead me to believe that it's not ALL blood-flow.

My first question is about bleeding. I still micro-needle my scalp, on occasion. When I do so, on my slick bald temples, they bleed. Furthermore, the skin in that area is seemingly healthy. If there were a blood flow problem, wouldn't I notice a difference in my skin or lack of bleeding when I get a small puncture wound in an area of no hair relative to where there is hair? That might be a dumb question because of something going on under the surface that I can't see, like fibrosis. But, I'm trying to be as objective an observational as I can, in the spirit of Alchemy. Also, it just makes sense to me that poor blood flow would manifest in other skin health problems besides hair loss.

The other question that I have is based on those drawings of the arterial network and how these thin blood vessels are stretching to hairline area from the major arteries. Given that the hairs on the hairline are CLOSER to the major arteries than the hairs just behind the hairline, and the way that the skull expands, then I would expect the hairs INSIDE of the hairline, rather than then hairs on the hairline, to be negatively impacted by the change in skull terrain FIRST. The hairs inside of the hairline are a bit FURTHER from both the temporal and supraorbital arteries than the hair at the hairline, and thus would be more vulnerable to strain. Sometimes that does happen, but it's rare. Rather, it's more common for the hairline to recede from the front of the hairline back.

The last objection that I have is that the bulge itself, based on toddler hair growth patterns, only impacts the shape of the hairline if it creates acute LATERAL curvature, or is bulging or rounding in a way that negatively impacts the definition of the contours that distinguish the forehead from the top of the skull. For a visual aid, compare the bulges and hair growth patterns for the following infants:

The toddler on the left clearly has a forehead bulge. However, she still has a straight hairline. Notice that the bulge is uniplanar though, and how her forehead still contours sharply to the sides and top of her head, despite the bulge. The baby on the right, however, does not have such sharp contours. Rather, her skull rounds gradually from the apex of that round bulge to all the other parts of her head. As result, she has the MPB growth pattern and very little hairline hair.

If it were all a matter of blood-flow, then it seems that either such severe bulging would stress the blood-flow to the hair follicles enough to impact the ability to grow a full healthy shaft. However, such is not the case. The lack of contouring, rather, seems to be the more influential factor in whether or not a hair will grow.

Therefore, my hypothesis, which I can't prove in any way, is that when the contour in an area changes, then the terrain gets reclassified by your body, and it adjusts the energetic flow. For example, when the forehead expands out and the temples start to slope steeply, then those sloping temples get reclassified as FOREHEAD, and the body treats it as such by not growing any hair there. The body, rather, will only grow hair on the top of the skull, for which the area needs to meet a minimum criteria of certain degree of being parallel to the ground. When the crown expands into one of those coneheads, or the forehead does a big gradual slope to the crown and never gets parallel to the ground, then no part of the top of the skull meets the criteria to be classified as "top of skull." Rather, the body considers your skull one giant forehead. And the body will not grow hair on your forehead.

Now, hair will always grow on the sides of the head where the artery diameters, and thus blood flow, is robust. So, I do still think that blood-flow is a factor. But, I also think that there is such a thing as "life-force" flow, which is an energetic force that governs much of our biological functions, which is not recognized much, if at all, by mainstream medicine. So, naturally, it intrigues me. What I like most about this theory is that the body is not presumed to be defective. Rather, it is aware of what is going on, the life-force itself has a consciousness of its own, and it's making adjustments in the flow deliberately. The body has a good sense for not growing hair on our foreheads. But, why is our skull turning into one giant forehead? That's what I want to focus on in this section, more so than the particulars of why that causes hair loss. We'll get there. For now, as far as we are concerned, it just does. So, why?

SKULL EXPANSION THEORIES

I doubt that Paul Taylor was the first guy ever to observe the connection between changing skull shape and MPB, but he's got a website called hairgrowthsos.com that has some interesting information. At the very least, I believe that he is credited with coining the term "skull expansion".

I came across his website a few years back, and it's what first turned me on to this whole skull expansion thing. I bought and read his ebook, which has all of these diagrams and crap in it, as well as some ideas for skull compressions to mitigate the expansion. It's a pretty good resource on this topic. I did his compression exercises for a few years. They didn't help me. I think I know why now. Anyway, he thinks that the issue is blood flow and that the skull expands due to a combination of natural skull shape, skull growth forces that persist into adulthood, and (of course) DHT. I don't think skull growth forces persist into adulthood, and I don't think DHT has anything to do with anything. But, I'll summarize his analysis, anyway, because it's an interesting starting point.

Basically, the idea is that everyone has a different degree of natural roundness to their skull. The men with the most natural roundness entering puberty are the ones that are most susceptible to MPB - this I agree with. Skulls originally grew from our fetal days from four points of eminence. There are two located on the forehead, left and right of center, and two located on the crown, left and right of center - this also seems plausible. The problem, according to Paul Taylor, is that the growth from these points never stop. They keep pushing out against each other all throughout childhood and into adulthood, well past when we stop growing in other parts of the body - this I am not so sure about; nevertheless, I'll keep going.

Split your forehead into two halves, mentally. Imagine two force vectors colliding in the middle of your forehead that are coming from the exact middle of the left and right halves. On a perfectly flat forehead, the force vectors coming from the eminence points are on the same plane, or nearly the same plane. Therefore, when the growth forces collide, head on, they produce a net force vector of zero. That is, they completely cancel each other out. By contrast, on a rounded forehead, the growth forces collide not head on, but rather at a slight angle, resulting in a net force outward (I promised there wouldn't be any science, but I never said there wouldn't be any math).

Just imagine F1 and F2 coming towards each other from two points of origin, left and right of center, on your very curved forehead, in the diagram below, and the outward resultant growth force should make sense. Note that the same rational applies to expansion at the crown.

The last variable at play, is the infamous hair loss culprit, DHT. Paul Taylor attributes higher DHT levels to the reason why men are the ones who experience skull expansion, and, thus, MPB. While females do tend to have flatter and more vertical foreheads, which helps keep growth forces in check, some do not. Some, rather, have pretty round and sloping foreheads. However, they do not experience skull expansion because they have much less DHT.

Supposedly, DHT is a growth hormone that increases in males during puberty in order to help grow, broaden, and densify our stature, as well as promote body hair growth. Since males have more DHT, then that DHT is going to our skulls, promoting more or stronger growth from the points of eminence. Therefore, those of us men ONLY, who have such an unfortunate natural rounded shape to our skull, where the growth forces collide at an angle, will experience skull expansion in those areas.

I don't want to be insulting towards Paul Taylor. He's a nice guy, and very smart. His anatomical analysis is intriguing. He's an independent thinker, and I respect that. I just think he's wrong about DHT.

Let's assume that DHT is a growth hormone in the body that causes bone and muscle growth. I don't think it exists, or occurs in the way we are told in the body, but I'll assume that it does for argument's sake. It being the differentiating factor between developing MPB for men and women doesn't seem likely to me, for three reasons:

The first reason is that, if this were so, then it I would expect women to develop skull expansion, and thus MPB, in a milder form. Women have DHT too, supposedly. They can have round heads and persistent growth forces. Why don't they develop MPB at just a much slower rate? They don't. Their foreheads and crowns do not bulge out and they don't develop slick bald temples on an M-shape hairline with a thinning isolated area in the crown. Rather, they develop diffuse thinning in patterns that are uncommon in infants and men. So, notwithstanding my doubt as to the scientific methods that demonstrate DHT exists, I don't think it's DHT.

My second objection is that this model assumes that the body is defective, or that the disease is just happenstance. Contrary to popular medical opinion, the body doesn't do random crap for no reason. Rather, it's a self-healing machine, whose wisdom far exceeds anything that science can fathom. That's my perspective, anyway, because It just seems true. For example, if you get sick, and don't go to the doctor or take any medicine? Do you get better? - Yes. If you break a bone, does the doctor fuse it together or the body? - The body. From the perspective that they body knows exactly what to do and how to heal, while always optimizing and economizing under the circumstances, then why would the body send growth hormone to the skull to grow it in grotesque ways for no discernible advantage, or respond to the growth hormone and grow the skull for no reason as though the growth hormone is in charge and the body's infinite wisdom is not? It just seems like a waste of valuable dietary calcium, and that the body is a moron.

I do believe that bone will respond to constant forces over time, though. Small growth forces coming from the points of eminence would do that. But, I don't think that is happening. For one, I don't see similar skull bulging in adult women. Secondly, it's too random of a cause for disease. I like to think, as I explained earlier, that disease has a purpose. It is a reflection of an imbalance.

The infant MPB growth patterns that we see are a clue, and this is the subject of my third objection to the theory that the cause is persistent growth forces and DHT. DHT is not a factor with infants. Assuming that DHT exists, or is what science leads us to believe, infants do not have DHT levels to the degree that adult men have. Furthermore, DHT levels for infant boys are significantly higher than girls, again, allegedly. Yet infant boys and girls BOTH develop the same skull shapes and hair growth patterns as adult men, all having much different DHT levels. DHT is NOT the common link. I need a common link to propose a comprehensive theory.

In addition, it just doesn't seem to me like the bulging patterns that I see in infants and adult men are just the result of a combination of constant growth forces and a varying supply of growth hormones. It doesn't seem like that would produce some of the severe bulging in infants or men. Rather, I think that the organism has more play in the game.

For infants, it makes more sense to me that the toddler body is responding to pressure inside of the skull due to brain growth. That is, the forehead area is in need of more room, or is anticipating a need for more room in the future. That would be wise because an infant's brain doubles in size in the first year, and another 15% in year two. The skull needs more space, and the body KNOWS that. It is responding to a need, and/or pressure.

I think that it's the same with adult men. I think the body is responding to a pressure coming from inside of the skull. I mean, look at these guys again. Does this look like happenstance constant growth forces over time, or does it look like something is pushing from the inside out?

It looks to me like something is pushing out from inside out! That's just my first impression. Something is going on inside there. It's the only way you get a bulge like that barbershop dude in the middle. Furthermore, the areas of expansion for the two guys on the left aren't near the frontal or crown eminences.

I think that there has to be another force pushing out from inside of the skull, there has to be a connection to infant skull shapes and growth patterns, and there has to be connection to iron and the energetic shift in males after puberty. What's going on in the front part of the skull that would make an infant and male skull bulge out? I don't think skull expansion is a result of males growth hormones and an ever expanding skull. Rather, I think that it's THINKING.

The ancient natural philosophers not only observed that there are two fundamental forces of nature, but they also noted that they have a directional component to them as well. The male force rises up with the energy of the Heavens, and the female force sinks down with the energy of the Earth. It is why we refer to our Heavenly Father and our Mother Earth with those respective gender assignments. It's not based on male dominance, oppression of women, or some other progressive notion that a university level education would have you to believe. Rather, it's based on careful observation of nature.

When lightning strikes, it sends electrical energy from UP in the positively charged atmosphere, DOWN to the negatively charged ground. The male part of the electrical circuit is the positive pole, the Heavens, the energy giving end, and the anode. The female part is the negative pole, the Earth, the energy receiving end, and the cathode. The reason ancients built "Cathedrals" is because they were designed to be very large and powerful cathodes, equipped with highly conductive copper spires in areas believed to be especially receptive to the electrical energy flow from the positively charged Heavens down to the negatively charged Earth. And inside of that cathedral were organs and holy water, because that's how life works. The battery supplies the energy to power the organs which energizes the water to make it holy (structured) with stored energy - our organs are musical too, by the way. And, it all starts with the up-down battery.

Up and down directional assignments to the male and female polarities is consistent across ancient philosophies. In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), the male force, yang, is represented by fire; because fire always rises UP towards the Heavens. Whereas, the female force, yin, is represented by water; because water falls DOWN towards the Earth. In this model Fire and Water meet to make steam, which is qi, or life-force. It is an acknowledgement of how both forces are fundamental to life and the importance of balance. Similarly, in alchemy, the symbol for male and female are an upward pointing triangle, △, and downward pointing triangle, ▽, respectively. The Star of David, ✡, from Judeo-Christianity, is just overlapping male and female alchemical triangles, again, to symbolize the importance of balance in the two polarities.

The direction of the polar forces seem to have an influence on our physiology as well. Males are taller, and females are shorter. Our dominant male energy pushes our stature up towards the Heavens, whereas females remain closer to the Earth. Of course, there is variation in height, but even if a male and female are the same height, the male will have a higher center of mass because male skeletons are naturally broader up in the shoulders and female skeletons are naturally broader down at the hips. In addition, males have a larger skull and significantly more upper body muscle mass, whereas females carry much more of their body muscle and fat in the legs and mid-section.

Notice how the male's shoulders are much more broad than his hips, and how the female's maximum body width in the pelvic region is about as wide as her shoulders. Science will tell you that this due to evolution, but I'm just going to assume it's not. The polarities are more interesting.

Given the dimorphic skeletal girth, it seems like, in addition to a directional component, the polar forces have an expansionary effect in the body, as well. The male force rises and expands the shoulders out for men, and for women it sinks into the abdomen and expands that area out. That's curious, because we, MPB sufferers, have an expansion problem.

Females do not have big feet. Rather it's their mid-section, in their lower abdomen, where they are broad. Males are broad in the shoulders, but also have a much larger skull. The skull and lower abdomen are of particular curiosity because these are the two areas where we can process information, i.e. think. Obviously, we think with our brain, which is in our skull. But we also have intuition, which is information that we get that bypasses our cognition. This is instinct, premonition, and a gut feeling.

Why is it a "gut" feeling? Why the digestive tract? Well, there are some micro-organisms that pretty much just have a digestive tract. They don't have a brain. They don't have livers or kidneys. All of the information on which they act has to come from what is processed through the digestive tract. This is how they "think". It's not really thinking, it's instinct. It's involuntary compulsion. We have this faculty too. Our intuition, our instinct, comes from our gut.

Intuition is not emphasized or trained as much as brain thinking in our culture. Education requires you to research, analyze, and deduce. Intuition, rather, is more abstract. It's mystical and even spiritual. It's not scientific - but we have it. For some reason, we have it. It must be useful.

Women tend to have stronger intuition than men. There's the phenomenon of "female intuition". Most psychics are women too. And women happen to more broad in the hips, the area of their stronger faculty. Men, on the other hand, have large skulls and are more logical (I'm sorry if that offends you). We tend to rely on facts and reason (Not sorry. Just true). This requires thinking with our brains, in our heads, which are large compared to women. This is also the area in which we experience skull expansion and hair loss. Women rely more on their intuition naturally, which probably requires energy to be sent down to the gut, which is their area of wideness and expansion.

Based on anatomical differences, it almost seems like which ever polar force is dominant, the energy of the body tends to concentrate in the area of the thinking faculty associated with that polar direction and expands it outward. This energy concentration would be exacerbated by an over-inclination for male "thinking", by means of environmental conditioning that favors logical thought or fosters an imbalanced energetic male constitution, which would be chronically pulling up an expansionary force into our skulls, pushing our foreheads out over time.

Given our educational training, all this probably seems prima facia utterly nonsensical and ridiculous. But, considering that the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that we use to think, is located behind the forehead, right where the giant bulge on Jason Statham's fat skull is, along with those other guys who are growing skull bubbles on their foreheads (including me), and the fact that toddlers and babies, who have rapidly growing prefrontal cortices that double in size within a year, also have similar bulging and hair growth patterns, then we may want to entertain this theory.

I'm going to entertain this theory, anyway. Because, based on the photos and position of the prefrontal cortex, that's exactly what looks like is going on to me. So, I'm going to go ahead and assume it's true. Why not, at this point? How would that pathology work out?

Thinking and Skull Expansion Pathology

A thought is energy. At least, a thought comes from energy. That is not even unscientific. When we think, calories (i.e. energy) that have been metabolized from food are then sent UP (i.e. rise) to the head, and into the prefrontal cortex, in order to produce the thought that we want to think. If we're dead, we can't do this. Energy makes thoughts.

THE ENERGY OF THOUGHTS

So, is a thought energy? This is more abstract and difficult to prove. But, based on the fact that every religion ever, for thousands and thousands of years, coincidentally derived and predicated their daily worship rituals on prayer, the healing power of thoughts, it seems likely that a thought is energy. I tend to put confidence in things people have done for thousands of years, as opposed to 6 month clinical trials with "favorable results" - in a controlled environment supplied and funded by the pharmakeia companies. Anyway, if a thought is energy, then it must come with a force.

Work (in units of energy) = force x distance.

It could be a small force, but it must be there in order to do work. How else would it have any healing effect? It takes work to heal. And where does that force go? Out! Prayers go OUT. "Our thoughts go OUT to you." "Our prayers go OUT for you." In order for a prayer to have any healing effect, it must go OUT of your head and INTO someone else. This should make sense to anyone who took Physics 4A at the Santa Rosa Junior College, like me.

I don't think anyone's skull is expanding from too much praying, but it's an example of the directional and force components of a thought. If you believe at all in the healing power of thoughts, then it must have a force and it must go OUT. Even if you think the whole thing prayer is a crock of shit, and prefer science, then there is still the placebo effect. If there were no force nor healing energy to thoughts, then there would be no placebo effect. But, there is.

SKULL REMODELLING

Is a thought force strong enough to push out bone? Even if it's a small force, bone remodelling can occur as a result of small consistent forces over time. In fact, that's how the skull expanded in the first place. The skeleton is constantly breaking itself down and building itself back up and will adjust to stimuli. This is true for the skull. The ancient mezo-americans would wear a series of smaller and smaller rings in order to elongate the back of their skulls to resemble their gods. Bone, even the skull, will be reshaped in response to small consistent forces over time. If a thought carries a force, then bone will gradually respond. How does hair loss occur? - Gradually.

But, aren't our skulls built to think thoughts? Why is the skull so sensitive to the thing that it's designed mainly to do? - I'm not so sure that the major function of skull is to house the production of outward thinking energy. Consider that most of our sense organs are located in our head. Our eyes, ears, nose, and mouth are all sensing external information at the head. The sights, the smells, the sounds, tastes, and some feel are inputs that go IN through the head. Then where? Well, probably down through the body and out of the area where things normally get excreted, which would pass through the gut. Our sensory organs must inform our intuition as well as our brain. In, down, and out seems like the most likely directional flow.

So, it may be that the natural energy direction in the head area is inward rather than outward. Since a thought runs counter to that flow, then it's not natural, nor beneficial, to be constantly producing thoughts that are radiating outward. It can create tension. For example, try focusing on what your eyes, ears, nose, and mouth are sensing right now instead of thinking. The tension gets released when you let the energies of life come to you. And what do those conehead skull bulges look more like than built up tension?

So, basically, I am suggesting that excessive production of logical thoughts are radiating outward from our prefrontal cortex, which is against the sensory perception flow inward towards our already underutilized intuition, which is interfering with its function thereby further discouraging its male thought balancing use, and are pushing outward on the skull, causing the bone to gradually bulge outward as the skeleton resorbs and remodels itself. Before you totally dismiss this theory as the rantings of a deranged lunatic (see the section of the Lunar Hair Care section on the Etheric Body page for more lunacy), consider the results of a study that got the bald boys all worked UP on the hair loss forums a few years back.

BALDNESS AND INTELLIGENCE

Several years ago a, probably bald, research scientist did a study in which he showed women pictures of men and had them evaluate certain characteristics based on first impressions. The results showed that, although bald men were perceived to be less attractive by these women (bummer), they were also perceived to be more intelligent, on average. A small consolation for losing your hair, but there may be some hidden insight in this study.

Women are the more intuitive sex, as mentioned before, and generally not an offensive claim. Intuition is information that you get mysteriously. It's when you know something without knowing how you know it. In this case, perhaps female intuition is subconsciously tapping into the underlying mechanism behind MPB. That is, these bald men have engaged in rigorous, excessive, academic thought and the result is an expanded and hair deficient skull.

Also of note, bald men were perceived to be more "dominant", as well. Dominance is an aggressive male characteristic that comes with aggressive male emotions. In general, any emotion that causes the energy in the body to rise up is a male emotion. For example, anger is a strong male emotion because the directional nature of this emotion is up, as captured in our idioms. It is said that anger can rise so forcefully in our bodies that we "blow our lid", or we have to go "let out steam". By contrast, calmness is a female emotion because it has a sinking energetic effect in the body. Why is it not "calm up"? - Because that doesn't feel right. The interesting aspect of about anger, "blowing our lid", and rising energy that comes with aggressive male emotions is that we men also develop that conehead skull with the bulge on top. Perhaps there is some unrecognized wisdom in that "lid blowing" idiom, whereby emotions like anger, dominance, controlling, competitiveness, can rise with such force that it will actually push out the top of the skull. And that's why females intuitively discern such a disposition from our skull shape.

THE DIVINE VS. IMBALANCED MALE

In general, anger and other aggressive emotions are more expressed in males after puberty, after they get an energetic dose of Ares. We need to be warriors, but imbalanced Ares can be a problem. We have female energy as well. We have a VENUS system. We're not supposed to be all Ares. We can't let him get out of balance. When he does, we start to exhibit the following characteristics.

Compare that with the "Divine" male characteristics, at the end of the alchemical transformation, where the female energy has adequately balanced out Ares.

Both tables could describe Ares. But, the Divine Male is more refined. What's interesting is that "logical thinking" is a divine trait. Logical thinking is not bad, per se. In fact, we're supposed to be good at it. The problem is when it's out of balance, i.e. when we "over-think". When our thoughts become obsessive, when they become so dominant that they consume us, and we stop listening to our intuition.

"Over-thinking" isn't what you would expect from a decisive Ares-type, perhaps. But, he does tend towards domination and control. Since thinking is the male faculty, it would make sense for this energy to have thinking dominate the more passive female intuition, when male energy is not balanced. Furthermore, after our iron spike at puberty, as mentioned earlier, males do become more contemplative. Our energy goes inward and we become less expressive. If not well-balanced and grounded, we can become stuck in our minds. That's going to expand our skulls.

Besides training their men to be useful members of the community, I suspect that the traditional rites of passage were designed to ensure that the iron-Ares-warrior energy in their boys was directed into developing "divine male" characteristics. A big part of that is learning to face your fears. When we don't learn to face and overcome our fears, then that male energy gets redirected in a negative way. It becomes imbalanced. Our fear gets us trapped in our heads. We can ruminate all day about our insecurities, doubts, indecision, and timidness, and we will if we don't have the courage to face our fears - Ares makes sure of that. This type of disposition is bad for our health in a variety of ways, but all of the disappointment and worry is going to draw a lot of energy up into our heads for long periods of time. I suspect this is what's expanding our foreheads.

Furthermore, Ares wants us to have courage. If we don't, then he's going to be angry. And we are going to be angry too, because deep down we know that we are being cowardly. Our anger comes from being angry with ourselves for not becoming the warriors that we are meant to be. The same is true for the other imbalanced male traits. This emotional constitution results in emotions that have a rising effect in the body, which can "fume" for long periods of time as well in regards to how someone disrespected us today or fantasizing about telling someone off, all exacerbating the expansionary effect from thinking.

But what is it exactly that we feel that rises in us when we experience a male emotion? Is that energy? Does that have a force too? We'll get there. For now, it seems like, for whatever reason, negative male emotions and chronic thinking seem to be connected to a physiological hardening in our body. Our skulls get giant bulges, our arteries get clogged with calcium, and the little holes in our skulls start to close. That's the other form of sclerosis in the skull that occurs with MPB. Why do our skull foramens calcify shut?

A German physiologist named Frederick Hoelzel noted, after doing autopsies on bald men, that there was significant calcification in the foramens and cranial sutures of their skulls; whereas, non-bald dead people had no such calcification. Here's the quote from the correspondence in 1942 that documents Hoelzel's findings, which has come to be known a the "Ivory Dome Theory" for MPB:

"Baldness occurred in persons in whom calcification of the skull bones had not only firmly knitted the cranial sutures but also closed or narrowed various small foramens through which blood vessels pass, most prominently in persons with a luxuriant crop of hair. These blood vessels are mainly veins which normally communicate with the diploic veins in the spongy tissue of the skull bones but which are evidently pinched off by calcification of the foramens. Various stages of this process of impairing the blood circulation of the scalp could be observed."

ANATOMY OF THE SKULL

Because I'm an idiot, I had to look a lot of this anatomy stuff up. A cranial suture is where the four major bones of the skull meet: frontal, parietals, and occipital bones. A "foramen" is a hole in bone to allow the passage of blood vessels. There are several of these on the skull. The major ones that connect the emissary veins to the diploic veins are located on the parietal bones near the top back of the head. The parietal bones are the skull plates on sides and back. The vessels that pass through the foramens are called "emissary" veins. These veins connect to the "diploic" veins which run inside of the skull, between a hard outer and inner shell.

The first image, below, is a top view of a skull. The cranial sutures are the squiggly lines, and the foramen are the little holes. The two most prominent holes, near the back of the skull, are the parietal foramen. The image on the right is a cartoon depiction of the diploic venous system in the interior of the skull.

So, why would the body need to calcify the cranial sutures and the foramen? Why use all of that calcium to turn the skull into an "ivory dome"? For the sutures, I have a pretty good guess. Take look at the guys with severe expansion in the crown area, again:

When those bulges form on the crown, what happens to the sutures? They are not otherwise "firmly knitted" with calcification on a normal non-bulged skull. So, when it does start to bulge, I would imagine, based on my understanding of things that are connected together that aren't calcium-bone bound together, that a small gap could possibly form in between the cranial sutures. The main purpose of the skull, as I understand it, is to protect the brain. By knitting the cranial sutures with calcium, I think the body is maintaining the protective integrity of the skull as the area expands. That's my best guess. I don't think this causes any hair loss. Rather, it's a response to the physiological change that is causing the hair loss.

The calcified foramen, on the other hand, might be influencing our hair loss. According Hoelzel's remarks, the calcified foramen are pinching off blood vessels in the venous network. The veins carry blood back to the heart, but they also carry back INFORMATION. The arteries deliver nutrients to the various body parts, and the veins carry back a message of what they need more of. That's why the veins are the feminine and nourishing part of the circulatory system. Why is that getting pinched off? To figure that out, I'm going to use some Alchemy.

PARACELSUS AND THE RHYTHMIC SYSTEM

Alchemy and other natural philosophies use element models to break down nature into fundamental parts in order to draw connections and gather insight. It's like what science does with protons, electrons, and the periodic table of elements, only more interesting, true, and useful. For example, TCM relies on a five element model, where the major organs are paired with earth, metal, water, wood, and fire. Alchemy traditionally uses a four element model of earth, water, air, fire and a three element model of mercury, sulfur, salt. I think they're all valid and helpful, and probably have different advantages based on what you are looking at and what you are trying to do. I use them all, but in this section I'm going to focus on the three element model.

The three element model was developed by 16th century alchemist, Paracelsus, as a more potent synthesis of the classic four element model, in certain applications. It's based on the two polar forces in the body and the dynamic flow between them. I'm going to use this one because it relates these forces to sclerosis, thinking, the polarities, and other such things that I have been discussing.

The "nerve-sense" system is the male pole. It has all of the male characteristics: fight or flight is upward moving stress emotions, thinking is the dominant male faculty, sclerosis is the hardening that we are prone to, and catabolism is energy spending or giving - as in the positive charge of the battery. And the "metabolic" system is the female pole: nurturing is a downward female emotion, inflammation is softening of the body, and anabolism is energy building or receiving - as in the negative charge of the battery.

"Willing", or "doing", seems like a male attribute, at first glance. After all, Ares is a man of action. However, I think it means more like doing in an intuitive way. For example, it's like the manner in which my 1.5 year old daughter plays. There's no logic or premeditative thought. Rather, she just goes around doing things. It's all sensory and impulse driven. I think Paracelsus meant impulsive non-thinking "doing" like that.

The "rhythmic system" pole is what the body is always striving for - balance. In this model, health is not static. Rather, it's being fluid, flexible, and always in flux. Health occurs when there is rhythm in the flow from one pole to the other. Disease occurs when we get stuck in one pole. For some reason, when you get stuck in the nerve-sense pole, i.e. male, that tends towards sclerosis. That is, there is an over-exuberance in the sclerotic function, and things get calcified that shouldn't. Furthermore, getting stuck in this male pole has something to do with having a disposition of "fight or flight", i.e. stress and aggression, and thinking. Too much aggression, stress, and thinking will lead to too much sclerosis. That seems to check out with everything so far.

Opposite of the male pole, is the "metabolic", female, pole. This is the nurturing function in our body. When an area of the body is damaged or in distress, the metabolic pole flushes the area with warmth and nutrients, i.e. inflammation. This results in temporary pain and swelling, but it is necessary to repair the damage and/or provide the additional resources. Like the nerve-sense pole, the aptitude of this polar function depends on our disposition. Meaning, how we are in our emotions impacts whether or not, or how well, we nourish parts of our body in distress.

INFLAMMATION OR DISTRESS?

Hair that is being impacted by skull expansion shows signs of distress. The follicles in the balding areas are thin, weak, short, and have a more frequent shedding cycle than normal healthy hair. Likely, the weakened state of the hair follicle is a result of lack of resources and the frequent shedding and regrowth is an effort to stimulate resource flow. If you believe that DHT is a male hormone in the body that encourages hair growth during puberty, I don't, but if you do, then it would make sense that it is found in large amounts in bald scalp tissue because that's an area in need of growth. It's not there KILLING hair, if it really is there; rather, it's there as part of an effort to GROW the hair. And it would be there as part of an inflammation response to encourage more resource flow to the area.

Most, if not all, alternative hair loss theories you find on the internet blame hair loss on scalp inflammation. There are some signs of inflammation. For example, men can experience the "MPB itch", or dandruff. I never did, though. Given that, and the fact that my scalp has never felt swollen or tender to the touch, as parts of the body that are inflamed generally are, then I'm not so sure that that scalp inflammation is truly there. And if it were, I certainly wouldn't want to anything ANTI-inflammatory to discourage that flow of resources to an area in need of them. Anti-inflammatory is anti-healing. Nevertheless, it would make sense that if there were inflammation in the scalp, then it would not be the cause of hair loss, but rather an effort to encourage additional resource flow to the area.

All this is to say that whether or not you believe in DHT, inflammation, or are just going off of your observation and experience, the hairs in the balding areas are showing signs of distress, and that they are probably, in some way, TRYING to communicate that they are in distress in order to get more resources. And, based on the Paracelsus model, how the polar forces that govern our body respond to that distress, depends on our disposition.

A TYPICAL MALE SOLUTION

Here's how I think it all goes down: As the skull expands, it will either put a strain on the blood-flow or the life-force flow to these areas of the scalp. Either way, the hair is not getting what it needs to grow a normal healthy hair. So, it panics. It signals that it needs more resources. The problem is that the body can't get resources to the hair, by normal means, anymore. That's because the skull has bulged out in various places, and the arterial capillary network is struggling maintain normal resource flow, and/or the life-force no longer flowing. Regardless, something is no longer getting to the hair that used to get there, and it's not going to get there, but the hair is going to keep complaining that it's not getting there until it does, which it can't (unless we contour the skull). So, what does the body do? What would you do? Remember that our disposition determines our physiological response.

We're males. So, we're going to THINK our way through this problem business-like and rationally. We have seemingly useless hair, in no way vital to our survival, complaining over and over about not getting enough stuff. We send more stuff, it doesn't get there or not enough gets there - and the complaining continues. Like a crying infant that we can't reason with, how do we get this thing to shut up? Because we need it to shut up. We're men - we have shit to do. We don't have time to dick around with silly ass hair when there are organs to manage, food to digest, and tons of toxic crap to get out of us. We want to to solve the problem and we want to solve it NOW. There's a sense of urgency - it's "fight or flight". You can't relax and think about it over a cup of warm tea in a fight or flight situation, or go out to lunch with your friends and get their opinion first. Rather, you have to decide NOW.

What's the simple solution? If the baby won't stop crying, and we can't reason with it - then, let's put it in the crib and close the door. Maybe we can, at least, turn the volume down a bit so we can concentrate. How do we do that? What's our "go to" physiological response? - Sclerosis!

The diploic venous network is the major drainage system for the skull to send blood back to the heart. Recall that the veins carry blood as well as information back to the heart. It's the nurturing end of the circulatory system. It tells the heart what we need. But, the male dominant energy is no longer willing to listen to, or nurture, the needs of its dying and unimportant hair. And this disposition, for some reason, affects the disposition of all of our bodily operations, including that of the circulatory system. So, the body calcifies the foramen, pinching off the communication back to the heart, thus closing the door so we don't have to hear the baby cry. We know the baby is still crying. We like having the baby. Unfortunately, it's just the only way we can focus and get stuff done. It sounds like a typical male solution. I'm not anti-male, but I can relate. I live with a crying infant.

Even if none of that is true, which I admittedly have no idea whether it is or not, we still have the issue of the calcified foramen to contend with. Why would that even be an issue? My guess is that a compromised communication network back to the heart from the hair probably affects our ability to regrow weakened hair. For example, if we somehow figure out how to flatten our skulls and restore normal blood flow, or life-force flow, to the hair follicles via the arterial network, then the hair would need to be able to communicate to the heart to get what it needs to grow a healthy follicle. That's going to be a challenge with all the calcified foramen. Therefore, my guess is that it is an impediment to our regrowth efforts, at the very least.

I'll clean up a lot of the details about how our disposition impacts our physiological responses when I get into the four element model, which covers things like life-force and emotional energy. But, for now, we have a decent rough draft for the pathology of MPB. Something like: the energy change at puberty, due to an iron influx, synergizes with some external factors to create an imbalance in thinking and aggressive emotions which are causing the skull to expand, impeding blood flow to the hair, triggering a distress, which the hair communicates, and the body is responding to that distress with foramen calcification due to a dominant energy pattern that we developed at the beginning of the pathology, and probably compounding the cycle in a negative feedback loop kind of way. This a basis, at least, for which to discuss what external factors could be causing or contributing to this pathology. Before I move on, though, I have a side note on hair being "non-vital".

SAMSON AND DELILAH

Our spirituality comes from female energy. Our intuition, the female thinking faculty, is even theorized to be a communication channel with the divine, which is a claim made by, our guy, Paracelsus:

"There is an earthly sun, which is the cause of all heat, and all who are able to see may see the sun; and those who are blind and cannot see him may feel his heat. There is an Eternal Sun, which is the source of all wisdom, and those whose spiritual senses have awakened to life will see that sun and be conscious of His existence; but those who have not attained spiritual consciousness may yet feel His power by an inner faculty which is called Intuition."

So, naturally, one of the characteristics of an imbalanced male, who neglects his intuition, is being "spiritually disconnected". This is when you are so logical, that you become more like a robot than a human. Life is all about facts, numbers, inputs, outputs, time, money, calories, protons, electron, blah, blah, blah. There's no spirit, there's no soul, and there's no interconnectedness. Rather, it's just survival - life and death. That's no way to live. It's not human, at least.

Hair was traditionally believed to be very spiritual. For example, in TCM, our qi, or life-force energy, is thought to be stored in our hair - because it's our hair that the energy of the Heavens first comes into contact with on its descent to Earth. This is concept of hair is similarly corroborated in the Bible, with the story of Samson and Delilah. Supposedly, Samson's power was stored in his hair. As the story goes, he was weakened by Delilah, whose name actually means "to weaken", when she cut off all his hair.

To an overly logical male, this all sounds pretty ridiculous. But, considering that women don't suffer from hair loss nearly as much, they have much longer hair, they have the strength to go through child birth multiple times, and they live longer, then it may be so that hair does stores some sort of life-force energy in it, or at least is an indication of the strength thereof. Even so, a spiritually disconnected and overly logical male would be much more willing to sacrifice the part of his body that is most connected to the Heavens and the spirit world, hence the sclerotic response to dying hair.

A lot of what I'm proposing on this website isn't even novel stuff. I'm just the guy trying work out the details so that we can get to some practical solutions. For example, Rudolf Steiner, the founder of Waldorf Education, made the connection between thinking and MPB over a 100 years ago (see his quote below), and a homeopathy book that I came across from 1906 prescribes rosemarinus officinalis (rosemary) as a treatment for "round head (baldness)". The parentheses baldness part was in the book - I didn't add it. If any of what I'm saying is true, then I'm probably just rediscovering what was once known, but long since forgotten. As it says in the Book of Ecclesiastes, "there's nothing new under the sun". Here's the Steiner quote:

"A child that learns to read too early in life, is introduced to abstraction too soon. And one would do many a future sufferer from sclerosis a service if one would not teach them to read too early. This hardening of the organism which manifests in the most diverse forms of sclerosis, can be traced back to children learning to read too soon... if healthier methods prevailed in the current school system, then many a male would not walk around with a bald head so early in life…"

READING

You probably didn't expect "reading" to be at the top of the list of environmental factors to discuss, or even be on the list, but we are dealing with an energy imbalance - so, it's going to get weird. Steiner is basically saying that learning to read too soon causes a male imbalance because it over-trains the male faculty at and age when we are supposed to be strengthening our female faculty; thus, undermining its development and forcing us to over-rely on our male faculty later in life, which causes "various forms of sclerosis". Steiner uses the word "abstraction", but it's basically logical thinking. Anyway, why does this happen?

When we are babies, we are soft. Our bodies are soft and our temperament is soft. We're fat, we cry, we giggle, we don't move well, and we want our mommies. As we get older, the body undergoes a natural hardening. Our bones harden, we lean out, we gain muscle, and our joints strengthen and stiffen for increased stability. This is necessary in order to walk, run, climb, lift heavy objects, and utilize the full range of our physical capacity. Our emotions harden too. We become more independent, resilient, courageous, and can endure a more complex range of negative emotions.

As we harden into our adult bodies, we naturally prefer to use our harder male faculty, logical thought. It helps us get work done so that we can obtain vital resources like food, water, warmth, and shelter. Not as infants though. That's not our natural inclination. Rather, we prefer to use our imagination. We play make-believe, we have imaginary friends, and we explore our environment with a more sensory lead experience; which is why my daughter wants to put every new object that she encounters in her mouth; every sense is being used to understand her world. This strengthens our female faculty because imagination is just like intuition; it's a communication channel with the divine that bypasses cognition. And it is supposed be developed as infants, while we are still soft. Otherwise, it will not serve to balance out our male energy after we have hardened into our adult bodies, adult emotions, and naturally rely more on logical thinking. That is to say, our imagination keeps us soft.

Bioenergetic phenomenon are completely ignored and/or dismissed in modern science. But that's pretty much how Steiner figured out that that MPB is a sclerotic disease without having to do over 80 autopsies on bald guys. He died 17 years before that "discovery", which is now oblivious to the geneticists and biochemists working on "cutting edge" MPB treatments. That's modern science in a nutshell. Anyway, bioenergetics is how, for whatever reason, our disposition tends to have an influence on our biological processes, and even vice versa. Learning to read to soon makes us emotionally harder by relying on "abstraction", which has a physiological effect of excess hardening, or sclerosis.

Learning to read too soon is, presumably, bad for both boys and girls. But, it is males, not females, who "walk around with a bald head so early in life". Women balance themselves out better because of their dominant energy's preference for intuition, a related faculty. As a result, they stay soft. For males, on the other hand, puberty is a molotov cocktail of masculinity ready to ignite if we don't have that fully developed female faculty to keep all that energy in check.

Male energy is not a bad thing. We get all that Ares energy at puberty for a reason. It has to be good for us. And there are natural forces in our body to help us maintain balance. Unfortunately, in western culture, where rates of MPB happen to be the highest, the conditions are just about perfect for a male imbalance to develop. It starts with subjecting our children to structured learning at too young of an age, assuming that the intent of our educational system is not to actually dull our intellect and groom us into being content, compliant, and oblivious slaves. But, it gets worse.

TOXIC CULTURE

Not only are we doing abstract thinking as toddlers; but, instead of being out in nature exploring and developing our imaginations, we have to sit down under fluorescent lighting inside of depressing prison buildings and do grunt paperwork. Both parents have jobs, and so the kids are thrown into government schools for the free daycare as early as pre-k. Furthermore, there is social pressure to get your kid a "head start" on academic learning. All this is so in about 20 years we can get a decent paying job doing meaningless work, still under fluorescent lights, in depressing buildings, with an added bonus of getting mostly blue light exposure for the majority of the waking hours and losing an hour or two of the day commuting and coming home miserable and exhausted. We accept this life because we are conditioned to accept the lifestyle from infancy and the educational "investment" pressures us to measure our success based on our salary, houses, vacations, cars, etc..

Social media makes us even more miserable, while I'm on a rant, because we have to compare ourselves based on phony online personas that show a "got it all figured out in life" grotesquely virtuous version of ourselves. It's an arms race for good news and happy family photos to share. So, we self-promote and quantify our popularity with likes and comments. Then, of course, we get into hostile squabbles family and "friends" over political matters that would never happen in a face-to-face encounter. Considering that the characteristics of an imbalanced male include competitive, success-driven, materialistic, selfish, burnt-out, aligned with ego, angry, confrontational, and dishonest, I think that we are dealing with more than learning to read too soon that is influencing our energy balance.

I'm not a marxist hippie (I'm a meat hippie), but I think we would be healthier, and probably have more hair, if we were more community-minded. I heard that in some "primitive" cultures, they don't even have the word "my" in their language. Rather, their attitude is that things belong to the Earth. That seems right. And they're much healthier than us too, which is a low bar. Speaking of which, there are all the ways that we are getting poisoned to discuss - that's a factor too.

TOXIC EARTH

Ancient wisdom teaches us that there are two fundamental energies to life on Earth - when they are balanced, then we have health, and when they are not, then we experience disease. However, in ancient times, they weren't fluoridating their drinking water and throwing up 5G towers in their neighborhoods. We're exposed to so many new and exciting toxicities in modern times, and that's going to cause problems with our physical bodies. We are more than just physical bodies, which I'll get into next, and so the problems with our physical bodies spill over and cause more abstract energetic problems - some of which I'll lightly touch on here. But, I'm going to stay mostly on the physical level, and discuss the three major body parts that are compromised in modern living that have the greatest potential negative impact on our health and our hair: the liver, the gut, and cranio-facial development.

The liver has a big job. It is the largest internal organ for a reason. It's like the Chief Operations Officer in our body. It is responsible for processing nutrients from the gut into usable nutrients and active substances (cholesterol and enzymes), it recycles our active molecules, and it is our major detoxification organ.

Whatever the liver cannot destroy itself and repurpose, it will either package as gallstones to send through the digestive track, or send it to the skin where it can be excreted in the sebum - our skin and hair oil. It does so when it is over burdened with toxic matter to excrete, which commonly occurs when living a modern lifestyle. This toxic overload and subsequent sebum excretion can negatively impact our hair, because sebum is the oil that nourishes our hair from the root. So, it's probably not great for the health of our hair if that oil regularly contains toxic excretions.

The gallstones can be a problem too. The liver can only stock pile so many gallstones before they severely obstruct the bile ducts. The liver produces bile, which breaks down fats so that we can get valuable fat soluble vitamins (A,D,E,K), or whatever form that nutrition actually comes in, from our food. The obstruction can even interfere with the release of pancreatic enzymes, also critical for the digestion of food, especially protein. Our hair is not going to look good if we are getting inadequate amounts of protein and fat soluble nutrients from our food, along with the rest of our body.

The other way in which liver can affect our hair is through the life-force. This is a little more abstract, but I think we can handle it. Our liver was named as such because it was thought to be responsible for circulating the LIFE-force energy throughout the body. For that reason, weakness in the liver will manifest as a lack of vitality in the appearance of your skin and hair, as well as energy levels and quality of bodily functions. Specifically for the hair, as mentioned earlier, the life-force is thought to be stored in the hair. A weak life force flow will likely be reflected most strongly in the part of the body that is most rich in the life-force, which is the hair.

Think about how much of your age is shown in your hair: It grays, it thins, it recedes, it dries out and loses it's luster. You can tell how old someone is from behind sometimes just by looking at the hair. Youthful hair has a different energy to it than old person hair. It is more vibrant. Also, consider that women find balding men less attractive, and vitality underlies sexual attraction. In fact, sexual energy is the foundational energy in TCM. Weak sexual energy = bad hair = not attractive. Maybe there's a connection there? To be safe, we probably want to make sure that our liver is as healthy as possible.

The final problem associated with the liver, and the life-force, is stagnation. This may actually apply to blood flow as well. Stagnation is a blockage of flow in either life-force or fluids, both of which are influenced by the function of the liver. This can exacerbate the condition of body parts that are already suffering from insufficient flow of resources, like the hair.

The other form of stagnation is being stuck in one pole or the other. The natural energy flow on the Earth is a constant flow back and forth from the male to the female pole. Stagnation disrupts that rhythm. In TCM, all disease is theorized to be related to stagnation for this reason, and is basically the same idea as Paracelsus's Rhythmic System model for health. Since the liver manages flow in the body, then it is an important organ for maintaining rhythm.

One way in which poor liver function can get us stuck in the male pole is through our emotions. In TCM, each organ governs a part of our emotional constitution. The liver governs our anger and kindness. Anger weakens the liver and causes qi (life-force) to rise. In addition, a weak liver makes us prone to anger. This creates a negative feedback loop of perpetuating angry emotions. Therefore, preventing a rising expansionary force in the body from getting into our heads and bulging our skulls out will be more or less challenging based on the health of our liver.

More details on how to flush gallstones and facilitate healthy live-r function can be found in the Detoxifying the Liver section on the Etheric Body page.

The gut is the foundation of the health of our physical body. Like I mentioned earlier, not everything moving around on the Earth has a brain, a liver, kidneys, lungs, a pancreas, or even blood - but everything from a micro-organism to a human being has a digestive tract. If we have a poorly functioning gut, then we are going to be nutrient deficient and unable to literally get toxic crap out of our bodies. And that's going to cause problems.

I'm wary of any science pertaining to micro-organisms since the whole corona virus thing; but, the intestinal soil having the same technology as the physical Earth's soil, there being various organisms present, like fungi, worms, and bacteria, to absorb, recycle, and regenerate itself fits in with the old world philosophies of "as above, so below", "the microcosm is the macrocosm", and all that stuff. So, even though I haven't autopsied a human large intestine and examined the lining under a light microscope, I'm going to assume that there is such a thing as a gut flora, and the constitution of that gut flora will impact everything from basic biological functions to personality and emotions. For example, people who have had fecal transplants, which is like a gut flora transplant, reportedly develop similar physical features and personality traits to the donor. Fecal transplants aside, the main way that we influence the constitution of our gut flora is through what we run through our digestive tract.

Whatever stuff that we put into our bodies, the gut flora will do whatever it has to do to break down and process that stuff. It will call upon whichever micro-organisms it needs to do the best job possible. Fungi are good at breaking down heavy metals, which is why people with mercury fillings tend to have a fungal overgrowth in their small intestine, known as candida. Some bacterial strains are good at breaking down starchy foods, and so those strains will grow or shrink proportionally in population commensurate with the carb load of your diet. There are even natural parasites, which probably have a job to do too, feeding off of certain things that you don't need absorbed into your blood-stream that aren't, otherwise, being properly broken down.

While the gut flora adjusts its constitution to optimize the assimilation of nutrients and excretion of toxins, there are consequences to that reconstitution. Like the Earth, it's a delicate ecosystem in there, and any change will have cascading systematic effects. For example, due to adverse circumstances, the micro-organisms that normally line the intestinal wall and regulate what substances permeate into the blood-stream, might be antagonized by the overgrowth of another strain that has to deal with excess starch or heavy metals, leaving the intestinal wall vulnerable to passing undigested food matter. And/Or the liver isn't producing enough bile to break down fat soluble vitamins and toxins, or the ducts are so jammed up with gallstones that very little of the bile or even pancreatic enzymes are getting mixed into the food matter. This increases the amount of poorly digested food passing through digestive tract. Both could provoke the flora to upregulate a parasitic strain that feeds off of undigested food matter, thereby depriving us of the nutrients of our food; but, it's better than undigested food matter passing through the poorly guarded intestinal wall and into the blood-stream, which would put a strain on the liver and, thus, negatively affect it's ability to deliver things to body parts in need, such as dying hair. Probably, some gets through anyway because it's a suboptimal auxiliary operation.

Another potential issue with antagonization of the micro-organisms on the intestinal walls is that they protect it from being scratched and damaged by the fiber in our food. The vacation of or reduction in these gut protecting microbes would allow fibrous fecal matter to irritate the intestinal walls, which causes digestive irritation, which may lead to emotional irritation, and anger makes our skulls bulge. That's probably a stretch for some. But, based on 6+ years experience elimination dieting, I can attest to the connection between healthy gut function and irritability. "Anecdotal is not scientific. Blah blah blah"... whatever. It's true. Trust your own experiences. Science tries to take that power away from us.

I also suspect that our intuition is influenced by, or actually comes from, the concerting efforts of the gut flora. Like how you get butterflies in your stomach when you get nervous around a pretty girl (if your are still in the dating world), these micro-organisms get agitated by our sensory inputs and seem to be trying to communicate things to us. Maybe it's like Fantasia, where God is like Mickey Mouse and the microbes are like the brooms being conducted to do his bidding. I don't know. But, I think the gut flora needs a specific constitution for there to be clear communication through our intuition. A "gut feeling" is not going to be reliable if it's overgrown with parasites and fungus, which will discourage us from relying on this valuable male-energy balancing faculty altogether.

The catch-22 of all of this is that you need to use intuition to heal your gut, but your intuition is damaged from a damaged gut. So, healing the gut may take some guess work at first. Check out the Physical Body page for some ideas on healing the gut through diet. Obviously, the fecal transplant is an option too. I haven't tried it, but I've come across at least one guy showing that his hair got thicker after such a procedure. So, it could get results. My concern with fecal matter transplants, though, is that our gut flora changed for a reason. It was an adaptation to do the best detoxification job it could do under less than ideal circumstances. Now, it could be that our gut was less than ideally constituted in the first place due to cesarian section at birth, followed by fake food formula, immune anti-booster shots, and trigger-happy antibiotics prescribing pharmakeia sales reps, aka doctors. Nevertheless, I think it's a better approach to try to reconstitute the gut with dietary and detoxification interventions first. Otherwise, the gut will revert back to it's previous suboptimal state to deal with all the toxins and food allergies that we have.

Weston A. Price founded the American Dental Association's research division and spent the decade of the 1930's studying the existing primitive populations of the time. If you read one chapter of his book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, it's pretty clear why you and all of your friends needed braces and wisdom teeth extractions. You see picture after picture of people with perfect dental arches who grew up eating fish guts for breakfast, and you start to realize that the human body requires more nutritional density from the first meal of the day than what you get from a Poptart.

Narrow dental arches are not just a cosmetic problem. In his study, Price noted the wide disparity in disease immunity, fertility, and neurological impairment in the populations that were subsisting on their native foods compared to those who had adopted the modern foods of the time (refined grains, sugar, and industrial seed oils), even in the first generation of that change. There are horrific photos of these people suffering severe tooth decay, infections, and just mangled and missing teeth, which is scary because the bad food that these people had access to in the 1930's was likely higher quality than the bad food that we have today.

One of the biggest reasons that our dental health and development has a significant impact on our overall health is because a wide dental arch allows for adequate air flow through the nostrils. The nostrils clean and condition the air for our lungs, and the mouth does not. A narrow arch will pinch off the air flow through the nasal passages, which forces us to breath through our mouths. The mouth does no such filtering or conditioning. It's suboptimal breath, and the quality of our breath is extremely important.

To put the importance of the quality of our breath in perspective in the hierarchy of necessities, our bodies can go about 3 WEEKS without food, 3 DAYS without water, 3 HOURS without warmth, and only 3 MINUTES without air before we die. Air is the most important nutrient that we get from the Earth. This may be in part why, in the Bible, it says that God "breathed" into Adam the "breath of life", and did so "through his nostrils". It is also why when we die, we are said to have "taken our last breath". The implication is that breath and air is more than just gas. Rather, the "breath of life" contains exactly that, life.

In TCM theory, air is also theorized to contain a life element. In Chinese characters, qi, the life-force, and "breath" share the same symbol. It is because, in TCM, when fire (male force) and water (female force) meet, they make steam, which is the qi vapor in the character. In this character below, the life-force vapor is symbolized by the bars on top, and the asterisk-looking thing is the fire that boils the water.

The air of this realm contains a life-force. Therefore, poor breath will lead to poor absorption of the life-force, and, thus, weak vitality. Weak vitality, as mentioned in the live-r section, will reflect in the health of our hair. At the very least, breath is as fundamental to life, and so it must be at least a consideration when investigating the origin of any disease, including MPB.

The mingling, or balance, of the polarities in the breath of life has interesting implications, and may have more of direct effect on pattern loss. For example, the nostrils themselves are theorized, in TCM, to stimulate one or the other polar energy. The left nostril nourishes the female yin energy, and calms us down, and the right nourishes the male yang energy, which amps us up. So, then, chronic breathing through the right nostril will keep you in a state of fight or flight, which will provoke feelings of stress and aggression. Based on the theories that I have proposed, this would pull expansionary energy up into the skull and create a dispositional preference for sclerosis. So let's say, for example, that as a result of poor cranio-facial development, or in 8th grade your middle school math teacher does a post move into your face at basketball practice and breaks your nose with his elbow, you do not have the ability to get a full deep breath through your left nostril throughout your entire post-pubescent life, then that might exacerbate a male imbalance and contribute to MPB.

Another way that poor facial development affects MPB, potentially, is how it yields certain facial structure features that are more susceptible to skull expansion. One of Paul Taylor's principles of skull expansion is that a wide face relative to head width serves to keep the skull expansion forces in check. A wide dental arch formed with the aid of liberal amounts of animal organs and fats in pre- and post-natal nutrition will result in a "broad face" based on Price's research. Therefore, good cranio-facial development could help to prevent MPB, if Paul Taylor's principle is true.

In Price's book, he did make one comment about MPB. He noted in his study of the Aborigine men that "little baldness was seen even in the very old." The implication in this observation is that other populations that he studied did exhibit some MPB. In fact, there is one photo in the book of an African man with fairly progressed MPB and a "superb" dental arch. He is photographed in the bottom left corner below:

Note how the man with MPB, although has a well-formed face, has the mark of an MPB skull with acute lateral curvature in his forehead and acute curvature in the front of the skull at the hairline. This is evidence that the skull can still deform despite how properly the face is formed. There were not any other men photographed with advanced MPB. And the baldest guy in Weston A. Price's book is, by far, Weston A. Price. Based on all this, I have to believe that a properly developed face does NOT give you immunity to MPB, but it probably helps prevent it from developing as quickly or to the degree that which it did in Weston A. Price.

Some alternative theories claim poor cranio-facial development to be the unique cause of MPB. I don't think that's the case, but I think that they are worth mentioning here. For example, a dentist named Bryan Dyre claims that there is a direct correlation between his patients with a Class II Malocclusion (overbite) and MPB. His theory is that a receded mandible, or lower jaw, severely impedes the flow of blood through the temporal artery, which feeds the scalp hair. He actually measured the blood pressure in that artery in bald and non-bald guys to prove that. Not surprisingly, men with MBP had much weaker blood flow.

Another guy with a website called "TMJ Occlusion" added to this research with a few articles. His claim was that poor cranio-facial development causes forward head posture, which puts excessive strain on the neck muscles. The strain on the neck muscles then moves up the kinetic chain, causing tension in the scalp perimeter muscles in order to help support the head. Chronically tense scalp perimeter muscles will pull the galea muscle on top of the scalp tight. This tightness, he claims, will compress the capillary network in the scalp, reducing blood flow, and encourage skull expansion as a way to protect the brain against excessive compression.

There may be some validity to both theories. At the very least, it probably does not help MPB to have poor head posture and a Malocclusion. The problem I have with it being THE CAUSE is that females have Class II Malocclusions and forward head posture just as bad a men, but they don't go bald. Nor do children, who probably have overbites and poor head posture, as well. Toddlers probably don't have malocclusions or tight galeas either. The only obvious connection, as far as I can tell, between all the humans with MPB is their skull shape. So, I'm going with that.

Information about orthodontic interventions that I have used to correct poor cranio-facial development, but not reverse MPB, can be found in the The Breath of Life section on the Etheric Body page.

MPB is a complex disease. There are physical phenomenon like iron levels, dental arches, skull expansion, gut damage, gallstones, and sclerosis. Plus, there is all this weird energy stuff with polarities, life-force, stagnation, rising emotions, etc.. Having grown up going to normal fake doctors and learning normal fake science, it's difficult to get a grip on a lot of this stuff. At least, that's my experience.

How do you correct energy imbalances? What do you do about the life-force? What's the bioenergetic link between our emotions and physiology? We're never going to understand any of this if our concept of the human body is little more than a composition of proteins, DNA, water molecules, and fat. Rather, we need to extend, and even CORRECT, our understanding of the human being to go beyond our physical bodies. Only when we do this can we fully understand the complexity of our disease and figure out what it is telling us, and what we can do about it.

In four element Alchemy, man is conceived as having four bodies. In addition to the Physical body, there is an Etheric body, a Soul body, and a Spirit body. Each body gives us different information, or feedback, and they are part of an integrated system that is designed to guide us through life. It sounds complicated, and it somewhat is. But, we're complicated creatures, probably by design. So, embrace it. Even so, working within this framework will be a more effective guide for our efforts in understanding and overcoming our disease than "it's all genetic, and science will have the cure in another 5 years" - that's a waste of time.

Everything on the Earth has a Physical Body. Everything is made of the same stuff. A rock and a human are made from the same stuff. Everything on the Earth needs minerals from the Earth to maintain its form. That is why the Physical Body is associated with the element of Earth. This body is also associated with the Mineral Kingdom, as it is the basis of our composition, and so it is where we can address mineral deficiency and toxicity in the cause of disease.

The pathology of MPB does seem to originate in the Physical Body and relate to a specific mineral. The increase in the iron mineral in our body during puberty creates the conditions for the systematic male-energy imbalance. Therefore, interventions in the Physical Body level that are aimed at managing iron levels in our body could benefit us. For example, women menstruate every month and are much more immune to hair loss than us. Perhaps it would help if we lost some blood every month too. Blood-letting is a therapy that has withstood the test of time, because it gets rid of excess iron and cleans out your blood. How often do you get the oil changed in your car? It's a similar concept. Except cars can't replenish themselves with fresh oil. It's not as sophisticated of a machine.

In addition, dietary interventions serve to heal and fortify us, because the minerals that we ingest are going to constitute our Physical Body. We need to put stuff in your body that it can use. Fruit roll ups are a waste of digestive energy. You get nothing from fake food other than cheap gasoline for weak combustion. Rather, see how your body runs on the minerals from organ meats and high octane fuel, like bone marrow fat.

On the subject of digestive work, in the Physical Body is where we can reconstitute our gut flora. This improves all of our bodily functions, including hair growth; and, as a major bonus, it strengthens our intuitive capacities. Our intuition is a powerful faculty that responds to all four bodies. It can improve each component in a unique but interrelated way. In the case of the Physical Body, it will help guide us on how to fuel and fortify it, once it's cleaned out, fixed up, and up and running again.

The Physical Body sets the foundation for the four body system. MPB goes deeper than the Physical Body. Rather, it's a cosmetic manifestation of a systematic problem. But, deficiencies and toxicities will cause disruptions to the whole system. In that sense, interventions at this level can, theoretically, facilitate quicker healing at all levels. For example, there is the phenomenon of mind (spirit) over matter (physical), which I believe is 100% valid. But a stronger body will make a stronger mind and, thus, make "mind over matter" more effective.

Everything that is alive on the Earth has an Etheric Body. This would include plants, animals, and humans, but exclude things like rocks. This lesser known body is associated with the element of Water and the Plant Kingdom. That is because, much like plants, within our Etheric Body FLOWS an insubstantial energy that is immeasurable by any scientific instrument. It flows through a network, called meridians, which connect our various body parts together in order to bring it all to life and unify it's operations under one governing, but not autocratic, intelligence.

As in plants, the life-force energy is stored in the seed. If our minds were not perverted by Science, then we would observe that things on the Earth never explode into existence, but rather everything grows from seed. What's in a seed? How does it know when to sprout? How does it know what kind of plant, animal, or human to become? How does it know when to flower, when to fruit, and when to reproduce? I used to believe it was all sterile transcriptions from fixed protein code that predetermines our whole existence and that no one has ever seen. Now it makes more sense to me that the seed contains an initial energy from it's parents, and that initial energy has it's own intelligence that is constantly sensing and adapting to its environment. It's fairly obvious in plants. But who cares about plants?

The Etheric Body is the strongest in plants because it is their highest form. A plant cannot move, it cannot think, and it doesn't have emotions. It has only the internal flow of life-force energy on which to rely to govern its biological functions and respond to stimuli. The life-force uses water as a medium to distribute nutrients, excrete toxins, and communicate between parts. But, the life-force does more than that. Plants demonstrate an incredible will to live. Think of weeds growing through asphalt cracks in the middle of a city, or trees that have grown out of a sheer cliff face. I have trees in my yard that grew up in the shade, then turned 90° parallel to the ground and out in order to stretch it's leaves into this one patch of sunshine that's not shrouded by the other, more vertical, trees. How does a plant know to do that? How does it know where that patch of sunshine is? How does it know the optimal form to grow into? Random genetic mutation? It can't be. I have at least three trees that do that. And we're the same way. We have that unconscious intelligence that wills us to live and can stretch us to that patch of light. We must have it, because we too grow from seed.

Most TCM interventions are aimed at correcting life-force flow issues in the Etheric Body. In TCM, the life-force is referred to as qi, which we have in a few different forms and can get it from a few different sources, which I will touch on more on the Etheric Body page. Good health is when the qi is flowing vigorously through the meridians, and pain, or disease, is our experience when there is "stagnation" in the flow of qi.

Stagnation is a blockage in flow. In our Physical Body we feel stagnation when there is a bruise caused by trauma to the blood vessels. These blood vessels have to get damned up temporarily to be repaired. Meanwhile, there is a swelling in the area to bring additional resources for the repairs. The overall effect is discomfort in the form of pain upon touch. Stagnation in the meridians is kind of similar, comes with its own form of discomfort, and can be the result of an emotional trauma as well as a physical trauma. The problem with emotional traumas, though, unlike banging your leg into the corner of the table, is that they can become chronic. The result is that the Etheric Body may block off an energy meridian for such a long time that it no longer remembers how to or even considers using it. This can cause a phenomenon of healing inertia (if that's a real term) in which, after you remove the negative stressor, the disease still persists as though it were still present. I think this may be related to why I still have stress dreams about high school football even though I haven't played a competitive game of football since 2002.

Acupuncture treatments can relieve stagnation through stimulation at points on the body where the flow of the life-force can be influenced. During the treatment, the patient, much like a plant, remains physically still while the acupuncturist stimulates the life-force to flow through the meridians where the flow is weak or stagnant. This healing modality probably would not have existed for thousands of years or have any noticeable effect on the patient if there were no such thing as the life-force, meridians, and an Etheric Body.

Plant medicines, like herbalism and homeopathy, are another Etheric Body intervention. These modalities use the life-force intelligence in plants to correct life-force flow issues in us, like stagnation. This is predicated on the notion that the life-force flow is so strong in plants that it can influence our own life-force in a similar manner to its own characteristics. It's not just the chemical compounds either, because homeopathic remedies have infinitesimal amounts of the plant compound and they still have an effect. That's because dilution of the physical plant matter, which is the basis for preparing a homeopathic remedy, actually potentiates the life-force from that plant to give it a stronger effect on ours.

One last note on the name of this body: The Etheric Body is also called the Life-Force body, for what should be obvious reasons. The connection between ether and life-force is that ether comes from the Greek word "aether", which is where we get our word "air". It's another acknowledgment of the life-force content in the air. Ether is the life-force energy in the air that we breath, that's all around us, and inside of us. The one bodily function that plants, animals, and humans have in common, is that we all have to breath. And what we all breath is more than just gas, it's life-force.

Everything that moves on the Earth has a Soul Body. This is the body that animates us with movement and emotions. For this reason, it is associated with the Animal (animate) Kingdom and the Air element. Since the Soul Body is the highest form of an animal, it is especially strong in them. Animals move with incredible grace and athleticism. They can fly, climb, jump, and move at speeds and with agility such that no elite human athlete can compare to the least athletic tree squirrel.

In addition, animals have very sharp instincts, which are guided by and interrelated with their emotions. Emotions are a form of instinct, because they give us information on which to act without premeditated thought. You don't decide to be angry, you just get angry. They are also a form of movement, which is why the word "motion" is built into the word. Such is why we have expressions about something beautiful "moving" us. There actually is a movement within our Soul Body.

Movements and emotions strongly influence each other. Our emotions show in our body language. For example, nervousness, anxiety, and stress make our bodies tense up, and everything gets pulled inward. Lack of confidence and inability to bear the burdens of the day are evident in slumped shoulders and a drooping head. Conversely, movements also impact our emotions. Correcting our slumped posture makes us feel more confident. Spreading our arms makes us feel more open and accepting. Drudgery jobs with minimal and unexciting movement make us feel tired and lifeless, while doing something that we enjoy invigorates us.

To nourish the Soul Body, it is necessary to experience a full range of movement and emotions. I believe that the Soul Body is associated with Air, because Air is temperamental. Air can be still or it can blow. It can blow gently or it can blow aggressively. It can start and stop at any time. It can blow in different directions, and change direction instantly and with varying gusts. It can be warm or cold, and dry or wet. It can twirl and whirl, it can dance and play, and can move whimsically about freely and fancifully. This is how are Soul Body wants our Physical Body to move.

This is not how we move, though. Rather, we are in routines. We do basically the same movements every day and without much emotion. Instead, we are just "going through the motions." Even when we think we are being healthy by going to the gym, we have a routine. I'm not anti-exercise, quite the contrary. I think we're supposed to move a lot, and move with variety, like the wind - free, wild, and with emotion. That is, our movements have to be interesting to us and done with enthusiasm. And having a routine, works counter to all of that.

The heart is an important organ when it comes to our emotions and the Soul Body. Heart and soul are often paired together in language and culture. We have phrases about putting our "heart and soul" into something, and being the "heart and soul" of whatever team. In addition, there are many songs titled "Heart and Soul", such as the classic piano tune and another by Huey Lewis and the News. There's even a store here in Santa Rosa called "Heart and Sole" that specializes in athletic footwear. That last example wasn't very good. Nevertheless, there are still a lot more of such associations, and they are all about LOVE or falling in LOVE. Therefore, I suspect that, much like how the liver is the seat of the Etheric Body, the heart is the seat of the Soul Body, and our heart, more than any other emotion wants us to feel love. This has interesting implications for MPB because the heart just so happens to be the organ that manages the cold-hearted system that is failing to supply our dying hair with nutrients, and is cutting off the circulation in part of the system named after a love goddess. This may be a major piece of the pathological puzzle.

Another way in which the Soul Body can impact MPB, or disease in general, is through trauma in the Etheric Body. As mentioned in the previous section, chronic negative emotions cause traumas in the Etheric Body in the form of stagnation in the life-force flow. This makes healing more challenging because you have to retrain the life-force to flow how it did before the stressor was present. My guess as to why the Etheric Body is prone to traumas is that it's a protective mechanism against future stress. The Etheric Body blocks and redirects the energy flow in ways that heighten our sensitivity to similar stressors in hopes that we know to avoid them in the future and the physical deterioration that results. Sometimes we don't do this, and take drugs instead. Even if we don't, and we actually do something about what is stressing us out, then we will still be overly-sensitive to stress because the trauma in the etheric body needs to be cleared. So, we think, worry, and feel fight or flight when there is no need. We're stuck in our male pole, and the end point of that is sclerosis in the Physical Body.

We can't ignore our emotions. Emotions are the way that our Souls are communicating with us. Experiencing the full range of emotions is considered good for the Soul, even negative ones because they give us information. The problem is when we are in environments where we are chronically experiencing negative emotions. This is our Souls is telling us that there is a something in our life that we need to change. If not, this stress will wear us down physically and cause disruptions in the Etheric Body. We also can't live our lives in fear of making such changes. We have the spirit of Ares in us to overcome that fear. And the male energy in our Souls want us to have the courage to act.

My last note on the Soul Body is that the energy of the emotion has a weird way of manifesting in our physical form. In TCM, it is theorized that the life-force is the interface between the Physical and Soul bodies. So, whatever emotions we embody, we will actual embody; i.e. they manifest in our physical features. Our life-force brings our emotional energy to the surface. For us, our iron levels cause hard emotions, and our hard emotions cause more hardening, which puts us in yet another negative feedback loop all facilitated by the life-force.

It's getting complicated. The Bodies are all influencing each other and and we're getting a lot of feedback. Fortunately, we have Spirit Body to reign it all in.

The Spirit Body is represented by the element of Fire. It is the Ego, the "spark" of the divine in us, our continuity from one life to the next, and is driving us to truth-seeking, self-discovery, and self-improvement. The Spirit Body gives us our unique faculty of objective thought, which distinguishes us from the Animal Kingdom, because it is through objective thought that we can acquire wisdom from our experiences in order to improve ourselves.

Animals do not have the abilities as us. Animals can experience emotions, but they cannot think why they had an emotion. Rather, they just act. Animals can learn little pet tricks or figure out how to break into your garden and eat all your cabbage. They can know things intuitively and through instinct. But, they cannot think and acquire wisdom in the manner that we can. Moreover, they don't have the internal drive to do so. For example, do house cats want to improve themselves? Would they sign up for hot yoga and do juice cleanses if they could?- No. They're happy being fat and lazy, hunting a few birds and then taking a nap on a warm rock. Even gorillas who have learned sign language, can fully communicate with humans, and can even understand existential concepts like the inevitability of death, once you set them free, they're not going to any Tony Robbins seminars. They're not interested in transforming their life. They're going right back to being a gorilla: back to the jungle, claiming females, defending their territory, and eating bananas.

Humans are different. We have a compulsive drive to improve ourselves and do all these things, albeit often misguided by mainstream health advice, because our Spirit Body has us on a path to a higher realm. And this body gives us the faculty of objective thought to analyze the information provided to it by the other three bodies in order to accomplish such. For example, it is through the Spirit Body and objective thought that we can identify the source of our disease and take corrective action.

Ironically, our disease is caused by too much thinking. So, the thing that we need to do is the thing that we do too much, and we need to do it to stop doing the thing that we're doing, by doing it. What? How do your think your way out of a thinking problem? How do you dig yourself out of a hole? Fire is male. Fire is spirit. Male is thinking. The Spirit Body has us literally fighting figurative fire with figurative fire. This is all very confusing. But that's the game! It's supposed to be a challenge. If not, it wouldn't be any fun.

The four body system is designed for the Spirit Body, the Mind, and thinking, to be in charge. Thinking is our highest function for a reason. It's supposed to help us. Otherwise, we wouldn't have it. Thinking is a very powerful function (it can move bone) and the objectivity that comes with it is our key asset. Objectivity liberates us from our impulses. We can experience an angry aggressive emotion in our Soul Body, but we don't have to act on it. Rather, we can think about it, interpret what it means, and use it for a higher purpose other than animalistic intimidation or defense.

We can also experience sensations like hunger in our Physical Body, but choose not to eat. We have the ability to fast. Animals will never intentionally fast. But we do. Fasting, allegedly, has strong health benefits due its detoxification and cellular cleansing effects. I don't believe that anymore. I do believe, based on experience, that it has a healing effect though. The difference is that the healing is not physical, at least at first. In fact, it has the opposite effect. It's deterioration. Rather, the healing is spiritual. And that spiritual healing manifests as physical healing AFTER the fast, so long as you fast in the correct way. It's because, it's not our cells that get cleansed, and the so-called phenomenon of autophagy, rather it's the Spirit, which has powerful healing effects on the whole system.

Jesus famously fasted for 40 days before he was tempted by the Devil in the wilderness. The fasting is an important detail in that story. Why? Because fasting teaches us discipline. It reminds us that we are separate from and more than our Physical Body and its urges. In doing so, it strengthens our Spirit. The more separated from our emotional and physical impulses that we become, the more objective we will be in our thought, and the more opportunity we have for the Spirit to learn and acquire wisdom from our experiences while on Earth. Furthermore, and this might be the most important detail, is that Jesus NEVER performed a single healing miracle BEFORE his 40 day fast. The implication is that, if we want to unlock our full healing potential, then we have to fast (while overcoming temptation).

Before I move on, consider the connection that animals do not have a Spirit Body, hence cannot think (in the manner that we do), and they do not go bald. They lose hair in patches due to malnutrition or when we do experiments on rats. But, it is nothing as chronic or progressive as MPB. No spirit - no thinking - no MPB. There is something distinctly male about this whole spiritual transformation stuff. Just a thought for now.

Now that we have a deeper understanding of the human being and the Earth that we live in, I'm going to take a crack at summarizing all of the information that I have discussed into a full pathology of MPB involving all four bodies of the fourfold man:

Starting at preconception, we were not given the nutrition to develop a properly-formed face. The result is narrow skull shape features that make it more susceptible to acute rounding due to expansionary pressure later in life. In addition, the poor cranio-facial development makes us more susceptible to anxiety and aggression by way of poor nasal air flow, which indirectly supplies the expansionary pressure through the attendant rising life-force energy.

In early childhood, we are subjected to academic learning prematurely. It impedes the development of our imagination, and at the same time over-trains us to rely on logical thought. This makes us susceptible to a male-energy imbalance later in life, as we harden into adulthood and are naturally more inclined to use our logical thinking abilities, and less inclined to be imaginative. In addition, the academic curriculum, at best, discourages use of intuition, the other form of this female faculty, in favor of data metrics and "hard science". Use of the intuition is further inhibited by gut issues caused by poor nutrition, vaccines, antibiotics, agricultural chemicals, chemically treated water, inadequate sun exposure, artificial environments, blue-light, and EMF emitting devices to name a few, which interfere with the quality of information that we get from our intuition, and, thus, discourages our reliance on such.

During puberty, the influx of aggressive warrior energy from the iron in our blood is not properly directed into building confidence and courage through traditional rites of passage. Instead, it fuels negative fear-driven emotions like anger, worry, resentment, jealousy, disappointment, indecision, and dominance, which pull the life-force up into the skull, expanding it in areas that are most susceptible due to a combination of natural head shape and poor cranio-facial development. This expansion erodes the sharp contours of the skull, which either puts a strain on the arterial network delivering blood to the hair across these contours and/or the skull is re-contoured in a way that the Etheric Body can no longer can differentiate between the forehead and the top of the skull, and reclassifies the entire area as forehead, which stops the life-force flow to the hair follicles there.

The life-force flow, itself, is weak to begin with, as a result of liver toxicity, which is going to contribute to the lack of flow to, and thus the prevalence of weakened hair in, the bald areas of the scalp. In addition, as a result of a chronic "fight or flight" emotions due to a combination of poor nasal air flow and poorly channeled male aggression, the Etheric Body shifts the life-force flow to actually make us more sensitive to "fight or flight". This is a protective mechanism in place to discourage us from continually subjecting ourselves to negative stressors like unfulfilling jobs, bad relationships, or just dispositions that make us not like ourselves. But, due to social conditioning and/or lack of courage, we tolerate these stressors, thus exacerbating the emotional constitution, life-force concentration in the skull, and subsequent expansion.

On the back end of the circulatory system, our hearts are suffering from a lack of warmth due to a disconnect between the Spirit and Soul bodies. Specifically, our hearts desires are being ignored by our Minds. We're in the daily drudgery, doing meaningless work, and won't break free from it due to family pressure, social pressure, competitiveness, and most of all fear. As a result, the Ares energy is expressed in imbalanced ways. It makes us prone to emotions that have a bioenergetic hardening effect on the body, and an overall propensity to overuse the sclerotic function of the male pole. This dispositional imbalance influences the behavior of the heart, which is already not getting the warmth it needs to have the compassion to listen to and nurture the needs of our struggling hair follicles, because our minds are not listening to and nurturing the needs of our Soul. All of this leaves us cold-hearted in literal and figurative ways, with calcified skull foramen, and a completely defunct circulatory system from the heart to the hair and back.

Interventions

So, basically, our problem is that we have debilitated circulation to the hair follicles, be it blood, life-force, or both, as a result of a grotesquely expanded skull and some degree of over calcification in the skull foramen. Furthermore, we have these four bodies, which are influencing the manifestation of this disease. Our heads are expanding in our Physical Body. The life-force is weak, and not flowing to the hair follicle in the Etheric Body. In addition, the life-force is facilitating a bioenergetic hardening in our Physical Body in response to the emotional constitution in our Soul Body, which is being influenced by social conditioning since childhood and a mineral that we have in our Physical Body. But, ultimately, the disease starts and ends in the Spirit Body, because the Spirit Body is in charge.

The Spirit Body is in charge, but it's not supposed to be authoritarian. Rather, the three body complex was designed to guide the Spirit through life in this realm. It's supposed to be a collaboration. The Spirit Body needs the information from the other bodies to maintain balance in the system. But, we're not in balance. Somehow, we're stuck in the male pole. Why?- Thinking.

The sensory information that we receive from the three lower bodies is processed by two independent thinking faculties, each of which correspond to a unique polar energy. The faculty with ultimate authority corresponds to the male pole, which is done in the Mind, the seat of the Spirit Body, the highest form, and also known as the Ego. Therefore, perhaps the source of our male imbalance is that the Spirit/Ego Body has become egotistical. It has stopped collaborating, it is not listening to the other bodies, it is constantly overriding the intuition and over-relying on itself, the Mind, and its own faculty of thought, and has become a thinking tyrant. In doing so it is embodying many of the imbalanced male characteristics, such as controlling, dominant, stubborn, closed-off, refusing help, egoism, over-thinking, and critical. If our Spirit is this way, and it's in charge, then that's going to have a cascading energetic effect on the whole system.

So, ultimately, the main focus of the interventions that we undertake is to cultivate AWARENESS in the Spirit Body. The Mind must be able to think, but it also must be aware. This can be very difficult because we're all extensively trained to think, but rarely, if ever, are we trained to be aware. Such requires quieting the mind, turning off the thinking function, and being present within our body; at least temporarily, so that we can get all the valuable sensory information being made available to us and listen to our intuition. If the lower bodies and intuition are doing their job properly, which they may not be due to toxic overload, which we may have to work on too, then they are providing the Mind with the feedback it needs to figure out what is causing the imbalance so that it can solve the problem. This is why we have a Mind, to figure stuff out. But, the system needs to work together. We have to listen FIRST, and then we can think about how to solve problem.

DHT blocking chemicals and hair cloning are to sorts of asinine solutions that our Minds are going to come up with when they are completely disconnected with our bodies and try to think our way through the entire problem. Let's not do that. In my experience, it's a waste of 13 years of your life. Instead, we are going to become AWARE of the information that we are receiving from each of the bodies, and use that to guide our interventions. That act, itself, could be therapeutic for our disease because the awareness, listening, openness, and receptivity are all powerful divine feminine qualities that could serve to refine our disturbed male energy.

PHYSICAL BODY INTERVENTIONS

The easiest way to start building awareness is through our basic sensory experience. The Physical Body has five senses and all of those are giving us information. When we are too much in our Mind and consumed with our thoughts, then we can't even see, hear, smell, taste, or feel anything. Our thoughts drown it all out. That's not good. I'll let Winnie the Pooh explain:

"Don't underestimate the value in doing nothing, of just going along, listening to all the things you can't hear, and not bothering".

We need to start listening to all the things we can't hear. Recall that four of the five senses are uniquely located in the head. Therefore, the natural flow of information is in through the head, not out, as with thinking. We need to take time to be aware of what we can see, feel, taste, smell, and hear in the moment in order to bring us back to the present. We need to be aware of what we are sensing with our Physical Body. And don't question The Pooh.

On the subject of Pooh, we have to pay attention to the information coming from our digestive tract. If you think about it, much of the feedback that we get from our Physical Body comes from the digestive system in the form of farting, pooping, burping, bloating, and even things like eczema, fatigue, and insomnia, if you understand the detoxification pathway. We don't have to keep a weird fart journal, or something. But, by being aware the digestive tract output is going to help us to figure out potential food intolerances and identify toxic exposures.

In general, the Physical Body needs a well functioning gut to detoxify itself and recover from any disease. But, the most important aspect of gut health, for us, could be in strengthening our intuition. This is our female faculty and by using it and relying on it, we can help balance our male energy. Furthermore, the inspiration that we want to guide our healing efforts comes from the divine wisdom that we get through our intuition. None of that is going to happen when the gut lining is in a shambles, which it likely is because it takes a huge beating from all of the toxic chemicals in our water, food, furniture, carpet, walls, car, clothes, cookware, soaps, and almost every aspect of modern living. We likely need to take extreme measures to improve the health of our digestive tract. Otherwise, it's going to interfere with the quality of information that we get from our "gut".

Gut healing protocols aside, we need to be aware of what our body is in the mood for. We need to pay attention to what appeals to us, meal to meal. Whatever that is, it is probably the mineral configuration that our body needs. Note that the body does not need Burger King. That is poison. If we are craving junk (non-food) food, then we have not adequately healed our gut. Or maybe we just need a healthy version of what we associate with that type of food, but instead made with fermented whole grains, organic produce, and cooked in beef fat.

Doing muscle testing and pendulum dowsing on food is a good way to strengthen the intuition, as well as a cheap way to accurately identify food intolerances. If you have no idea what that is, I'll have some basic info on The Physical Body page because, in my experience, it takes much of the guess work out of elimination dieting. In general, though, it's probably overall good to emphasize "going with your gut" rather than over analyzing decisions, especially minor ones, in order to start working on balancing our male thinking energy.

The last thing that we need to be aware of in our Physical Body, and this might be the most important thing in our efforts to recover, is the shape of our skulls. For one, the way that our skulls have expanded in grotesque ways is a reflection of the inner turmoil in our Soul and Spirit. That's not good. But, we can use it as a guide for the inner body work that we must do.

The other manner in which awareness of a skull shape is important is that I don't see another way to permanently recover our hair without re-contouring our skull. This is a more cosmetic issue than the soul-spirit turmoil aspect of the expansion, but a fun and worthwhile challenge to our ingenuity, nonetheless. Study the shape of your head. Figure out where it has expanded and rounded. If you have an m-shape receding hairline, like me, then the bulges will be in the forehead and forelock as a result of an over-active prefrontal cortex. If you have thinning at the crown, then that area is bulging up. Or maybe your sides are pushing out and your hairline is getting pushed up. Figure out where it is and what it means, then start pushing it back in.

We need to flatten our skulls back into a more contoured shape. This will either help to relieve the strain on the arterial network on the top of the skull in the Physical Body, or, more likely, help the Etheric Body distinguish between parts of the scalp that should have hair, like the top of the skull, and the parts that shouldn't have hair, like the forehead, and send the life-force back to the hair follicles in those regions. Quieting the Mind and working on our emotional constitution will reduce the internal outward force, but we'll need some external force to compress the bulge back in. If the skull can expand out, then it can compress back in.

If you need inspiration for how to re-contour your skull with localized forces, I have my best ideas, so far, posted on the Skull Re-Contouring section in the Physical Body page.

ETHERIC BODY INTERVENTIONS

In the Etheric Body, we need to be aware of the life-force and how it is flowing or congesting in the body. Then, we can start moving it around to our advantage. At the very least we want to be able to move it down.

Recall that the qi, or life-force, is the interface between the physical and emotional, aka soul, bodies. That means that the rising sensation that we feel along with an aggressive male emotion, like anger, is the life-force rising. Or, when we over-think a decision to the extent that our head is throbbing in the front of the skull, that's the life-force concentrated in our prefrontal cortex. And the problem with the life-force in our heads is that the life-force is a FORCE. Otherwise, it wouldn't be called a life-"force". It would be called a life-tingling sensation, or something silly and impotent like that.

Our major problem is that we have a force in our heads that's pushing out on and bulging our skulls. That's the life-force. That's why thoughts have a force, that's why our prayers heal ourselves and others. It comes from the life-force, which is pretty strong force. If it can telepathically heal people, if it can push a weed through NYC asphalt and grow a rock on the side of a cliff, then it can push your skull out a few millimeters, or so. Furthermore, it's expansionary in nature, which is evident, again, in the disparate broadness in male and female bodies.

If we can feel the congestion in our head when we're frustrated or when we have been ruminating for a while on our thoughts, then we can become aware of life-force stagnation. Whenever we feel that, we need take measures to direct the life-force downward to prevent further skull expansion. That feeling of congestion occurs in the head because the life-force is stuck, and not flowing back down. Congestion is a simple form of stagnation that we can feel in our body even if we don't have any training. We just have to be still, empty our mind, be aware, and dedicate time to doing so. Usually, all it takes to direct the life-force downwards is simple focused diaphragmatic breathing. Directing our awareness to the abdomen will naturally move the life-force to that area. And due to the downward flow of the life-force, it will have a calming effect on our emotions.

If we have difficulty calming down with simple focused breathing, then we have persistent stagnation. This means that we have some meridian blockages or a life-force that has been conditioned to be in fight or flight mode. As a result, we're stuck in the male pole. This is likely due to a exposure to a chronic emotional trauma or another persistent negative stressor. We have to figure out what that source is and eliminate it. Then, we can do some reconditioning of the life-force, ourselves. In my experience, removing persistent stagnated life-force from the head can be much accomplished with mediation methods that are just slightly more advanced than focused breathing. It requires a little more focus and imagination, but these are things that we can learn quickly and start implementing. I'll post these techniques on the Etheric and Spirit Body page because it does takes time, dedication, and increased awareness with our Ego working in tandem with the life-force to remove persistent stagnation.

Once we are aware of simple stagnation, and have experience moving the life-force down and throughout our Etheric Body, then we can start messing around with energy healing modalities like homeopathy, herbalism, acupuncture, and maybe even weirder stuff like sound healing and crystals to complement our meditation work. These other energy work modalities require more time, research, financial investment, and experimentation to start seeing a benefit. Although It may be necessary for deeper healing. In the meantime, we can get proficient at basic meditation techniques to help us get more intuitive with the life-force and access an energy inside of us that has hitherto been untapped.

The trickier stagnation to correct is in the closed energy pathways that specifically run to our hair. Recall that qi, in TCM, is believed to be stored in the hair. If that's true, then it supports the theory that weak life-force flow is more of what is causing follicle miniaturization than weak blood flow. Those miniaturized hairs even LOOK like they have weak life-force energy. So, if there are meridians that run qi to the hair follicles, then those meridians probably have not been used in a long time; because why would the body send qi to be stored in a hair that's not even there? And even if the Etheric Body stopped sending qi to that follicle because it no longer recognizes that terrain as an area where hair normally grows, it still may be possible to re-stimulate life-force flow to those bald areas to reverse miniaturization by doing some sophisticated life-force energy work.

Another reason why I think that blood-flow is not the only factor in miniaturization, and why life-force could be what is lacking in addition, is how I see that "willing to survive" life-force characteristic in hairs on bald scalp. I have these hairs on my bald temples that are still growing, sometimes full length, even though all the hairs around them have disappeared. If it were all a matter of blood to the hair, then how could that be? One one hair, in a desert of bald scalp, demonstrating an incredible will to survive? That seems like a life-force thing. And it makes me think of this:

I suspect that our hair, like the trees above, has the same life-force and will to survive. Even though the scalp environment is suboptimal due to the bulging and contourless skull, if one hair has the will to keep growing, then maybe they all can. Maybe we can somehow cultivate the same "die hard" life-force as the trees that stretch out to a patch the sun and grow out of rocks on the side of a cliff, and send it to the bald areas of our scalp. Maybe our hair could grow back if it just had a little bit more, or we had just a bit more, of this determined life-force energy. Trees and hair even have similar characteristics, if you think about it.

Of course, none of these life-force interventions matter if you have a toxic liver. There's no sense getting ass-deep into energy healing, trying to figure out meridian blockages and trying to infuse unique types of die-hard qi into our weakened hairs, when we have a burnt out, busted up, and gallstone plugged-up liver. Since the liver is responsible for circulating the life-force through the body, then liver detoxification should be the first priority. Once vigorous qi flow has been restored, then we can work on directing the life-force to our hair.

SOUL BODY INTERVENTIONS

In our Soul Body, we need to be aware of our emotions, and what they are telling us about our life choices. Disorder in our Soul Body can influence both forms of sclerosis in MPB. Rising male emotions can have an expansionary effect on our skulls, and our disposition can bioenergetically influence our body's physiological inclination for the sclerotic function, which it will evidently apply liberally to our skull foramen. The root of these issues come from our movements, and cognizant choice thereof.

The sclerotic aspect of MPB is indicating that a fair amount of the movements and emotions, that we have regularly engaged in, have somehow had bioenergetic hardening effect in our Physical Body. Presumably, our Soul Body has warned us somehow, but we have ignored it. And now we have sclerosis. So, we probably want to figure out, by listening to our Soul, and objectively analyzing the emotional information, as to what regular movements, and corresponding emotions, are potentially hardening us, and severely limit them, or cut them out entirely from our lives.

To figure out what is hardening us, it may be better to first think about what can soften us. If there are emotions and movements that harden us, then there must be ones that soften us too. Softening, in our case, will serve to dissolve the cold, hard, calcified foramens of our skull. Dissolving hard bone requires the warming power of inflammation. What emotion could be strong enough to supply the warmth needed to swell with nourishment and dissolve the cold, hardened, calcified parts of our skull? My first guess is Love.

The heart is the seat of the Soul Body, which is responsible for all of our emotions, and symbolically represents love, which is probably the most important emotion there is. Love has inspired, and often is the subject of, just about every laborious beautiful piece of artwork that has been created on Earth; be it a painting, book, movie, song, building, sculpture, or whatever. In addition, it is said that "love conquers all". It is has even been proclaimed be the most powerful force in the universe. If that's true, then maybe it could helpful for MPB. No one has ever said that about Rogaine, anyway.

The heart and love symbol is also the only common organ to emotion connection that I am aware of. We don't draw a pancreas for any emotions, right? - let alone the most important one. And since the heart is symbolic of love, the Soul sits in the heart, and love is potentially the most powerful and beneficial healing emotion for us, then if the Soul Body is doing its job, then it must be screaming at us, in every moment in the day, what we need to do to provide our heart with love. What would be a higher priority? Not many of us feel intense feelings of love throughout the day, but we all will feel passion.

Passion is a word synonymous with "heart" and "love", and a very warm emotion. In a more mild form, we could call it interest. We always have interest. In every moment of every day, something will interest us. Even in our dreams we have interest. I'm never bored in my dreams, perhaps that is why they are related to inspiration, another form in which the divine can communicate with us. Interest is a form of passion, and passions may have the anti-sclerotic effect that we are looking for. It is because through our passions, and interests, that we feel a "burning desire" to do or achieve something. In doing so, or acting on those desires, the passion that we feel in those movements may be able to generate and supply the needed warmth to our heart, which has become cold. A cold heart doesn't care and it doesn't listen, which seems to be the problem with our circulatory system.

By this rationale, the movements that would have the greatest softening effect in our Physical Body would be those that we do with enthusiasm, because we are actually interested in the movement that we are doing. The passion in the enthusiasm with which we perform such activities will supply the heart with the warmth that it needs to run a functional circulatory system that dissolves calcification, listens to our needs, and supplies our hair with what nourishment it can. By contrast, the movements that would have the greatest hardening effect in the body would be those of being in a routine, going through the motions, drudging through the day, and doing work that leaves us frustrated, angry, and unfulfilled.

I'm naturally wary of clichés, but it seems like the classic "follow your heart" and "let your passions guide" you advice is the solution. I also like these clichés because, while everybody prima facie supports these notions, few actually do it because takes a lot of courage. You have to take risks, you have to endure criticism, even from family, and you have to fail miserably and not give up. The fact is, most people will discourage you in this regard, apart from those who have a fair degree of faith.

The Book of Exodus from the Bible, contains some applicable lessons in this regard. There are a lot of perks to being a slave. Mostly, it comes with security. If you want to get to the Promised Land, however, that can be very risky. It may not go so well at first. You may regret your decision to leave slavery at times. It could even take 40 years to get there. But, you'll never get there if you don't have the courage to pursue it.

The advantage that males have with respect to rejecting slavery in favor risky reward pursuit is that every one of us gets an influx of defiant warrior god energy at puberty. Again, I believe that the reason why our ancestors put us through grueling rites of passage at this age was to help us properly use this energy to cultivate the courageous fighting spirit to take on such a risk. And in not doing so, it causes an underlying dissatisfaction, and subsequent hardening, because deep down we know that we failed to face our fears and do what we were meant to do.

The overall takeaway from the Soul Body intervention level is that our hearts, through passion, are guiding us to figure out who we are meant to become in this lifetime, and the Ares energy gives us the courage to do it. And, ultimately, our disease is a reflection of our inner failure to either be aware of how our passions are guiding us to our destiny, or lack of courage to act on these passions, or both. That's how deep this disease goes. But, if breaking free from slavery by radically changing the direction of your life is too intense for you right now, you can try dancing instead.

Dancing is a form of exercise that we may want to somehow integrate into our lives. It was a large part of ancestral cultures likely because of its health benefits. It is very effective at balancing male energy because it often focuses on movements in the lower body. In addition, dancing is expressive, sensual, and rhythmic. This is good for men because we tend to be stiff, stoic, and jerky, which is exactly how guests describe my dancing at my wedding.

In general, daily movements that will be most therapeutic for our disease and our Soul, are ones that involve rhythm, which helps restore rhythm in the dipole rhythmic system, involve a sensory experience, which engages our intuition, focus the energy in the lower parts of the body, which lowers the life-force down in the body, has a purpose, to engage our Soul Body, and incorporates our imagination, to nourish our female energy and reconnect us with the spirit world. Simple conscious breathing meditations actually incorporate all of these elements, several of which I describe on the Etheric, Soul, and Spirit body webpages.

In addition, a powerful way to build our awareness in the Soul Body is to simply pay attention to our mood. For example, in terms of movement, instead of going to the gym and grinding through a workout routine because it's leg day, or going on the treadmill to get our cardio in; rather, think about what you are in the mood to do. Our body wants to move. Whatever we feel like doing is what our Soul Body needs. Maybe it wants to play tennis, ride a bike (outside), dance, do soft movements like yoga and qigong, or maybe it just wants you to go out in nature somewhere and just go wild. Whatever it is, the Soul will communicate what it needs through what appeals to us in the moment. Also, note that the Soul wants us move outdoors, just like the Wind.

ADDITIONAL SPIRIT BODY INTERVENTIONS

Within the Spirit Body, we have to learn how to quiet the Mind. The less we think, the more awareness we will have. In heightened states of awareness, there is a "stillness", which is a state strived for in TCM, and various religious texts, in order to connect with God, or The Creator, or The Creation.

In my experience, the TCM martial art of qigong, which means "life-force work", or basically "putting the life-force to work" is an effective way to quite the Mind, and cultivate the awareness or stillness that's desired. In addition, because the meditations require breathing, movement, and intent, in that manner they engage all four bodies in a way that improves our awareness in the Spirit and it's benevolent control over the impulses in the outer bodies. Much of it comes down to focus and conscious breathing. If your Mind wanders, and you let the subconscious take over the breathing, then the awareness is gone, the energy is still in your head, i.e. thinking, and the exercise is rendered ineffective. In addition, qigong is a potential powerhouse of female intuitive faculty training because many of the meditations incorporate use of our imaginations, which we may need to build back up because of stupid-ass reading.

In addition to building awareness, fasting is the other critical Spirit Body intervention. Fasting is a way to break our attachment to things, which can supercharge our healing efforts. To do long fasting requires extreme mental discipline and willingness to sacrifice. Don't let the autophagy bozos on the internet mislead you, this will negatively impact the health of your Physical Body. In fact, that's the point. It's because, in doing so, the Spirit grows stronger, it sheds its ego, alters our attitude, and facilitates healing from the inside out. This is ultimately what we need, and will make all of our healing efforts more effective because it heals us from the deepest part of our being.

MPB is a complex disease. It's deep. It's layered. It can't be simplified to just "take this" or "put this on your head". There's skull expansion, gut damage, liver damage, sclerosis, stagnation, emotions, foramens, reading, dancing, breathing, facial development, iron, puberty, meridians, planets, polarities, Venus, Mars, Paracelsus, Winnie the Pooh...It's a lot of stuff! Why even bother? Why not "just shave it bro" and just live your life?

Admittedly, shaving your head takes a fair amount of manhood, and acceptance, a very positive emotion, to do so. However, MPB is not the disease. Rather, it's symptom of something that we were meant to overcome in this lifetime, which we haven't yet done. It's a learning opportunity. It's a culmination of the three bodies screaming at us, trying to get our attention, trying to get us to make a change somewhere. And the stakes are not just our hair, it's our spiritual evolution.

Why do we experience pain? Because our Spirit wants to evolve. It's goal is to acquire as much wisdom as possible from incarnation to incarnation in an effort to get to whatever destiny has been pre-programed into it. The way in which it acquires wisdom is through feeling pain and overcoming disease. The Spirit wants to suffer because that is how it learns. The other three bodies are there to guide the Spirit. When we feel emotional pain, physical pain, have life-force stagnation, or a combination thereof, as in MPB, that is all designed to help keep the Spirit on track in its quest to learn, improve itself, and evolve. To ignore that pain, or medicate it, is a wasted opportunity to learn deep lessons and acquire a huge chunk of wisdom on our evolutionary path.

Spiritual Evolution is an abstract concept nowadays. Something about the allure gets lost in an age when we all "know" that we are a just many iterations of a mutated bacteria cell on a random rotating spherical mineral configuration, shooting through infinite space on an elliptical path, within an elliptical path, with no discernible purpose. For argument's sake, let's pretend that all of that was made up. What would you believe then? How would you give your life context? I'll try to put this spiritual evolution concept into perspective with one more Bible story, because everyone loves Christians and the Bible.

THE GARDEN OF EDEN

In Genesis, the serpent famously tempted Eve with the apple from The Tree of Knowledge in The Garden of Eden. She then tempted Adam, they became aware of their nakedness, God found out, and then they were banished from the Garden. This story represents the beginning of our spiritual evolution.

Before the banishment, we were like the animals. Maybe not so much in form. We were actually more like plants, hence why we were in a garden, and the serpent wrapping itself around a tree, i.e. spine, and filling us with desire, i.e. animal body needs, is when our bodies started to take on an animal form. This is, at least, the esoteric interpretation that the elites, now and throughout history, are taught within the orders of the Freemasons, Knights of Templar, Rosicrucians, Fabian Society, etc.. But we were more like animals in how we obeyed God's will because we didn't have the ability to do so otherwise. We had no choice. We were slaves to our instinct. We had no free will. After the temptation, we now had the freedom to choose to obey God, or not, which is to live in accordance with his laws or nature. Alternatively, we could live a life of sin, which means "misalignment", and just kind of do what we wanted instead, ultimately learning through bad choices and the consequences that we should have done what God told us to do in the first place. The biting of the apple was our first bad choice, and there was a consequence. Henceforth, we started to learn.

Getting kicked out of The Garden of Eden was the first hard lesson that we learned. But, it was a necessary first step to kickstart our spiritual evolution, to willingly choose to obey to God, and to transform us from humans to the entity that we are destined to become. It was easy to obey God's laws when we were living the good life in The Garden. But out here, in the real world, where we have to work for a living, it's not so easy.

After the banishment, men were to "toil in the fields" all day and women's pain was multiplied in childbirth. It's a hard life out here. No time to be all idealistic about spiritual crap. This Cage the Elephant song sums it up pretty well, to reference something other than the Bible, which is ultimately referencing the Bible (Isaiah 57:21):

There ain't no rest for the wicked

Money don't grow on trees

I got bills to pay, I've got mouths to feed

And there ain't nothing in this world for free.

It's a challenge to learn to overcome our attachment to the physical world out here when we have our physical needs, our obligations, other people's expectations of us, our pride, and our ego. To make it even more challenging, based on the fact that the majority of adults and teenagers are currently carrying on them, and obsessively referencing, almost every waking minute of the day, a device that has on it the image of the bitten apple from The Tree of Knowledge in The Garden of Eden, then I'm guessing this serpent character is still around somewhere today. There was a reason he was in The Garden in the first place. He's got a job to do. And he's VERY good at his job. We learn from making bad decisions. That's how we get to our spiritual destination. And that character is an expert at tempting us to make bad decisions.

What is our spiritual destination? What would that even look like? Alchemy! That order of the planets in the alchemical process is a roadmap for our spiritual transformation. It starts with Saturn, which is dark, heavy, and lead. It's where we lose everything so that we can start to rebuild ourselves into something greater - something pure and brilliant. Saturn is the stage of us getting kicked out of The Garden of Eden. The beginning of our transformation from lead into gold. Gold is represented by the Sun. It shines brilliantly. Light is energy and matter fused together. It is the physical and the spiritual united and awesome. We have seen this on the Earth, supposedly, which is going to make some of you Christian-phobic types uncomfortable - it's Jesus. I know. I used to tune out every time someone mentioned Jesus. Then I realized that science and history were all lies. So, now I think the Jesus stuff is interesting. And I think that it's particularly interesting that the story of Jesus is based on Alchemy.

BIBLICAL ALCHEMY

Jesus is God incarnated in the flesh. He represents the physical and the spiritual merged, which is represented by the sun. The sun is the last stage of the transformation process. Jesus was the son of God. Or was he the "sun" of God? He's called "the light of the world". That sounds like the sun. His birthday is also celebrated three days after the winter solstice, when the sun has reached its lowest point in the sky, and in higher latitudes has disappeared entirely, and starts rising again. That also sounds very sun-like. Furthermore, he is the culminating character of "holy bible", which was translated from Greek and the title seems like it could easily be derived from "helios biblios", which means "book of the sun". Then, of course, there are those vatican elite types wearing all this sun imagery on their robes. Based on all this, I'm thinking that someone is trying to tell us that Jesus is the sun. He's the alchemical sun. He's the sun that Paracelsus was talking about. He's the final stage in the transformation process, when we have fully overcome our attachment to our physical being and voluntarily live in accordance to God's laws. The purpose of Jesus was to show us what we are evolving towards.

Also, why was Jesus a man? Why did he not incarnate as woman? Jesus had to be a man because, in the alchemical transformation, the sun represents the divine masculine. Therefore, it would have been inappropriate for Jesus to be a woman, which would have had to have been the divine feminine. Rather, the divine feminine, represented by the moon and silver, is the stage BEFORE the final transformation. This is the stage of purification. What divine feminine type represents purity and comes directly before Jesus in the story of Jesus? The Virgin Mary. The immaculate conception and Mary are the leading events to the birth of Jesus - spiritual gold. Why was she a virgin? Purity! Substance needs to be purified before it is coagulated into gold. It's all Alchemy.

If you know what to look for, you'll realize almost all of our folklore is based on Alchemy too. For example, have you ever wondered why all the heroic tales, until recently, are about men? It's not because it is part of humanity's long documented systematic and ignorant oppression of women. Rather, it's because Alchemy, the transformation process on Earth, always ends in gold, the divine masculine. Through overcoming trials of character in the alchemical sequence, and with the help of the divine feminine ( there's always a girl), regular flawed/imbalanced men transform into heroic/ divinely masculine men. By the end of the story they embody the traits of honesty, decisiveness, disciplined, protective, confident, focused and all of the other qualities of the divine male.

Our ancestors understood Alchemy and spiritual evolution, and their wisdom carries on in our mythology. The purpose of these stories is to guide our lives. They are to remind us of how we transform. Except, nowadays, we're taught to scoff at the Bible and deride the male hero. We're the ignorant ones. We've been deceived. Who is deceiving us? Still have that bitten apple phone?

MPB AND THE ALCHEMICAL SEQUENCE

Let's tie this back into MPB. As alluded to earlier, it is intriguing to me how the alchemical process has two male archetypes. There is Ares, corresponding to the iron imbalance in our bodies, and then there is the Sun, the divine male, the presumably balanced version of this male. I've theorized that Ares energy can manifest as an imbalanced male disposition under less than ideal circumstances, which I still think is true. But, maybe, the imbalance cannot be totally avoided. Maybe, since he is in the middle of the alchemical process, he represents an unrefined state that we all must pass through somewhere in the process. That is, overcoming a male imbalance is fundamental to our transformation as spiritual beings. It all happens to directly relate to our disease, and so this one reason why I strongly believe that our problem goes deeper than cosmetic hair loss.

To give some context to those of us who are unfamiliar with Alchemy (like me), here's a stage by stage summary that I got off of a website called humaninfluence.org. I don't suppose that this guy is the definitive authority on the alchemical stages. But, since I didn't write it, I'm not really able to twist things to support all of my claims here.

For funzies though... no! I hate people who use the word "funzies". Rather, or purposes of refining my own understanding of the connection between the alchemical process and overcoming hair loss, and possibly yours, I'll provide my own interpretation of each stage as it relates to MPB below each stage description.

Saturn is our hair loss. It's our pain. It's our motivation to evolve. Nothing happens in The Garden of Eden. There's no suffering. Things are too easy. God HAD to banish us and put us out here "in the shit", as Nick Nolte eloquently puts it in Tropic Thunder, in order to light a metaphorical fire under our asses, which is what all good parents do when their dead-beat 26 year old son is living at home with no job, no girlfriend, no direction, and no motivation to grow up (that was me).

Furthermore, we have to do something about our Ego. The Spirit Body has become too dominant. It is over-reliant on it's own faculty of objective thought. The soul is imprisoned because it's not being listened to. There's no passion. We're just going through the motions of life. Light a big ass fire, in a low oxygen environment, and start burning away your ego. Stop thinking so much. Let the lower bodies guide us. That's Saturn.

Is hair loss natural? Is it genetic? Is anything genetic? What if everything I've ever been taught is a lie? Who am I? What am I? What is this place? Dissolve the illusion. Our belief systems keep us confined, probably by design (serpent). Once you detach from them, and swallow your pride, then you get inspired. The opportunities to learn and grow expand immensely.

To dissolve is to be open to being wrong, to having been deceived, to becoming a different man entirely. Be willing to detach from everything you ever thought was true, because (1) it's probably not true, and (2) the imbalanced Ego desperately clings to it. It wants to believe what it "knows" is true, even if our experience is telling it something different. That's cognitive dissonance. It's noise.

When we start to dissolve the Ego, our attachment to our thoughts, then our mind starts to quiet. We can then do like Winnie the Pooh and begin to listen to all of the things we can't hear, like our heart. Then the "emotions flood in", and we will be engaging the Soul Body in our transformation efforts, which we absolutely need.

Why do we get that iron spike at puberty? Is it genetic? Is it evolution? Or is it to give us the spirit of the warrior to overcome life's challenges? The imbalanced Mars male is not so much a state of imbalance, as it is a state of incompleteness. We have to go through this stage of aggressively hacking away at our weaknesses, doubts, fears, and insecurities with a ruthless warrior mindset. Otherwise, we'll never get to the Sun, the DIVINE male. In that manner, the iron increase is not the source of our problem. Rather, it exposes our problem. It brings to the surface our weaknesses so that we can grapple with and overcome them. It gives us the courage to make radical life changes that impact our jobs, our cushy incomes, meeting social expectation, family pressures, and embracing uncertainty.

Iron is our curse, but also our strength. We need it to sever everything that his holding us down, and preventing us from transforming into who we are destined to become, so that we can forge ahead.

I feel like I don't even need to comment on this one. It's everything I've been writing about on this webpage, with the balancing the polarities stuff, and the whole spirit listening to the soul so that it gets the warmth it needs from love to be more nurturing. This is the essence of our disease, and it is right smack in the middle of the alchemical transformation process.

In order to overcome our disease, we have to balance the polarities. In order to transform into the man we were destined to be, we need to balance the polarities. All this is telling me that MPB is our opportunity to transform.

I ferment a lot of cabbage. After cabbage ferments into sauerkraut, it tastes nothing like cabbage. In good sauerkraut, every characteristic of the original cabbage, the original substance, is gone. This is the phase when it starts to not become about the hair. Rather, it's about something bigger. It's about the challenge. It's about facing your fear. It's about the notion of becoming someone different entirely than who you once were.

It's also chaotic. This is the phase when the sauerkraut is expanding and exploding out of the jar, and getting your counter all wet. For us, it's inspiration and insight that is exploding. We're diving into energy healing, bee venom therapy, skull compression strategies, cutting our hair with the moon cycles, doing things we never heard about, making mistakes, researching, implementing, failing, learning, correcting, improving, and passion has become our fuel. This is where it's getting fun.

We have to refine our knowledge. We have to figure out what works and what is true, and all that pain from Saturn gets crystallized into wisdom. Meanwhile, the power of the feminine divine, the intuition, is unleashed. We're using it, relying on it, and it's firing on all cylinders. This is the part in The Matrix when Keanu Reeves starts dodging bullets. You can't think and dodge a bullet. Thinking slows you down, it makes you tense. You need to act purely on instinct to move with speed, precision, and grace - like an animal.

The Mind isn't dormant, though. Rather, it has control. It's calm. It doesn't act on emotions. Rather, it RECEIVES them. It embraces them, analyzes them, and then let's them go. This is the stage of letting go and being receptive, which define the divine feminine. We must let go of the mind's control, the ego. Rather, we integrate, and let the four body system work the way in which it was designed.

This is Keanu Reeves at the end of The Matrix when he's stopping bullets and flying. We are the hero. We are the Divine Male. We have overcome all obstacles, fears, doubts, and weakness and now we move through the world with confidence and new abilities. It's not about the hair. It was never about the hair. It was about becoming who we were destined to be in this lifetime.

Neo means "the one". It is probably an allusion to coagulation, and Jesus, as is Jesus. The yin, female, matter, Earth, and the yang, male, Heaven, spirit reunite and create light, a substance of pure matter and energy. The polarities aren't just balanced, they are combined. That is divinity. That is what we are destined to achieve as humans.

TRANSFORMATION SHOULD APPEAL TO YOU

Does this appeal to you? It should. It should activate something in your core and make it start vibrating like something is going to explode out of your chest. Your Spirit wants this. It needs this. If not, then you must be an NPC, or a replicant, or your nerves are so scarred from blue light, EMF, processed food, and dispensary gummies that you can't even process what this means. Like I said, the serpent is very good at his job.

The Divine Male, Gold, the Sun, Jesus, is the pre-programmed destination (destiny) of our Spirit. Our disease is a massive opportunity to overcome our greatest weaknesses, learn, and help our Spirit evolve, especially considering all of this Alchemy crap aligns with what we have to do for MPB. Not that it's easy. I was hoping it would be as simple as taking a pill, or changing my diet, or doing liver flushes. I don't want to have to work on my character flaws. That can be really uncomfortable sometimes. But, I wouldn't be doing it if didn't make my hair fall out. I needed the motivation.

I don't know where I'm going with my spiritual evolution or my MPB, or how far I'll get. But, what I do know for certain, is that I wouldn't have learned one damn thing on this website if I had never went bald or if the FDA approved poison actually worked. So, what is the purpose of pain? To get your lazy ass off your phone, off of the various forms of medicating yourself, stop drifting through life, dig deep, expose your flaws, face your fears, and get you closer to spiritual gold. Now, let's grow some hair.

One more note on the subject of The Matrix. If you need help with the whole dissolving the illusion phase of this process, consider that Neo's passport expires on 9/11/2001.

"The Matrix" is actually an alchemical term, which means the weaving together of cosmic emanations to form the illusion of the material world. No doubt, the makers of the movie were aware of this, and are initiates to one of the societies that protects the secret esoteric history of the world, whose purpose is to guide humanity through the awakening of our consciousness. This passport date was INTENTIONAL, because, like Neo, it's time for us to wake up to OUR illusions of the material world.

The following is a summary of the most intriguing ideas that I have, so far, organized by which of the four bodies the intervention targets. See the appropriate webpage, organized by body type, for more details regarding these specific interventions.

While many of these interventions impact multiple bodies, I did my best to categorize based on the spirit of the intervention. I apologize for anything you would deem a misclassification. This is just a summary, and it will, for certain, evolve over time.

Basically, MPB boils down to figuring out what is causing your skull to change shape (Spirit), doing a lot of deep inner work to stop that from happening (Soul), undoing the bulging damage that has been done to your skull (Physical), and getting the life-force flowing back into the hair follicle (Etheric). It requires work in all four bodies.

If you think you can fix this problem working just in the realm of the Physical Body, and maybe dabbling with a few energy work tricks in the Etheric Body, then you're just a bio-hacker. And bio-hackers aren't going to make it. They're like lotto junkies, waiting to hit the right combination if they just buy enough tickets. We've all seen the guy on reddit who did the basic minox, fin, and derma-roll combo and got crazy results. I'm not sure how long those results last, but these guys do exist. They're lotto winners. But you know who eventually goes broke? - lotto winners. It's not true healing because it doesn't change their financial behavior. Bio-hacking your hair back with some chemicals is not true healing. Bio-hacking failed for us. Now, we have the opportunity to do it right.

This is not to say that Physical Body interventions are unimportant. In fact, I think they are necessary. Everyone that I see with a flat forehead has a full hairline, no matter how spiritually off-track or physically unhealthy they are. I have some new ideas about re-contouring our skulls that I am very excited about. They are simple, but they could be very effective. There are a lot of options and ways to get creative when it comes to life-force stimulation too. HOWEVER, the approach to correcting MPB will not be successful if we just work on physical skull contouring and getting blood there - I've tried. It doesn't work. Maybe some very clever life-force work will get you something. But the point is to correct what got us into this mess in the first place. And that's worthwhile endeavor.

On the next page, I'm going to describe the grotesque skull growth patterns that I see in more detail, asS well as compare them with more cute baby photos, so that you have a clear understanding of why our hair growth patterns are as they are. It's obvious once you are aware of the actual problem. Furthermore, I will describe the best ideas that I have for skull re-contouring as of yet. There's also a robust section on diet and gut health, which is helpful, but my views on that are evolving quickly. The more I get into it, the more I just see our Physical Body as just minerals (no hormones, genetics, cells, etc.) combined with, as Nikola Tesla said, energy, frequency, and vibration.