EMERGENT HEALING
by Iona Miller
The Emergent Healing Paradigm
Jung said, "The Gods have become diseases", meaning our ailments carry a deeper metaphorical, even spiritual Truth. Sometimes the body heals but not the soul or spirit; sometimes the spirit finds peace and soul finds meaning when the body can't mend. I have clinically researched the roles of empathy, intentionality, compassion, medical intuition, and positive expectations in healing for decades - the rapport of the healing relationship.
Healing relationships are as important as medicine. We might call this synergetic effect, meta-syn. Healing rituals create a multidimensional focus of attention. The mindbody is electronic. Living systems are very sensitive to tiny energy fields and resonance phenomena, both locally and at a distance. They allow the cells of the body to work together instantaneously and symphonically.
Our hearts are powerful electromagnetic organs whose influence extends far beyond our skin boundaries through field effects and nonlocal intentionality, emotions and thoughts. Also, each cell of the body has a 'mind' of its own, connected holistically through the living matrix, a communication system within the body. The living matrix is as or more powerful than the nervous system, because it extends into each and every cell. It is another kind of consciousness. The body has a cellular memory which embodies our traumas and triumphs. Integrative medicine approaches this mind/body system with a holistic treatment philosophy toward the body's operating system.
Healing relationships are as important as medicine. We might call this synergetic effect, meta-syn. Healing rituals create a multidimensional focus of attention. The mindbody is electronic. Living systems are very sensitive to tiny energy fields and resonance phenomena, both locally and at a distance. They allow the cells of the body to work together instantaneously and symphonically.
Our hearts are powerful electromagnetic organs whose influence extends far beyond our skin boundaries through field effects and nonlocal intentionality, emotions and thoughts. Also, each cell of the body has a 'mind' of its own, connected holistically through the living matrix, a communication system within the body. The living matrix is as or more powerful than the nervous system, because it extends into each and every cell. It is another kind of consciousness. The body has a cellular memory which embodies our traumas and triumphs. Integrative medicine approaches this mind/body system with a holistic treatment philosophy toward the body's operating system.
MINDBODY CONNECTION
For most of human history, healing has had to do with contact with spirit, with consciousness, with rituals intended to create a shared biofield with a shaman who seemingly could exert mind over matter. This spiritual technology has yielded to technological medicine governed by the rational protocols of science. But noting that medical intuition and therapeutic rapport are real forces in the healing process, many practitioners are moving toward a new paradigm or model of healing.
Anomalies such as the proven power of prayer, placebo effect, spontaneous remission, therapeutic intentionality, and remote healing hint that the irrational, the mysterious, is an inherent part of the natural healing process. When we become ill, the fundamental nature of consciousness is revealed as it relates to both mind and matter, psyche and soma.
Uncertainty is the zeitgeist of our day. We are anxious and unsure. We face global warming, economic and environmental deterioration, emerging infections and incurable viruses, pandemics, bioterrorism, wars, urban violence, soil and water depletion, rampant population growth, genetically-engineered food and organisms, hazardous waste, and profound doubts about our earth's ability to continue to sustain life. Much of earth's life is already going extinct, and we wonder about own own and our grandchildren's futures, health, and well-being. Many of us feel the impact as loss of our cherished dreams of a better future.
We did not anticipate this transition from the arrogant certainty of the rational enlightenment promise to disquieting uncertainty. We have realized only empty promises of solutions to life's fundamental problems, like world health, food, and peace. Despite all our knowledge we have not been able to control or dominate our environment successfully. Knowledge is not wisdom, or even understanding. There is a deeper current in life and it is embodied in Mystery-- the unpredictable, the unknown, and perhaps unknowable.
Chaos Theory (CT) is the third revolution in science after relativity and quantum theory. It is the prime source of unpredictability in the macrocosmic world and the human scale, formerly described only by classical physics. Chaos and complexity is nature's own way of organizing systems and creating structure. All systems emerge from and eventually dissolve back into chaos.
Chaos is ubiquitous in nature, but it was missed by science due to the overwhelming complexity of detecting its underlying pattern and purpose. Chaos theory means dynamic processes are deterministic though unpredictable. Much the same can be said for its discovery in human physiology and psychology.
It is well established now that most dynamics in nature, ranging from the orbits of planets to behavioral adjustments in life, are essentially chaotic. We are chaotic systems ourselves, and chaotic systems exhibit holistic behavior. Holism sees the world in all its diversity as connected through complex feedback loops. Through the chaotic process of emergence, order appears spontaneously or even instantly within a system.
The conventional medical model has failed many of us. Holistic health systems embrace the mindbody paradigm, but that does not necessarily mean we should all rush out to substitute "foreign" or alternative therapies for conventional medical wisdom. Generally, these modalities are complementary to biomedical care. However, the
holistic scientific metaphor provided by chaos theory allows us to describe the psyche in terms congruent with physical reality. This is simply the way nature works, and the way our nature works, too. It provides a comprehensive psychophysical metaphor for uniting physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual realities.
Holism is a paradigm - a worldview, which is equally applicable to the universe and our human existence. Chaos Theory is not a metaphor, per se, but functions as a science metaphor to describe systems, organisms, and dynamic behavior, including complex adaptation. It describes how order emerges from chaos. People often spontaneously incorporate science metaphors in their self-narratives, using such terms as "black holes" and "melt downs," or "quantum leaps," etc. to describe their feelings or personal dynamics. And the same can be done with aspects of chaos theory which can describe how we adapt to life at the edge of chaos in our own unique way.
Paradigms from one field of science often interpenetrate others. Because the findings are more than metaphorical, they translate across disciplines. Metaphors reflect the interdependency of mind and body, and the embodied nature of metaphor holistically reflects the unity of individual and world. Embodied knowledge reflects our shifting understandings of the body. Metaphors of chaos are as prevalent in our life trajectory as the explicit chaotic patterns are in our physiology (in our brains, hearts, and metabolic systems, etc.). The events of our lives become embedded in our structure and metabolism. We might call this embodiment "metaphorms."
Various forms of metaphor therapy can help us heal and adapt in the recovery process, giving our psyche a voice. With the advent of chaos theory and complexity theory, universally negative attitudes toward chaos are changing slowly but surely, at least in some individuals. We are learning to consciously accept chaos, and intuit that it also
has value. Linear and deterministic theory is on the decline in favor of nonlinearity, fragmentation, multiplicity, iteration, complex feedback loops, and indeterminacy.
This ascendancy of the scientific paradigm of chaos includes medical uncertainty, both for practitioners and patients, who must learn to deal creatively with chaos, tolerate ambiguity, and respect the unapparent. Our sense of control over our external world is a destructive illusion. As we come to understand that disruption is part of the creative cycle, we learn to understand how "emergency" is part of the creative process of "emergence" of renewal and new potential.
Over time we can expect this paradigmatic shift to penetrate more deeply into the cultural fabric of our lives and an integrative health system. Chaos theory, systems theory, and complexity theory have shown us that self-organizing order emerges from chaos, and is thus the paradigm of the natural healing process. It describes the dissolution or fragmentation and reconstruction of the volitional self. It helps us attach a more positive valence to disruptions of our mortal human lives, either through illness or misfortune.
Anomalies such as the proven power of prayer, placebo effect, spontaneous remission, therapeutic intentionality, and remote healing hint that the irrational, the mysterious, is an inherent part of the natural healing process. When we become ill, the fundamental nature of consciousness is revealed as it relates to both mind and matter, psyche and soma.
Uncertainty is the zeitgeist of our day. We are anxious and unsure. We face global warming, economic and environmental deterioration, emerging infections and incurable viruses, pandemics, bioterrorism, wars, urban violence, soil and water depletion, rampant population growth, genetically-engineered food and organisms, hazardous waste, and profound doubts about our earth's ability to continue to sustain life. Much of earth's life is already going extinct, and we wonder about own own and our grandchildren's futures, health, and well-being. Many of us feel the impact as loss of our cherished dreams of a better future.
We did not anticipate this transition from the arrogant certainty of the rational enlightenment promise to disquieting uncertainty. We have realized only empty promises of solutions to life's fundamental problems, like world health, food, and peace. Despite all our knowledge we have not been able to control or dominate our environment successfully. Knowledge is not wisdom, or even understanding. There is a deeper current in life and it is embodied in Mystery-- the unpredictable, the unknown, and perhaps unknowable.
Chaos Theory (CT) is the third revolution in science after relativity and quantum theory. It is the prime source of unpredictability in the macrocosmic world and the human scale, formerly described only by classical physics. Chaos and complexity is nature's own way of organizing systems and creating structure. All systems emerge from and eventually dissolve back into chaos.
Chaos is ubiquitous in nature, but it was missed by science due to the overwhelming complexity of detecting its underlying pattern and purpose. Chaos theory means dynamic processes are deterministic though unpredictable. Much the same can be said for its discovery in human physiology and psychology.
It is well established now that most dynamics in nature, ranging from the orbits of planets to behavioral adjustments in life, are essentially chaotic. We are chaotic systems ourselves, and chaotic systems exhibit holistic behavior. Holism sees the world in all its diversity as connected through complex feedback loops. Through the chaotic process of emergence, order appears spontaneously or even instantly within a system.
The conventional medical model has failed many of us. Holistic health systems embrace the mindbody paradigm, but that does not necessarily mean we should all rush out to substitute "foreign" or alternative therapies for conventional medical wisdom. Generally, these modalities are complementary to biomedical care. However, the
holistic scientific metaphor provided by chaos theory allows us to describe the psyche in terms congruent with physical reality. This is simply the way nature works, and the way our nature works, too. It provides a comprehensive psychophysical metaphor for uniting physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual realities.
Holism is a paradigm - a worldview, which is equally applicable to the universe and our human existence. Chaos Theory is not a metaphor, per se, but functions as a science metaphor to describe systems, organisms, and dynamic behavior, including complex adaptation. It describes how order emerges from chaos. People often spontaneously incorporate science metaphors in their self-narratives, using such terms as "black holes" and "melt downs," or "quantum leaps," etc. to describe their feelings or personal dynamics. And the same can be done with aspects of chaos theory which can describe how we adapt to life at the edge of chaos in our own unique way.
Paradigms from one field of science often interpenetrate others. Because the findings are more than metaphorical, they translate across disciplines. Metaphors reflect the interdependency of mind and body, and the embodied nature of metaphor holistically reflects the unity of individual and world. Embodied knowledge reflects our shifting understandings of the body. Metaphors of chaos are as prevalent in our life trajectory as the explicit chaotic patterns are in our physiology (in our brains, hearts, and metabolic systems, etc.). The events of our lives become embedded in our structure and metabolism. We might call this embodiment "metaphorms."
Various forms of metaphor therapy can help us heal and adapt in the recovery process, giving our psyche a voice. With the advent of chaos theory and complexity theory, universally negative attitudes toward chaos are changing slowly but surely, at least in some individuals. We are learning to consciously accept chaos, and intuit that it also
has value. Linear and deterministic theory is on the decline in favor of nonlinearity, fragmentation, multiplicity, iteration, complex feedback loops, and indeterminacy.
This ascendancy of the scientific paradigm of chaos includes medical uncertainty, both for practitioners and patients, who must learn to deal creatively with chaos, tolerate ambiguity, and respect the unapparent. Our sense of control over our external world is a destructive illusion. As we come to understand that disruption is part of the creative cycle, we learn to understand how "emergency" is part of the creative process of "emergence" of renewal and new potential.
Over time we can expect this paradigmatic shift to penetrate more deeply into the cultural fabric of our lives and an integrative health system. Chaos theory, systems theory, and complexity theory have shown us that self-organizing order emerges from chaos, and is thus the paradigm of the natural healing process. It describes the dissolution or fragmentation and reconstruction of the volitional self. It helps us attach a more positive valence to disruptions of our mortal human lives, either through illness or misfortune.
HEALING DISRUPTED LIVES
DISRUPTED LIVES:
Chaos Theory and the Healing Process
The Role and Value of
Journey Work in the Process of Recovery
by Iona Miller, Asklepia Foundation, 2003
1). Disruption and Continuity;
2). Healing Words: "Metaphors Be with You";
3). The Healing Power of Narrative History;
4). Soul Support: Healing the Disordered Bodymind;
5). Character: Have Some, Don't Just Be One;
6). Conclusions and Directions
Abstract: Our life journey is an unpredictable series of chaotic twists and turns which mold our lives, despite our best intentions and plans, as we wend our way toward our certain end. The 'journey' is a core guiding metaphor for our multifarious experiences. It is a poetic journey of self-discovery. Chaos theory provides a natural yet scientific metaphor of this complex trajectory of emergent order from disorder, the complex dance at the edge of chaos.
Process-oriented therapies help us not only recover but make sense of our feelings and experiences by evoking our story, a meaningful narrative of our unique course. It is a combination of subjective healing fiction and our objective history, but expresses the reality of our psyche -- our embodied soul.
Even if many have embarked on a similar quest, each of us makes this dramatic voyage of discovery for ourselves -- we become our own Columbus of the soul, going where we do not know. It leads into the unknown where fearsome dragons (pain, suffering, loss, grief, illness, emotional devastation, mortality, our own personal demons) await to devour us. How we navigate those turbulent seas or traverse that undiscovered country is crucial to our wholeness and well-being...even as old explorers heading for the shores of death.
If metaphor is central to embodied experience, we can find healing meaning embodied in our personal tales, which speak from the soul of the resilience of human spirit.
Efforts to control a chronic condition are rooted in two ideas: that people can control their environment and that people should take responsibility for their health. The notion that chronic illness can be controlled is common in U.S. medical practice, whereas discussion of the limits of control are uncommon. Often couched in terms of illness management in both the medical and social science literature, control over the condition reflects interpretations of Western Cartesian philosophy, which, in contemporary thought, has been interpreted as mind over matter.
The responsibility people feel for controlling their chronic illnesses and the efforts they make to overcome the constraints such control places on everyday life affect self-perceptions and alter as the illness waxes and wanes. . .embodied knowledge is assaulted by the ethos of rational determinism. The imposition of another type of order [leaves us] without meaning in [our] lives.
The close relationship between embodied knowledge and meaning is thus relegated to a subsidiary position, while control over the body becomes preeminent. Metaphor is central to embodied experience. -- Gay Becker, 1997
Emergent Healing Paradigm
MIND/BODY CONNECTION
For most of human history, healing has had to do with contact with spirit, with consciousness, with rituals intended to create a shared biofield with a shaman who seemingly could exert mind over matter. This spiritual technology has yielded to technological medicine governed by the rational protocols of science. But noting that medical intuition and therapeutic rapport are real forces in the healing process, many practitioners are moving toward a new paradigm or model of healing.
Anomalies such as the proven power of prayer, placebo effect, spontaneous remission, therapeutic intentionality, and remote healing hint that the irrational, the mysterious, is an inherent part of the natural healing process. When we become ill, the fundamental nature of consciousness is revealed as it relates to both mind and matter, psyche and soma. Consciousness may be more fundamental than either energy or matter, as the Vedas claimed centuries ago. At this sensitive threshold, miniscule changes in the situation can lead to large differences in the outcome.
THE QUANTUM SELF
We need to remold our healing institutions to conform with new physics to develop a contemporary understanding of the mind/body. A new model of the human organism is emerging ~ a holistic rather than mechanistic model that theorizes our basis in the quantum world; it means healing can happen in very subtle ways, perhaps even at the quantum level.
Emergence is the process by which order appears spontaneously within a system. It is essential to understanding functional consciousness, the mind/body, subjective experience, and the healing process. When many elements of a system mingle, they form patterns among themselves as they interact.
When the mind lets go of its rational order, lets the old form die, and enters into unstructured chaos, the whole person emerges with a new form, embodied as a creative expression, an intuition, or as healing. Most often it is characterized by an element of novelty and surprise, since it apparently does not originate in what came before. Both healing and medical intuition are examples of emergence. It is a spontaneous solution to a problem.
HEALING PHILOSOPHIES
The healing arts, from conventional medicine to alternative/complementary medicine, and from psychology to pastoral counseling are undergoing a shift from a mechanistic to a holistic paradigm. Science is actually an experimental philosophy whose highest value is empiricism, and conventional healing shares this philosophy. All new scientific theories require some unifying idea, and that idea is, by definition, metaphysical ~ essentially untestable.
Today's heresies are tomorrow's dogmas. In any metaphysical dispute, strong non-scientific arguments can propose new theories, which may become scientific. Speculative ideas have contributed heavily to the growth of knowledge.
Rather than discouraging exploration of fringe areas of knowledge, this awareness makes it mandatory we explore all possible modalities and anomalies without prejudice, no matter how unconventional. Even extraordinary subjects may be approached with rigorous protocols. Though subjectivity is unwelcome in science, we can study the subjective nature of experience (qualia) in various ways. The process of healing is one such subjective experience.
The alchemists, who were students of consciousness in matter, created an elixer of life, a “medicine of philosophers”, a cure-all or panacea. What the modern world yearns for is a “meta-syn,” or visionary synthesis rooted not in a mechanistic model but one using nature’s own forms of self-organization.
This model is based on the peculiar characteristics of nonlocality and probability of quantum physics, rather than classical Newtonian mechanics. Hopefully, the new model has the power to resonate with our whole being and propel us into a more effective healing paradigm. Emergent healing is actually a treatment philosophy, rooted in a worldview born from our current understanding of the nature of Reality.
The emerging paradigm is a more subtle and energetic model of health. In the emergent healing paradigm, healing depends on the nonlocal principles of nature’s own self-organization, as well as on direct causal influences on the mind/body of the organism. It appeals to spirit, soul, and body.
Recognizing the complexity of reality, the new paradigm includes a series of perspectives, which emphasize the positive rather than pathological, health rather than sickness, and a holistic approach to health care.
In this qualitative, rather than outcome-oriented approach, subjective experience and process are valued. The fusion of mind, emotions, body and spirit is recognized as central. In this ecological approach, the individual is embedded within larger systems, not isolated as a disease process. When we treat a symptom or disease rather than the whole person, we treat the part not the whole.
Interdependence of individuals, societies, and nature can be honored. As our knowledge of nature is increased, our knowledge of our own nature also grows correspondingly. Health, self-healing, and therapeutics is a balance supported by many disciplines, including physics, biology, and psychology as well as medicine.
We have all noticed that often the physical body is healed, but not the emotional trauma; or perhaps there is spiritual or psychological healing, but not physical cure. Therefore, it only makes sense to treat the whole person, rather than just the symptomology.
PARADIGM SHIFT
Paradigms underlie the interplay of chaos and order in human culture, at the conscious and unconscious, collective and individual level. These tacit belief systems act as lenses through which all sensory data passes before it is experienced as perception. Some perceptions arrive relatively undisturbed while others are subject to immediate characterization, distortions, and value-judgments.
Old ideas die hard. The established order, materialism, is entrenched. Establishment science is always resistant to new ideas. Science deals with models and metaphors of our perception of reality. We have had science less than 500 years, but in that time it has transformed much of the world technologically, intellectually and physically.
Scientific models change as exploration leads to the discovery of new facts and approaches that work. Still, new models are slow to be embraced. The dominant worldview hangs on as tenaciously as geocentric religious views did in the Dark Ages.
A paradigm is a working set of assumptions and postulates, (a disciplinarian matrix), about a field of inquiry or practice ~ such as healing. How we envision healing is as important as how we proceed to try to heal. It governs our protocols, what we notice and fail to notice, and how we evaluate the results. The theoretical construct defines our approach and methodology. It gains momentum over time.
Scientific exploration is not a linear process, but results from competition among theories. The best results of each system are then woven into a seamless fabric that, at least temporarily, defines the nature of that field. New observations can lead to complete revisioning of a discipline, like the emergence of quantum mechanics did in physics. Filling in theoretical gaps leads toward better explanations and solutions to problems.
Sometimes new paradigms coexist and develop alongside one another, until one supersedes the other. This is paradigm shift. Such has been the case in concurrent development of allopathic and alternative or energy medicine, also called integral medicine.
Both the conventional and integral approaches have long, noble histories, one rooted largely in western culture, the other in Asian systems. Allopathic doctors and patients themselves now recognize that strictly reductionistic and technologically-based medicine has its limitations in contemporary healthcare.
Objective science can be devoid of higher purpose and intentionality. Thus, we find ourselves with a host of ethical dilemmas in genetic engineering, transplant research, geriatrics, pharmacology, cloning, technological intervention, and molecular biology.
The relativism of postmodern deconstructionism has undermined all theoretical perspectives, turning them into or exposing them as social constructions. It is true that the healing arts are riddled with political, religious, and cultural biases. Health care has been delivered in terms of a power relationship over the body, superimposed on its biology.
There is a strong desire from the both the scientific community and public for a health system that values personal relationships, emotions, meaning, and beliefs. They connect body, mind, spirit, and society.
It is crucial to realize there is both rational and paradoxical healing, and both are vital to our well-being. Paradoxical thinking is unpredictable, unique, unforgettable, unrepeatable, and often indescribable. Breakthroughs are often paradoxical in nature, seemingly absurd, yet in fact true. Rational healing relies on doing, while paradoxical healing is rooted in ways of being. Physician Larry Dossey says it requires, “standing in the Mystery.”
There is a yearning to return “mystery” to the mechanistic arena of healing, so we can face illness and disease as whole organisms. Transpersonal forces have a valid place in healing, as they do in all areas of our existence. Many people have a sense of the importance of actively integrating spiritual principles with the material world.
The whole-systems approach co-exists with conventional medicine and is making inroads among its practitioners. Treating causes as well as symptoms, it mobilizes the patient’s will to live. It fosters the inner dimensions of the healing experience. The healing response includes behavioral, mental and spiritual shifts or transformations.
Health is the natural outcome of a meaningful life, not just absence of symptoms. It means a comprehension of the complexities of life that is deeper than the conventional worldview of cause and effect. It proposes that consciousness is the foundation of reality. We do not exist independently from the universe, but the exact nature of that seamless connection is unknown.
Rooted in relativity, quantum, holographic and chaos theories, a metaphysical context is provided to justify such a paradigm shift from the purely causal healing model. The interactive field (psychodynamic field) present in healing situations can be amplified intentionally through therapeutic entrainment, or resonant feedback playing off the unified field (universal field).
NEW CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK
No science or healing is independent of the realities of our fundamental consciousness. Consciousness is a process not an object. Neuroscientists have begun to study consciousness, both in its functional and universal aspects.
Some scientists try to reduce matter (brain cells) to consciousness while others are trying to reduce consciousness to matter. Some suggest (Newell), echoing ancient philosophies, that Absolute Consciousness may be a field that is always everywhere.
We are not discrete entities but deeply embedded within the fabric of the universe. The essence we share, more fundamental than matter and energy, may well be primordial consciousness. It may be the very basis of materiality, as the Vedas implied centuries ago. Consciousness involves the integration of information, not just a passive array of information itself.
We have many ways, besides our senses, of interfacing with reality, including intentionality, intuition, somatic perception, and direct apprehension. The new integral model of health and mind/body healing recognizes and operates from this expanded perspective and innovative medical options.
Consciousness -- the intersubjective dimension -- may be a stronger dynamic causal factor in healing than previously considered. Incorporating the full spectrum of human experience into healing promises new possibilities, new outcomes, which have been neglected in the biomedical model.
Conscious intentionality may influence subtle electromagnetic or quantum field energy processes. It affects the exchange of information at the cellular, organismic, and social level. Exceptional states of awareness (such as meditation, shamanic journeying, dreaming, dissociation, etc.) can lead to exceptional results, but they also require exceptional proof that may be difficult to produce in the laboratory or document objectively.
The emerging worldview extends our concepts beyond the domain of purely objective, reductionistic realism ~ materialism. The trend is moving from biophysical to psychophysical and psychospiritual dimensions without loss of scientific rigor.
Just as physics seeks a unified field theory, so the healing process needs a model that accounts for the mechanisms of natural healing and its anomalies such a placebo effect, spontaneous remission, even distant healing. Consciousness may just be an expression of such a universal field.
Models of healing in which disease is seen as an invasive process and the treatments are also invasive can give way to those following a natural, evolutionary course. Rather than comparing healing to a fight, or war on an external invader, we can imagine it as the creation of healthy processes. New forms emerge from adaptations after the breakdown of old forms. In this synergetic view, the organism interacts with its total environment.
Quantum Biophysics and Healing
Our contemporary task is to move beyond the apparent mind/body dichotomy of western mechanistic thought. This cannot remain a mere concept but must become part of our essence, a belief lived from our very core. Living from a holistic perspective is an experiential process, a Way of life.
"Consciousness" encompasses the potentially integrated healing aspects of brain, mind, emotions, and spirit, together with physiological and environmental influences that produce unique patterns. Healing is a physical or biological form of creativity. Nonlocal healing is a synchronistic event, which takes place in the presence of intentionality to share a common field of influence.
The "consciousness of healing" may be a pattern, or patterns, that can be identified in the anomalous energies associated with sensitive persons. Anomalous energies are one highly meaningful constellation of factors. Recurrent, complex, interrelated patterns, processes and temporal variations, influenced by the environment, are inherent in states of consciousness for better or worse.
Selected aspects of consciousness provide more reliable experimental replication and active integration of holistic investigations into the sources and processes of healing, other associated non-local phenomena, environmental effects and biophysical interactions of body, mind, emotions and spirit.
New developments on the frontier of science start with (1) observations of phenomenological effects, (2) collection of anecdotal information, (3) organizing the data into useful patterns and relationships from the experiential data, (4) developing a subsequent taxonomy for defining discrete phenomena and their various aspects, (5) forming research protocols and designs to test hypotheses and maximize successful and reproducible results, and (6) utilizing the research results in development of individual and group healing applications and expanding knowledge about the bioenergetic aspects of healing.
It has been suggested (Dossey; Krippner; Gowan; Motoyama; Beal and Gilula, 2004) that some individuals possess unusual capabilities and processes of consciousness. They are often considered intuitive about past, present or future events, and highly sensitive to body, mind, spirit and environmental influences, in and around other persons, as well other living and non-living systems. They may be admired, imitated, ignored, feared, suppressed or judged as "handicapped" or "mentally afflicted", depending on how they use their "gifts".
Associated with an individual’s abilities, there are aspects of, (1) emotional events, both life-changing (epiphany or tragedy), and sequelae, (2) and/or an inherited component, (3) a health issue, which may also serve to influence their unusual capabilities, and, (4) an environmental influence, positive or negative.
Please note that these people, by inheritance, accident, illness, discipline, or environmental influence manifest an incredible range of sensitivity, down to quantum energy levels. Many persons involved in healing processes are hypersensitive to chemical, electromagnetic, and electrical factors, whether acquired either naturally or artificially induced.
Strong psychosomatic overtones are related to electrical and electromagnetic hypersensitivity (EHS) as well as to multiple chemical sensitivities (MCS). This type of adaptation and sensitivity may be one of the characteristics important to possess or develop in the healing process.
There are many answers to "unexplained phenomena." We are developing more sensitive instruments to measure, internally and externally, the electrochemical nature of living systems and the interacting variables of the environment. Every day we watch the impossible or nonsensical become useful and applicable through technological and conceptual quantum leaps in awareness.
The complex interactions of all these energy factors (holographic, quantum, electromagnetic and chemical) that shape life processes must be considered, along with genetic, biochemical, age, gender and health processes. All of these factors must be addressed in any exploration of unusual states of consciousness whether they occur in individuals or in groups. There is comparatively very little human perspective/awareness anywhere about our long-term relationship interactions with the earth and all other living systems.
We are a product of our natural earth environment and respond to some subtle degree (and sometimes not so subtle) to the same geoelectromagnetic, chemical and atmospheric factors which affect all other living things. We can, and are, affecting the balance of nature, which in the long-term affects us. This is a true form of biological feedback.
The field of healing sources and processes requires the development of taxonomy and protocols for analyzing and exploring inherited, spontaneous, controlled and stressful patterns of consciousness, and relating these patterns to potential environmental influences.
Areas of concern, which can respond to investigation, are the recurrent, complex, interrelated patterns of brain activity (before, during, and after healing events) related to 1) the consciousness of the healer (what psychophysiological patterns are required to produce optimal and repeatable healing, 2) environmental influences supporting the healing objectives, and 3) consciousness of the subject.
When both the patient and healer are co-equals in the process and on a “level playing field,” patient safety is optimized, but so is healer safety. This type of setting also maximizes the possibilities of bioentrainment of physiological signals belonging to both patient and healer.
A level playing field also allows patient and healer to co-create the process of healing from a position of mutual empathy, respect, and trust. Such a level field is created by an environment, which maximizes those traits. Interrelated patterns of consciousness are reflected in brainwave (EEG) frequency distribution, psychophysiological states, and environmental conditions, which affect the clinical healing setting (Gilula).
Unusual states of consciousness, controlled or spontaneous may occur due to: (1) external sensory induction, sensory deprivation or sensory over-stimulation, (by environmental influences); (2) internal changes that are self-induced by body and mind disciplines, (3) ill health, (psychophysiological aspects of electrical and chemical sensitivity), accident, injury or near-death trauma, (4) inherited CNS influences, for example, familial periodic paralysis (FPP) and recurring spontaneous psychokinesis (RSPK), or (5) interactive combinations of the previous factors.
Research suggests that RSPK incidents tend to occur under unusual emotional stress and on days of above average geomagnetic fields, modulated by EMFs from the agent and focused by the agent onto significant other objects. Krippner and Persinger also report anomalies and amplification of psi reports associated with periods of exposure to tectonic strain.
The RSPK process is similar to the electro-acoustic effect of movement induced in the diaphragm of a loudspeaker by an electric current. But, in RSPK, the EMF energy moves through space-time without the benefit of electrical wiring, presumably because it is highly focused.
Roll brings up Puthoff’s theory that the central person affects the zero-point energy (ZPE) that fills space and thereby the gravity/inertia that usually keep things in place. If the ZPE is affected during RSPK, this may suggest that the ZPE has a consciousness component.
Meditative or yogic practices would add a dimension of personal exploration to any investigation of the zero-point energy. Recent research studies of the nature of consciousness and the relationship to "quantum holography", requires a new perspective regarding time, space and energy interactions.
Persons who exhibit strong allergic responses, who are often chemically and/or electrically sensitive, may inadvertently affect tape recorders, computers, lights, TVs and other sensitive electronic equipment during their reactive episodes. This is strongly reminiscent of the “Pauli Effect.” Robert Morris has reported that some individuals are affecting electronic equipment when they are in an intense or traumatized emotional state. Effects on magnetometers, electrical, magnetic, and electromagnetic field detectors have been noted from persons who claim non-local energy projection abilities.
Pathological sensitivities can be either inherited or accidentally acquired. Spontaneous, non-local events may occasionally occur around FPP or EHS-afflicted individuals. The events seem causally related to RSPK, and include lights going on and off (usually solar-activated types), computers crashing, individual components burning up, and other similar effects on sensitive solid-state electronic devices. Stressful events that may be psychophysiological or environmental seem to help initiate both FPP and ESH reactions, with RSPK occurring sometimes as a side-effect.
New methodologies and taxonomies may provide more consistent replication, control, amplification, and exploration of the subtle energies associated with healing and other states of consciousness. In the efforts to understand the interrelated patterns of body, brain, emotions, mind and environment involved in healing processes, we may describe some sources of healing within the blend of consciousness and quantum cosmology.
Discussion
Quantum mechanics, chaos theory and complexity have superceded both the pre-scientific and mechanistic worldviews. The new paradigm is an organic model ~ Nature's Way of spontaneous self-organization, self-assembly, regeneration, and transmutation of energy/matter.
Chaos prevails from the infinitely small to cosmic levels. Dynamic processes are deterministic though unpredictable. All experience is subjective. Intuition is an informational source that is non-linear and therefore can create quantum leaps in consciousness. Using imagination, we can ‘see through’ to a deeper level of reality.
The Universe is a fractal manifestation of the interaction or interdependence of chaos and order. Nature and evolution are complimentary systems evolving at the edge of chaos ~ the source of the genesis of new forms. Like a fractal, the individual embodies the whole, to a greater or lesser degree. We are neither exclusively biological nor psychospiritual beings ~ we are both/and psychobiological.
Archetypes are rooted in or emerge from the Demiurgic field as attractors, chaotic systems having fractal or reiterative structures that repeat at all levels of observation. They never settle into equilibrium, periodicity, or resonance. Transpersonal experience creates a new interpretation, or perspective on reality. Systems arise from positive feedback and amplification. Thus, archetypes introduce erratic behavior that leads to the emergence of new situations, including creative insight.
Both perception and cognition can be modeled as a transition from a state of chaos representing the unrecognized condition, or the unresolved problem, to a state of order. Creativity or learning can emerge spontaneously, from exploring states of confusion, to the instantaneous insight of a "Eureka"; moment, or knowing state through bifurcation to a new attractor, to chaotic resolution.
Art and artfulness embody the imagination expressed as a living form. An expressive form manifests human feelings and values, a concept of life (exoteric) and inward reality (esoteric) ~ the logic of consciousness itself. Other examples are sudden illumination, aesthetic appreciation, opening to nature (nature-mystic experience), simple recognition to dramatic realization, or awe.
An experience, innovation, discovery or realization always has aesthetic appeal. It contains mythological, metaphorical and epistemological dimensions. When we have a creative, therapeutic or transformative experience, it involves a degree of "what it is like"; to be shaped, to apprehend this given, to undergo this process or happening.
Chaos theory shows us we actually need to cooperate with chaotic dynamics, to enter a less-rigid process of flow, submitting outworn aspects of the ego to dissolution. This increases our adaptability helping us evolve. At supercritical junctions (crises, crossroads, bifurcations) we either breakdown (emergency) or increase adaptation (emergence) with more creative solutions.
Creativity is an excited-exalted state of arousal with a characteristic increase in both informational content and the rate of information processing. Creative holistic repatterning is introduced into the human system through the psyche as nonmanifest yet phenomenological images, symbols, and patterning information.
Imagination is embodied, objectified, expressed in the creative process. It is knowing through living through, distinctionally different from knowing about. It carries a sense of immediacy. Imagination is the voice of creativity. It is the primary way we experience soul; imagination embodies it’s own reality. It is self-revelatory. Meaning dwells in the image like consciousness dwells in the body.
We live in a chaotic universe to which we are seamlessly wed. We are a chaotic system ourselves, and chaotic systems exhibit holistic behavior. Holism sees the world in all its diversity as connected. A global wave of information (consciousness) is responsible for the extraordinary coherence that expresses as self-organization. It’s not a case of ‘we are the world’; we are one with the whole universe of phenomena and being in the deepest sense. The unifying force is consciousness.
Beauty is a state of consciousness described in Kabbalah and Hermetic philosophy as related to self-actualization. In psychological terms it implies transcendence of the realm of personality and intimate knowledge of the transpersonal self. It corresponds with creativity, healing, genius and bliss states or unitive experience. The bottom-up creative dynamic runs from personality to Self, to Demiurgic Field.
Chaos theory provides a comprehensive metaphor for uniting physical, emotional, mental and spiritual realities. Supreme insights are always metaphorical in expression. The empirical connection may lie in the mystery of the true nature of consciousness, healing, and creativity. Knowledge about natural phenomena, the way nature and ourselves work, can help us attune to deeper resources. The same essential dynamics that gave rise to the birth of the universe govern human creativity and learning.
For most of human history, healing has had to do with contact with spirit, with consciousness, with rituals intended to create a shared biofield with a shaman who seemingly could exert mind over matter. This spiritual technology has yielded to technological medicine governed by the rational protocols of science. But noting that medical intuition and therapeutic rapport are real forces in the healing process, many practitioners are moving toward a new paradigm or model of healing.
Anomalies such as the proven power of prayer, placebo effect, spontaneous remission, therapeutic intentionality, and remote healing hint that the irrational, the mysterious, is an inherent part of the natural healing process. When we become ill, the fundamental nature of consciousness is revealed as it relates to both mind and matter, psyche and soma. Consciousness may be more fundamental than either energy or matter, as the Vedas claimed centuries ago. At this sensitive threshold, miniscule changes in the situation can lead to large differences in the outcome.
THE QUANTUM SELF
We need to remold our healing institutions to conform with new physics to develop a contemporary understanding of the mind/body. A new model of the human organism is emerging ~ a holistic rather than mechanistic model that theorizes our basis in the quantum world; it means healing can happen in very subtle ways, perhaps even at the quantum level.
Emergence is the process by which order appears spontaneously within a system. It is essential to understanding functional consciousness, the mind/body, subjective experience, and the healing process. When many elements of a system mingle, they form patterns among themselves as they interact.
When the mind lets go of its rational order, lets the old form die, and enters into unstructured chaos, the whole person emerges with a new form, embodied as a creative expression, an intuition, or as healing. Most often it is characterized by an element of novelty and surprise, since it apparently does not originate in what came before. Both healing and medical intuition are examples of emergence. It is a spontaneous solution to a problem.
HEALING PHILOSOPHIES
The healing arts, from conventional medicine to alternative/complementary medicine, and from psychology to pastoral counseling are undergoing a shift from a mechanistic to a holistic paradigm. Science is actually an experimental philosophy whose highest value is empiricism, and conventional healing shares this philosophy. All new scientific theories require some unifying idea, and that idea is, by definition, metaphysical ~ essentially untestable.
Today's heresies are tomorrow's dogmas. In any metaphysical dispute, strong non-scientific arguments can propose new theories, which may become scientific. Speculative ideas have contributed heavily to the growth of knowledge.
Rather than discouraging exploration of fringe areas of knowledge, this awareness makes it mandatory we explore all possible modalities and anomalies without prejudice, no matter how unconventional. Even extraordinary subjects may be approached with rigorous protocols. Though subjectivity is unwelcome in science, we can study the subjective nature of experience (qualia) in various ways. The process of healing is one such subjective experience.
The alchemists, who were students of consciousness in matter, created an elixer of life, a “medicine of philosophers”, a cure-all or panacea. What the modern world yearns for is a “meta-syn,” or visionary synthesis rooted not in a mechanistic model but one using nature’s own forms of self-organization.
This model is based on the peculiar characteristics of nonlocality and probability of quantum physics, rather than classical Newtonian mechanics. Hopefully, the new model has the power to resonate with our whole being and propel us into a more effective healing paradigm. Emergent healing is actually a treatment philosophy, rooted in a worldview born from our current understanding of the nature of Reality.
The emerging paradigm is a more subtle and energetic model of health. In the emergent healing paradigm, healing depends on the nonlocal principles of nature’s own self-organization, as well as on direct causal influences on the mind/body of the organism. It appeals to spirit, soul, and body.
Recognizing the complexity of reality, the new paradigm includes a series of perspectives, which emphasize the positive rather than pathological, health rather than sickness, and a holistic approach to health care.
In this qualitative, rather than outcome-oriented approach, subjective experience and process are valued. The fusion of mind, emotions, body and spirit is recognized as central. In this ecological approach, the individual is embedded within larger systems, not isolated as a disease process. When we treat a symptom or disease rather than the whole person, we treat the part not the whole.
Interdependence of individuals, societies, and nature can be honored. As our knowledge of nature is increased, our knowledge of our own nature also grows correspondingly. Health, self-healing, and therapeutics is a balance supported by many disciplines, including physics, biology, and psychology as well as medicine.
We have all noticed that often the physical body is healed, but not the emotional trauma; or perhaps there is spiritual or psychological healing, but not physical cure. Therefore, it only makes sense to treat the whole person, rather than just the symptomology.
PARADIGM SHIFT
Paradigms underlie the interplay of chaos and order in human culture, at the conscious and unconscious, collective and individual level. These tacit belief systems act as lenses through which all sensory data passes before it is experienced as perception. Some perceptions arrive relatively undisturbed while others are subject to immediate characterization, distortions, and value-judgments.
Old ideas die hard. The established order, materialism, is entrenched. Establishment science is always resistant to new ideas. Science deals with models and metaphors of our perception of reality. We have had science less than 500 years, but in that time it has transformed much of the world technologically, intellectually and physically.
Scientific models change as exploration leads to the discovery of new facts and approaches that work. Still, new models are slow to be embraced. The dominant worldview hangs on as tenaciously as geocentric religious views did in the Dark Ages.
A paradigm is a working set of assumptions and postulates, (a disciplinarian matrix), about a field of inquiry or practice ~ such as healing. How we envision healing is as important as how we proceed to try to heal. It governs our protocols, what we notice and fail to notice, and how we evaluate the results. The theoretical construct defines our approach and methodology. It gains momentum over time.
Scientific exploration is not a linear process, but results from competition among theories. The best results of each system are then woven into a seamless fabric that, at least temporarily, defines the nature of that field. New observations can lead to complete revisioning of a discipline, like the emergence of quantum mechanics did in physics. Filling in theoretical gaps leads toward better explanations and solutions to problems.
Sometimes new paradigms coexist and develop alongside one another, until one supersedes the other. This is paradigm shift. Such has been the case in concurrent development of allopathic and alternative or energy medicine, also called integral medicine.
Both the conventional and integral approaches have long, noble histories, one rooted largely in western culture, the other in Asian systems. Allopathic doctors and patients themselves now recognize that strictly reductionistic and technologically-based medicine has its limitations in contemporary healthcare.
Objective science can be devoid of higher purpose and intentionality. Thus, we find ourselves with a host of ethical dilemmas in genetic engineering, transplant research, geriatrics, pharmacology, cloning, technological intervention, and molecular biology.
The relativism of postmodern deconstructionism has undermined all theoretical perspectives, turning them into or exposing them as social constructions. It is true that the healing arts are riddled with political, religious, and cultural biases. Health care has been delivered in terms of a power relationship over the body, superimposed on its biology.
There is a strong desire from the both the scientific community and public for a health system that values personal relationships, emotions, meaning, and beliefs. They connect body, mind, spirit, and society.
It is crucial to realize there is both rational and paradoxical healing, and both are vital to our well-being. Paradoxical thinking is unpredictable, unique, unforgettable, unrepeatable, and often indescribable. Breakthroughs are often paradoxical in nature, seemingly absurd, yet in fact true. Rational healing relies on doing, while paradoxical healing is rooted in ways of being. Physician Larry Dossey says it requires, “standing in the Mystery.”
There is a yearning to return “mystery” to the mechanistic arena of healing, so we can face illness and disease as whole organisms. Transpersonal forces have a valid place in healing, as they do in all areas of our existence. Many people have a sense of the importance of actively integrating spiritual principles with the material world.
The whole-systems approach co-exists with conventional medicine and is making inroads among its practitioners. Treating causes as well as symptoms, it mobilizes the patient’s will to live. It fosters the inner dimensions of the healing experience. The healing response includes behavioral, mental and spiritual shifts or transformations.
Health is the natural outcome of a meaningful life, not just absence of symptoms. It means a comprehension of the complexities of life that is deeper than the conventional worldview of cause and effect. It proposes that consciousness is the foundation of reality. We do not exist independently from the universe, but the exact nature of that seamless connection is unknown.
Rooted in relativity, quantum, holographic and chaos theories, a metaphysical context is provided to justify such a paradigm shift from the purely causal healing model. The interactive field (psychodynamic field) present in healing situations can be amplified intentionally through therapeutic entrainment, or resonant feedback playing off the unified field (universal field).
NEW CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK
No science or healing is independent of the realities of our fundamental consciousness. Consciousness is a process not an object. Neuroscientists have begun to study consciousness, both in its functional and universal aspects.
Some scientists try to reduce matter (brain cells) to consciousness while others are trying to reduce consciousness to matter. Some suggest (Newell), echoing ancient philosophies, that Absolute Consciousness may be a field that is always everywhere.
We are not discrete entities but deeply embedded within the fabric of the universe. The essence we share, more fundamental than matter and energy, may well be primordial consciousness. It may be the very basis of materiality, as the Vedas implied centuries ago. Consciousness involves the integration of information, not just a passive array of information itself.
We have many ways, besides our senses, of interfacing with reality, including intentionality, intuition, somatic perception, and direct apprehension. The new integral model of health and mind/body healing recognizes and operates from this expanded perspective and innovative medical options.
Consciousness -- the intersubjective dimension -- may be a stronger dynamic causal factor in healing than previously considered. Incorporating the full spectrum of human experience into healing promises new possibilities, new outcomes, which have been neglected in the biomedical model.
Conscious intentionality may influence subtle electromagnetic or quantum field energy processes. It affects the exchange of information at the cellular, organismic, and social level. Exceptional states of awareness (such as meditation, shamanic journeying, dreaming, dissociation, etc.) can lead to exceptional results, but they also require exceptional proof that may be difficult to produce in the laboratory or document objectively.
The emerging worldview extends our concepts beyond the domain of purely objective, reductionistic realism ~ materialism. The trend is moving from biophysical to psychophysical and psychospiritual dimensions without loss of scientific rigor.
Just as physics seeks a unified field theory, so the healing process needs a model that accounts for the mechanisms of natural healing and its anomalies such a placebo effect, spontaneous remission, even distant healing. Consciousness may just be an expression of such a universal field.
Models of healing in which disease is seen as an invasive process and the treatments are also invasive can give way to those following a natural, evolutionary course. Rather than comparing healing to a fight, or war on an external invader, we can imagine it as the creation of healthy processes. New forms emerge from adaptations after the breakdown of old forms. In this synergetic view, the organism interacts with its total environment.
Quantum Biophysics and Healing
Our contemporary task is to move beyond the apparent mind/body dichotomy of western mechanistic thought. This cannot remain a mere concept but must become part of our essence, a belief lived from our very core. Living from a holistic perspective is an experiential process, a Way of life.
"Consciousness" encompasses the potentially integrated healing aspects of brain, mind, emotions, and spirit, together with physiological and environmental influences that produce unique patterns. Healing is a physical or biological form of creativity. Nonlocal healing is a synchronistic event, which takes place in the presence of intentionality to share a common field of influence.
The "consciousness of healing" may be a pattern, or patterns, that can be identified in the anomalous energies associated with sensitive persons. Anomalous energies are one highly meaningful constellation of factors. Recurrent, complex, interrelated patterns, processes and temporal variations, influenced by the environment, are inherent in states of consciousness for better or worse.
Selected aspects of consciousness provide more reliable experimental replication and active integration of holistic investigations into the sources and processes of healing, other associated non-local phenomena, environmental effects and biophysical interactions of body, mind, emotions and spirit.
New developments on the frontier of science start with (1) observations of phenomenological effects, (2) collection of anecdotal information, (3) organizing the data into useful patterns and relationships from the experiential data, (4) developing a subsequent taxonomy for defining discrete phenomena and their various aspects, (5) forming research protocols and designs to test hypotheses and maximize successful and reproducible results, and (6) utilizing the research results in development of individual and group healing applications and expanding knowledge about the bioenergetic aspects of healing.
It has been suggested (Dossey; Krippner; Gowan; Motoyama; Beal and Gilula, 2004) that some individuals possess unusual capabilities and processes of consciousness. They are often considered intuitive about past, present or future events, and highly sensitive to body, mind, spirit and environmental influences, in and around other persons, as well other living and non-living systems. They may be admired, imitated, ignored, feared, suppressed or judged as "handicapped" or "mentally afflicted", depending on how they use their "gifts".
Associated with an individual’s abilities, there are aspects of, (1) emotional events, both life-changing (epiphany or tragedy), and sequelae, (2) and/or an inherited component, (3) a health issue, which may also serve to influence their unusual capabilities, and, (4) an environmental influence, positive or negative.
Please note that these people, by inheritance, accident, illness, discipline, or environmental influence manifest an incredible range of sensitivity, down to quantum energy levels. Many persons involved in healing processes are hypersensitive to chemical, electromagnetic, and electrical factors, whether acquired either naturally or artificially induced.
Strong psychosomatic overtones are related to electrical and electromagnetic hypersensitivity (EHS) as well as to multiple chemical sensitivities (MCS). This type of adaptation and sensitivity may be one of the characteristics important to possess or develop in the healing process.
There are many answers to "unexplained phenomena." We are developing more sensitive instruments to measure, internally and externally, the electrochemical nature of living systems and the interacting variables of the environment. Every day we watch the impossible or nonsensical become useful and applicable through technological and conceptual quantum leaps in awareness.
The complex interactions of all these energy factors (holographic, quantum, electromagnetic and chemical) that shape life processes must be considered, along with genetic, biochemical, age, gender and health processes. All of these factors must be addressed in any exploration of unusual states of consciousness whether they occur in individuals or in groups. There is comparatively very little human perspective/awareness anywhere about our long-term relationship interactions with the earth and all other living systems.
We are a product of our natural earth environment and respond to some subtle degree (and sometimes not so subtle) to the same geoelectromagnetic, chemical and atmospheric factors which affect all other living things. We can, and are, affecting the balance of nature, which in the long-term affects us. This is a true form of biological feedback.
The field of healing sources and processes requires the development of taxonomy and protocols for analyzing and exploring inherited, spontaneous, controlled and stressful patterns of consciousness, and relating these patterns to potential environmental influences.
Areas of concern, which can respond to investigation, are the recurrent, complex, interrelated patterns of brain activity (before, during, and after healing events) related to 1) the consciousness of the healer (what psychophysiological patterns are required to produce optimal and repeatable healing, 2) environmental influences supporting the healing objectives, and 3) consciousness of the subject.
When both the patient and healer are co-equals in the process and on a “level playing field,” patient safety is optimized, but so is healer safety. This type of setting also maximizes the possibilities of bioentrainment of physiological signals belonging to both patient and healer.
A level playing field also allows patient and healer to co-create the process of healing from a position of mutual empathy, respect, and trust. Such a level field is created by an environment, which maximizes those traits. Interrelated patterns of consciousness are reflected in brainwave (EEG) frequency distribution, psychophysiological states, and environmental conditions, which affect the clinical healing setting (Gilula).
Unusual states of consciousness, controlled or spontaneous may occur due to: (1) external sensory induction, sensory deprivation or sensory over-stimulation, (by environmental influences); (2) internal changes that are self-induced by body and mind disciplines, (3) ill health, (psychophysiological aspects of electrical and chemical sensitivity), accident, injury or near-death trauma, (4) inherited CNS influences, for example, familial periodic paralysis (FPP) and recurring spontaneous psychokinesis (RSPK), or (5) interactive combinations of the previous factors.
Research suggests that RSPK incidents tend to occur under unusual emotional stress and on days of above average geomagnetic fields, modulated by EMFs from the agent and focused by the agent onto significant other objects. Krippner and Persinger also report anomalies and amplification of psi reports associated with periods of exposure to tectonic strain.
The RSPK process is similar to the electro-acoustic effect of movement induced in the diaphragm of a loudspeaker by an electric current. But, in RSPK, the EMF energy moves through space-time without the benefit of electrical wiring, presumably because it is highly focused.
Roll brings up Puthoff’s theory that the central person affects the zero-point energy (ZPE) that fills space and thereby the gravity/inertia that usually keep things in place. If the ZPE is affected during RSPK, this may suggest that the ZPE has a consciousness component.
Meditative or yogic practices would add a dimension of personal exploration to any investigation of the zero-point energy. Recent research studies of the nature of consciousness and the relationship to "quantum holography", requires a new perspective regarding time, space and energy interactions.
Persons who exhibit strong allergic responses, who are often chemically and/or electrically sensitive, may inadvertently affect tape recorders, computers, lights, TVs and other sensitive electronic equipment during their reactive episodes. This is strongly reminiscent of the “Pauli Effect.” Robert Morris has reported that some individuals are affecting electronic equipment when they are in an intense or traumatized emotional state. Effects on magnetometers, electrical, magnetic, and electromagnetic field detectors have been noted from persons who claim non-local energy projection abilities.
Pathological sensitivities can be either inherited or accidentally acquired. Spontaneous, non-local events may occasionally occur around FPP or EHS-afflicted individuals. The events seem causally related to RSPK, and include lights going on and off (usually solar-activated types), computers crashing, individual components burning up, and other similar effects on sensitive solid-state electronic devices. Stressful events that may be psychophysiological or environmental seem to help initiate both FPP and ESH reactions, with RSPK occurring sometimes as a side-effect.
New methodologies and taxonomies may provide more consistent replication, control, amplification, and exploration of the subtle energies associated with healing and other states of consciousness. In the efforts to understand the interrelated patterns of body, brain, emotions, mind and environment involved in healing processes, we may describe some sources of healing within the blend of consciousness and quantum cosmology.
Discussion
Quantum mechanics, chaos theory and complexity have superceded both the pre-scientific and mechanistic worldviews. The new paradigm is an organic model ~ Nature's Way of spontaneous self-organization, self-assembly, regeneration, and transmutation of energy/matter.
Chaos prevails from the infinitely small to cosmic levels. Dynamic processes are deterministic though unpredictable. All experience is subjective. Intuition is an informational source that is non-linear and therefore can create quantum leaps in consciousness. Using imagination, we can ‘see through’ to a deeper level of reality.
The Universe is a fractal manifestation of the interaction or interdependence of chaos and order. Nature and evolution are complimentary systems evolving at the edge of chaos ~ the source of the genesis of new forms. Like a fractal, the individual embodies the whole, to a greater or lesser degree. We are neither exclusively biological nor psychospiritual beings ~ we are both/and psychobiological.
Archetypes are rooted in or emerge from the Demiurgic field as attractors, chaotic systems having fractal or reiterative structures that repeat at all levels of observation. They never settle into equilibrium, periodicity, or resonance. Transpersonal experience creates a new interpretation, or perspective on reality. Systems arise from positive feedback and amplification. Thus, archetypes introduce erratic behavior that leads to the emergence of new situations, including creative insight.
Both perception and cognition can be modeled as a transition from a state of chaos representing the unrecognized condition, or the unresolved problem, to a state of order. Creativity or learning can emerge spontaneously, from exploring states of confusion, to the instantaneous insight of a "Eureka"; moment, or knowing state through bifurcation to a new attractor, to chaotic resolution.
Art and artfulness embody the imagination expressed as a living form. An expressive form manifests human feelings and values, a concept of life (exoteric) and inward reality (esoteric) ~ the logic of consciousness itself. Other examples are sudden illumination, aesthetic appreciation, opening to nature (nature-mystic experience), simple recognition to dramatic realization, or awe.
An experience, innovation, discovery or realization always has aesthetic appeal. It contains mythological, metaphorical and epistemological dimensions. When we have a creative, therapeutic or transformative experience, it involves a degree of "what it is like"; to be shaped, to apprehend this given, to undergo this process or happening.
Chaos theory shows us we actually need to cooperate with chaotic dynamics, to enter a less-rigid process of flow, submitting outworn aspects of the ego to dissolution. This increases our adaptability helping us evolve. At supercritical junctions (crises, crossroads, bifurcations) we either breakdown (emergency) or increase adaptation (emergence) with more creative solutions.
Creativity is an excited-exalted state of arousal with a characteristic increase in both informational content and the rate of information processing. Creative holistic repatterning is introduced into the human system through the psyche as nonmanifest yet phenomenological images, symbols, and patterning information.
Imagination is embodied, objectified, expressed in the creative process. It is knowing through living through, distinctionally different from knowing about. It carries a sense of immediacy. Imagination is the voice of creativity. It is the primary way we experience soul; imagination embodies it’s own reality. It is self-revelatory. Meaning dwells in the image like consciousness dwells in the body.
We live in a chaotic universe to which we are seamlessly wed. We are a chaotic system ourselves, and chaotic systems exhibit holistic behavior. Holism sees the world in all its diversity as connected. A global wave of information (consciousness) is responsible for the extraordinary coherence that expresses as self-organization. It’s not a case of ‘we are the world’; we are one with the whole universe of phenomena and being in the deepest sense. The unifying force is consciousness.
Beauty is a state of consciousness described in Kabbalah and Hermetic philosophy as related to self-actualization. In psychological terms it implies transcendence of the realm of personality and intimate knowledge of the transpersonal self. It corresponds with creativity, healing, genius and bliss states or unitive experience. The bottom-up creative dynamic runs from personality to Self, to Demiurgic Field.
Chaos theory provides a comprehensive metaphor for uniting physical, emotional, mental and spiritual realities. Supreme insights are always metaphorical in expression. The empirical connection may lie in the mystery of the true nature of consciousness, healing, and creativity. Knowledge about natural phenomena, the way nature and ourselves work, can help us attune to deeper resources. The same essential dynamics that gave rise to the birth of the universe govern human creativity and learning.
Holographic Healing
The placebo effect and spontaneous remission are two of the most powerful yet discounted healing phenomena known in the healing arts and sciences. Such healing occurs with any or all illnesses, yet nothing, no treatment or substances, has been administered that can account for it. In studies of new treatments, as a control, the placebo consistently brings about symptomatic remissions 30-50% of the time.
If a test drug performs in the 60% range (as many, if not most, do) the placebo was also at work in the test group and accounts for at least half or more of the effectiveness of the test treatment. The proponent of the treatment generally prefers to claim it to be the entire 60% effective. The half or more that is accountable by the placebo effect is ignored and illusions created about the drug's effectiveness.
The placebo effect and spontaneous remission are consciousness events, and more specifically events in which consciousness and matter interact to naturally change or transform diseased structures into healing process or flow. At the level of reality at which this event takes place, it is not even an interaction, it is a reality in which consciousness-matter, or as it is more popularly known, mind-body, are not different but are virtualities not committed to either condition, yet the potential of both. It is, in other words, a level of quantum reality.
Spontaneous healing is closely associated with REM. These clues all imply the mechanism through which dreams, placebos, and experiential psychotherapy do their healing and regenerative work. Chaos is always associated with change and is usually seen as its aftereffect.
Chaos is actually the mechanism of the change itself. REM-Chaos consciousness is the most chaotic or complex state of dynamics in the brain. It is the state that most supports its self-correction (the homeostasis effect) and the natural transformation of any organism to healthy flow. It is the state that supports profound self-healing.
This information also implies a major change in the way we can view illness and healing.
Seen from a consciousness viewpoint and consistent with the new physics of quantum holographic, and chaos theories, illness and wellness are more a matter of basic consciousness structure than mere chemistry. Chemical changes are an effect rather than a cause, an associated phenomenon. We can no longer view illness as merely the invasion of the body by carcinogens or germs and viruses and healing as the mechanistic or chemical correction of these conditions. Natural healing happens at quantum-implicate levels of reality. Accessing it through the REM-Chaos state brings about subsequent changes in brain chemistry and may be the mechanisms by which placebos heal.
NONLOCAL MIND
Unbound Consciousness: Beyond the Mind/Body Model
The universe is infinite, and so is the mind, not in the individual personalistic sense, but in terms of consciousness. ‘Nous’ is an ancient word for what we now call nonlocal mind or consciousness. Many philosophers and modern physicists consider ‘consciousness’ as the fundamental basis of all that is.
Alchemy, as the search for godhead in matter, argues that “there is one stone, one medicine to which nothing from outside is added, nor is it diminished, save that the superfluities are removed: as above, so below; as within, so without. Alchemists sought the Unus Mundus, the One World analogous to the modern search for a Grand Unified Theory in physics, or the Theory of Everything uniting all known forces.
The Greeks conceived of the mind as both limited and infinite, human and divine. The root of this notion comes from Hermetic and occult sciences, attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. The mind is not localized nor confined to the body but extends outside it. This notion lies at the root of sympathetic magic.
The Persians were even bolder in their view that the mind could escape the confines of the physical body and create effects in the outside world. Their physician Avicenna declared, “The imagination of man can act not only on his own body but even on others and very distant bodies. It can fascinate and modify them, make them ill, or restore them to health.”
These notions were superceded by later causal and mechanistic views that came to dominate Western science and medicine, separating mind and body. The nonlocal mind paradigm suggests we can effectively operate with the realization that consciousness can free itself from the body and can act not only on our own bodies, but nonlocally on distant things, events, and people, even if they are unconscious of the intentionality. But it is a holistic viewpoint that doesn’t split mind from body. It also suggests a new emergent healing paradigm (Miller, 2003).
This nonlocal model is perhaps the basis of such phenomena as psychosomatics, remote healing, remote viewing, and dream initiations. Physicists use the term nonlocal to describe the distant interactions of subatomic particles such as electrons. We can experience nonlocal mind spontaneously, paradoxically, without losing our individuality. A creator can live in many universes instead of simply adhering to a prescribed worldview such as the outmoded causal paradigm or unscientific New Age beliefs.
It has been proven that human minds display similar interactions at a distance (Krippner; Mishlove; Radin; Dossey; May; Stanford; Germine; Nelson; Motoyama; Sidorov; Swanson; Miller & Miller). These anomalies include therapeutic rapport, telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, visions, prophetic dreams, breakthroughs, creativity, prayer, synchronicity, medical intuition, nonlocal diagnosis, spontaneous remission, and intent mediated or paradoxical healing.
Nonlocal mind erupts spontaneously, surprising, even shocking us. The mind has ultradimensional qualities seemingly unlimited by physical constraints. Psi phenomena concern organism-environment interactions in which it appears that information or infuence has occurred that cannot be explained through current models of sensory-motor channels. They are outside current scientific concepts of time, space, and force. We have hypotheses but little idea how organism-environment and organism-organism information and influence interface and flow.
“Emergence” is the process by which order appears spontaneously within a system. It is essential to understanding functional consciousness, the mind/body, subjective experience, and the healing process. When many elements of a system mingle, they form patterns among themselves as they interact.
Fundamental physics is about observable and verifiable anticipation of possible relatively evolving quantities and/or qualities, including complementary wave/particle descriptions. Quantum mechanical equations of motion yield open systems and work out their consequences for the flow of information. We have tremendous empirical evidence that quantum mechanics is part of such a physics. And so are we when we seem to make quantum leaps” in awareness.
When the mind lets go of its rational order, lets the old form die, and enters into a bifurcation or unstructured chaos, the whole person emerges with a new form, embodied as a creative expression, an intuition, or as healing. Most often it is characterized by an element of novelty and surprise, since it apparently does not originate in what came before. Both healing and medical intuition are examples of emergence. It is a spontaneous solution to a problem.
The healing arts, from conventional medicine to alternative/complementary medicine (CAM), and from psychology to pastoral counseling are undergoing a shift from a mechanistic to a holistic paradigm. Science is actually an experimental philosophy whose highest value is empiricism, and conventional healing shares this philosophy. All new scientific theories require some unifying idea, and that idea is, by definition, metaphysical or essentially untestable.
Today’s heresies are tomorrow’s dogmas. In any metaphysical dispute, strong non-scientific arguments can propose new theories, which may become scientific. Speculative ideas have contributed heavily to the growth of knowledge.
Rather than discouraging exploration of fringe areas of knowledge, this awareness makes it mandatory we explore all possible modalities and anomalies without prejudice, no matter how unconventional. Even extraordinary subjects may be approached with rigorous protocols. Though subjectivity is unwelcome in science, we can study the subjective nature of experience (qualia) in various ways. The process of healing is one such subjective experience.
The alchemists, who were students of consciousness in matter, created an elixir of life, a “medicine of philosophers”, a cure-all or panacea. What the modern world yearns for is a “meta-syn,” or visionary synthesis rooted not in a mechanistic model but one using nature’s own organic forms of self-organization.
This model is based on the peculiar characteristics of nonlocality and probability of quantum physics, rather than classical Newtonian mechanics. QM doesn't explain gravity, but the fact that the world “ever” appears classical is just a simplification due to our inability to sense quantum states directly. There is no such thing as a classical world.
Hopefully, the new model has the power to resonate with our whole being and propel us into a more effective healing paradigm. Emergent healing is actually a treatment philosophy, rooted in a worldview born from our current understanding of the nature of Reality as described in chaos theory, quantum mechanics, and the holographic concept..
Health is the natural outcome of a meaningful life, not just absence of symptoms. It means a comprehension of the complexities of life that is deeper than the conventional worldview of cause and effect. It proposes that consciousness is the foundation of reality. We do not exist independently from the universe, but the exact nature of that seamless connection is unknown.
Rooted in relativity, quantum, holographic and chaos theories, a nonlocal metaphysical context suggests such a paradigm shift from the purely causal healing model. The interactive field (psychodynamic field) present in healing situations can be amplified intentionally through therapeutic entrainment, or resonant feedback playing off the unified field (universal field).
Experiential therapy sessions and mysticism demonstrate that as we journey deeper and deeper into the psyche we eventually encounter a state characterized either as "chaotic" or void of images. In a therapeutic context, chaos is experienced as a consciousness state--the ground state. This state is related to healing, dreams, and creativity. Shamanic approaches to healing involve co-consciousness states which lead to restructuring both physical and emotional-mental senses of self.
Dreams, creativity, and healing arise from this undifferentiated "chaotic consciousness." Dreamhealing uses images as portals for consciousness journeys to facilitate transformations ranging from mood alteration to profound physiological changes. Imagery (virtual experience) affects the immune system, activating psychosomatic forces, such as the placebo effect. Chaos-oriented consciousness journeys suggest these states reflect complex phase space, fractal patterns, strange attractors, "the butterfly effect," sensitivity, complex feedback loops, intermittency, and other general dynamical aspects suggested by chaos theory. More than an experiential process, this is a philosophy of treatment--"Chaosophy."
If a test drug performs in the 60% range (as many, if not most, do) the placebo was also at work in the test group and accounts for at least half or more of the effectiveness of the test treatment. The proponent of the treatment generally prefers to claim it to be the entire 60% effective. The half or more that is accountable by the placebo effect is ignored and illusions created about the drug's effectiveness.
The placebo effect and spontaneous remission are consciousness events, and more specifically events in which consciousness and matter interact to naturally change or transform diseased structures into healing process or flow. At the level of reality at which this event takes place, it is not even an interaction, it is a reality in which consciousness-matter, or as it is more popularly known, mind-body, are not different but are virtualities not committed to either condition, yet the potential of both. It is, in other words, a level of quantum reality.
Spontaneous healing is closely associated with REM. These clues all imply the mechanism through which dreams, placebos, and experiential psychotherapy do their healing and regenerative work. Chaos is always associated with change and is usually seen as its aftereffect.
Chaos is actually the mechanism of the change itself. REM-Chaos consciousness is the most chaotic or complex state of dynamics in the brain. It is the state that most supports its self-correction (the homeostasis effect) and the natural transformation of any organism to healthy flow. It is the state that supports profound self-healing.
This information also implies a major change in the way we can view illness and healing.
Seen from a consciousness viewpoint and consistent with the new physics of quantum holographic, and chaos theories, illness and wellness are more a matter of basic consciousness structure than mere chemistry. Chemical changes are an effect rather than a cause, an associated phenomenon. We can no longer view illness as merely the invasion of the body by carcinogens or germs and viruses and healing as the mechanistic or chemical correction of these conditions. Natural healing happens at quantum-implicate levels of reality. Accessing it through the REM-Chaos state brings about subsequent changes in brain chemistry and may be the mechanisms by which placebos heal.
NONLOCAL MIND
Unbound Consciousness: Beyond the Mind/Body Model
The universe is infinite, and so is the mind, not in the individual personalistic sense, but in terms of consciousness. ‘Nous’ is an ancient word for what we now call nonlocal mind or consciousness. Many philosophers and modern physicists consider ‘consciousness’ as the fundamental basis of all that is.
Alchemy, as the search for godhead in matter, argues that “there is one stone, one medicine to which nothing from outside is added, nor is it diminished, save that the superfluities are removed: as above, so below; as within, so without. Alchemists sought the Unus Mundus, the One World analogous to the modern search for a Grand Unified Theory in physics, or the Theory of Everything uniting all known forces.
The Greeks conceived of the mind as both limited and infinite, human and divine. The root of this notion comes from Hermetic and occult sciences, attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. The mind is not localized nor confined to the body but extends outside it. This notion lies at the root of sympathetic magic.
The Persians were even bolder in their view that the mind could escape the confines of the physical body and create effects in the outside world. Their physician Avicenna declared, “The imagination of man can act not only on his own body but even on others and very distant bodies. It can fascinate and modify them, make them ill, or restore them to health.”
These notions were superceded by later causal and mechanistic views that came to dominate Western science and medicine, separating mind and body. The nonlocal mind paradigm suggests we can effectively operate with the realization that consciousness can free itself from the body and can act not only on our own bodies, but nonlocally on distant things, events, and people, even if they are unconscious of the intentionality. But it is a holistic viewpoint that doesn’t split mind from body. It also suggests a new emergent healing paradigm (Miller, 2003).
This nonlocal model is perhaps the basis of such phenomena as psychosomatics, remote healing, remote viewing, and dream initiations. Physicists use the term nonlocal to describe the distant interactions of subatomic particles such as electrons. We can experience nonlocal mind spontaneously, paradoxically, without losing our individuality. A creator can live in many universes instead of simply adhering to a prescribed worldview such as the outmoded causal paradigm or unscientific New Age beliefs.
It has been proven that human minds display similar interactions at a distance (Krippner; Mishlove; Radin; Dossey; May; Stanford; Germine; Nelson; Motoyama; Sidorov; Swanson; Miller & Miller). These anomalies include therapeutic rapport, telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, visions, prophetic dreams, breakthroughs, creativity, prayer, synchronicity, medical intuition, nonlocal diagnosis, spontaneous remission, and intent mediated or paradoxical healing.
Nonlocal mind erupts spontaneously, surprising, even shocking us. The mind has ultradimensional qualities seemingly unlimited by physical constraints. Psi phenomena concern organism-environment interactions in which it appears that information or infuence has occurred that cannot be explained through current models of sensory-motor channels. They are outside current scientific concepts of time, space, and force. We have hypotheses but little idea how organism-environment and organism-organism information and influence interface and flow.
“Emergence” is the process by which order appears spontaneously within a system. It is essential to understanding functional consciousness, the mind/body, subjective experience, and the healing process. When many elements of a system mingle, they form patterns among themselves as they interact.
Fundamental physics is about observable and verifiable anticipation of possible relatively evolving quantities and/or qualities, including complementary wave/particle descriptions. Quantum mechanical equations of motion yield open systems and work out their consequences for the flow of information. We have tremendous empirical evidence that quantum mechanics is part of such a physics. And so are we when we seem to make quantum leaps” in awareness.
When the mind lets go of its rational order, lets the old form die, and enters into a bifurcation or unstructured chaos, the whole person emerges with a new form, embodied as a creative expression, an intuition, or as healing. Most often it is characterized by an element of novelty and surprise, since it apparently does not originate in what came before. Both healing and medical intuition are examples of emergence. It is a spontaneous solution to a problem.
The healing arts, from conventional medicine to alternative/complementary medicine (CAM), and from psychology to pastoral counseling are undergoing a shift from a mechanistic to a holistic paradigm. Science is actually an experimental philosophy whose highest value is empiricism, and conventional healing shares this philosophy. All new scientific theories require some unifying idea, and that idea is, by definition, metaphysical or essentially untestable.
Today’s heresies are tomorrow’s dogmas. In any metaphysical dispute, strong non-scientific arguments can propose new theories, which may become scientific. Speculative ideas have contributed heavily to the growth of knowledge.
Rather than discouraging exploration of fringe areas of knowledge, this awareness makes it mandatory we explore all possible modalities and anomalies without prejudice, no matter how unconventional. Even extraordinary subjects may be approached with rigorous protocols. Though subjectivity is unwelcome in science, we can study the subjective nature of experience (qualia) in various ways. The process of healing is one such subjective experience.
The alchemists, who were students of consciousness in matter, created an elixir of life, a “medicine of philosophers”, a cure-all or panacea. What the modern world yearns for is a “meta-syn,” or visionary synthesis rooted not in a mechanistic model but one using nature’s own organic forms of self-organization.
This model is based on the peculiar characteristics of nonlocality and probability of quantum physics, rather than classical Newtonian mechanics. QM doesn't explain gravity, but the fact that the world “ever” appears classical is just a simplification due to our inability to sense quantum states directly. There is no such thing as a classical world.
Hopefully, the new model has the power to resonate with our whole being and propel us into a more effective healing paradigm. Emergent healing is actually a treatment philosophy, rooted in a worldview born from our current understanding of the nature of Reality as described in chaos theory, quantum mechanics, and the holographic concept..
Health is the natural outcome of a meaningful life, not just absence of symptoms. It means a comprehension of the complexities of life that is deeper than the conventional worldview of cause and effect. It proposes that consciousness is the foundation of reality. We do not exist independently from the universe, but the exact nature of that seamless connection is unknown.
Rooted in relativity, quantum, holographic and chaos theories, a nonlocal metaphysical context suggests such a paradigm shift from the purely causal healing model. The interactive field (psychodynamic field) present in healing situations can be amplified intentionally through therapeutic entrainment, or resonant feedback playing off the unified field (universal field).
Experiential therapy sessions and mysticism demonstrate that as we journey deeper and deeper into the psyche we eventually encounter a state characterized either as "chaotic" or void of images. In a therapeutic context, chaos is experienced as a consciousness state--the ground state. This state is related to healing, dreams, and creativity. Shamanic approaches to healing involve co-consciousness states which lead to restructuring both physical and emotional-mental senses of self.
Dreams, creativity, and healing arise from this undifferentiated "chaotic consciousness." Dreamhealing uses images as portals for consciousness journeys to facilitate transformations ranging from mood alteration to profound physiological changes. Imagery (virtual experience) affects the immune system, activating psychosomatic forces, such as the placebo effect. Chaos-oriented consciousness journeys suggest these states reflect complex phase space, fractal patterns, strange attractors, "the butterfly effect," sensitivity, complex feedback loops, intermittency, and other general dynamical aspects suggested by chaos theory. More than an experiential process, this is a philosophy of treatment--"Chaosophy."
Venus Butterfly Effect
Sexual Healing: A Review and Discussion
By Iona Miller, CHT 12/04
But couldn't everyone's life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life? ~ Michel Foucault
The relationship between two people creates society; society is not independent of you and me; the mass is not by itself a separate entity but you and I in relationship to each other create the mass, the group, the society. --Krishnamurti
For all the trappings of civilized society, and our attempts to restrain and civilize it, sex remains forever the chaotic vital force, eclipsing our hearts and capturing our minds, winging on the airwaves in the throbbing beat of rock and roll, ensnaring all, in love's enticements and torments, from our founding creation myths, to our greatest dramatic performances. Its mountains of spice span the great divide between divine comedy and stark tragedy. ~ Chris King, Sexual Paradox
“Total union is not possible when the ego is afraid to give up, and where the ego is not firmly grounded in the instincts it dare not surrender to the transpersonal power. ~ Marion Woodman, Addiction to Perfection
The philosophy presented in Paul Pearsall's 1994 book Sexual Healing is more pertinent than ever, as we seek new ways of healing ourselves, others, and our trouble-plagued world. Many people understand that this work begins at home, in cleaning up one's own backyard; but we can also come to understand that social outreach can be rooted in a healthy approach to our sexuality and wholeness.
In chaos theory's butterfly effect, small influences are pumped up into great change; in the Venus butterfly effect; healing spreads from the sexual core of each of us into the environment. The seemingly inconsequential or unrelated affects outcomes in ways unpredicatable to modern humankind. We can certainly guess at many factors in our lives, but there are equally other things happening beyond our knowing that perturb our life paths into different choices. The same can happen on a greater scale, from molecular to global.
Sexual healing requires that we practice selflessness as often out of bed as we do in bed so that when we make love, we love like we live. Sexual healing suggests the universal principles of collective responsibility rather than individual right lead to better health for ourselves and our society. The focus to comply to avoid punishment must be replaced with intentionality. All the elements of ordinary experience are sacralized.
The sexual and reproductive choices of each of us play a pivotal role in the future of life and human culture. The multidimensional sexual relationship in its mingling of cooperative and competitive motifs, is a fundamental mystery of existence, out of which life, diversity and the richness of human culture spring - the condition of creative sexual paradox. (Fiedler and King).
People connecting is the true act of healing. Sexual healing views the immune system as a sensual and sexual organ ~ a liquefied nervous system. The primary purpose of sex as a psychophysical impulse is not to fulfill the individual but to promote more caring and intimacy everywhere and for everyone - family, society, and the world. Sexual healing is based on the sacredness and privacy of the two-person interaction. There are five levels of connection: with self, with another, with something more, with the present moment, and with the body of another person.
Intimacy/interdependence and immunity are inseparably linked, like mindbody and matter/energy. Our personal health is intimately related to our sexual and bonding styles, and reflects in the greater community at large. Our culture is rooted in our psychophysiology. Sexual healing is based on the assumption that the desire and ability to merge intensely with another person is crucial to health. Through it we connect with another person, the present moment, and open to the transpersonal, living in the moment not for the moment.
There are long-term health benefits in such unions. But healing love derives from caring acts, not spontaneous and romantic emotional reflexes and brain-chemistry which can be quite overwhelming and distressing. Pleasure heals. Sexual healing actively enhances relationship, feels good and fits well and constructively with the world and is good for your health. It is the physical expression of how we think, feel and believe about our healing partner. People either stress or nurture us, in general. We decide if we feel threatened or comforted, attracted or repulsed.
Psychoneurosexuality
Psychoneurosexuality suggests intimate relationships are not only choices of who and how we love but affect our health and that of our partner. Every act of love and intimacy is an act of immunity. We can protect and heal our bodies with healthy connections. Trust and security allow us to open to vulnerability.
In meaningful connected sexual intimacy our hormones are in erotic harmony that boosts immune function. Every sex act is potentially an anti-aging immune stimulation. Intimate relations are a way of stimulating, programming, balancing and strengthening the immune system.
Loving empathy is earned within an enduring, responsible, intimate exchange intentionally engaged in with another person. We feel love when we behave lovingly. Empathy means sensing and acknowledging another’s feelings, but sympathy validates them as authentic. Sexual healing combines both for mutual support. Our passions are prototypes for immune function and healing, and perhaps more foundational than fads in “healthy living.” Those who pursue time-consuming health hobbies to the detriment of their relationships, take note.
Attachment Patterns
Adult romantic love can be viewed as a continuation of the attachment process. Love is an integration of three biologically based behavioral systems: attachment, caregiving, and sexuality. "Companionate love" includes attachment and caregiving but not necessarily sexuality, whereas "passionate love" emphasizes only sexual attraction. Attachment style is likely to exert a very pervasive influence on our relationships with others, because it reflects general views about the rewards and dangers of interpersonal relationships.
There are three typical attachment styles: secure, avoidant, and anxious/ambivalent. There are similarities in the life-cycle of adult love (an attaching “in-love” phase leads on to a secure attachment) and childhood attachment (strong maternal attachment leads to secure attachment style).
Characteristics of parent-child relationships are probable causes of differences in infant attachment styles and are also among the determinants of adult romantic attachment styles. Attachment dimensions are likely to influence who one chooses as a dating partner and may play an important role in organizing behaviours, perceptions and expectations within dating relationships.
Secure individuals have a more positive self-image than insecure types. They are more trusting in general and likely to believe in people’s altruism and capacity and willingness and to adapt and control the outcomes of their lives. Their views of love are more romantic and less practical. They tended to report warm relationships with caregivers.
Insecure people have lower self-worth and confidence. They believe human nature is complex and difficult to understand, consider others less altruistic and more likely to conform to social pressures. Love style is related to obsession/dependency. They tend to report cold or inconsistent caregiving. Differences in attachment are linked to differences in beliefs about self and others in ways that are consistent with attachment theory.
Secure individuals’ parental representations are characterized by differentiation, elaboration, benevolence, and nonpunitiveness. Representations by dismissing people were characterized by less differentiation and more punitiveness and malevolence. Fearful individuals describe their parents as relatively punitive and malevolent, but their representations are well differentiated and conceptually complex. Anxious-ambivalent people describe their parents ambivalently as both punitive and benevolent.
Differences in adult attachment styles are found to be related to differences in (1) most significant love experiences, (2) mental models of self and relationships, (3) attachment-history (memories of childhood relationships with parents), (4) vulnerability to loneliness, and (5) feelings related to work, such as feelings towards relationships with coworkers and using work to avoid social contacts.
Bonding is a buffer against both delusional delight and crisis, the slings and arrows of life. We learn to be attracted to the intensity of interpersonal relationship rather than our own arousal states (psychochemical high). Infatuation causes us to assess our emotional, cognitive and sexual coping capacity to be intimate in a healthy and satisfying way. An individual`s own attachment style was a stronger predictor of perceived relationship quality than the partner`s attachment style.
Compared with secure and anxious-ambivalent persons, avoidant persons report lower levels of intimacy, enjoyment, promotive interaction, and positive emotions, and higher levels of negative emotions, primarily in opposite-sex interactions. Avoidant persons may structure social activities in ways that minimize closeness. Secure people differentiate more clearly than either insecure group between romantic and other opposite-sex partners.
1. Personal attachment style has a more significant effect on how relationships are experienced than partner`s style.
2. Males will report lower levels of interdependence, commitment and satisfaction when with anxious females.
3. Females will report lower levels of trust and satisfaction when with avoidant males.
Relationships can have an effect on attachment style, but attachment style is actually pretty robust and rarely affect another’s attachment style. Attachment style is related to attachment history, beliefs about relationships, personal love style, duration of romantic relationships, self-esteem, avoidance of intimacy, limerance and love addiction.
This suggests attachment style is likely to exert a very pervasive influence on the individual’s relationships with others, because it reflects general views about the rewards and dangers of interpersonal relationships. Attachment history has a decreasing effect on style of romantic relationship as individuals age.
Sexual Healing
We can be nurtured by someone without feeding on them. Sexual healing is based on sharing our life energy generated by a fully connected life. It is not possible when we draw from the core our partners’ life energy or give energy from our own core. We can give altruistically without giving lives away to energy vampires. Sexual healing requires a new view of bonding and a concept of connective codependence as a cure ~ a means of deploying one’s loving erotic style to care for and with another no matter how severe the relationship crisis and challenges may be or how hurt and impaired the partner may become.
Sexual healing requires us to move beyond mindbody chemistry toward more growth-promoting, meaningful, stable, enduring, more demanding relationships, focusing on the other rather than our internal high. Sexual healing involves recognition of your own, your partner's, and your relationship's variations in sexual intimacy. It is a measured response to the true identity and essence of the other person. Bonding is based on connective codependence and interdependence and is the source of the most powerful sexual healing.
Pearsall helps us reclaim our psychosexual essential nature from the "sexual syndicate"; with its negative labels, mechanical technical proficiencies, ersatz taboo-breaking, and hypersexualized but relatively meaningless sexual context and content. Media arguably plays as big or larger of a role in the syndication of sex than the healing arts.
The net result is that we either manically try to ‘measure up’, or feel like failures, grow despondent, wrongly viewing ourselves as addicts or codependents. We import techniques from outside of ourselves to “fix” the problems from self image and sexual compulsion to erotic anesthesia.
My own experience as a therapist with a specialty in sexual abuse throughout the 1980s and ‘90s showed me quite graphically that many of the principles being preached by the recovery movement and other social institutions lacked a certain fundamental insight.
They spoke of the four primary modes or dimensions of human connection: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual, but often in a prescriptive not in a cohesive way. It seemed like a one-size-fits-all formulaic approach, with a dogma of "Do's and don'ts". The guiding principle of sexual healing is Oneness and connection, not power, control, or even personal autonomy.
Sometimes the enforcement of these models of life, sexuality, and recovery were toxic in and of themselves. In collusion with misplaced religious zeal, it spawned the poisonous cultural memes of Satanic Panic and False Memory Syndrome, which consumed many lives. Families were split apart by an imported delusion and faulty social model, children were manipulated and confused, enforcement agencies and courts were tied up, people were falsely accused and imprisoned, etc.
At best, rigid protocols and endless meetings were the "only" way to become a more functional individual, lest one continuously repeat the dysfunctional cycle or pass it on to future generations. This distorted control over cookbook definitions of good sex has created a bondage of self-pleasure.
Sexual Shamanism
But wouldn't it be terrific if we could perturb society and mount the same kind of effect in a positive direction based on sexual healing, and permeating the fabric of life from the molecular to the transperonal level? This would go a long way toward healing our mindbody splits, left over from the obsolete paradigm of the mechanistic age. It reminds of Lysistrata, and the more recent Women Who Slept with Men to Take the War Out of Them.
Pearsall dared question some of these underlying recovery-based assumptions without attacking the system directly. Instead he simply offered a treatment philosophy he felt supported overall health more strongly. Some of these values are echoed in tradition while others are revolutionary in their simplicity. Sexual healing is an androgynous process that combines the strengths and counterbalances the vulnerabilities of gender roles. It might therefore be considered a creative movement toward gender reunion, or wholeness.
He suggested a type of sexual shamanism, that a sexual healer is a model of sexual health, not just one with an absence of sexual problems. He called this personality an Erotophilic ~ a lover of the erotic, of Eros, of close intimate contact. In myth, Eros is wed to Psyche, the psychophysical imaginal faculty. The child Voluptas embodied their mutual joy. Giving, not just trying to get, makes us healthy and heals us. We partner in a kind of privileged miracle.
All shamans exhibit sensual activity and playful joy in living with others. A sexual healer is a "care-sharer". Stamina and desire emerge spontaneously from those who are energetic, erotic, tender, responsible, happy, confident, empathic, sympathetic, and fulfilled. Motivation follows the exchange of intentional caring acts. Why wouldn't it?
But Pearsall doesn't burden us with New Age guilt or shame about our health or lack of it. He busts the myths of self-healing, illness, grief and guilt as enemies, positive thinking, codependence and the heroic medical model. In fact, he considers illness a learning experience that perturbs our emotional stagnation. Suffering sickness is an inspiration for healing and an evolutionarily necessesity because it drives us toward reconnection and the maintenance of our connections. No disease kills people faster than loneliness. Most depression is rooted in lack of meaningful connection, bonding.
Connection guarantees the continuation of our genetic identity and the survival of humanity and the world. Health isn't strength, it's balance. Sickness isn’t failure, it's a challenge. He points out that health as a convenience allows us to continue to engage as effective individuals in too much work or busyness, neglect our loved ones in narcissistic pursuits, and focus on distractions from feeling love and loving. Total health includes loving intimacy with those around us not just solitary health fitness practices and choices. Suffering can set us back or draw us together; none of us are self-sufficient.
But rather than polyamory, a term usually applied to guilt-free licentiousness rather than omnidirectional capacity for intimacy, he suggests a “pentamerous model of sexual healing, based in psychoneurosexualiy. Thoughts, feelings, caring, intimate touch, eroticism and healing can be united through meaningful sexual intimacy to promote wellness. Important factors include 1) self esteem; 2) intimacy; 3) coherence or rapport; 4) mindful celebration; and 5) sensual connection at the molecular level.
Sexual healing is a paradigm that transcends the mechanical tension-release model of the last 50 years. It looks for the healer between and maximizes the power of intimate connection between two people who choose to link their inner healers, to seek meaning in life together, and to express that connection physically.
The body is designed for connection. The body is an enchanted resonating musical instrument on which our minds play. We can use it as a means of celebrating and actualizing our connection with another person, an interactional synchrony. We can literally breath love and life into one another, particularly in times of illness or suffering.
When we make love, in a sense all of us have made love, since we all share the same genetic stuff. The sexual response model of sexual healing is based on the art of sex and the process of creating beauty and meaning together by merging not only our bodies but our most personal inner healers. Responsible intimacy leads directly toward world transformation.
We can heal ourselves, heal another, and help heal the world. Sexual healing is volitional, rational, socially responsible merging with our lover to find multidimensional meaning together: enhanced self esteem (self-actualization), increased sense of intimacy, shared sense of life coherence, mindfulness of the present moment, and sensual expression of loving caring. Sexual healing is thinking, behaving and responding sensuously with another person.
Meaningful sexual intimacy allows us to connect with the higher Self we all share, finding higher meaning and purpose in love. This helps with the manageability and comprehension of life’s seemingly endless chaos. Merging with someone we love makes us intensely aware of the present moment. It leads to an increased sense of purposeful, giving and caring life, constructive to society. Bonds don't happen; they are made. Meaningful bonds are not the automatic and inevitable result of love, but result from loving behaviors and intimate caring acts.
Ravishment
Matter is spiritually transformed through love. It matters deeply. Soul becomes matter and matter becomes soul. When the passion for life harmonizes with the transformative dynamic, body and soul are one. Divine ravishment is an awakening to higher innocence. Subjective and objective worlds become one.
Ravishment requires the conscious sacrifice of ego demands and unconscious power ~ saying YES to life. It means surrender spiritually to the thing between us, surrender to the body, to the process. You feel the blood, the bones, the beating heart. We plunge into our own Being. The genuine coniunctio is a complete interchange, a glimpse of the profound mystery of the spiritual life, putting our trust in the irrational. We risk doing so.
If the passionate receptivity is strong enough it is nearly impossible for beautiful and potent expression not to manifest. To receive is to connect with, to become permeable. The deeper the significant permeability the more pan-experiential it becomes. The intimacy of real softness and the experience of beauty and growth is inherent in honest and open interaction.
Deep receptivity seems to have no connection limited by our usual ways of thinking. Authentic receptivity empowers all who come near it, who risk being touched. We open to the outside and to ourselves, softening boundaries in our own being, discovering new things about ourselves in the process. It is an opening to experience as a whole: self and other, inner and outer self, existence as a whole. At our embodied core we are simply all-embracing wonder.
When the expressive potency penetrates and knows it is penetrating and the receptive receives and knows it is received, then both polarities are functioning in creative interplay, constant creation. In giving and receiving the forces of life are multiplied. The giving one receives and the receiving one gives by letting go. The body is surrendered to its own primordial oceanic rhythm in active expression.
We listen and respond and translate what is heard into creative interplay, trusting there is meaning in the irrational. This is the Tao of relationship, or Eros, the essential creative capacity to give and receive, which cannot separate sexuality from love.
To be true to the soul is to value the soul, to express it as uniquely as possible. Love engenders soul. The paradox is that to be in time is to be in the eternal. We see with new eyes. Sexuality is no longer limited to parts of us but becomes our total response to the whole world. We are either part of the problem or the solution. Unhealed patterns are passed on to future generations.
By Iona Miller, CHT 12/04
But couldn't everyone's life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life? ~ Michel Foucault
The relationship between two people creates society; society is not independent of you and me; the mass is not by itself a separate entity but you and I in relationship to each other create the mass, the group, the society. --Krishnamurti
For all the trappings of civilized society, and our attempts to restrain and civilize it, sex remains forever the chaotic vital force, eclipsing our hearts and capturing our minds, winging on the airwaves in the throbbing beat of rock and roll, ensnaring all, in love's enticements and torments, from our founding creation myths, to our greatest dramatic performances. Its mountains of spice span the great divide between divine comedy and stark tragedy. ~ Chris King, Sexual Paradox
“Total union is not possible when the ego is afraid to give up, and where the ego is not firmly grounded in the instincts it dare not surrender to the transpersonal power. ~ Marion Woodman, Addiction to Perfection
The philosophy presented in Paul Pearsall's 1994 book Sexual Healing is more pertinent than ever, as we seek new ways of healing ourselves, others, and our trouble-plagued world. Many people understand that this work begins at home, in cleaning up one's own backyard; but we can also come to understand that social outreach can be rooted in a healthy approach to our sexuality and wholeness.
In chaos theory's butterfly effect, small influences are pumped up into great change; in the Venus butterfly effect; healing spreads from the sexual core of each of us into the environment. The seemingly inconsequential or unrelated affects outcomes in ways unpredicatable to modern humankind. We can certainly guess at many factors in our lives, but there are equally other things happening beyond our knowing that perturb our life paths into different choices. The same can happen on a greater scale, from molecular to global.
Sexual healing requires that we practice selflessness as often out of bed as we do in bed so that when we make love, we love like we live. Sexual healing suggests the universal principles of collective responsibility rather than individual right lead to better health for ourselves and our society. The focus to comply to avoid punishment must be replaced with intentionality. All the elements of ordinary experience are sacralized.
The sexual and reproductive choices of each of us play a pivotal role in the future of life and human culture. The multidimensional sexual relationship in its mingling of cooperative and competitive motifs, is a fundamental mystery of existence, out of which life, diversity and the richness of human culture spring - the condition of creative sexual paradox. (Fiedler and King).
People connecting is the true act of healing. Sexual healing views the immune system as a sensual and sexual organ ~ a liquefied nervous system. The primary purpose of sex as a psychophysical impulse is not to fulfill the individual but to promote more caring and intimacy everywhere and for everyone - family, society, and the world. Sexual healing is based on the sacredness and privacy of the two-person interaction. There are five levels of connection: with self, with another, with something more, with the present moment, and with the body of another person.
Intimacy/interdependence and immunity are inseparably linked, like mindbody and matter/energy. Our personal health is intimately related to our sexual and bonding styles, and reflects in the greater community at large. Our culture is rooted in our psychophysiology. Sexual healing is based on the assumption that the desire and ability to merge intensely with another person is crucial to health. Through it we connect with another person, the present moment, and open to the transpersonal, living in the moment not for the moment.
There are long-term health benefits in such unions. But healing love derives from caring acts, not spontaneous and romantic emotional reflexes and brain-chemistry which can be quite overwhelming and distressing. Pleasure heals. Sexual healing actively enhances relationship, feels good and fits well and constructively with the world and is good for your health. It is the physical expression of how we think, feel and believe about our healing partner. People either stress or nurture us, in general. We decide if we feel threatened or comforted, attracted or repulsed.
Psychoneurosexuality
Psychoneurosexuality suggests intimate relationships are not only choices of who and how we love but affect our health and that of our partner. Every act of love and intimacy is an act of immunity. We can protect and heal our bodies with healthy connections. Trust and security allow us to open to vulnerability.
In meaningful connected sexual intimacy our hormones are in erotic harmony that boosts immune function. Every sex act is potentially an anti-aging immune stimulation. Intimate relations are a way of stimulating, programming, balancing and strengthening the immune system.
Loving empathy is earned within an enduring, responsible, intimate exchange intentionally engaged in with another person. We feel love when we behave lovingly. Empathy means sensing and acknowledging another’s feelings, but sympathy validates them as authentic. Sexual healing combines both for mutual support. Our passions are prototypes for immune function and healing, and perhaps more foundational than fads in “healthy living.” Those who pursue time-consuming health hobbies to the detriment of their relationships, take note.
Attachment Patterns
Adult romantic love can be viewed as a continuation of the attachment process. Love is an integration of three biologically based behavioral systems: attachment, caregiving, and sexuality. "Companionate love" includes attachment and caregiving but not necessarily sexuality, whereas "passionate love" emphasizes only sexual attraction. Attachment style is likely to exert a very pervasive influence on our relationships with others, because it reflects general views about the rewards and dangers of interpersonal relationships.
There are three typical attachment styles: secure, avoidant, and anxious/ambivalent. There are similarities in the life-cycle of adult love (an attaching “in-love” phase leads on to a secure attachment) and childhood attachment (strong maternal attachment leads to secure attachment style).
Characteristics of parent-child relationships are probable causes of differences in infant attachment styles and are also among the determinants of adult romantic attachment styles. Attachment dimensions are likely to influence who one chooses as a dating partner and may play an important role in organizing behaviours, perceptions and expectations within dating relationships.
Secure individuals have a more positive self-image than insecure types. They are more trusting in general and likely to believe in people’s altruism and capacity and willingness and to adapt and control the outcomes of their lives. Their views of love are more romantic and less practical. They tended to report warm relationships with caregivers.
Insecure people have lower self-worth and confidence. They believe human nature is complex and difficult to understand, consider others less altruistic and more likely to conform to social pressures. Love style is related to obsession/dependency. They tend to report cold or inconsistent caregiving. Differences in attachment are linked to differences in beliefs about self and others in ways that are consistent with attachment theory.
Secure individuals’ parental representations are characterized by differentiation, elaboration, benevolence, and nonpunitiveness. Representations by dismissing people were characterized by less differentiation and more punitiveness and malevolence. Fearful individuals describe their parents as relatively punitive and malevolent, but their representations are well differentiated and conceptually complex. Anxious-ambivalent people describe their parents ambivalently as both punitive and benevolent.
Differences in adult attachment styles are found to be related to differences in (1) most significant love experiences, (2) mental models of self and relationships, (3) attachment-history (memories of childhood relationships with parents), (4) vulnerability to loneliness, and (5) feelings related to work, such as feelings towards relationships with coworkers and using work to avoid social contacts.
Bonding is a buffer against both delusional delight and crisis, the slings and arrows of life. We learn to be attracted to the intensity of interpersonal relationship rather than our own arousal states (psychochemical high). Infatuation causes us to assess our emotional, cognitive and sexual coping capacity to be intimate in a healthy and satisfying way. An individual`s own attachment style was a stronger predictor of perceived relationship quality than the partner`s attachment style.
Compared with secure and anxious-ambivalent persons, avoidant persons report lower levels of intimacy, enjoyment, promotive interaction, and positive emotions, and higher levels of negative emotions, primarily in opposite-sex interactions. Avoidant persons may structure social activities in ways that minimize closeness. Secure people differentiate more clearly than either insecure group between romantic and other opposite-sex partners.
1. Personal attachment style has a more significant effect on how relationships are experienced than partner`s style.
2. Males will report lower levels of interdependence, commitment and satisfaction when with anxious females.
3. Females will report lower levels of trust and satisfaction when with avoidant males.
Relationships can have an effect on attachment style, but attachment style is actually pretty robust and rarely affect another’s attachment style. Attachment style is related to attachment history, beliefs about relationships, personal love style, duration of romantic relationships, self-esteem, avoidance of intimacy, limerance and love addiction.
This suggests attachment style is likely to exert a very pervasive influence on the individual’s relationships with others, because it reflects general views about the rewards and dangers of interpersonal relationships. Attachment history has a decreasing effect on style of romantic relationship as individuals age.
Sexual Healing
We can be nurtured by someone without feeding on them. Sexual healing is based on sharing our life energy generated by a fully connected life. It is not possible when we draw from the core our partners’ life energy or give energy from our own core. We can give altruistically without giving lives away to energy vampires. Sexual healing requires a new view of bonding and a concept of connective codependence as a cure ~ a means of deploying one’s loving erotic style to care for and with another no matter how severe the relationship crisis and challenges may be or how hurt and impaired the partner may become.
Sexual healing requires us to move beyond mindbody chemistry toward more growth-promoting, meaningful, stable, enduring, more demanding relationships, focusing on the other rather than our internal high. Sexual healing involves recognition of your own, your partner's, and your relationship's variations in sexual intimacy. It is a measured response to the true identity and essence of the other person. Bonding is based on connective codependence and interdependence and is the source of the most powerful sexual healing.
Pearsall helps us reclaim our psychosexual essential nature from the "sexual syndicate"; with its negative labels, mechanical technical proficiencies, ersatz taboo-breaking, and hypersexualized but relatively meaningless sexual context and content. Media arguably plays as big or larger of a role in the syndication of sex than the healing arts.
The net result is that we either manically try to ‘measure up’, or feel like failures, grow despondent, wrongly viewing ourselves as addicts or codependents. We import techniques from outside of ourselves to “fix” the problems from self image and sexual compulsion to erotic anesthesia.
My own experience as a therapist with a specialty in sexual abuse throughout the 1980s and ‘90s showed me quite graphically that many of the principles being preached by the recovery movement and other social institutions lacked a certain fundamental insight.
They spoke of the four primary modes or dimensions of human connection: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual, but often in a prescriptive not in a cohesive way. It seemed like a one-size-fits-all formulaic approach, with a dogma of "Do's and don'ts". The guiding principle of sexual healing is Oneness and connection, not power, control, or even personal autonomy.
Sometimes the enforcement of these models of life, sexuality, and recovery were toxic in and of themselves. In collusion with misplaced religious zeal, it spawned the poisonous cultural memes of Satanic Panic and False Memory Syndrome, which consumed many lives. Families were split apart by an imported delusion and faulty social model, children were manipulated and confused, enforcement agencies and courts were tied up, people were falsely accused and imprisoned, etc.
At best, rigid protocols and endless meetings were the "only" way to become a more functional individual, lest one continuously repeat the dysfunctional cycle or pass it on to future generations. This distorted control over cookbook definitions of good sex has created a bondage of self-pleasure.
Sexual Shamanism
But wouldn't it be terrific if we could perturb society and mount the same kind of effect in a positive direction based on sexual healing, and permeating the fabric of life from the molecular to the transperonal level? This would go a long way toward healing our mindbody splits, left over from the obsolete paradigm of the mechanistic age. It reminds of Lysistrata, and the more recent Women Who Slept with Men to Take the War Out of Them.
Pearsall dared question some of these underlying recovery-based assumptions without attacking the system directly. Instead he simply offered a treatment philosophy he felt supported overall health more strongly. Some of these values are echoed in tradition while others are revolutionary in their simplicity. Sexual healing is an androgynous process that combines the strengths and counterbalances the vulnerabilities of gender roles. It might therefore be considered a creative movement toward gender reunion, or wholeness.
He suggested a type of sexual shamanism, that a sexual healer is a model of sexual health, not just one with an absence of sexual problems. He called this personality an Erotophilic ~ a lover of the erotic, of Eros, of close intimate contact. In myth, Eros is wed to Psyche, the psychophysical imaginal faculty. The child Voluptas embodied their mutual joy. Giving, not just trying to get, makes us healthy and heals us. We partner in a kind of privileged miracle.
All shamans exhibit sensual activity and playful joy in living with others. A sexual healer is a "care-sharer". Stamina and desire emerge spontaneously from those who are energetic, erotic, tender, responsible, happy, confident, empathic, sympathetic, and fulfilled. Motivation follows the exchange of intentional caring acts. Why wouldn't it?
But Pearsall doesn't burden us with New Age guilt or shame about our health or lack of it. He busts the myths of self-healing, illness, grief and guilt as enemies, positive thinking, codependence and the heroic medical model. In fact, he considers illness a learning experience that perturbs our emotional stagnation. Suffering sickness is an inspiration for healing and an evolutionarily necessesity because it drives us toward reconnection and the maintenance of our connections. No disease kills people faster than loneliness. Most depression is rooted in lack of meaningful connection, bonding.
Connection guarantees the continuation of our genetic identity and the survival of humanity and the world. Health isn't strength, it's balance. Sickness isn’t failure, it's a challenge. He points out that health as a convenience allows us to continue to engage as effective individuals in too much work or busyness, neglect our loved ones in narcissistic pursuits, and focus on distractions from feeling love and loving. Total health includes loving intimacy with those around us not just solitary health fitness practices and choices. Suffering can set us back or draw us together; none of us are self-sufficient.
But rather than polyamory, a term usually applied to guilt-free licentiousness rather than omnidirectional capacity for intimacy, he suggests a “pentamerous model of sexual healing, based in psychoneurosexualiy. Thoughts, feelings, caring, intimate touch, eroticism and healing can be united through meaningful sexual intimacy to promote wellness. Important factors include 1) self esteem; 2) intimacy; 3) coherence or rapport; 4) mindful celebration; and 5) sensual connection at the molecular level.
Sexual healing is a paradigm that transcends the mechanical tension-release model of the last 50 years. It looks for the healer between and maximizes the power of intimate connection between two people who choose to link their inner healers, to seek meaning in life together, and to express that connection physically.
The body is designed for connection. The body is an enchanted resonating musical instrument on which our minds play. We can use it as a means of celebrating and actualizing our connection with another person, an interactional synchrony. We can literally breath love and life into one another, particularly in times of illness or suffering.
When we make love, in a sense all of us have made love, since we all share the same genetic stuff. The sexual response model of sexual healing is based on the art of sex and the process of creating beauty and meaning together by merging not only our bodies but our most personal inner healers. Responsible intimacy leads directly toward world transformation.
We can heal ourselves, heal another, and help heal the world. Sexual healing is volitional, rational, socially responsible merging with our lover to find multidimensional meaning together: enhanced self esteem (self-actualization), increased sense of intimacy, shared sense of life coherence, mindfulness of the present moment, and sensual expression of loving caring. Sexual healing is thinking, behaving and responding sensuously with another person.
Meaningful sexual intimacy allows us to connect with the higher Self we all share, finding higher meaning and purpose in love. This helps with the manageability and comprehension of life’s seemingly endless chaos. Merging with someone we love makes us intensely aware of the present moment. It leads to an increased sense of purposeful, giving and caring life, constructive to society. Bonds don't happen; they are made. Meaningful bonds are not the automatic and inevitable result of love, but result from loving behaviors and intimate caring acts.
Ravishment
Matter is spiritually transformed through love. It matters deeply. Soul becomes matter and matter becomes soul. When the passion for life harmonizes with the transformative dynamic, body and soul are one. Divine ravishment is an awakening to higher innocence. Subjective and objective worlds become one.
Ravishment requires the conscious sacrifice of ego demands and unconscious power ~ saying YES to life. It means surrender spiritually to the thing between us, surrender to the body, to the process. You feel the blood, the bones, the beating heart. We plunge into our own Being. The genuine coniunctio is a complete interchange, a glimpse of the profound mystery of the spiritual life, putting our trust in the irrational. We risk doing so.
If the passionate receptivity is strong enough it is nearly impossible for beautiful and potent expression not to manifest. To receive is to connect with, to become permeable. The deeper the significant permeability the more pan-experiential it becomes. The intimacy of real softness and the experience of beauty and growth is inherent in honest and open interaction.
Deep receptivity seems to have no connection limited by our usual ways of thinking. Authentic receptivity empowers all who come near it, who risk being touched. We open to the outside and to ourselves, softening boundaries in our own being, discovering new things about ourselves in the process. It is an opening to experience as a whole: self and other, inner and outer self, existence as a whole. At our embodied core we are simply all-embracing wonder.
When the expressive potency penetrates and knows it is penetrating and the receptive receives and knows it is received, then both polarities are functioning in creative interplay, constant creation. In giving and receiving the forces of life are multiplied. The giving one receives and the receiving one gives by letting go. The body is surrendered to its own primordial oceanic rhythm in active expression.
We listen and respond and translate what is heard into creative interplay, trusting there is meaning in the irrational. This is the Tao of relationship, or Eros, the essential creative capacity to give and receive, which cannot separate sexuality from love.
To be true to the soul is to value the soul, to express it as uniquely as possible. Love engenders soul. The paradox is that to be in time is to be in the eternal. We see with new eyes. Sexuality is no longer limited to parts of us but becomes our total response to the whole world. We are either part of the problem or the solution. Unhealed patterns are passed on to future generations.
Healing Disrupted Lives
Chaos Theory and Experiential Therapy
The Role and Value of Journey Work in the Process of Recovery
by Iona Miller, Asklepia Foundation, 2003
1). Disruption and Continuity;
2). Healing Words: "Metaphors Be with You";
3). The Healing Power of Narrative History;
4). Soul Support: Healing the Disordered Bodymind;
5). Character: Have Some, Don't Just Be One;
6). Pathos and Healing
Summary: Our life journey is an unpredictable series of chaotic twists and turns which mold our lives, despite our best intentions and plans, as we wend our way toward our certain end. The 'journey' is a core guiding metaphor for our multifarious experiences through all of life's disruptions. It is a poetic journey of self-discovery. Chaos theory provides a natural yet scientific metaphor of this complex trajectory of emergent order from disorder, the complex dance at the edge of chaos.
Process-oriented therapies help us not only recover but make sense of our feelings and experiences by evoking our story, a meaningful narrative of our unique course. It is a combination of subjective healing fiction and our objective history, but expresses the reality of our psyche -- our embodied soul. Even if many have embarked on a similar quest, each of us makes this dramatic voyage of discovery for ourselves -- we become our own "Columbus of the soul," going where we do not know. It leads into the great unknown where fearsome dragons (pain, suffering, loss, grief, illness, dissocIation, emotional devastation, mortality, our own personal demons) await to devour us.
How we navigate those turbulent seas or traverse that undiscovered country is crucial to our wholeness and well-being...even as old explorers heading for the shores of death. If metaphor is central to embodied experience, we can find healing meaning embodied in our personal tales, which speak from the soul of the resilience of human spirit.
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CHAPTER 1
Disruption of Continuity
Efforts to control a chronic condition are rooted in two ideas: that people can control their environment and that people should take responsibility for their health. The notion that chronic illness can be controlled is common in U.S. medical practice, whereas discussion of the limits of control are uncommon. Often couched in terms of illness management in both the medical and social science literature, control over the condition reflects interpretations of Western Cartesian philosophy, which, in contemporary thought, has been interpreted as mind over matter. The responsibility people feel for controlling their chronic illnesses and the efforts they make to overcome the constraints such control places on everyday life affect self-perceptions and alter as the illness waxes and wanes. . .embodied knowledge is assaulted by the ethos of rational determinism. The imposition of another type of order [leaves us] without meaning in [our] lives. The close relationship between embodied knowledge and meaning is thus relegated to a subsidiary position, while control over the body becomes preeminent. Metaphor is central to embodied experience.
--Gay Becker, 1997
Introduction
Uncertainty is the zeitgeist of our day. We are anxious and unsure. We face global warming, environmental deterioration, emerging infections and incurable viruses, pandemics, bioterrorism, wars, urban violence, soil and water depletion, rampant population growth, genetically-engineered food and organisms, hazardous waste, and profound doubts about our earth's ability to continue to sustain life. Much of earth's life is already going extinct, and we wonder about own own and our grandchildren's futures, health, and well-being. Many of us feel the impact as loss of our cherished dreams of a better future.
We did not anticipate this transition from the arrogant certainty of the rational enlightenment promise to disquieting uncertainty. We have realized only empty promises of solutions to life's fundamental problems, like world health, food, and peace. Despite all our knowledge we have not been able to control or dominate our environment successfully. Knowledge is not wisdom, or even understanding. There is a deeper current in life and it is embodied in Mystery-- the unpredictable, the unknown, and perhaps unknowable.
Chaos Theory (CT) is the third revolution in science after relativity and quantum theory. It is the prime source of unpredictability in the macrocosmic world and the human scale, formerly described only by classical physics. Chaos and complexity is nature's own way of organizing systems and creating structure. All systems emerge from and eventually dissolve back into chaos.
Chaos is ubiquitous in nature, but it was missed by science due to the overwhelming complexity of detecting its underlying pattern and purpose. Chaos theory means dynamic processes are deterministic though unpredictable. Much the same can be said for its discovery in human physiology and psychology.
It is well established now that most dynamics in nature, ranging from the orbits of planets to behavioral adjustments in life, are essentially chaotic. We are chaotic systems ourselves, and chaotic systems exhibit holistic behavior. Holism sees the world in all its diversity as connected through complex feedback loops. Through the chaotic process of emergence, order appears spontaneously or even instantly within a system.
The conventional medical model has failed many of us. Holistic health systems embrace the mindbody paradigm, but that does not necessarily mean we should all rush out to substitute "foreign" or alternative therapies for conventional medical wisdom. Generally, these modalities are complementary to biomedical care. However, the holistic scientific metaphor provided by chaos theory allows us to describe the psyche in terms congruent with physical reality. This is simply the way nature works, and the way our nature works, too. It provides a comprehensive psychophysical metaphor for uniting physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual realities.
Holism is a paradigm - a worldview, which is equally applicable to the universe and our human existence. Chaos Theory is not a metaphor, per se, but functions as a science metaphor to describe systems, organisms, and dynamic behavior, including complex adaptation. It describes how order emerges from chaos. People often spontaneously incorporate science metaphors in their self-narratives, using such terms as "black holes" and "melt downs," or "quantum leaps," etc. to describe their feelings or personal dynamics. And the same can be done with aspects of chaos theory which can describe how we adapt to life at the edge of chaos in our own unique way.
Paradigms from one field of science often interpenetrate others. Because the findings are more than metaphorical, they translate across disciplines. Metaphors reflect the interdependency of mind and body, and the embodied nature of metaphor holistically reflects the unity of individual and world. Embodied knowledge reflects our shifting understandings of the body.
Metaphors of chaos are as prevalent in our life trajectory as the explicit chaotic patterns are in our physiology (in our brains, hearts, and metabolic systems, etc.). The events of our lives become embedded in our structure and metabolism. We might call this embodiment "metaphorms."
Various forms of metaphor therapy can help us heal and adapt in the recovery process, giving our psyche a voice. With the advent of chaos theory and complexity theory, universally negative attitudes toward chaos are changing slowly but surely, at least in some individuals. We are learning to consciously accept chaos, and intuit that it also has value. Linear and deterministic theory is on the decline in favor of nonlinearity, fragmentation, multiplicity, iteration, complex feedback loops, and indeterminacy.
This ascendancy of the scientific paradigm of chaos includes medical uncertainty, both for practitioners and patients, who must learn to deal creatively with chaos, tolerate ambiguity, and respect the unapparent. Our sense of control over our external world is a destructive illusion. As we come to understand that disruption is part of the creative cycle, we learn to understand how "emergency" is part of the creative process of "emergence" of renewal and new potential.
Over time we can expect this paradigmatic shift to penetrate more deeply into the cultural fabric of our lives and an integrative health system. Chaos theory, systems theory, and complexity theory have shown us that self-organizing order emerges from chaos, and is thus the paradigm of the natural healing process. It describes the dissolution or fragmentation and reconstruction of the volitional self. It helps us attach a more positive valence to disruptions of our mortal human lives, either through illness or misfortune.
Society itself, even taking into account the various cultural distinctions of diversity, changes in unpredictable ways, including through human frailty or perversity, such as crime and war. Political figures, in particular have the ability to affect great masses of people with their policies and dictates. How we mediate and ameliorate these societal disruptions is a major part of our personal stories, and the story of humanity, in general.
Medical Anthropology
Medical Anthropology [1], in particular, is the field of inquiry which deals with how different cultures handle healthcare issues. Cultures are dynamic holistic systems which are 1). webs of meaning; 2). patterns of and for behavior; 3). "integrated" and interwoven; 4). filters which proscribe and prescribe; 5). give meaning and create order.
What is medical anthropology? Medical anthropology is a subfield of anthropology that draws upon social, cultural, biological, and linguistic anthropology to better understand those factors which influence health and well being (broadly defined). It encompasses the experience and distribution of illness, the prevention and treatment of sickness, healing processes, the social relations of therapy management, and the cultural importance and utilization of pluralistic medical systems.
Thus, we see that culture influences the definition, experience, and treatment of sickness in Western and non-Western societies. Western medicine is mechanistic, while other cultures tend to incorporate the subtle or spiritual dimension in their healing practices. There is also a definition of sickness based on the patient's perception of suffering rather than the physician's assessment of biomedical signs.
This is the dimension of psyche, or soul, in the embodied rather than religious sense. This is expressed as autobiographical narrative, or personal poesis, which is imaginal in form, composed of healing fictions as well as fact. It tells the subjective story "as if" this is the way it is. It is generally also colored by the culture we are immersed in.
The discipline of medical anthropology draws upon many different theoretical approaches. It is as attentive to popular health culture as bioscientific epidemiology, and the social construction of knowledge and politics of science as discovery and hypothesis testing. Medical anthropologists examine how the health of individuals, larger social formations, and the environment are affected by interrelationships between humans and other species; cultural norms and social institutions; micro and macro politics; and forces of globalization as each of these affects local worlds.
There is an anthropological antidote for too narrow a framing of the complex tangle of ways-of-being and ways-of-telling. Stories of illness and healing are often arresting in their power, and they can illuminate aspects of practices and experiences surrounding illness that might otherwise be neglected. Recognizing the theoretical value of these healing tales among those eliciting, telling, and responding to narratives, we can explore these subjective stories from a variety of perspectives.
There is inherent poetics in the experience of personal chaos, tragedy, and illness, just as there is high drama in the grand confrontations of world history. Creative narratives flow from our challenging experiences as both healing fictions and historicities. Broadly, poetics means an expression of the movement of the human spirit. It details chaotic change which profoundly moves our psyches as well as our bodies, revealing resilience of the spirit if not the flesh.
Aristotle describes the classical framework of all dramas in the Poetics. These same qualities can be found in all our personal stories. Do we do it intuitively, or in fact, do these stories create us? People tell their stories; that is how they explain themselves whether to friends or strangers, therapists, or the public at large. We spontaneously weave our stories together into an overview, a word picture of the way it has been for us, from the inside out -- from our personal point of view.
The same dramatic framework is reflected also in our experiences of tragedies: catastrophes, natural and personal disasters, disillusionments, our dark depressions, life passages, loss of our dreams, shortchanged childhoods, stolen innocence, the pain of relationship break ups, sexual dysfunction, distorted body images, addictions, the pain of war, sickness and catastrophic illness, or other losses which move us deeply. Often the chaos of "real life" throws us off our projected course.
Some chronic illnesses and mental disorders have chaos or high drama as their constantly reiterated theme. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, for example, is the constant reliving of painful chaotic sequences and seeing one's whole life through that distorted lens. But these soul-revealing narratives also have their own healing power and constitute a creative therapeutic avenue of their own, which restores meaning to our lives. Whether spontaneous or evoked through therapy, these stories are meaningful and important to our souls and spirits.
To heal originally meant to make whole. But, if we do not feel whole then the image of wholeness becomes a defense against feelings of fragmentation. There has been a loss of meaning in Western medicine. The body has been reduced to the the image of a machine, then medicine can say it is impaired, incomplete, and requires healing.
Biomedicine thinks in linear terms of illness and treatment, as if abeyance of symptoms equates with cure of disease. Sometimes it does, but not always. Sometimes we heal physically, but don't heal emotionally or spiritually. Or we heal emotionally, but not physically. When we step outside of this medical model, we find not only a fictitious goal, but also a new goal, or rather telos: function becomes psychic reality itself, deliteralized -- metaphorical.
Entering our interior story takes the same courage as starting a novel. This is not to say that each of us going to the doctor or therapist should come up with some coherent narrative, or deep insight. But given the opportunity, we do have a story to tell about what brought us to that point. These stories are not consciously crafted. Sometimes our medical treatment is relatively straightforward.
However, we can recognize the fact that most of us spontaneously do go through these internal dialogues, whether we realize it or not. They concern our own issues and our relationship to our bodies, our existential positions, our culture. They go on even when we are not in need of medical treatment. The fantasies and imagery we automatically spin around our psychophysical self surround us like a cocoon.
Autobiographical self-consciousness is a systematic record of our memories of past situations, of our self image, and of likes and dislikes--in short, of the more invariant properties we have discovered about ourselves. It generates the subjective experience of possessing an identity over time. Interestingly, what it grows out of is a much more transient entity--the core self, which is "ceaselessly re-created for each and every object with which the brain interacts." Neurology has produced this new idea of anchoring our traditional self-concept in a more fundamental notion of a "core-self" -- continuously changing bodily processes.
Perhaps we do not create our stories, rather our stories create us! Neurologist Antonio Damasio (1999) asserts that consciousness is an internal narrative. The "I" is not telling the story: the "I" is created by stories told in the mind. The more serious our affliction the more we tend to focus our attention around it, to spin tales of our journey around it. All of us take that one road, our idiosyncratic path of life, unique only to us. Sometimes there are detours and complex loops in our lives, our trajectories, and our stories -- factors beyond our control. Unlike an author with specific goals in mind, we do not know where it may take us, for it is not complete until our final breath.
Symptoms belong to the embodied soul. The metaphorical reality of the psyche is more than mere fiction but less than literal. Metaphors are more than symbolic ways of speaking. Metaphors facilitate thought by providing an experiential framework in which newly acquired, abstract concepts may be assimilated. They are ways of perceiving, feeling and existing. Through this imaginal reality we find soul, meaning, and significance in our suffering. Intractable problems create a continuous flow of psychological ideas, (Hillman, 1975).
Psyche connects us with the larger process and purpose of life. Then our symptoms reflect back to us other parts of ourselves that were alienated. They call attention to the way we live life that has made us feel disconnected, haunted, abnormal or afflicted.
The truth of our situation is not reflected in the literal conditions but in symbolic, poetic form -- in mystery, not history. Which is not to say that some lives aren't heavily impacted by collective history, war in particular. Nothing calls our attention to life like a close call, or brush with death. Or perhaps chaos came hauntingly early in life, creating the feeling of being an "outsider" all along, never seeming to fit in to the commonplace social forms.
When we literalize our symptoms, we remove them from their metaphorical basis, and this amplifies our suffering. Our autobiographical fictions do not have great explanatory power, but they do provide a resting place for a mind restlessly searching for ambiguity and depth. Psyche or soul calls us to place our attention back there by creating illness, morbidity, disorder, abnormality, and suffering, so we see our lives through the deformed or afflicted perspective. Literature is full of sorrowful laments, such as we find from Tolstoy:
"It seemed to him that he and his pain were being thrust into a narrow, deep black sack, but though they were pushed farther and further in they could not be pushed to the bottom...He wept on account of his helplessness, his terrible loneliness, and the cruelty of man, the cruelty of God, and the absence of God...Why hast Thou done all this? Why hast Thou brought me here? Why dost Thou torment me so terribly?. . . 'What is it you want?' was the first clear conception capable of expression in words that he heard. 'What do I want? To live and not to suffer,' he answered...'To live? How?' asked his inner voice. 'Why, to live as I used to--well and pleasantly.' 'As you lived before well and pleasantly?' the voice repeated. . . He suffered ever the same unceasing agonies and in his liveliness pondered always the same insoluble question: 'What is this? Can it be that it is Death?' And the voice answered" 'Yes, it is Death.' "Why these sufferings?' and the voice answered, 'For no reason -- they just are so.'" (Tolstoy, Ivan Ilych).
Medicine holds up an unrealistic image of an ideal level of functioning where virtually every system and organ works properly, and sets this image up as its healing goal. The wound or disease is an aberration in the wholeness of the 'machine' and must be repaired to its previous level of functioning.
This empty metaphor of unimaginative fixing prevents us from a deeper, more meaningful relationship with our afflictions. Setting of goals and progress, especially in psychotherapy, locks us into a specific ideal of problem and solution, ailment and remedy, wound and healing which is too linear to reflect our complex human nature. It is not actually healing but a palliative -- an unimaginative fantasy of healing.
Cultural concepts, like this medical model, shape the experience of illness. Body image is related to culture, as is self-image. Around the world, we find diverse rationalities and multiple realities surrounding health and healing. Beliefs about body and illness are linked to social and political agendas.
This unique symbolic construction of illness prevalent in the West has spread through 'medicalization' into other cultures.
Medical anthropology studies the beliefs and practices related to enhancing human health and healing in specific contexts. It describes a cross-cultural picture about how pain, illness, suffering, and misfortune are handled worldwide.
Using a medical anthropological “lens,” we can examine the diverse ways in which individuals and societies understand, express and deal with illness and health. Medical anthropology offers a window into the relationship between individuals’ bodies and their ongoing social, cultural and political worlds, including the political agendas of scientific research. The diversity of medical beliefs and practices includes shamanic, humoral, bioenergetic, holistic or mindbody, and biomedical healing systems. There is an intimate relationship between healers and patients and quality of care.
Likewise, there is a relation between the human life cycle, gender, health and the social implications of new biotechnologies, and international health issues. It impacts many of us through new technologies and diagnostic and treatment procedures.
We are overwhelmed and confused in our rapidly-changing world by such issues as genetic engineering, safer sex, birth control, birthing procedures, infertility treatment, hormone replacement, cosmetic surgery and enhancement, preventative medicine, and a variety of other health-related choices that directly impact our self-image -- hence our soul and spirit.
The healing approaches from many cultural sources are practiced in the west as complementary care. Over 40 out of 124 US medical schools are beginning to offer courses in complementary or alternative care. Some of these so-called alternatives, originating in Asia or indiginous shamanic cultures, are much older than allopathic medicine. Many nursing schools teach complementary concepts and skills as part of undergraduate and graduate curricula. [2]
According to an often quoted 1993 study by Dr. David Eisenberg at Harvard Medical School, one out of three adults in the U.S. report using a complementary treatment for a health problem, Americans made more visits to alternative practitioners than they did to primary care physicians and they spent .7 billion for such treatments, of which more than .5 billion was paid out-of pocket. The figures are even higher now, since these statistics are 10 years old, and complementary treatment has an even better foothold.
The public's interest in non-conventional health care has risen dramatically in recent years.
Whether referred to as complementary, alternative or integrative care, the subject is receiving significant coverage in both the popular press and in professional journals. Several studies have estimated that 30-50% of the American adult population are consumers of complementary care. In a recent publication, Janis Claflin of the John E. Fetzer Institute referred to this movement as the "invisible mainstream". While initially this was a very consumer driven movement, increasingly health care professionals, third-party payers, health plans, and other purchasers of health care are taking note as evidence accumulates that many complementary care approaches achieve credible outcomes at lower costs. There is a significant need for interdisciplinary models of education and research in complementary care.
The new scientific model of health and illness argues that a bioinformational process constantly oscillates between chaos-like non-linearity and linearity. When this oscillation collapses into a repetitive linear loop, it looses coherence with its bioinformational field creating a rigid state of pathology, (Martinez, 2001). This suggests the individual is an inseparable unit of cognition, biology, and historical culture.
Health and illness are neither exclusively biological nor totally mental. All human processes are inseparable biocognitions of bodymindculture, which is the domain of psychoneuroimmunology, bioinformatics, and medical anthropology. These fields have enriched clinical medicine. Body, mind and culture also meet in our stories where we either "think it out," or "tough it out." These stories express explanatory knowledge or power -- the power to define ourselves, to define our experience of reality -- to personalize and mythologize our experience of consensus reality. They may include denial, anger, and delusory features, but they are our version of the facts none the less.
In the objective, scientific model of who we are, we are complex fields of dynamic information flow. The bioinformational field is contained by horizons functioning as attractors that oscillate from stability to instability in the process of communicating and learning. This oscillation is operational at all levels of the bioinformational field, ranging from cognitive to cellular and perhaps subquantum modes of communication.
Reductionist and dualistic limitations of upward and downward causality are superseded by the notion of 'contextual coemergence.' This suggests causality is a co-authored and simultaneous process taking place within and between bioinformational field horizons rather than originating at the molecular (reductionism) or cognitive (expansionism) levels of life, (Martinez, 2001).
Chaos Theory
Chaos Theory (CT) is a holistic discipline which has cut across all the sciences, including medicine. It has grown to include models of nonlinear complex dynamics, patterns of randomness, global effects, scale-invariance and deterministic chaos from the quantum to macroscopic realms, including the human scale. Gleick said, "Where chaos begins, classical science stops." By that, he means linear, causal descriptions stop and the nonlinear rules of turbulence hold sway. Near criticality, a crisis-point, predictability becomes impossible.
Gleick quotes Ford as saying "Evolution is chaos with feedback." It includes the science and computer modeling of fractals, bifurcations, intermittancies, strange attractors, complex feedback loops, and periodicities. In complexity theory, humans are viewed holistically as complex adaptive systems. This has also offered us a new, more positive perspective on the nature of chaos and disruption in our lives.
Chaos comes into our lives through an endless variety of crises. We all intuitively recognize how chaos interpenetrates our lives, punctuating our so-called equilibrium, diverting our most carefully-crafted plans and detouring our agendas. Sometimes it hits us broadside. It is unpredictability, part of our emotional "weather," and we are generally trying to adjust to it in some way.
Chaos theory holds that the more complex a system, the more stable and self-correcting it is. Disruption to a linear system throws it off course, but only affects a portion of a complex system, which soon adjusts to "fill in the gap." Chaos can engulf us either subjectively or objectively, but becomes embodied in any case, beginning by increasing our stress levels.
Disruptive changes impact us from inside as fear, pain, symptoms, compulsions, complexes, irrationalities, delusions, grief, mental disorders, blind spots, dementia, moods, suicidal tendencies, woundedness, addictions, nervous breakdowns, panic attacks, distorted thinking, social disconnection, and immunological dysfunction, to name a few.
Whether it is rational or not, shame, guilt, dissociation, and low self-esteem may come along with many breakdowns, diseases, or disorders. Vulnerability and guilt walk hand in hand; the affliction reaches us through the guilt it brings. Physical pain is compounded with emotional suffering. When we feel something is wrong, we are likely to perceive something as wrong with ourselves as well as with our bodies.
From outside, chaos impacts as accidents, impairment, injury, maladies, emotional loss, decline, frailty, debilitation, paralysis, dismemberment, mobility loss, brain damage, victimization, disenfranchisement, unexpected traumas and catastrophes (both personal and collective), a near-death experience, and the 'normal' yet unfortunate set-backs we all experience.
Or, we may be the victim of unsavory acts of human perversity in its myriad forms. All can have potentially devastating effects. Chaotic impact from outside oneself brings its own issues of blame, forgiveness, enforced rest, struggles for compensation, dependency, crises of faith. Our concern resides in our symptoms, embodied in more than metaphors. Our pathologies have immediate impact; they change our point of view.
Events beyond our control can lead to sudden, profound changes in our being, in our very physiology. Images of the sick or wounded are exceptionally moving to us all. The psyche itself either denies or complains and pathologizes spontaneously by magnifying all our sensations, aches and pains, often way out of proportion. Under this mental magnification, the body becomes the acute focus of our attention. Our anxiety may lead beyond our legitimate ailments into additional psychosomatic phenomena or even hypochondria. We hold our breath waiting for the next sign of distress.
Even when we are sick or wounded, we simultaneously have fantasies of "falling apart," being sick and wounded, around being sick and wounded. Affliction, real or imagined, reveals deep movement taking place in the psyche. Dreams, fantasies, and symptoms reveals the same imaginal process. As usual, our problems remain the focus of our fantasies. Chaos touches the dark edge of human experience and celebrates the mystery of our nature and destiny, soul and spirit.
Yet somehow people create meaning in a chaotic world. Some of our reactions depend on the basic foundations of our character. Creating meaning involves a process of life reorganization, after assessing the magnitude of impairment.
We like to think we are immortal, unassailable. We tend to live in denial of such almost certainly expectable disasters striking us, even though we know others are assailed daily. Cultural constraints, such as lack of access to affordable medical care can throw more people into crisis. Some of them never see treatment, or treatment and medicine are cut off.
The course of our lives are structured by expectations about each phase of life, and meaning is assigned to specific life transitions, events and the roles that accompany them. When expectations about the course of life are not met, we experience inner chaos and disruption. Restoring order to life necessitates reworking understandings of the self and the world, redefining the disruptions and life itself, (Becker, 1997).
Disease (or injury and degeneration) is an agent of chaos whose attacks can originate from inside or outside of our skin boundary. It even affects us second-hand by generating stress in family systems, and in our social networks. Stress, of course, is one of the commonest causes of many chronic symptoms. Stress can dramatically impact immune function. Serious illness can be like living in limbo. Illness or infirmities can limit our options and independence and thus can enforce the metaphorical death of the old way of life as well as actual deaths. The journey of our lives is interrupted midstream.
Sociologists and anthropologists have begun applying the principles of complexity to their studies of human nature and behavior, and to culture in general. Like mathematicians, they have found that complex adaptive systems, such as human beings, seem to function best at or near the "edge of chaos."
Cultural foundations are revealed particularly in the narratives surrounding states of the body, birth, rites of passage, health, illness, death and dying. These are the stories we tell about ourselves, reflecting our experience as we see it and as we wish others to see it.
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CHAPTER 2
Healing Words: "Metaphors Be With You"
Like "the Force", metaphors are always with us. They help us move conceptually from the known to the unknown. They help us embody concepts in sensory terms. There is a reciprocal loop between metaphors, conceptual models, and physical orientation. Metaphors imply models, and models aren't easily grasped without metaphors. That is why we have modeled our bodymind after communication systems metaphors ranging from the switchboard to the computer, and now to a quantum computer. Over the last few decades our technology progressed but we still model the body as a machine.
The known metaphor helps us grasp the functional concept. That is why chaos theory comes as a more "user friendly" model, since it is organic, complex, and dynamic, rather than static. The principle of self-organization is arguably complementary to evolution. We are completely immersed in metaphors and our thinking is enabled by them. It is impossible to say many things literally, without resorting to metaphor.
We all speak in metaphors whether we realize it or not, not just scientists and poets. Linguist, George Lakoff, in Metaphors We Live By, suggests that they make our thoughts more vivid and interesting while they actually structure our perceptions and understanding.
So, metaphor is much more than a poetical device of the imaginative. They are pervasive in daily life, not only in language but in conceptual thought and action. They help structure what we perceive, how we perceive it, and how we orient ourselves in the world, and communicate with others. They help define our everyday reality, organizing our thoughts, shaping our judgments, and structuring our language.
Lakoff claims the mind is "embodied", that almost all of human cognition, up through the most abstract reasoning, depends on and makes use of such concrete and "low-level" facilities as the sensorimotor system and the emotions. Therefore embodiment is a rejection not only of any dualism of mind and matter, but also of claims that human reason can be basically understood without reference to the underlying psychosensory metaphors.
Conceptual metaphors also consitute the vocabulary of dream interpretation. It is the collection of our everyday conceptual metaphors that make dream interpretations possible. This is the language of symbolism, but it should not be taken too literally. Each symbol we can extract from a dream has a specific context and dynamic that make it unique. We should be cautious when we think we know what it "means," since as a symbol it stands for the unknown.
We don't want to extract symbols from dreams, but dreaming while awake, we want to surrender to imagery which emerges from us revealing our "as if" reality, our psychic reality. The unconscious mind makes use our unconscious system of conventional metaphor, sometimes to express psychological states in terms of spatial orientation and physical symptoms. They ground concepts in the body.
For example, in the Event Structure metaphor, there is a submapping DIFFICULTIES ARE IMPEDIMENTS TO MOTION which has, as a special case, DIFFICULTIES ARE BURDENS . It is fairly common for someone encountering difficulties to walk with his shoulders stooped, as if carrying a heavy weight that is burdening him.
The network of metaphors that underlie thought in this way form a cognitive map, a web of concepts organized in terms which serves to ground abstract concepts in our physical experiences, and in our relation to the external world. A major component of the human cognitive map is what Lakoff terms a cognitive topology, essentially "a mechanism by which we impose structure on space, in a way to give rise to spatial inferences" (Lakoff 1988).
A unifying framework links a conceptual representation to its sensory and experiential ground. The target to become grounded in spatiophysical experience via the source metaphor. In this view, a metaphoric schema is a mental representation that grounds the conceptual (intellectual) structure of an abstract domain in the sensory (sensible) basis of another, more physical, domain. the target to become grounded in spatiophysical experience via the source. The result is that the schemas which mediate between conceptual and sensory levels in the source become active also in the target. In this view, a metaphoric schema is a mental representation that grounds the conceptual (intellectual) structure of an abstract domain in the sensory (sensible) basis of another, more physical, domain.
There are many allusions surrounding the metaphor that "life is a journey." It implies that purposes are destinations, means are routes, difficulties are obstacles, achievements or catastrophes can be landmarks, and choices are crossroads. The "end of the line" is "written in stone," which reads R.I.P. If a lifetime is likened to a day, death is sleep; if likened to a year, death is winter. If life is a struggle, dying is losing that contest to an adversary. If life is seen as a precious possession, time is a thief and death is loss.
We speak of the "high points"of life, and our "lows." The physical basis of metaphorical well-being is clear: Serious incapacitation forces us to lie down physically, and with death we are physically "down for the count," and buried even deeper. We can be "deeply disturbed," or "deep in trouble." When it's really bad, it is "living Hell." Happiness is "Seventh Heaven."
The most common metaphors of sickness and health relate healthy life with being "up"and sickness and death with being "down." We say that we are at "the peak of health," "he rose from the dead," "she's in top shape," "we fell ill," he's sinking fast," "they came down with the flu," "her health is declining," "he dropped dead." Having control or well-being is referred to as being "up," while loss of motivation and control is being "down."
Metaphors help us describe what experiences are like. Rather than literal, they depicts an "as if" reality. A simile is a simple comparison; a metaphor is more complex, expressing an implicit rather than literal comparison. They are emotionally charged, clarifying or emphasizing an idea by translating it into more concrete and familiar terms.
Metaphors transform abstractions into images. Metaphors carry several meanings simultaneously, and 'work" when they are appropriate to the context. Thought and image must harmonize. They enrich meaning by implying added dimensions of thought and feeling.
There is no formula for creating metaphors. Whether metaphor arises from "inside" the subject or from "outside," its coming depends on imagination. There is no magic for discovering metaphors. It is a talent which emerges with a sense of freshness and originality. They can be emphatic, expressing feelings or judgments, intensifying our awareness, and strongly restating a theme while creating a memorable image. Thus we describe, embellish, even embody our incapacitation, devastation, despair, pain, anger, and shame.
Personification is a special kind of metaphor which speaks of the inanimate or abstract "as if" it were a person, a subtle being. For example, the image of menace, chaos, or death is often personified in a number of culturally-expectable forms, such as "the grim reaper," or "Father Time." The purpose of personifying is to expand, explain or vivify. It breathes life even into the image of death. Or, it comes more metaphorically, embodied as being "scared to death," "being at death's door," or "a brush with death," "cheating death."
We use metaphor to describe things we can't see or that are not readily apparent. We use metaphors which come from our own experiential base. Thus, children are able to make metaphors which come from and are familiar to a child's vision and experience. We all know they are not to be taken literally.
However, if a metaphor lies outside our experience or is too learned, we will fail to "get it." If understood, they help us extend, explore, and expand our understanding. We do not necessarily need to concoct or develop metaphors of our experience; they emerge spontaneously. They help familiarize the strange. They link the known with the unknown, yoking us to reality by joining diverse experiences.
Metaphor therapies help us describe a vaguely-sensed process. We grope toward descriptions of our experience. They help us develop our healing stories, encapsulating the inner and outer journey we have been forced to undertake.
Epistemological metaphors tell us how we known what we know. They are unique to each individual. As soon as we describe what a condition or experience is like, we have created a metaphor of our dynamic state. We all know what we would like to have happen and what happens when it doesn't happen. We can generally describe what that experience is like, how we know, and when, where and how we feel it in our bodies.
When we don't recover as quickly as initially expected, a profound sense of hopelessness and doom, even suicidal thoughts, can set in. Or, we waiver between hope and hopelessness. Feelings of hopelessness can lead to further psychophysical complications, dysfunction, and breakdown. The longer the trauma lasts the higher the incidence of post-traumatic stress (PTSD) and the risk of dissociation associated with loss of goal-directed action.
In treating psychophysical trauma, many goal-directed mindbody practitioners make an error using metaphor therapeutically. They attempt to "import" or artificially introduce metaphors into the healing system. The unspoken assumption is that they can somehow "know" what images will effectively "work" on their subject. They take their client on a prefabricated or "canned" journey, of their own fashioning, which may or may not fit. This is a "band-aid" approach, bringing only temporary, if any respite.
What is needed is the mobilization of self-discovery , one's emergent process, rather than a surgical strike with a metaphorical missle to "get rid of" a symptom. One must follow one's own chaotic trajectory. "One size fits all" does not work when it comes to therapy. It has to be tailored to the individual.
A good therapist never pre-empts the process of self-discovery by informing the client of some realization which is obvious to him or her long before the client can articulate it. These externally introduced, or "guided" imagery practices ignore the reality that what is needed are the home-spun emergent metaphors, specific to the individual and arising spontaneously from within.
Destruction of the fabric of daily life, health and wholeness -- disruption of the intrinsic order of everyday life -- can leave us with a sense of unreality. We are forced to face the destruction of the habituated, embodied self as well as uncertainty about whether we have time left to create new selves.
This task of linking past, present and future may be beyond our cognitive or expressed abilities. For this reason, the transition is often aided by process-oriented "journey work" which is neither logically nor physically demanding. It merely requires focusing deeply on the embodied imagery that is already there. These are the images which get to the heart of the matter.
Healing Stories
Our "healing" stories all have a common plot: a disruption to life is followed by efforts to restore life to 'normal.' There are many journeys, yet just one road, our own well-trodden "trail of tears." Plot forms give stories coherence and order. Events are defined not in terms of their singularity but in terms of the meaningful contribution they make to the unfolding of the story or history in question. They contribute to the development of a plot and a story line. Often this coherent plot will not emerge until years later.
We portray the anguish and changes we undergo and the ways we reframe the disruption over time. Thus images of fragmentation, black holes, explosive disintegration, dismemberment, the disorientation of limbo, etc. are common metaphors in the narrative process. They express the opposite of integration -- dissociation.
Our old self-image dies before the new one emerges. Confronting the changed body is the first task of recovery. But the body cannot be treated as separate from the mind. Emotions can be triggered unconsciously, from unattended thoughts or unknown dispositions, as well as from unperceivable aspects of our body states.
Reason and emotions work together, as do intellect and spirit. Neural processes become images which are incorporated into the narrative of our stream of thoughts. Emotions and the body are intimately linked. The critical difference between stressful but normal events and trauma is the feeling of helplessness to change the outcomes. Helplessness leads to numbness, withdrawal, dissociation, confusion, shock, even speechless terror. Emotion-focused coping is an attempt to alter emotional states instead of the circumstances it arose from to reset equilibrium.
The biological purpose of emotions is clearly to help regulate metabolism, homeostasis and survival. They underlie our autobiographical experience. Feelings are sensory patterns signaling pain, pleasure, and emotions as images. Inducers of background emotions are usually internal - visceral. They allow us to experience background feelings of tension or relaxation, fatigue or energy, well-being or malaise, anticipation or dread.
The "body-loop" of chemical messengers and neural signals can change our somatosensory perception. Each symptom, illness, distress, or disease we manifest, whether physical or mental, is based in or reflects a deep psychosensory self-image. It defines our existential worldview, which simply means how we experience self, the world, and the the relationship between the two.
Thus, the mysteries of consciousness are rooted in our basic life regulation processes. The basic emotions function as fundamental regulatory mechanisms. They are complicated collections of chemical and neural responses, forming a pattern.
Primary universal emotions include happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, or disgust. Secondary social emotions include embarrassment, jealousy, guilt or pride. Background emotions, essentially degrees of arousal of either the sympathetic or parasympathetic systems, include well-being or malaise, calm or tension. The name emotion has also been attached to drives and motivations and states of pain and pleasure. All emotions use the body as their theater.
The Plot Thickens
Plot has the capacity to model our experience, it organizes our emotional experience. The plot weaves together the agents, goals, means, interactions, and unexpected results and renders the story's contents intelligible. Formulating the plot points is a crucial imaginative task of people who face sudden illness. It is a tool to mediate disruption and promote self-healing.
We choose how to plot their autobiographical narratives, which unify the chronological and nonchronological. This interweaving of non-linear narrative time is not reducible to linear time, and the beginning and end are often confounded with significance and explanations. We weave convoluted tales of stories within stories, shaping memory and events.
Narratives are a way to articulate and resolve core issues, or universal problems and paradoxically a way to either avoid or heal biographical discontinuities. In storytelling, we organize, display and work through our experiences.
Narratives can be a potent force mediating disruptions, whether it is caused by illness or personal misfortune. Experience is reframed and reshaped in the narrative process. Narratives are subject to change with subsequent experiences. They can have contradictory and multiple interpretations, as we struggle to characterize our existential condition.
Journey work helps us create narratives which heal. But journey work is not a linear, rational, enculturated process like the conscious stories we confabulate around our experiences. The defocusing of our enculturated conscious orientation allows an underlying paradigm to surface from nature's own self-organizing principles.
Chaos works for us as it becomes more explicit -- the underlying truth of chaos and creative, emergent self-organization. When we are "onto something" during an inner journey into our own depths, the more fundamental issues will surface gradually, and most likely spontaneously self-organize at a higher level, a more adaptive level.
Successful navigation of our lives is a rite of passage which never ends. Life includes all of the trials, joys, triumphs, victories, wishes, and the chaotic disruptions we experience as well. We cannot disown any of them, the years of our lives -- both good and bad, the light and dark -- or we disown a large part of ourselves.
To remain authentic, our histories must be comprehensive. The person we are, moment to moment, emerges from the coevolutionary context of our life, including our dreams. But we can always embrace new dreams for ourselves consistent with our current reality, using imagination and creativity.
It is a spiritual matter to own the chaotic as well as the 'successful' aspects of ourselves and incidents of our lives. Others want to hear, want to know how we successfully navigated the treacherous parts of our histories. We draw nourishment for ourselves from the healing stories of others, their triumphs of the spirit. We ask, "How did you survive?", "What did you do?", "How did you keep your spirits up?", "How did you keep from losing your sanity?" "How did you bounce back?" "What did you reject and what was helpful to you in your healing process?"
Narrative is a means for giving voice to bodily experience, from embodied despair to spiritual breakthrough. Any process-oriented therapies which foster the narrative process mobilize healing (Miller, 2003). When sensation and bodily expression are undervalued, narrative is our primary means of accessing the world of bodily experience and essential to our understanding of that experience.
Embodied knowledge reflects our shifting understandings of the body and can be revealed in the metaphors in which we describe that understanding. Through metaphor we come to comprehend what we know, but don't know that we know!
In story we develop creative ways of interpreting disruption and draw together disparate aspects of the disruption into a cohesive whole. We express our development over time. Our individual history is brought together in a work of imagination. In articulating the various points of connection, we transform it into a coherent story. In the midst of our experience it is not always possible to know the meaning of our actions. Only with time do certain aspects of what is meaningful emerge.
Our stories reveal the kaleidoscope of our emotions and response patterns. They run the gamut of human ills, from infancy and childhood catastrophes to the experience of living with chronic illness, especially later in life.
Throughout life we may even be plagued or obsessed with health concerns even when we needn't be, imagining maladies and amplifying psychosomatic symptoms. These are the products of our medical fears and hypochondriasis. Gender issues such as infertility and related disruptions of midlife, relationship troubles, transitioning from independence to dependence, and recovery struggle stories, etc. are other persistent themes.
When disruption comes at the hands of an abuser, assailant, or any form of human perversity, the chaos of another is introjected into our lives. This is even true of car accidents. Our story becomes enmeshed with theirs, even if it is a stranger. The impact on our life's arc can be tremendous -- even more strongly jolting than the impact of metal on metal and flesh.
The loss and pain cannot be compensated. That which is lost cannot be returned, whether it is the innocence of childhood, cherished life plans and ambitions, or stolen treasures of the heart or mind. When we confront a disruption, it often brings in its wake all the disruptions we experienced in our lives, such as deaths of family members, sudden job loss, other accidents, and the onset of illness.
In a sea of unforeseeable changes, disruptions can be cataclysmic, or subtle and profound. Their legacy can persist for years, for decades, even a lifetime. The disruption is actually one of personal meaning, and the consequent destruction of a sense of continuity.
The stories we tell ourselves struggling to make sense of our lives are full of metaphors to make sense of disruption, limbo, and efforts to create continuity. We raise questions about what is meaningful. We try to make peace with our ideals. This dialogue with culture and its constructs takes place in both the body and the narrative. Our lives can also be studded with islands of serenity, periods of stability in which we seem to go on "normally."
Our ongoing interpretation of events, the stories we tell ourselves and others about disruptive changes, enables us to make sense of our personal worlds. And the knowable world provides a framework for understanding major events as well as everyday experiences. Humans thrive in routine, even though we also crave novelty, even ecstasy.
The body, in particular, responds to the orderliness of routine, in terms of sleeping, eating and sexual patterns, for example. Continuity is embodied in the ordinary routines of daily life, since even though they are repetitive or mundane, that is comforting at a deep level. This need for routine in order to thrive is clearly seen in the adaptation of infants. That is why we often react adversely if we miss our morning coffee or tea, or perhaps the morning newspaper.
When disruptions are large-scale, we interpret them first with a sense of loss, loss of our expected future. However, if we can reframe our experiences as time goes on, we see that the disruption of the normal and habitual also opens us to a new realm of possibility.
When things go wrong, when events fall outside of our experiences of life, and our expectations about it, we are called to a challenge. It is a test of our coping skills and resilience, not only of body and mind, but also of our spirit. The notion of the human psyche as a harmony and rhythm appears again and again, as in Shakespeare, who often uses music to suggest the health of the inner being.
Although continuity is apparently a human need and a universal expectation across cultures, continuity has a culture-specific shape. However, our real lives are more unpredictable than the cultural ideal, which is often framed around our notions of what is "normal," -- normal for our age, for our gender, for our station in life, family background, as well as other more subtle parameters.
Each of these categories gives us a window on the assumptions we make about ourselves and insights about the impact of specific types of disruption. We use them to make sense of our lives. We amend these core ideas associated with these categories to encompass our experiences. Then we find antidotes to the moral force of normalizing ideologies associated with such constructs.
We find new ways of understanding catastrophes, family, womanhood and manhood, the issues we face at different phases of life. Resistance to ideologies is a natural part of the process. Anthropologists have noted that distress seems to be a major organizing factor in the way people, particularly in the U.S., preserve or reconstruct some semblance of continuity in the wake of disruptions.
In the Continuum
Continuity is an illusion. Disruption to life is the real constant in human experience. The only continuity that has staying power is that of the body, and even that is vulnerable. But this fact is too unsettling for us to live with consciously. Faith in continuity of the body preserves the illusion of a more sweeping kind of continuity.
There is a disconnect, a disparity between cultural notions of how things are supposed to be and how they are. This disparity is highlighted by disruption. We all face it daily, but want to deny it, and are trained to deny it as a coping mechanism. We subscribe to an ethos that posits an orderly, predictable life, that shields us from a distasteful reality -- unpredictable chaos.
Although continuity in life is an illusion, it is an effective one. We use it to organize our plans and expectations, and the way we understand who and what we are and what we do. Or else, why do it if chaos will surely disrupt it?
This ideology of downplaying disruption and creating continuity is based on key components:
1) embodied knowledge, including bodily order and memory;
2) a view of linear cultural life rooted in development, adaptation, and transformation;
3) a polarized view of order and chaos, favoring order and mentally shunning chaos;
4) prioritizing values of the "Puritan work ethic" and "rugged individualism" -- productivity, personal responsibility, perseverance, control of the environment and future-orientation;
5) embedding order in our narratives to order the very experience of disruption;
6) moralizing with normalizing ideologies and core guiding metaphors, such as 'the journey of life,' and 'transformation.'
Metaphors give shape and form to life stories. They are tools for working with experience. They embody the situational knowledge that constitutes culture. We integrate explicit metaphors and more implicit images that encompass our whole life into a framework for understanding. We grope through associated images of light and darkness, healing and disease, life and death, toward the perception of truth.
When life begins to return to normal and we attempt to bring closure to a period of disruption, the role of metaphor represents a synthesis of interpretation and creation. The previous interpretations yield to new ones. Aristotle valued analogy and metaphor as the basis of poetic language: "But the greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor. This alone cannot be imparted by another; it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances."
The concerns of young and old are not decidedly different -- we all have human concerns. We all cling to core guiding metaphors, and those most employed are "the journey of life metaphor" and "transformation" metaphors. These metaphors help us create critical linkages between the past, present, and future. But, rather than a retrospective continuity, memory is actually an illumination of discontinuity, subject to social influence.
Memory apparently both illuminates discontinuity and enables people to maintain the illusion of continuity. Because of memory, lives 'appear' to have continuity. Memory is not simply a personal, subjective experience. It is socially constructed and present oriented and thus reconfigures experience. People filter memories according to what is meaningful and through these meanings they interpret the events in their own lives. Memories used to maintain a sense of continuity are apparently highly selective. Past life influences the current moment in time through this selection process, enabling the illusion of consistency to be maintained amid the facts of change. (Beaker, 1997).
When we experience one disruption to life after another, we may begin to experience disruption as the rule rather than the exception, concluding that (1) people are unreliable, (2) life is unpredictable, and (3) life is a struggle we fight alone. Metaphors are idioms of distress. They explain our feelings and bodily distress. They help us comprehend suffering, and reorganize our lives. They provide a way of locating new meaning, expanding our personal framework. They help us locate our personal experience in a culturally relevant context and encompass contradictions, such as good and evil.
Thus we construct mediating metaphors for drawing order out of chaos: metaphors for the journey of life, metaphors of identity, metaphors for life's crossroads, metaphors for struggle, metaphors for inexplicable loss, metaphors for the disordered body, metaphors for perseverance.
We have metaphors for transformation, metaphors for healing body and mind, metaphors of hope, metaphors of evil and good, chaos and hopelessness, metaphors for healing the body through the mind. Metaphors for living in limbo, metaphors of acceptance and healing, metaphors for cure, metaphors for present, past and future, metaphors for anticipation of death, etc.
Rather than "May the force be with you," it is more like "metaphors be with you." And they always are here as our creative guides. Our stories need to make sense, above all, to ourselves -- not only to communicate but to create coherence. Metaphors link disruption to meaning through creativity. They help us express emotions by channeling words in creative ways, defining our subjective reality. Their moral authority helps answer the question, "Why me?" when we feel we are innocent.
Metaphors are one of the most powerful change techniques available. Embodied metaphors provide a direct link to the emotions and deep patterns of behavior. In Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson (1980) tell us that our conceptual system is metaphorical. Women Fire, and Dangerous Things by Lakoff (1987) tells us that thought is embodied and grows out of perception, movement, and physical experience. A number of recent researchers have identified the importance of the body in creating consciousness.
Antonio Damasio (1999) has identified body level feedback systems as intricate aspects of emotions and even consciousness. In addition to neural structures, emotional states are defined by changes in the chemical profile of the body, changes in the viscera, and changes in the degree of contraction of the muscles of the body. Damasio believes that emotions are an important part of our homeostatic regulation and survival mechanism.
Candace Pert (1991), who describes the molecules of emotion and the science behind mind-body medicine, believes that the body is the unconscious mind and can best be addressed through right brain, expressive therapies such as dream work or art therapy. The reason we need to address emotional states in the body is because negative emotions are stored in the physical body long term and must be released before healing can occur. These stored negative emotions can create numerous emotional problems and can even set the stage for disease.
Unconscious or Merely Dissociated?
Negative emotions accumulated over a life time are stored not only as memories but also in the physical body. These stored emotions can become an integral part of our personality and identity. Since these emotions do not represent our true nature, they can often block our success in a variety of areas in life. Focusing directly on the embodied emotions can create change across contexts. It is also a way of bypassing conscious road blocks and engaging the creativity of the unconscious mind. Working at this level ensures that the changes are ecological and are in line with the our own deepest values. In fact this type of change work often has a spiritual component.
The bottomline is that metaphors help us mobilize emotions to enact change -- they move us. They lead toward the understanding of a particular worldview. But when chaos or disaster strikes, we feel the journey of our life is interrupted midstream. Then metaphors help us self re-organize. We do this experientially and through narrative.
The Role and Value of Journey Work in the Process of Recovery
by Iona Miller, Asklepia Foundation, 2003
1). Disruption and Continuity;
2). Healing Words: "Metaphors Be with You";
3). The Healing Power of Narrative History;
4). Soul Support: Healing the Disordered Bodymind;
5). Character: Have Some, Don't Just Be One;
6). Pathos and Healing
Summary: Our life journey is an unpredictable series of chaotic twists and turns which mold our lives, despite our best intentions and plans, as we wend our way toward our certain end. The 'journey' is a core guiding metaphor for our multifarious experiences through all of life's disruptions. It is a poetic journey of self-discovery. Chaos theory provides a natural yet scientific metaphor of this complex trajectory of emergent order from disorder, the complex dance at the edge of chaos.
Process-oriented therapies help us not only recover but make sense of our feelings and experiences by evoking our story, a meaningful narrative of our unique course. It is a combination of subjective healing fiction and our objective history, but expresses the reality of our psyche -- our embodied soul. Even if many have embarked on a similar quest, each of us makes this dramatic voyage of discovery for ourselves -- we become our own "Columbus of the soul," going where we do not know. It leads into the great unknown where fearsome dragons (pain, suffering, loss, grief, illness, dissocIation, emotional devastation, mortality, our own personal demons) await to devour us.
How we navigate those turbulent seas or traverse that undiscovered country is crucial to our wholeness and well-being...even as old explorers heading for the shores of death. If metaphor is central to embodied experience, we can find healing meaning embodied in our personal tales, which speak from the soul of the resilience of human spirit.
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CHAPTER 1
Disruption of Continuity
Efforts to control a chronic condition are rooted in two ideas: that people can control their environment and that people should take responsibility for their health. The notion that chronic illness can be controlled is common in U.S. medical practice, whereas discussion of the limits of control are uncommon. Often couched in terms of illness management in both the medical and social science literature, control over the condition reflects interpretations of Western Cartesian philosophy, which, in contemporary thought, has been interpreted as mind over matter. The responsibility people feel for controlling their chronic illnesses and the efforts they make to overcome the constraints such control places on everyday life affect self-perceptions and alter as the illness waxes and wanes. . .embodied knowledge is assaulted by the ethos of rational determinism. The imposition of another type of order [leaves us] without meaning in [our] lives. The close relationship between embodied knowledge and meaning is thus relegated to a subsidiary position, while control over the body becomes preeminent. Metaphor is central to embodied experience.
--Gay Becker, 1997
Introduction
Uncertainty is the zeitgeist of our day. We are anxious and unsure. We face global warming, environmental deterioration, emerging infections and incurable viruses, pandemics, bioterrorism, wars, urban violence, soil and water depletion, rampant population growth, genetically-engineered food and organisms, hazardous waste, and profound doubts about our earth's ability to continue to sustain life. Much of earth's life is already going extinct, and we wonder about own own and our grandchildren's futures, health, and well-being. Many of us feel the impact as loss of our cherished dreams of a better future.
We did not anticipate this transition from the arrogant certainty of the rational enlightenment promise to disquieting uncertainty. We have realized only empty promises of solutions to life's fundamental problems, like world health, food, and peace. Despite all our knowledge we have not been able to control or dominate our environment successfully. Knowledge is not wisdom, or even understanding. There is a deeper current in life and it is embodied in Mystery-- the unpredictable, the unknown, and perhaps unknowable.
Chaos Theory (CT) is the third revolution in science after relativity and quantum theory. It is the prime source of unpredictability in the macrocosmic world and the human scale, formerly described only by classical physics. Chaos and complexity is nature's own way of organizing systems and creating structure. All systems emerge from and eventually dissolve back into chaos.
Chaos is ubiquitous in nature, but it was missed by science due to the overwhelming complexity of detecting its underlying pattern and purpose. Chaos theory means dynamic processes are deterministic though unpredictable. Much the same can be said for its discovery in human physiology and psychology.
It is well established now that most dynamics in nature, ranging from the orbits of planets to behavioral adjustments in life, are essentially chaotic. We are chaotic systems ourselves, and chaotic systems exhibit holistic behavior. Holism sees the world in all its diversity as connected through complex feedback loops. Through the chaotic process of emergence, order appears spontaneously or even instantly within a system.
The conventional medical model has failed many of us. Holistic health systems embrace the mindbody paradigm, but that does not necessarily mean we should all rush out to substitute "foreign" or alternative therapies for conventional medical wisdom. Generally, these modalities are complementary to biomedical care. However, the holistic scientific metaphor provided by chaos theory allows us to describe the psyche in terms congruent with physical reality. This is simply the way nature works, and the way our nature works, too. It provides a comprehensive psychophysical metaphor for uniting physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual realities.
Holism is a paradigm - a worldview, which is equally applicable to the universe and our human existence. Chaos Theory is not a metaphor, per se, but functions as a science metaphor to describe systems, organisms, and dynamic behavior, including complex adaptation. It describes how order emerges from chaos. People often spontaneously incorporate science metaphors in their self-narratives, using such terms as "black holes" and "melt downs," or "quantum leaps," etc. to describe their feelings or personal dynamics. And the same can be done with aspects of chaos theory which can describe how we adapt to life at the edge of chaos in our own unique way.
Paradigms from one field of science often interpenetrate others. Because the findings are more than metaphorical, they translate across disciplines. Metaphors reflect the interdependency of mind and body, and the embodied nature of metaphor holistically reflects the unity of individual and world. Embodied knowledge reflects our shifting understandings of the body.
Metaphors of chaos are as prevalent in our life trajectory as the explicit chaotic patterns are in our physiology (in our brains, hearts, and metabolic systems, etc.). The events of our lives become embedded in our structure and metabolism. We might call this embodiment "metaphorms."
Various forms of metaphor therapy can help us heal and adapt in the recovery process, giving our psyche a voice. With the advent of chaos theory and complexity theory, universally negative attitudes toward chaos are changing slowly but surely, at least in some individuals. We are learning to consciously accept chaos, and intuit that it also has value. Linear and deterministic theory is on the decline in favor of nonlinearity, fragmentation, multiplicity, iteration, complex feedback loops, and indeterminacy.
This ascendancy of the scientific paradigm of chaos includes medical uncertainty, both for practitioners and patients, who must learn to deal creatively with chaos, tolerate ambiguity, and respect the unapparent. Our sense of control over our external world is a destructive illusion. As we come to understand that disruption is part of the creative cycle, we learn to understand how "emergency" is part of the creative process of "emergence" of renewal and new potential.
Over time we can expect this paradigmatic shift to penetrate more deeply into the cultural fabric of our lives and an integrative health system. Chaos theory, systems theory, and complexity theory have shown us that self-organizing order emerges from chaos, and is thus the paradigm of the natural healing process. It describes the dissolution or fragmentation and reconstruction of the volitional self. It helps us attach a more positive valence to disruptions of our mortal human lives, either through illness or misfortune.
Society itself, even taking into account the various cultural distinctions of diversity, changes in unpredictable ways, including through human frailty or perversity, such as crime and war. Political figures, in particular have the ability to affect great masses of people with their policies and dictates. How we mediate and ameliorate these societal disruptions is a major part of our personal stories, and the story of humanity, in general.
Medical Anthropology
Medical Anthropology [1], in particular, is the field of inquiry which deals with how different cultures handle healthcare issues. Cultures are dynamic holistic systems which are 1). webs of meaning; 2). patterns of and for behavior; 3). "integrated" and interwoven; 4). filters which proscribe and prescribe; 5). give meaning and create order.
What is medical anthropology? Medical anthropology is a subfield of anthropology that draws upon social, cultural, biological, and linguistic anthropology to better understand those factors which influence health and well being (broadly defined). It encompasses the experience and distribution of illness, the prevention and treatment of sickness, healing processes, the social relations of therapy management, and the cultural importance and utilization of pluralistic medical systems.
Thus, we see that culture influences the definition, experience, and treatment of sickness in Western and non-Western societies. Western medicine is mechanistic, while other cultures tend to incorporate the subtle or spiritual dimension in their healing practices. There is also a definition of sickness based on the patient's perception of suffering rather than the physician's assessment of biomedical signs.
This is the dimension of psyche, or soul, in the embodied rather than religious sense. This is expressed as autobiographical narrative, or personal poesis, which is imaginal in form, composed of healing fictions as well as fact. It tells the subjective story "as if" this is the way it is. It is generally also colored by the culture we are immersed in.
The discipline of medical anthropology draws upon many different theoretical approaches. It is as attentive to popular health culture as bioscientific epidemiology, and the social construction of knowledge and politics of science as discovery and hypothesis testing. Medical anthropologists examine how the health of individuals, larger social formations, and the environment are affected by interrelationships between humans and other species; cultural norms and social institutions; micro and macro politics; and forces of globalization as each of these affects local worlds.
There is an anthropological antidote for too narrow a framing of the complex tangle of ways-of-being and ways-of-telling. Stories of illness and healing are often arresting in their power, and they can illuminate aspects of practices and experiences surrounding illness that might otherwise be neglected. Recognizing the theoretical value of these healing tales among those eliciting, telling, and responding to narratives, we can explore these subjective stories from a variety of perspectives.
There is inherent poetics in the experience of personal chaos, tragedy, and illness, just as there is high drama in the grand confrontations of world history. Creative narratives flow from our challenging experiences as both healing fictions and historicities. Broadly, poetics means an expression of the movement of the human spirit. It details chaotic change which profoundly moves our psyches as well as our bodies, revealing resilience of the spirit if not the flesh.
Aristotle describes the classical framework of all dramas in the Poetics. These same qualities can be found in all our personal stories. Do we do it intuitively, or in fact, do these stories create us? People tell their stories; that is how they explain themselves whether to friends or strangers, therapists, or the public at large. We spontaneously weave our stories together into an overview, a word picture of the way it has been for us, from the inside out -- from our personal point of view.
The same dramatic framework is reflected also in our experiences of tragedies: catastrophes, natural and personal disasters, disillusionments, our dark depressions, life passages, loss of our dreams, shortchanged childhoods, stolen innocence, the pain of relationship break ups, sexual dysfunction, distorted body images, addictions, the pain of war, sickness and catastrophic illness, or other losses which move us deeply. Often the chaos of "real life" throws us off our projected course.
Some chronic illnesses and mental disorders have chaos or high drama as their constantly reiterated theme. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, for example, is the constant reliving of painful chaotic sequences and seeing one's whole life through that distorted lens. But these soul-revealing narratives also have their own healing power and constitute a creative therapeutic avenue of their own, which restores meaning to our lives. Whether spontaneous or evoked through therapy, these stories are meaningful and important to our souls and spirits.
To heal originally meant to make whole. But, if we do not feel whole then the image of wholeness becomes a defense against feelings of fragmentation. There has been a loss of meaning in Western medicine. The body has been reduced to the the image of a machine, then medicine can say it is impaired, incomplete, and requires healing.
Biomedicine thinks in linear terms of illness and treatment, as if abeyance of symptoms equates with cure of disease. Sometimes it does, but not always. Sometimes we heal physically, but don't heal emotionally or spiritually. Or we heal emotionally, but not physically. When we step outside of this medical model, we find not only a fictitious goal, but also a new goal, or rather telos: function becomes psychic reality itself, deliteralized -- metaphorical.
Entering our interior story takes the same courage as starting a novel. This is not to say that each of us going to the doctor or therapist should come up with some coherent narrative, or deep insight. But given the opportunity, we do have a story to tell about what brought us to that point. These stories are not consciously crafted. Sometimes our medical treatment is relatively straightforward.
However, we can recognize the fact that most of us spontaneously do go through these internal dialogues, whether we realize it or not. They concern our own issues and our relationship to our bodies, our existential positions, our culture. They go on even when we are not in need of medical treatment. The fantasies and imagery we automatically spin around our psychophysical self surround us like a cocoon.
Autobiographical self-consciousness is a systematic record of our memories of past situations, of our self image, and of likes and dislikes--in short, of the more invariant properties we have discovered about ourselves. It generates the subjective experience of possessing an identity over time. Interestingly, what it grows out of is a much more transient entity--the core self, which is "ceaselessly re-created for each and every object with which the brain interacts." Neurology has produced this new idea of anchoring our traditional self-concept in a more fundamental notion of a "core-self" -- continuously changing bodily processes.
Perhaps we do not create our stories, rather our stories create us! Neurologist Antonio Damasio (1999) asserts that consciousness is an internal narrative. The "I" is not telling the story: the "I" is created by stories told in the mind. The more serious our affliction the more we tend to focus our attention around it, to spin tales of our journey around it. All of us take that one road, our idiosyncratic path of life, unique only to us. Sometimes there are detours and complex loops in our lives, our trajectories, and our stories -- factors beyond our control. Unlike an author with specific goals in mind, we do not know where it may take us, for it is not complete until our final breath.
Symptoms belong to the embodied soul. The metaphorical reality of the psyche is more than mere fiction but less than literal. Metaphors are more than symbolic ways of speaking. Metaphors facilitate thought by providing an experiential framework in which newly acquired, abstract concepts may be assimilated. They are ways of perceiving, feeling and existing. Through this imaginal reality we find soul, meaning, and significance in our suffering. Intractable problems create a continuous flow of psychological ideas, (Hillman, 1975).
Psyche connects us with the larger process and purpose of life. Then our symptoms reflect back to us other parts of ourselves that were alienated. They call attention to the way we live life that has made us feel disconnected, haunted, abnormal or afflicted.
The truth of our situation is not reflected in the literal conditions but in symbolic, poetic form -- in mystery, not history. Which is not to say that some lives aren't heavily impacted by collective history, war in particular. Nothing calls our attention to life like a close call, or brush with death. Or perhaps chaos came hauntingly early in life, creating the feeling of being an "outsider" all along, never seeming to fit in to the commonplace social forms.
When we literalize our symptoms, we remove them from their metaphorical basis, and this amplifies our suffering. Our autobiographical fictions do not have great explanatory power, but they do provide a resting place for a mind restlessly searching for ambiguity and depth. Psyche or soul calls us to place our attention back there by creating illness, morbidity, disorder, abnormality, and suffering, so we see our lives through the deformed or afflicted perspective. Literature is full of sorrowful laments, such as we find from Tolstoy:
"It seemed to him that he and his pain were being thrust into a narrow, deep black sack, but though they were pushed farther and further in they could not be pushed to the bottom...He wept on account of his helplessness, his terrible loneliness, and the cruelty of man, the cruelty of God, and the absence of God...Why hast Thou done all this? Why hast Thou brought me here? Why dost Thou torment me so terribly?. . . 'What is it you want?' was the first clear conception capable of expression in words that he heard. 'What do I want? To live and not to suffer,' he answered...'To live? How?' asked his inner voice. 'Why, to live as I used to--well and pleasantly.' 'As you lived before well and pleasantly?' the voice repeated. . . He suffered ever the same unceasing agonies and in his liveliness pondered always the same insoluble question: 'What is this? Can it be that it is Death?' And the voice answered" 'Yes, it is Death.' "Why these sufferings?' and the voice answered, 'For no reason -- they just are so.'" (Tolstoy, Ivan Ilych).
Medicine holds up an unrealistic image of an ideal level of functioning where virtually every system and organ works properly, and sets this image up as its healing goal. The wound or disease is an aberration in the wholeness of the 'machine' and must be repaired to its previous level of functioning.
This empty metaphor of unimaginative fixing prevents us from a deeper, more meaningful relationship with our afflictions. Setting of goals and progress, especially in psychotherapy, locks us into a specific ideal of problem and solution, ailment and remedy, wound and healing which is too linear to reflect our complex human nature. It is not actually healing but a palliative -- an unimaginative fantasy of healing.
Cultural concepts, like this medical model, shape the experience of illness. Body image is related to culture, as is self-image. Around the world, we find diverse rationalities and multiple realities surrounding health and healing. Beliefs about body and illness are linked to social and political agendas.
This unique symbolic construction of illness prevalent in the West has spread through 'medicalization' into other cultures.
Medical anthropology studies the beliefs and practices related to enhancing human health and healing in specific contexts. It describes a cross-cultural picture about how pain, illness, suffering, and misfortune are handled worldwide.
Using a medical anthropological “lens,” we can examine the diverse ways in which individuals and societies understand, express and deal with illness and health. Medical anthropology offers a window into the relationship between individuals’ bodies and their ongoing social, cultural and political worlds, including the political agendas of scientific research. The diversity of medical beliefs and practices includes shamanic, humoral, bioenergetic, holistic or mindbody, and biomedical healing systems. There is an intimate relationship between healers and patients and quality of care.
Likewise, there is a relation between the human life cycle, gender, health and the social implications of new biotechnologies, and international health issues. It impacts many of us through new technologies and diagnostic and treatment procedures.
We are overwhelmed and confused in our rapidly-changing world by such issues as genetic engineering, safer sex, birth control, birthing procedures, infertility treatment, hormone replacement, cosmetic surgery and enhancement, preventative medicine, and a variety of other health-related choices that directly impact our self-image -- hence our soul and spirit.
The healing approaches from many cultural sources are practiced in the west as complementary care. Over 40 out of 124 US medical schools are beginning to offer courses in complementary or alternative care. Some of these so-called alternatives, originating in Asia or indiginous shamanic cultures, are much older than allopathic medicine. Many nursing schools teach complementary concepts and skills as part of undergraduate and graduate curricula. [2]
According to an often quoted 1993 study by Dr. David Eisenberg at Harvard Medical School, one out of three adults in the U.S. report using a complementary treatment for a health problem, Americans made more visits to alternative practitioners than they did to primary care physicians and they spent .7 billion for such treatments, of which more than .5 billion was paid out-of pocket. The figures are even higher now, since these statistics are 10 years old, and complementary treatment has an even better foothold.
The public's interest in non-conventional health care has risen dramatically in recent years.
Whether referred to as complementary, alternative or integrative care, the subject is receiving significant coverage in both the popular press and in professional journals. Several studies have estimated that 30-50% of the American adult population are consumers of complementary care. In a recent publication, Janis Claflin of the John E. Fetzer Institute referred to this movement as the "invisible mainstream". While initially this was a very consumer driven movement, increasingly health care professionals, third-party payers, health plans, and other purchasers of health care are taking note as evidence accumulates that many complementary care approaches achieve credible outcomes at lower costs. There is a significant need for interdisciplinary models of education and research in complementary care.
The new scientific model of health and illness argues that a bioinformational process constantly oscillates between chaos-like non-linearity and linearity. When this oscillation collapses into a repetitive linear loop, it looses coherence with its bioinformational field creating a rigid state of pathology, (Martinez, 2001). This suggests the individual is an inseparable unit of cognition, biology, and historical culture.
Health and illness are neither exclusively biological nor totally mental. All human processes are inseparable biocognitions of bodymindculture, which is the domain of psychoneuroimmunology, bioinformatics, and medical anthropology. These fields have enriched clinical medicine. Body, mind and culture also meet in our stories where we either "think it out," or "tough it out." These stories express explanatory knowledge or power -- the power to define ourselves, to define our experience of reality -- to personalize and mythologize our experience of consensus reality. They may include denial, anger, and delusory features, but they are our version of the facts none the less.
In the objective, scientific model of who we are, we are complex fields of dynamic information flow. The bioinformational field is contained by horizons functioning as attractors that oscillate from stability to instability in the process of communicating and learning. This oscillation is operational at all levels of the bioinformational field, ranging from cognitive to cellular and perhaps subquantum modes of communication.
Reductionist and dualistic limitations of upward and downward causality are superseded by the notion of 'contextual coemergence.' This suggests causality is a co-authored and simultaneous process taking place within and between bioinformational field horizons rather than originating at the molecular (reductionism) or cognitive (expansionism) levels of life, (Martinez, 2001).
Chaos Theory
Chaos Theory (CT) is a holistic discipline which has cut across all the sciences, including medicine. It has grown to include models of nonlinear complex dynamics, patterns of randomness, global effects, scale-invariance and deterministic chaos from the quantum to macroscopic realms, including the human scale. Gleick said, "Where chaos begins, classical science stops." By that, he means linear, causal descriptions stop and the nonlinear rules of turbulence hold sway. Near criticality, a crisis-point, predictability becomes impossible.
Gleick quotes Ford as saying "Evolution is chaos with feedback." It includes the science and computer modeling of fractals, bifurcations, intermittancies, strange attractors, complex feedback loops, and periodicities. In complexity theory, humans are viewed holistically as complex adaptive systems. This has also offered us a new, more positive perspective on the nature of chaos and disruption in our lives.
Chaos comes into our lives through an endless variety of crises. We all intuitively recognize how chaos interpenetrates our lives, punctuating our so-called equilibrium, diverting our most carefully-crafted plans and detouring our agendas. Sometimes it hits us broadside. It is unpredictability, part of our emotional "weather," and we are generally trying to adjust to it in some way.
Chaos theory holds that the more complex a system, the more stable and self-correcting it is. Disruption to a linear system throws it off course, but only affects a portion of a complex system, which soon adjusts to "fill in the gap." Chaos can engulf us either subjectively or objectively, but becomes embodied in any case, beginning by increasing our stress levels.
Disruptive changes impact us from inside as fear, pain, symptoms, compulsions, complexes, irrationalities, delusions, grief, mental disorders, blind spots, dementia, moods, suicidal tendencies, woundedness, addictions, nervous breakdowns, panic attacks, distorted thinking, social disconnection, and immunological dysfunction, to name a few.
Whether it is rational or not, shame, guilt, dissociation, and low self-esteem may come along with many breakdowns, diseases, or disorders. Vulnerability and guilt walk hand in hand; the affliction reaches us through the guilt it brings. Physical pain is compounded with emotional suffering. When we feel something is wrong, we are likely to perceive something as wrong with ourselves as well as with our bodies.
From outside, chaos impacts as accidents, impairment, injury, maladies, emotional loss, decline, frailty, debilitation, paralysis, dismemberment, mobility loss, brain damage, victimization, disenfranchisement, unexpected traumas and catastrophes (both personal and collective), a near-death experience, and the 'normal' yet unfortunate set-backs we all experience.
Or, we may be the victim of unsavory acts of human perversity in its myriad forms. All can have potentially devastating effects. Chaotic impact from outside oneself brings its own issues of blame, forgiveness, enforced rest, struggles for compensation, dependency, crises of faith. Our concern resides in our symptoms, embodied in more than metaphors. Our pathologies have immediate impact; they change our point of view.
Events beyond our control can lead to sudden, profound changes in our being, in our very physiology. Images of the sick or wounded are exceptionally moving to us all. The psyche itself either denies or complains and pathologizes spontaneously by magnifying all our sensations, aches and pains, often way out of proportion. Under this mental magnification, the body becomes the acute focus of our attention. Our anxiety may lead beyond our legitimate ailments into additional psychosomatic phenomena or even hypochondria. We hold our breath waiting for the next sign of distress.
Even when we are sick or wounded, we simultaneously have fantasies of "falling apart," being sick and wounded, around being sick and wounded. Affliction, real or imagined, reveals deep movement taking place in the psyche. Dreams, fantasies, and symptoms reveals the same imaginal process. As usual, our problems remain the focus of our fantasies. Chaos touches the dark edge of human experience and celebrates the mystery of our nature and destiny, soul and spirit.
Yet somehow people create meaning in a chaotic world. Some of our reactions depend on the basic foundations of our character. Creating meaning involves a process of life reorganization, after assessing the magnitude of impairment.
We like to think we are immortal, unassailable. We tend to live in denial of such almost certainly expectable disasters striking us, even though we know others are assailed daily. Cultural constraints, such as lack of access to affordable medical care can throw more people into crisis. Some of them never see treatment, or treatment and medicine are cut off.
The course of our lives are structured by expectations about each phase of life, and meaning is assigned to specific life transitions, events and the roles that accompany them. When expectations about the course of life are not met, we experience inner chaos and disruption. Restoring order to life necessitates reworking understandings of the self and the world, redefining the disruptions and life itself, (Becker, 1997).
Disease (or injury and degeneration) is an agent of chaos whose attacks can originate from inside or outside of our skin boundary. It even affects us second-hand by generating stress in family systems, and in our social networks. Stress, of course, is one of the commonest causes of many chronic symptoms. Stress can dramatically impact immune function. Serious illness can be like living in limbo. Illness or infirmities can limit our options and independence and thus can enforce the metaphorical death of the old way of life as well as actual deaths. The journey of our lives is interrupted midstream.
Sociologists and anthropologists have begun applying the principles of complexity to their studies of human nature and behavior, and to culture in general. Like mathematicians, they have found that complex adaptive systems, such as human beings, seem to function best at or near the "edge of chaos."
Cultural foundations are revealed particularly in the narratives surrounding states of the body, birth, rites of passage, health, illness, death and dying. These are the stories we tell about ourselves, reflecting our experience as we see it and as we wish others to see it.
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CHAPTER 2
Healing Words: "Metaphors Be With You"
Like "the Force", metaphors are always with us. They help us move conceptually from the known to the unknown. They help us embody concepts in sensory terms. There is a reciprocal loop between metaphors, conceptual models, and physical orientation. Metaphors imply models, and models aren't easily grasped without metaphors. That is why we have modeled our bodymind after communication systems metaphors ranging from the switchboard to the computer, and now to a quantum computer. Over the last few decades our technology progressed but we still model the body as a machine.
The known metaphor helps us grasp the functional concept. That is why chaos theory comes as a more "user friendly" model, since it is organic, complex, and dynamic, rather than static. The principle of self-organization is arguably complementary to evolution. We are completely immersed in metaphors and our thinking is enabled by them. It is impossible to say many things literally, without resorting to metaphor.
We all speak in metaphors whether we realize it or not, not just scientists and poets. Linguist, George Lakoff, in Metaphors We Live By, suggests that they make our thoughts more vivid and interesting while they actually structure our perceptions and understanding.
So, metaphor is much more than a poetical device of the imaginative. They are pervasive in daily life, not only in language but in conceptual thought and action. They help structure what we perceive, how we perceive it, and how we orient ourselves in the world, and communicate with others. They help define our everyday reality, organizing our thoughts, shaping our judgments, and structuring our language.
Lakoff claims the mind is "embodied", that almost all of human cognition, up through the most abstract reasoning, depends on and makes use of such concrete and "low-level" facilities as the sensorimotor system and the emotions. Therefore embodiment is a rejection not only of any dualism of mind and matter, but also of claims that human reason can be basically understood without reference to the underlying psychosensory metaphors.
Conceptual metaphors also consitute the vocabulary of dream interpretation. It is the collection of our everyday conceptual metaphors that make dream interpretations possible. This is the language of symbolism, but it should not be taken too literally. Each symbol we can extract from a dream has a specific context and dynamic that make it unique. We should be cautious when we think we know what it "means," since as a symbol it stands for the unknown.
We don't want to extract symbols from dreams, but dreaming while awake, we want to surrender to imagery which emerges from us revealing our "as if" reality, our psychic reality. The unconscious mind makes use our unconscious system of conventional metaphor, sometimes to express psychological states in terms of spatial orientation and physical symptoms. They ground concepts in the body.
For example, in the Event Structure metaphor, there is a submapping DIFFICULTIES ARE IMPEDIMENTS TO MOTION which has, as a special case, DIFFICULTIES ARE BURDENS . It is fairly common for someone encountering difficulties to walk with his shoulders stooped, as if carrying a heavy weight that is burdening him.
The network of metaphors that underlie thought in this way form a cognitive map, a web of concepts organized in terms which serves to ground abstract concepts in our physical experiences, and in our relation to the external world. A major component of the human cognitive map is what Lakoff terms a cognitive topology, essentially "a mechanism by which we impose structure on space, in a way to give rise to spatial inferences" (Lakoff 1988).
A unifying framework links a conceptual representation to its sensory and experiential ground. The target to become grounded in spatiophysical experience via the source metaphor. In this view, a metaphoric schema is a mental representation that grounds the conceptual (intellectual) structure of an abstract domain in the sensory (sensible) basis of another, more physical, domain. the target to become grounded in spatiophysical experience via the source. The result is that the schemas which mediate between conceptual and sensory levels in the source become active also in the target. In this view, a metaphoric schema is a mental representation that grounds the conceptual (intellectual) structure of an abstract domain in the sensory (sensible) basis of another, more physical, domain.
There are many allusions surrounding the metaphor that "life is a journey." It implies that purposes are destinations, means are routes, difficulties are obstacles, achievements or catastrophes can be landmarks, and choices are crossroads. The "end of the line" is "written in stone," which reads R.I.P. If a lifetime is likened to a day, death is sleep; if likened to a year, death is winter. If life is a struggle, dying is losing that contest to an adversary. If life is seen as a precious possession, time is a thief and death is loss.
We speak of the "high points"of life, and our "lows." The physical basis of metaphorical well-being is clear: Serious incapacitation forces us to lie down physically, and with death we are physically "down for the count," and buried even deeper. We can be "deeply disturbed," or "deep in trouble." When it's really bad, it is "living Hell." Happiness is "Seventh Heaven."
The most common metaphors of sickness and health relate healthy life with being "up"and sickness and death with being "down." We say that we are at "the peak of health," "he rose from the dead," "she's in top shape," "we fell ill," he's sinking fast," "they came down with the flu," "her health is declining," "he dropped dead." Having control or well-being is referred to as being "up," while loss of motivation and control is being "down."
Metaphors help us describe what experiences are like. Rather than literal, they depicts an "as if" reality. A simile is a simple comparison; a metaphor is more complex, expressing an implicit rather than literal comparison. They are emotionally charged, clarifying or emphasizing an idea by translating it into more concrete and familiar terms.
Metaphors transform abstractions into images. Metaphors carry several meanings simultaneously, and 'work" when they are appropriate to the context. Thought and image must harmonize. They enrich meaning by implying added dimensions of thought and feeling.
There is no formula for creating metaphors. Whether metaphor arises from "inside" the subject or from "outside," its coming depends on imagination. There is no magic for discovering metaphors. It is a talent which emerges with a sense of freshness and originality. They can be emphatic, expressing feelings or judgments, intensifying our awareness, and strongly restating a theme while creating a memorable image. Thus we describe, embellish, even embody our incapacitation, devastation, despair, pain, anger, and shame.
Personification is a special kind of metaphor which speaks of the inanimate or abstract "as if" it were a person, a subtle being. For example, the image of menace, chaos, or death is often personified in a number of culturally-expectable forms, such as "the grim reaper," or "Father Time." The purpose of personifying is to expand, explain or vivify. It breathes life even into the image of death. Or, it comes more metaphorically, embodied as being "scared to death," "being at death's door," or "a brush with death," "cheating death."
We use metaphor to describe things we can't see or that are not readily apparent. We use metaphors which come from our own experiential base. Thus, children are able to make metaphors which come from and are familiar to a child's vision and experience. We all know they are not to be taken literally.
However, if a metaphor lies outside our experience or is too learned, we will fail to "get it." If understood, they help us extend, explore, and expand our understanding. We do not necessarily need to concoct or develop metaphors of our experience; they emerge spontaneously. They help familiarize the strange. They link the known with the unknown, yoking us to reality by joining diverse experiences.
Metaphor therapies help us describe a vaguely-sensed process. We grope toward descriptions of our experience. They help us develop our healing stories, encapsulating the inner and outer journey we have been forced to undertake.
Epistemological metaphors tell us how we known what we know. They are unique to each individual. As soon as we describe what a condition or experience is like, we have created a metaphor of our dynamic state. We all know what we would like to have happen and what happens when it doesn't happen. We can generally describe what that experience is like, how we know, and when, where and how we feel it in our bodies.
When we don't recover as quickly as initially expected, a profound sense of hopelessness and doom, even suicidal thoughts, can set in. Or, we waiver between hope and hopelessness. Feelings of hopelessness can lead to further psychophysical complications, dysfunction, and breakdown. The longer the trauma lasts the higher the incidence of post-traumatic stress (PTSD) and the risk of dissociation associated with loss of goal-directed action.
In treating psychophysical trauma, many goal-directed mindbody practitioners make an error using metaphor therapeutically. They attempt to "import" or artificially introduce metaphors into the healing system. The unspoken assumption is that they can somehow "know" what images will effectively "work" on their subject. They take their client on a prefabricated or "canned" journey, of their own fashioning, which may or may not fit. This is a "band-aid" approach, bringing only temporary, if any respite.
What is needed is the mobilization of self-discovery , one's emergent process, rather than a surgical strike with a metaphorical missle to "get rid of" a symptom. One must follow one's own chaotic trajectory. "One size fits all" does not work when it comes to therapy. It has to be tailored to the individual.
A good therapist never pre-empts the process of self-discovery by informing the client of some realization which is obvious to him or her long before the client can articulate it. These externally introduced, or "guided" imagery practices ignore the reality that what is needed are the home-spun emergent metaphors, specific to the individual and arising spontaneously from within.
Destruction of the fabric of daily life, health and wholeness -- disruption of the intrinsic order of everyday life -- can leave us with a sense of unreality. We are forced to face the destruction of the habituated, embodied self as well as uncertainty about whether we have time left to create new selves.
This task of linking past, present and future may be beyond our cognitive or expressed abilities. For this reason, the transition is often aided by process-oriented "journey work" which is neither logically nor physically demanding. It merely requires focusing deeply on the embodied imagery that is already there. These are the images which get to the heart of the matter.
Healing Stories
Our "healing" stories all have a common plot: a disruption to life is followed by efforts to restore life to 'normal.' There are many journeys, yet just one road, our own well-trodden "trail of tears." Plot forms give stories coherence and order. Events are defined not in terms of their singularity but in terms of the meaningful contribution they make to the unfolding of the story or history in question. They contribute to the development of a plot and a story line. Often this coherent plot will not emerge until years later.
We portray the anguish and changes we undergo and the ways we reframe the disruption over time. Thus images of fragmentation, black holes, explosive disintegration, dismemberment, the disorientation of limbo, etc. are common metaphors in the narrative process. They express the opposite of integration -- dissociation.
Our old self-image dies before the new one emerges. Confronting the changed body is the first task of recovery. But the body cannot be treated as separate from the mind. Emotions can be triggered unconsciously, from unattended thoughts or unknown dispositions, as well as from unperceivable aspects of our body states.
Reason and emotions work together, as do intellect and spirit. Neural processes become images which are incorporated into the narrative of our stream of thoughts. Emotions and the body are intimately linked. The critical difference between stressful but normal events and trauma is the feeling of helplessness to change the outcomes. Helplessness leads to numbness, withdrawal, dissociation, confusion, shock, even speechless terror. Emotion-focused coping is an attempt to alter emotional states instead of the circumstances it arose from to reset equilibrium.
The biological purpose of emotions is clearly to help regulate metabolism, homeostasis and survival. They underlie our autobiographical experience. Feelings are sensory patterns signaling pain, pleasure, and emotions as images. Inducers of background emotions are usually internal - visceral. They allow us to experience background feelings of tension or relaxation, fatigue or energy, well-being or malaise, anticipation or dread.
The "body-loop" of chemical messengers and neural signals can change our somatosensory perception. Each symptom, illness, distress, or disease we manifest, whether physical or mental, is based in or reflects a deep psychosensory self-image. It defines our existential worldview, which simply means how we experience self, the world, and the the relationship between the two.
Thus, the mysteries of consciousness are rooted in our basic life regulation processes. The basic emotions function as fundamental regulatory mechanisms. They are complicated collections of chemical and neural responses, forming a pattern.
Primary universal emotions include happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, or disgust. Secondary social emotions include embarrassment, jealousy, guilt or pride. Background emotions, essentially degrees of arousal of either the sympathetic or parasympathetic systems, include well-being or malaise, calm or tension. The name emotion has also been attached to drives and motivations and states of pain and pleasure. All emotions use the body as their theater.
The Plot Thickens
Plot has the capacity to model our experience, it organizes our emotional experience. The plot weaves together the agents, goals, means, interactions, and unexpected results and renders the story's contents intelligible. Formulating the plot points is a crucial imaginative task of people who face sudden illness. It is a tool to mediate disruption and promote self-healing.
We choose how to plot their autobiographical narratives, which unify the chronological and nonchronological. This interweaving of non-linear narrative time is not reducible to linear time, and the beginning and end are often confounded with significance and explanations. We weave convoluted tales of stories within stories, shaping memory and events.
Narratives are a way to articulate and resolve core issues, or universal problems and paradoxically a way to either avoid or heal biographical discontinuities. In storytelling, we organize, display and work through our experiences.
Narratives can be a potent force mediating disruptions, whether it is caused by illness or personal misfortune. Experience is reframed and reshaped in the narrative process. Narratives are subject to change with subsequent experiences. They can have contradictory and multiple interpretations, as we struggle to characterize our existential condition.
Journey work helps us create narratives which heal. But journey work is not a linear, rational, enculturated process like the conscious stories we confabulate around our experiences. The defocusing of our enculturated conscious orientation allows an underlying paradigm to surface from nature's own self-organizing principles.
Chaos works for us as it becomes more explicit -- the underlying truth of chaos and creative, emergent self-organization. When we are "onto something" during an inner journey into our own depths, the more fundamental issues will surface gradually, and most likely spontaneously self-organize at a higher level, a more adaptive level.
Successful navigation of our lives is a rite of passage which never ends. Life includes all of the trials, joys, triumphs, victories, wishes, and the chaotic disruptions we experience as well. We cannot disown any of them, the years of our lives -- both good and bad, the light and dark -- or we disown a large part of ourselves.
To remain authentic, our histories must be comprehensive. The person we are, moment to moment, emerges from the coevolutionary context of our life, including our dreams. But we can always embrace new dreams for ourselves consistent with our current reality, using imagination and creativity.
It is a spiritual matter to own the chaotic as well as the 'successful' aspects of ourselves and incidents of our lives. Others want to hear, want to know how we successfully navigated the treacherous parts of our histories. We draw nourishment for ourselves from the healing stories of others, their triumphs of the spirit. We ask, "How did you survive?", "What did you do?", "How did you keep your spirits up?", "How did you keep from losing your sanity?" "How did you bounce back?" "What did you reject and what was helpful to you in your healing process?"
Narrative is a means for giving voice to bodily experience, from embodied despair to spiritual breakthrough. Any process-oriented therapies which foster the narrative process mobilize healing (Miller, 2003). When sensation and bodily expression are undervalued, narrative is our primary means of accessing the world of bodily experience and essential to our understanding of that experience.
Embodied knowledge reflects our shifting understandings of the body and can be revealed in the metaphors in which we describe that understanding. Through metaphor we come to comprehend what we know, but don't know that we know!
In story we develop creative ways of interpreting disruption and draw together disparate aspects of the disruption into a cohesive whole. We express our development over time. Our individual history is brought together in a work of imagination. In articulating the various points of connection, we transform it into a coherent story. In the midst of our experience it is not always possible to know the meaning of our actions. Only with time do certain aspects of what is meaningful emerge.
Our stories reveal the kaleidoscope of our emotions and response patterns. They run the gamut of human ills, from infancy and childhood catastrophes to the experience of living with chronic illness, especially later in life.
Throughout life we may even be plagued or obsessed with health concerns even when we needn't be, imagining maladies and amplifying psychosomatic symptoms. These are the products of our medical fears and hypochondriasis. Gender issues such as infertility and related disruptions of midlife, relationship troubles, transitioning from independence to dependence, and recovery struggle stories, etc. are other persistent themes.
When disruption comes at the hands of an abuser, assailant, or any form of human perversity, the chaos of another is introjected into our lives. This is even true of car accidents. Our story becomes enmeshed with theirs, even if it is a stranger. The impact on our life's arc can be tremendous -- even more strongly jolting than the impact of metal on metal and flesh.
The loss and pain cannot be compensated. That which is lost cannot be returned, whether it is the innocence of childhood, cherished life plans and ambitions, or stolen treasures of the heart or mind. When we confront a disruption, it often brings in its wake all the disruptions we experienced in our lives, such as deaths of family members, sudden job loss, other accidents, and the onset of illness.
In a sea of unforeseeable changes, disruptions can be cataclysmic, or subtle and profound. Their legacy can persist for years, for decades, even a lifetime. The disruption is actually one of personal meaning, and the consequent destruction of a sense of continuity.
The stories we tell ourselves struggling to make sense of our lives are full of metaphors to make sense of disruption, limbo, and efforts to create continuity. We raise questions about what is meaningful. We try to make peace with our ideals. This dialogue with culture and its constructs takes place in both the body and the narrative. Our lives can also be studded with islands of serenity, periods of stability in which we seem to go on "normally."
Our ongoing interpretation of events, the stories we tell ourselves and others about disruptive changes, enables us to make sense of our personal worlds. And the knowable world provides a framework for understanding major events as well as everyday experiences. Humans thrive in routine, even though we also crave novelty, even ecstasy.
The body, in particular, responds to the orderliness of routine, in terms of sleeping, eating and sexual patterns, for example. Continuity is embodied in the ordinary routines of daily life, since even though they are repetitive or mundane, that is comforting at a deep level. This need for routine in order to thrive is clearly seen in the adaptation of infants. That is why we often react adversely if we miss our morning coffee or tea, or perhaps the morning newspaper.
When disruptions are large-scale, we interpret them first with a sense of loss, loss of our expected future. However, if we can reframe our experiences as time goes on, we see that the disruption of the normal and habitual also opens us to a new realm of possibility.
When things go wrong, when events fall outside of our experiences of life, and our expectations about it, we are called to a challenge. It is a test of our coping skills and resilience, not only of body and mind, but also of our spirit. The notion of the human psyche as a harmony and rhythm appears again and again, as in Shakespeare, who often uses music to suggest the health of the inner being.
Although continuity is apparently a human need and a universal expectation across cultures, continuity has a culture-specific shape. However, our real lives are more unpredictable than the cultural ideal, which is often framed around our notions of what is "normal," -- normal for our age, for our gender, for our station in life, family background, as well as other more subtle parameters.
Each of these categories gives us a window on the assumptions we make about ourselves and insights about the impact of specific types of disruption. We use them to make sense of our lives. We amend these core ideas associated with these categories to encompass our experiences. Then we find antidotes to the moral force of normalizing ideologies associated with such constructs.
We find new ways of understanding catastrophes, family, womanhood and manhood, the issues we face at different phases of life. Resistance to ideologies is a natural part of the process. Anthropologists have noted that distress seems to be a major organizing factor in the way people, particularly in the U.S., preserve or reconstruct some semblance of continuity in the wake of disruptions.
In the Continuum
Continuity is an illusion. Disruption to life is the real constant in human experience. The only continuity that has staying power is that of the body, and even that is vulnerable. But this fact is too unsettling for us to live with consciously. Faith in continuity of the body preserves the illusion of a more sweeping kind of continuity.
There is a disconnect, a disparity between cultural notions of how things are supposed to be and how they are. This disparity is highlighted by disruption. We all face it daily, but want to deny it, and are trained to deny it as a coping mechanism. We subscribe to an ethos that posits an orderly, predictable life, that shields us from a distasteful reality -- unpredictable chaos.
Although continuity in life is an illusion, it is an effective one. We use it to organize our plans and expectations, and the way we understand who and what we are and what we do. Or else, why do it if chaos will surely disrupt it?
This ideology of downplaying disruption and creating continuity is based on key components:
1) embodied knowledge, including bodily order and memory;
2) a view of linear cultural life rooted in development, adaptation, and transformation;
3) a polarized view of order and chaos, favoring order and mentally shunning chaos;
4) prioritizing values of the "Puritan work ethic" and "rugged individualism" -- productivity, personal responsibility, perseverance, control of the environment and future-orientation;
5) embedding order in our narratives to order the very experience of disruption;
6) moralizing with normalizing ideologies and core guiding metaphors, such as 'the journey of life,' and 'transformation.'
Metaphors give shape and form to life stories. They are tools for working with experience. They embody the situational knowledge that constitutes culture. We integrate explicit metaphors and more implicit images that encompass our whole life into a framework for understanding. We grope through associated images of light and darkness, healing and disease, life and death, toward the perception of truth.
When life begins to return to normal and we attempt to bring closure to a period of disruption, the role of metaphor represents a synthesis of interpretation and creation. The previous interpretations yield to new ones. Aristotle valued analogy and metaphor as the basis of poetic language: "But the greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor. This alone cannot be imparted by another; it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances."
The concerns of young and old are not decidedly different -- we all have human concerns. We all cling to core guiding metaphors, and those most employed are "the journey of life metaphor" and "transformation" metaphors. These metaphors help us create critical linkages between the past, present, and future. But, rather than a retrospective continuity, memory is actually an illumination of discontinuity, subject to social influence.
Memory apparently both illuminates discontinuity and enables people to maintain the illusion of continuity. Because of memory, lives 'appear' to have continuity. Memory is not simply a personal, subjective experience. It is socially constructed and present oriented and thus reconfigures experience. People filter memories according to what is meaningful and through these meanings they interpret the events in their own lives. Memories used to maintain a sense of continuity are apparently highly selective. Past life influences the current moment in time through this selection process, enabling the illusion of consistency to be maintained amid the facts of change. (Beaker, 1997).
When we experience one disruption to life after another, we may begin to experience disruption as the rule rather than the exception, concluding that (1) people are unreliable, (2) life is unpredictable, and (3) life is a struggle we fight alone. Metaphors are idioms of distress. They explain our feelings and bodily distress. They help us comprehend suffering, and reorganize our lives. They provide a way of locating new meaning, expanding our personal framework. They help us locate our personal experience in a culturally relevant context and encompass contradictions, such as good and evil.
Thus we construct mediating metaphors for drawing order out of chaos: metaphors for the journey of life, metaphors of identity, metaphors for life's crossroads, metaphors for struggle, metaphors for inexplicable loss, metaphors for the disordered body, metaphors for perseverance.
We have metaphors for transformation, metaphors for healing body and mind, metaphors of hope, metaphors of evil and good, chaos and hopelessness, metaphors for healing the body through the mind. Metaphors for living in limbo, metaphors of acceptance and healing, metaphors for cure, metaphors for present, past and future, metaphors for anticipation of death, etc.
Rather than "May the force be with you," it is more like "metaphors be with you." And they always are here as our creative guides. Our stories need to make sense, above all, to ourselves -- not only to communicate but to create coherence. Metaphors link disruption to meaning through creativity. They help us express emotions by channeling words in creative ways, defining our subjective reality. Their moral authority helps answer the question, "Why me?" when we feel we are innocent.
Metaphors are one of the most powerful change techniques available. Embodied metaphors provide a direct link to the emotions and deep patterns of behavior. In Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson (1980) tell us that our conceptual system is metaphorical. Women Fire, and Dangerous Things by Lakoff (1987) tells us that thought is embodied and grows out of perception, movement, and physical experience. A number of recent researchers have identified the importance of the body in creating consciousness.
Antonio Damasio (1999) has identified body level feedback systems as intricate aspects of emotions and even consciousness. In addition to neural structures, emotional states are defined by changes in the chemical profile of the body, changes in the viscera, and changes in the degree of contraction of the muscles of the body. Damasio believes that emotions are an important part of our homeostatic regulation and survival mechanism.
Candace Pert (1991), who describes the molecules of emotion and the science behind mind-body medicine, believes that the body is the unconscious mind and can best be addressed through right brain, expressive therapies such as dream work or art therapy. The reason we need to address emotional states in the body is because negative emotions are stored in the physical body long term and must be released before healing can occur. These stored negative emotions can create numerous emotional problems and can even set the stage for disease.
Unconscious or Merely Dissociated?
Negative emotions accumulated over a life time are stored not only as memories but also in the physical body. These stored emotions can become an integral part of our personality and identity. Since these emotions do not represent our true nature, they can often block our success in a variety of areas in life. Focusing directly on the embodied emotions can create change across contexts. It is also a way of bypassing conscious road blocks and engaging the creativity of the unconscious mind. Working at this level ensures that the changes are ecological and are in line with the our own deepest values. In fact this type of change work often has a spiritual component.
The bottomline is that metaphors help us mobilize emotions to enact change -- they move us. They lead toward the understanding of a particular worldview. But when chaos or disaster strikes, we feel the journey of our life is interrupted midstream. Then metaphors help us self re-organize. We do this experientially and through narrative.
Healing Narratives
The Healing Power of Narrative History
"To heal the symptom, we must heal the person, and to heal the person we must first heal the story in which the person has imagined himself." --James Hillman
Emphasis in the West, has particularly been on the linear, orderly unfolding of life and the emphasis on the individual journey, the self in relation to society. Return to progress, activity, productivity, perseverance, achievement, determination, goal-orientation, and self-reliance are emphasized in our cultural ideologies in the face of uncertainty, loss of hope, and the anticipation of death. Yet our lives clearly don't follow predictable, coherent, linear paths.
This paradigm is not as pronounced in cultures which have a distinctively cyclic worldview, and maintain more integrated family and community lives where collective human values are prioritized. This is evident for example in Canada and Europe where healthcare is not treated solely as an individual responsibility. This sociopolitical aspect permeates healthcare in the U.S. which is the only country in the world to include its receipts in the Gross National Product.
Treatment in the health field starts with the assumption that clinical treatment of disease is a cost-efficient way to maintain health. In the past centuries, public health practices eliminated many diseases at a fraction of the cost possible with clinical treatment, so more holistic or sociological approaches have developed. Clinical medicine, with its emphasis on curing disease has gradually replaced the less remunerative public health emphasis, since it is much more lucrative and prestigious.
The medical ecology of the 1950s, focusing on disease and individuals, was based in a simplistic environmental stimulus-response model. It virtually eliminated scourges like polio, tuberculosis, many bacterial infections, and smallpox, at least in the US. But it failed to cope with the global spread of capitalism and its impact on health and societal development, which require more sophisticated ecological concepts. Critiques of biocultural paradigms, medical ecology, and medical anthropology need a common field of discourse, such as political ecology, but that is beyond the scope of this work, and the political power of our public health centers for disease control.
Our point is that our healing arc in the west is conditioned by the mandates of our Puritan work ethic, the underlying ethos of the U.S. Clearly this productivity bias goes hand in glove with our mechanistic, Cartesian upbringings -- we are trained from birth to notice and value certain things over others.
The history of Western civilization contains a fundamental theme of dissociation (Ross). It is manifest in the Cartesian treatent philosophy which splits mind from body. Its reductionist aspect is physically embodied in medical science; its dissociated romantic side in psychology. We are caught in the social web of dualism, dissociation, and projection. Curiously, the Western mind projects the products of its own function onto the unconscious and mistakenly concludes they originate there. Reductionism denies the reality of the psyche.
Contemporary medicine projects its vision of a mechanistic function onto the body and physical universe. Psychology's philosophical doctrine sentimentalizes the natural world and projects abnormal ideas onto the body and the "unconscious" mind. But is it unconscious, or merely dissociated? Culturally divorced from the body, of course the mind becomes dissociated. We need a spiritual return to a dynamic unified perspective.
Dissociation of mind and body was followed by fragmentation of social function.
Looking at how we respond to disruption helps reveal our core tenets, and how deeply we are embedded in the cultural contours of our society. Can we have value as human beings, or must we force ourselves to respond as 'human doings' to maintain our self image and esteem, because our culture demands it?
Narratives, both personal and collective, arise from the desire to have life display coherence, integrity, fullness, disclosure, and closure. Even psychotherapy is based in part on the premise that reshaping or reframing events lends a sense of coherence where there has been chaos. Change the history or reframe the story and the attitudes associated with it automatically change.
The development of these narratives is preeminently, a cultural process. Even though the premise is unspoken, we have come to tacitly expect a "beginning, middle, and end" to our personal stories. Most of us would like to imagine an optimistic end to our stories, one that provides meaning and purpose for our lives...a "good" ending, if not always a "happy" one.
We all witnessed this, both at the personal and national level, even worldwide, in the aftermath of the 9/11 disaster. Part of the healing process commenced immediately with the constant telling of tales to one another -- how we were involved, or changed, and further impacted by this graphic demonstration that the sanctity of our native soil would never be the same again. The psychological and cultural healing became as important as the practical clean up and strategic reactions.
The distressed body plays the largest role in our response to and the impact of chaos. Stress alone can affect us even when we are not emotionally or personally connected to an event. Sometimes empathic viewing of an event, and the personal associations and issues it brings up, such as existential safety and trust, fear and personal pain can be enough to mobilize the body for the fight-flight response. A wake of psychophysical and immunological changes follow, and persist, depending on the degree of involvement.
Our understanding of ourselves and the world begins with our reliance on the orderly functioning of our body. Our expectations in this regard are somewhat conditioned in childhood by our own experiences and those of our close caregivers. A relatively uneventful childhood may lead to an exaggerated sense of strength, immortality, undefeatability; while exposure to catastrophic or chronic illness may lead to a deep sense of vulnerability, even weakness. We can't know just how strong or resilient we are until we are challenged to mobilize our inner reserves and resources.
We carry our histories, as well as the whole history of humanity, with us into the present through our bodies. Our feelings and thoughts become manifest in our physical structure. The past is "sedimented" in the body -- that is, it is embodied. Our bodies' sensory apparatus is the only way we experience the larger world. It is the medium through which we meet and respond to that world, feeling its reciprocal impact on us. Thus our symptoms can reflect our cultural as well as personal attitudes.
We may ignore, diminish, or hide symptoms, use specific kinds of supplements, folk or new age remedies attempting to control or minimize our symptoms. We may delay seeking treatment to avoid the fear of being "abnormal," or perceived in that way by others. There is a pervasive feeling that most of us don't want to become a "burden" to our loved ones.
Thus, the body is foundational in the emergence of culture and cultural norms. Its as if a deep part of us remembers the hunter-gatherer days of humanity when the infirm were simply left to fend for themselves or die when they could not "keep up." Culture essentially began with shamanic healing, lore, and ritual burials. We can presume teaching stories were used to bind the tribe together.
We are also able to ground our resistance to the power of cultural norms in bodily experience. Our resistance is tempered by our bodily knowledge as we listen to our bodies in deciding whether care is necessary. Failure to listen for symptoms, or to gauge them accurately, can have serious and even fatal medical consequences. Thus, bodily knowledge informs our actions, including resistance to the status quo. Part of that status quo is the availability of heathcare we feel is simpatico with our worldview and sense of self -- our view of the healing professions -- physical, emotional and spiritual.
Often in our illnesses, breakdowns, or grief, we seek a new norm for ourselves in larger social collectives, such as support groups or spiritual groups. It is comforting to be around others who share the same infirmities and issues, and are navigating the same turbulent waters.
We draw succor from knowing we are sharing the same passages, and can share information, resources, solutions and benefit from the experience of those who have gone before. By telling our sad tales, or tales of recovery over and over, we project images of ourselves into the world through performance. This is actually a form of creativity which helps the healing process, and creates resilience in the general community.
Order and Chaos
Our notions of order and chaos change as we attempt to come to grips with disruption in our lives. We reexamine the given ideas of our culture when we become marginalized from the bustling demands of daily life. When our life circumstances don't fit with our preconceived image we have to look at the disjunction, the discrepancies, the disconnections, and make adjustments.
Often efforts to create coherence and provide closure to situations are at odds with notions of order shaped by complex cultural dynamics. Where we find support for this reassessment can make a profound difference in our ability to move beyond the problem phase toward healthy choices, solutions, and resolutions. Depending on the nature of the disruption, various cultural ideals of, for example, health, womanhood, manhood, parenthood, independence, and the aging process emerge.
When our stability is threatened, we begin to wonder if the unspoken "end" of our personal story will take a different tack. Yet, stability is individually defined. We can adjust to a diminished capacity without feeling that our sense of self-identity is diminished, but it may be a big part of the healing struggle. Our culture has programmed us to derive a great part of our sense of self from doing, rather than being. Ideally, even when infirm, we can partake of an active life of the spirit.
Thus, our value is wrapped up in what we are able to do in the world, rather than simply being valued for existing, for our basic humanity. When challenged, we learn there are often a wide variety of other ways we can contribute. Our attitudes are a good predictor of how we will respond to challenge. A good attitude, even though it may not cure, supports the healing of the bodymind since it doesn't put an extra stress load on it.
Our self-narratives help us make "sense" of our ordeals, the gauntlet we are forced to run by the impact of disruption. What is most striking about the portrait of issues that emerge when we wrestle with disruption is that in the U.S. at least, core beliefs persist despite ongoing social change.
Even if we have been progressive, illness may cause us to regress to the values of our youth, when we felt more helpless, less independent. Of course, there is variation according to ethnicity, gender, class, and age. Disruption throws these cultural distinctions into high relief so the underlying core foundations and unspoken beliefs become more visible.
Most people strive to be somewhat "normal." But the realities of life can carry us far afield from that imaginal ideal. We all have compelling concerns and precious stakes to defend and sustain, including relationships and life goals and dreams that guide and sustain us.
Yet events occur continuously that do not fit in with our vision of how life should be. When they strike like a bolt from the blue, what we do affects our individualized view of the world. We may present a brave front to the world, and yet be quaking internally with fear and pain. To be authentic, to be congruent in our self-expression we need to make our inner truth part of our story.
Disruption makes us feel different from others, due to our existential position, traumas, or reactions. Once we feel marginalized we begin to define ourselves in terms of difference rather than normalcy. Over and over the conflict arises between the desire for normalcy and the blunt acknowledgment of difference playing over and over in one's experience and consciousness.
Our abilities to care for our selves in terms of pre-planning and response patterns effect those around us. Disruption makes us feel different from others and can render social relationships uncomfortable and even cumbersome. Our narratives repeatedly attest to the emotional pain that difference causes and to the struggle to reduce or eliminate that sense of difference from others.
On the other hand, some people exploit their infirmities for the social payoffs of what are called "secondary gains," in medicine and psychotherapy. This survival strategy may or may not manifest the desired manipulation, and can often backfire on the person, who may be totally unconscious of this goal.
The stories we construct surrounding the disruption of our lives are essentially moral accounts. This is virtually the only way we can endow our reality with so much meaning. But, clearly, bad things happen to "good" people. We call this tragic or say it's a "tragedy."
When thrust into a different lifestyle, into an experience of otherness, we seem to require a moralizing antidote to mediate the experience of the radical shift in self-image. This experience has been canonized in the dramatic form called tragedy, which devolved from ancient Greek rituals of Dionysus, god of chaos and disruption and Apollo, traditionally the god of light and healing, but also disease.
We struggle in the moral dimension rethinking our values under assault from chaotic disruption. Thus, our faith in ourselves, or perhaps a higher power is either confirmed or disavowed. Some of that resistance gets directed at the status quo. At this point many people rebel against the limitations of conventional treatment and seek alternative treatments or healing for the soul and spirit, as well as the body. [3] Our internal dialogue on differences and normalcy is riddled with metaphors that reveal cultural foundations.
CHAPTER 4
Soul Support: Healing the Disordered Bodymind
"The gods have become diseases; Zeus no longer rules Olympus, but the solar plexus, and produces curious specimens for the doctor's consulting room." --C. G. Jung (1929, p. 37)
Carl Jung believed the soul or psyche to be autonomous from ego consciousness. Soul, according to Jung, is a manifestation of the collective unconscious: the deepest substrate upon which existence rests. Its function is to animate life. In Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious , Jung writes: "Soul is the living thing in man, that which lives of itself and causes life ….She is full of snares and traps, in order that man should fail, should reach the earth, entangle himself there, and stay caught, so that life should be lived…"
The voice with which Ivan Ilych dialogues, is that of soul. It is soul, the objective psyche, which inquires in the midst of one’s suffering "What is it you want?" Symptoms are generally believed to derive from an external event, or an internal neuro-biological imbalance. From this ego perspective, symptoms are in us because that is the way they are experienced. Symptoms are experienced as an alien other.
When our mental or physical health is suddenly disrupted, we are thrown into chaos. It can be likened to a "descent into hell," "dark night of the soul," "being dragged over the coals," a "bad dream," or "nightmare," "limbo," "falling into a black hole," "reaping the whirlwind," or a "brush with death." The chaos and disorientation is reflected most strongly in our hopes and dreams as we attempt to cope with onslaught of our body, mind and spirit.
It splits our perception into two separate realities -- "before and after," -- the known world of normalcy before catastrophe or disease struck, and the chaotic world of the dis-ease, mental or physical. All sources of disruption disturb the psyche. Our spirit is assaulted by the agents of chaos. We can feel let down or even betrayed by our bodies. It raises a host of issues, such as lasting, leaving, longevity, mortality, repetition, being left behind, compassion, isolation, abandonment, marginalization, etc.
The spontaneous human activity of creating healing narratives to restore order is the basis of psychotherapy, particularly talk therapy. However, the healing journey and milestones of all therapies, including biomedicine and energy medicine, are congealed in the narratives we produce spontaneously about our life journeys. The life journey is a core metaphor. We don't need to formally enter therapy for its directive power to come into play.
It is a guiding force. We can creatively employ this natural process to mobilize healing by helping the process along in an integrated way. We can address the needs of the whole person: the bodymind, with its need to restore a sense of emotional balance, order and meaning, and the moral dimension with its need for spirituality.
All human actions are worked out to the end, passing through the unforeseeable contingencies of a "world we never made." The conscious purpose with which we start is redefined after each unforeseen contingency is sufferance. At the end, in the light of hindsight, we see the truth of what we have been doing.
When we experience illness and health conditions requiring considerable medical intervention, we monitor and discuss our bodies. How we talk about them tells us much about the nature of embodiment and how cultural particulars influence the way we experience embodiment. How we talk also tells us much about the portrayal of bodily experience.
There is a connection between how people talk about their bodies -- bodily concerns and bodily experience -- and how they experience them. This action is a kind of natural history of the psyche's life. But action does not means deeds, event, or physical activity but the motivation from which deeds spring. The action this art seeks is to depict a psychic energy working outwards, the focus or movements of the psyche toward what seems good to it at the moment -- a movement-of-spirit.
A Moving Experience
Action is active: the psyche perceives something it wants, and "moves" toward it. Passion, or pathos (suffering) is passive. The psyche suffers something it cannot control or understand, and "is moved" thereby. But in our human experience action and passion are always combined.
There is no movement of the psyche which is pure passion -- totally devoid of purpose and understanding. There is no human action without its component of ill-defined feeling or emotion. Pain, lust, terror, grief, and passion continually arises out of the more formless pathos or affectivity. Purpose arises out of the passion of fear, and is given form through the continued effort to see how the common purpose might still be achieved.
When disruption occurs, the temporary or permanent destruction of our sense of "fit" with society calls into question our personhood, sense of identity, and sense of normalcy. It can strike at every aspect of life from self-image, to sexuality, life plans, even ability to get a good night's sleep.
Usually the theme is loss, but simultaneously many aspects of the experience may give life meaning, distressing though it is. Biomedical diagnoses shape our discourses on normalcy. Diagnosis makes concrete what was previously indeterminate. It creates the goal and desire to return to normal, which is also shaped by societal discourse.
Like good biographers, we instinctively edit our life stories into an "organic" form - the plot.
The purpose of plot-making is to represent one 'complete action.' We don't tell everything about ourselves, even to ourselves. We choose only those salient features which lead toward a satisfactory culmination, in the short or long term. We are being selective, rather than secretive, to lend coherence to our tale. It gives us a sense of greater consistency, and introjects a cultural or universal, as well as personal angle. Plot unfoldment is the unifying element of narrative.
Plot is the first principle, the very soul of tragedy. Plot-making forms story into an actual tragedy, bringing potential for catharsis or purging of the emotions of fear and pity. Purging us of our emotions helps us reconcile with our fate, because we come to understand it as the universal human lot.
Catharsis or purgation can mean either the cleansing of the body (a medical term) or the cleansing of the spirit (a spiritual term). It is a movement of spirit from ignorance to insight. A complete action passes through the modes of purpose and pathos to the final perception. Both action and character are formed of our ill-defined feelings and emotions, appetites and fears, but this element of pathos is essential.
Thus, tragedy speaks to the mind, soul, and spirit. The "end" of tragedy is the purgation of passion, and the embodiment of a universal truth, analogous to the purposes of spiritual ritual. Paradoxically, tragedy gives us pleasure, even with its images of conflict, terror and suffering.
Perhaps it is the promise of catharsis, which may or may not come, in an unpredictable real life tragedy. Poetry expresses the universal, but our histories express the particular. The appeal of tragedy is, in the last analysis inexplicable, rooted as it is in our instincts and mysterious human nature.
Our instinctive editing is in fact driven by cultural considerations about disruption, as its ritualistic aspect implies. Thus, the same topics emerge over and over again in stories by those from the same cultural background. They reveal what we consider most meaningful about our lives. Do we find ourselves sympathetic or unsympathetic characters in our own story? Or, do we or others judge us as simply pathetic ? Some themes remain dominant, while others recede into the background until another chaotic disruption brings them to the fore again.
Life Themes and Memes
Themes are cultural "memes" which also help us make sense of our experiences. Our stories may be highly influenced by a complex dynamic interaction of memes (cultural "viruses"), mirror neurons (biological capacity for imitation), poetics (emergent dramatic expression), and embodiment (embodied distress or normalcy).
The theory of memes describes them as a form of information that sculpts minds and culture as they spread through imitation. Memes are likened to informational "viruses," and the DNA of human society because of their ability to propagate. Because of their ability to replicate themselves, they influence every aspect of mind, behavior and culture.
Memes are the cultural equivalent of DNA. This notion undermines some of our cherished illusions about individuality. We are neither the slaves of our genes nor rational free agents creating culture, art, science and technology for our own happiness.
Blackmore includes among memes the stories, songs, habits, skills, inventions and ways of doing thing that we copy from person to person, including medical memes. Memes are to our minds what genes are to our bodies. Perhaps memes also evolve. Our culture has generated a host of medical memes about health, illness, and treatment. Our own stories morph over time varying with the meaning they embody.
[Richard Dawkins, "father" of meme theory] described the basic principle of Darwinian evolution in terms of three general processes—when information is copied again and again, with variations and with selection of some variants over others, you must get evolution. That is, over many iterations of this cycle, the population of surviving copies will gradually acquire new properties that tend to make them better suited to succeeding in the ongoing competition to produce progeny. Although the cycle is mindless, it generates design out of chaos. (Blackmore, 2000).
Human life is permeated through and through with memes and their consequences. Everything we have learned by imitation from someone else is a meme. But we must be clear what is meant by the word 'imitation' because our whole understanding of memetics depends on it.
Dawkins said that memes jump from "brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation." If in doubt, remember that something must have been copied. Aristotle named this principle of imitation the first tenet of his description of the mimetic arts, essentially the varieties of storytelling, chiefly epic, comedy, and tragedy:
"And with regard to each of the poetic forms, I wish to consider what characteristic effect it has, how its plots should be constructed if the poet's work is to be good, and also the number and nature of the parts of which the form consists. . .Let us then follow the order of nature and begin by taking up that which is by nature first: the basic principle of imitation. " [Second comes] "differences based on the means of imitation." (Aristotle's Poetics).
This dramatic imitation takes place in narrative, action, and manner and mode of presentation. But when Aristotle speaks of imitating action, he does not mean mere physical activity but a movement-of-spirit. By imitation, he does not mean superficial copying, but the representation of countless forms which the life of the human spirit may take through the arts.
This, peripherally, is why art therapy in all media is so effective as an aid to psychophysical recovery. It helps us express what we cannot put into words. Many of the arts combine imitation with harmony and rhythm. And so do our dramatic tales of our life journeys.
Ain't It Awful?
Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is whole and compete in itself and of a certain magnitude. As a whole thing it has a beginning, middle, and end. Differences arise from the object of imitation and the manner of imitating. The most important aspect of drama is the organization of the events -- the plot. It is in action that happiness and unhappiness are found. Everything that is passed from person to person through imitation is a meme. This is also revealed in the emergent style of drama, as described holistically by Aristotle:
"Just as in the other mimetic arts an imitation is unified when it is in the imitation of a unified object, so in poetry the plot, since it is imitation of an action, must be the imitation of a unified action comprising a whole; and the events which the parts of the plot must be so organized that if any one of them is displayed or taken away, the whole will be shaken and put out of joint; for if the presence or absence of a thing makes no discernible difference, that thing is not part of the whole. . . [P]ossbility means credibility; until something happens we remain uncertain of its possibility, but what has happened obviously is possible since if impossible, it would not have happened. . .It is clear then that the poet should be a maker of plots more than a maker of verses, in that he is poet by virtue of his imitation and he imitates actions. . .It is not only an action complete in itself that tragedy represents; it also represents incidents involving pity and fear, and such incidents are most effective when they come unexpectedly and yet occur in a causal sequence in which one thing leads to another...things that actually do happen by accident seem most marvelous when they appear to be intention...It is hard to believe that such things happen without design."
Aristotle goes on to describe elements of drama that seem reminiscent of chaotic dynamics. Some plots are simple; some are complex. In simple action, changes of fortune take place without a reversal or recognition. In complex plots, the change of fortune involves a recognition or a reversal or ideally both.
The action of perceiving, passing from ignorance to knowledge, is near the heart of tragedy. Pathos or suffering is also an essential element. The recognition and reversal follow from the preceding events toward a probabilistic outcome, but with a vast difference between "following from" (emergence) and "following after" (linearity).
Complications are influential events which happen outside of the range of the story, while the denouement or unraveling is the final turn of events, for good or ill, before the end of the story. In medical treatment, for example, the reveal comes after treatment with the prognosis.
Reversal is a change from one state of affairs to its exact opposite; recognition is a change from ignorance to knowledge. The best form of recognition is that accompanied by a reversal and springing from the events themselves. The three primary elements of tragedy include reversal, recognition and suffering (pathos), reflecting critical problems and their solutions. In drama and life, tragedy is never about one isolated character:
Neuroscientists are finding that much brain function is an interpersonal phenomenon. Not only do brain structures and functions provide the means by which we connect with and make sense of one another, but through relational experience, parts of the brain, literally, grow. In fact, the brain, as we know it, is inconceivable without social relationships:
“The traditional idea of the brain has been the single-skull view - an organ encased inside us whose functioning is determined primarily by our inborn biology,” says Siegel, who coined the term interpersonal neurobiology to describe how advances in research have created a conceptual bridge among biology, attachment research, development psychology, brain science, and systems theory. “But we survived as a species not so much because of our physical brawn, but due to our interpersonal capacity. More and more, we’re realizing that evolution has designed our brains to be shaped by our interpersonal environment.”
Siegel posits a “multiskull view” of the brain, a way of understanding that brain processes take place through people’s interactions with one another. “The best way to define the mind is as the flow of energy and information,” says Siegel. “That flow can happen between neurons in a person’s skull, as well as between two people. Without being reductionistic, the cultural transmission of meaning ultimately comes down to a neuronal process.”
A securely attached child develops the neural pathways for resilience. Even when his or her parents are upset or impatient, his or her brain’s wiring “knows” from experience that they won’t abandon her and will reconnect after the storm has passed. Kids who don’t get this kind of back-and-forth parental attention may grow up more or less at the mercy of their emotions, unable to manage their rage and aggression, calm their anxieties, console themselves in their sadness, or tolerate high levels of pleasure and excitement.
Furthermore, they’ll be more likely to suffer social disconnection: unable to interpret others’ social cues because of deficits in their orbitofrontal cortices, they’ll have trouble joining in the rhythm of relational exchange. In short, from the beginning, relating isn’t a discretionary activity, something we can do without. As an organ, the brain must make human connections to develop a healthy, working mind, (Wylie and Simon).
Narrative is fundamental to brain function and attachment. There’s no greater example of the brain’s innate powers of self-creation than the universal human practice of constructing narratives, of drawing from the raw stuff of experience the stories with which our brain explains itself—to itself and other brains. “Storytelling is central to every culture, and when you find that kind of universality, you know it’s not just social learning but reflects something deep-seated in our genes,” says Siegel, who believes that the neurological subplot, if you will, of the well-made story involves the integration of the brain’s left and right hemispheres.
“Coherent stories are an integration of the left hemisphere’s drive to tell a logical story about events and the right brain’s ability to grasp emotionally the mental processes of the people in those events,” he adds. Storytelling also relies on the prefrontal short- and long-term memory systems and the cerebellum - once thought to coordinate only physical movement, but now believed to coordinate different emotional and cognitive functions. Storytelling involves planning, sequencing ideas, using language coherently, shifting attention, and interacting appropriately with other people. The ability to tell a good story is a measure of mental health and a well-functioning brain.
The most striking empirical indication of storytelling’s role in mental health and development may come from a series of studies involving the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI), a research protocol that assesses the level of relational attachment. In the mid-1990s, Mary Main, the primary researcher, now at University of California, Berkeley, and then graduate student Ruth Goldwyn, found that a child’s attachment to a parent could be better predicted by listening to the how a pregnant couple related their autobiographical narrative than by measures of intellectual function, personality assessment, or socioeconomic status.
A year after the initial assessment, children’s attachment to their parent could be predicted with 75 percent accuracy, based on the AAI assessment. The idea is that by measuring the “coherence” with which people describe their life story—its emotional content, plausibility, completeness, relevance, brevity, and clarity—you can determine how securely bonded their child will be. Additional research suggests that secure children will then develop the capacity for coherent narrative themselves - good narrative is, literally, something their parents can pass on.
Tell me A Story
Why is storytelling paramount? Stories link the factual to the emotional, the specific to the universal, the past to the present. A child hearing a story thinks, “There are others like me.” A storytelling parent models coping skills and provides a template for self-expression, logic, and how to prioritize.
In sharing stories, parent and child are connected at many levels of mind, which translates to many levels of the brain. Siegel speculates: “For a parent to engage in the process of telling a coherent story about his or her life reflects a fundamental capacity for that parent’s brain to integrate memory, knowledge, and feeling. It appears that this ability in the parents’ brain nurtures their children’s own neural integration.” And the process of integration then guides their capacity for self-regulation and full adult development. (Wylie and Simon)
People tell their stories in therapy. That’s how they explain themselves. But they also learn to tell stories, learn how to organize and make something whole from sometimes chaotic feelings of pain and confusion. The enterprise of therapy is itself a kind of story: there are psychoanalytic stories, cognitive-behavioral stories, family therapy stories. Different stories resonate with the brains of different patients.
“Therapy evolved because language organizes the brain in some primary, fundamental way,” says Cozolino. “What we know of the brain suggests that therapy is successful to the degree to which it builds and integrates neural networks. In therapy, we teach clients that the more ways they have of interacting with others, experiencing themselves, and understanding life, the more likely they are to find new ways of approaching their problems. Therapy is a process of helping clients rewrite the story of their lives while simultaneously building neural networks and reorganizing neural integration.”
Psychotherapy is perhaps the area where the human brain’s capacity for storytelling is most deeply engaged—not only telling old stories, but making sense of what has always seemed irrational, and making up newer, better stories, with better plotlines, stronger characters, and more promising outcomes. Even the reduction of the mind to “nothing but” the physical brain, even the way the physical brain functions, become stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, providing meaning, worldviews, and political and social agendas. Our predisposition to stories probably explains our interest in brain science.
Neuroscience researcher Jaak Panksepp of Bowling Green State University posits what he calls a “seeking system” in the brain—the inner urge to find and get, to discover and learn, to understand, to satisfy curiosity. This system underpins primitive urges, like the urge to hunt. It informs complex behaviors, like the search for knowledge, spiritual connection, love. The need to satisfy curiosity about ourselves—where we come from, who we are, how we developed, what we’re made of—compels the creation of the evolving story of the brain and how it grows. As John Ratey puts it, “Whatever the advances of neurobiology and our ability to relieve symptoms, I don’t think that we’ll ever undo the need for understanding people’s history.” (Wylie and Simon).
From infancy and childhood it is instinctive for human beings to mirror others, to imitate. Our brains are endowed with specialized "mirror neurons" in our frontal lobes that move us spontaneously in this direction. Researchers have identified individual “mirror neurons in monkeys,” single neurons that fire both when a monkey performs a meaningful act, such as eating a peanut, and also when a monkey sees another monkey perform an act. Scientists think that this capacity for neural mirroring helps us interpret other people’s actions and feelings, and may be the neurophysiological basis for empathy.
With knowledge of these neurons, you have the basis for understanding a host of very enigmatic aspects of the human mind: "mind reading" empathy, imitation learning, and even the evolution of language. Anytime you watch someone else doing something (or even starting to do something), the corresponding mirror neuron might fire in your brain, thereby allowing you to "read" and understand another's intentions, and thus to develop a sophisticated "theory of other minds." ...
Mirror neurons can also enable you to imitate the movements of others thereby setting the stage for the complex Lamarckian or cultural inheritance that characterizes our species and liberates us from the constraints of a purely gene based evolution. . .their emergence and further development in hominids was a decisive step. The reason is that once you have a certain minimum amount of "imitation learning" and "culture" in place, this culture can, in turn, exert the selection pressure for developing those additional mental traits that make us human. And once this starts happening you have set in motion the auto-catalytic process that culminated in modern human consciousness. My suggestion that these neurons provided the initial impetus for "runaway" brain/ culture co-evolution in humans, isn't quite as bizarre as it sounds... the first great leap forward was made possible largely by imitation and emulation. (Ramachandran).
Scientists once thought the number of neurons and their interconnections was permanently fixed: the brain you were born with was physically the brain you died with. Now the rankest of neuroscience heresies that the brain produces brand-new cells in maturity has become generally accepted, as has the idea that the brain is changing and growing continuously throughout life, shaped as much by experience as genetic heritage.
Every passing sensation, everything we learn, every human contact we make causes millions of neurons to fire together, forming physical interconnections called neural maps or networks, the architecture of all our experiences. Some studies suggest that the process of neural growth can be startlingly fast.
The neurophysiological basis for empathy might logically be extended to include imitating the health-promoting, coping, or recovery behavior of another -- their healing arc, their healing story. It means taking elements from that story and making it one's own.
Tragedy reveals the complex dynamics of action. Dramatic tragedy is said to remove fearful emotions from the soul through compassion and terror through catharsis. Thus, our stories can also be instructive. Our painful tortures become transformative testimonials. They arouse the sympathy, empathy, even imitation of others.
Fabrega presents not only the vulnerability to disease and injury but also the need to show and communicate sickness and to seek and provide healing as innate biological traits grounded in evolution.
In Fabrega's view, sickness and healing are linked facets of a unique human adaptation developed during the evolution of the hominid line and expressed culturally in relation to the changing historical contingencies of social organization and complexity. This linking in which sickness and healing are two sides of the same coin rather than separate phenomena offers a new vantage point from which to examine the institution of medicine. After setting forth the idea that a complex, integrated adaptation for sickness and healing lies at the root of medicine, Fabrega goes on to trace the characteristics of sickness and healing through the early and later stages of social evolution.
He describes epidemiological patterns of disease and injury, and the associated cultural constructions of sickness and healing, for family- and village-level societies, pre-states, and states and civilizations up to and including the modern European and postmodern eras. The notion of "memes" --units of cultural information stored and used by members of any society, in this case.
"Medical memes" that relate to combating the effects of disease and injury--serves Fabrega in elaborating his concepts of the evolution of medicine as a social institution. Besides offering a new conceptual structure and a methodology for analyzing medicine in evolutionary terms, Fabrega shows the relevance of this approach and its implications for the social sciences and for the formulation of medical policy. The evolutionary formulation provides a common basis for the biological, social, and cultural investigation of medicine. (Fabrega, review).
It has been said that we each have a rather small significant number of influential people, decision points, and life-changing events. These influences are the dramatis personae and plot points around which the rest of our stories revolve.
In the language of chaos theory, we might call them the "strange attractors" of our lives -- those people and events without which we would not have become who we are. Often, the hoped-for end is not yet in sight. Our story remains open ended, pregnant with human possibilities, with healing possibilities.
Plot is the unifying elements of narrative giving it holistic cohesion and well as context. The change of fortune introduces a disruption for good or ill. It is this very change of fortune that reveals character, a person's habit of moral choice.
Many of the elements of our history come about by chance, fortune or misfortune. Universally, tragedy is depicted as growing out of an initial small plot point into a sizable magnitude and influence, through a close succession of probable events. This is reflected in chaos theory where sensitivity to initial conditions amplifies small changes into ones of tremendous magnitude and scale -- even global effects.
"To heal the symptom, we must heal the person, and to heal the person we must first heal the story in which the person has imagined himself." --James Hillman
Emphasis in the West, has particularly been on the linear, orderly unfolding of life and the emphasis on the individual journey, the self in relation to society. Return to progress, activity, productivity, perseverance, achievement, determination, goal-orientation, and self-reliance are emphasized in our cultural ideologies in the face of uncertainty, loss of hope, and the anticipation of death. Yet our lives clearly don't follow predictable, coherent, linear paths.
This paradigm is not as pronounced in cultures which have a distinctively cyclic worldview, and maintain more integrated family and community lives where collective human values are prioritized. This is evident for example in Canada and Europe where healthcare is not treated solely as an individual responsibility. This sociopolitical aspect permeates healthcare in the U.S. which is the only country in the world to include its receipts in the Gross National Product.
Treatment in the health field starts with the assumption that clinical treatment of disease is a cost-efficient way to maintain health. In the past centuries, public health practices eliminated many diseases at a fraction of the cost possible with clinical treatment, so more holistic or sociological approaches have developed. Clinical medicine, with its emphasis on curing disease has gradually replaced the less remunerative public health emphasis, since it is much more lucrative and prestigious.
The medical ecology of the 1950s, focusing on disease and individuals, was based in a simplistic environmental stimulus-response model. It virtually eliminated scourges like polio, tuberculosis, many bacterial infections, and smallpox, at least in the US. But it failed to cope with the global spread of capitalism and its impact on health and societal development, which require more sophisticated ecological concepts. Critiques of biocultural paradigms, medical ecology, and medical anthropology need a common field of discourse, such as political ecology, but that is beyond the scope of this work, and the political power of our public health centers for disease control.
Our point is that our healing arc in the west is conditioned by the mandates of our Puritan work ethic, the underlying ethos of the U.S. Clearly this productivity bias goes hand in glove with our mechanistic, Cartesian upbringings -- we are trained from birth to notice and value certain things over others.
The history of Western civilization contains a fundamental theme of dissociation (Ross). It is manifest in the Cartesian treatent philosophy which splits mind from body. Its reductionist aspect is physically embodied in medical science; its dissociated romantic side in psychology. We are caught in the social web of dualism, dissociation, and projection. Curiously, the Western mind projects the products of its own function onto the unconscious and mistakenly concludes they originate there. Reductionism denies the reality of the psyche.
Contemporary medicine projects its vision of a mechanistic function onto the body and physical universe. Psychology's philosophical doctrine sentimentalizes the natural world and projects abnormal ideas onto the body and the "unconscious" mind. But is it unconscious, or merely dissociated? Culturally divorced from the body, of course the mind becomes dissociated. We need a spiritual return to a dynamic unified perspective.
Dissociation of mind and body was followed by fragmentation of social function.
Looking at how we respond to disruption helps reveal our core tenets, and how deeply we are embedded in the cultural contours of our society. Can we have value as human beings, or must we force ourselves to respond as 'human doings' to maintain our self image and esteem, because our culture demands it?
Narratives, both personal and collective, arise from the desire to have life display coherence, integrity, fullness, disclosure, and closure. Even psychotherapy is based in part on the premise that reshaping or reframing events lends a sense of coherence where there has been chaos. Change the history or reframe the story and the attitudes associated with it automatically change.
The development of these narratives is preeminently, a cultural process. Even though the premise is unspoken, we have come to tacitly expect a "beginning, middle, and end" to our personal stories. Most of us would like to imagine an optimistic end to our stories, one that provides meaning and purpose for our lives...a "good" ending, if not always a "happy" one.
We all witnessed this, both at the personal and national level, even worldwide, in the aftermath of the 9/11 disaster. Part of the healing process commenced immediately with the constant telling of tales to one another -- how we were involved, or changed, and further impacted by this graphic demonstration that the sanctity of our native soil would never be the same again. The psychological and cultural healing became as important as the practical clean up and strategic reactions.
The distressed body plays the largest role in our response to and the impact of chaos. Stress alone can affect us even when we are not emotionally or personally connected to an event. Sometimes empathic viewing of an event, and the personal associations and issues it brings up, such as existential safety and trust, fear and personal pain can be enough to mobilize the body for the fight-flight response. A wake of psychophysical and immunological changes follow, and persist, depending on the degree of involvement.
Our understanding of ourselves and the world begins with our reliance on the orderly functioning of our body. Our expectations in this regard are somewhat conditioned in childhood by our own experiences and those of our close caregivers. A relatively uneventful childhood may lead to an exaggerated sense of strength, immortality, undefeatability; while exposure to catastrophic or chronic illness may lead to a deep sense of vulnerability, even weakness. We can't know just how strong or resilient we are until we are challenged to mobilize our inner reserves and resources.
We carry our histories, as well as the whole history of humanity, with us into the present through our bodies. Our feelings and thoughts become manifest in our physical structure. The past is "sedimented" in the body -- that is, it is embodied. Our bodies' sensory apparatus is the only way we experience the larger world. It is the medium through which we meet and respond to that world, feeling its reciprocal impact on us. Thus our symptoms can reflect our cultural as well as personal attitudes.
We may ignore, diminish, or hide symptoms, use specific kinds of supplements, folk or new age remedies attempting to control or minimize our symptoms. We may delay seeking treatment to avoid the fear of being "abnormal," or perceived in that way by others. There is a pervasive feeling that most of us don't want to become a "burden" to our loved ones.
Thus, the body is foundational in the emergence of culture and cultural norms. Its as if a deep part of us remembers the hunter-gatherer days of humanity when the infirm were simply left to fend for themselves or die when they could not "keep up." Culture essentially began with shamanic healing, lore, and ritual burials. We can presume teaching stories were used to bind the tribe together.
We are also able to ground our resistance to the power of cultural norms in bodily experience. Our resistance is tempered by our bodily knowledge as we listen to our bodies in deciding whether care is necessary. Failure to listen for symptoms, or to gauge them accurately, can have serious and even fatal medical consequences. Thus, bodily knowledge informs our actions, including resistance to the status quo. Part of that status quo is the availability of heathcare we feel is simpatico with our worldview and sense of self -- our view of the healing professions -- physical, emotional and spiritual.
Often in our illnesses, breakdowns, or grief, we seek a new norm for ourselves in larger social collectives, such as support groups or spiritual groups. It is comforting to be around others who share the same infirmities and issues, and are navigating the same turbulent waters.
We draw succor from knowing we are sharing the same passages, and can share information, resources, solutions and benefit from the experience of those who have gone before. By telling our sad tales, or tales of recovery over and over, we project images of ourselves into the world through performance. This is actually a form of creativity which helps the healing process, and creates resilience in the general community.
Order and Chaos
Our notions of order and chaos change as we attempt to come to grips with disruption in our lives. We reexamine the given ideas of our culture when we become marginalized from the bustling demands of daily life. When our life circumstances don't fit with our preconceived image we have to look at the disjunction, the discrepancies, the disconnections, and make adjustments.
Often efforts to create coherence and provide closure to situations are at odds with notions of order shaped by complex cultural dynamics. Where we find support for this reassessment can make a profound difference in our ability to move beyond the problem phase toward healthy choices, solutions, and resolutions. Depending on the nature of the disruption, various cultural ideals of, for example, health, womanhood, manhood, parenthood, independence, and the aging process emerge.
When our stability is threatened, we begin to wonder if the unspoken "end" of our personal story will take a different tack. Yet, stability is individually defined. We can adjust to a diminished capacity without feeling that our sense of self-identity is diminished, but it may be a big part of the healing struggle. Our culture has programmed us to derive a great part of our sense of self from doing, rather than being. Ideally, even when infirm, we can partake of an active life of the spirit.
Thus, our value is wrapped up in what we are able to do in the world, rather than simply being valued for existing, for our basic humanity. When challenged, we learn there are often a wide variety of other ways we can contribute. Our attitudes are a good predictor of how we will respond to challenge. A good attitude, even though it may not cure, supports the healing of the bodymind since it doesn't put an extra stress load on it.
Our self-narratives help us make "sense" of our ordeals, the gauntlet we are forced to run by the impact of disruption. What is most striking about the portrait of issues that emerge when we wrestle with disruption is that in the U.S. at least, core beliefs persist despite ongoing social change.
Even if we have been progressive, illness may cause us to regress to the values of our youth, when we felt more helpless, less independent. Of course, there is variation according to ethnicity, gender, class, and age. Disruption throws these cultural distinctions into high relief so the underlying core foundations and unspoken beliefs become more visible.
Most people strive to be somewhat "normal." But the realities of life can carry us far afield from that imaginal ideal. We all have compelling concerns and precious stakes to defend and sustain, including relationships and life goals and dreams that guide and sustain us.
Yet events occur continuously that do not fit in with our vision of how life should be. When they strike like a bolt from the blue, what we do affects our individualized view of the world. We may present a brave front to the world, and yet be quaking internally with fear and pain. To be authentic, to be congruent in our self-expression we need to make our inner truth part of our story.
Disruption makes us feel different from others, due to our existential position, traumas, or reactions. Once we feel marginalized we begin to define ourselves in terms of difference rather than normalcy. Over and over the conflict arises between the desire for normalcy and the blunt acknowledgment of difference playing over and over in one's experience and consciousness.
Our abilities to care for our selves in terms of pre-planning and response patterns effect those around us. Disruption makes us feel different from others and can render social relationships uncomfortable and even cumbersome. Our narratives repeatedly attest to the emotional pain that difference causes and to the struggle to reduce or eliminate that sense of difference from others.
On the other hand, some people exploit their infirmities for the social payoffs of what are called "secondary gains," in medicine and psychotherapy. This survival strategy may or may not manifest the desired manipulation, and can often backfire on the person, who may be totally unconscious of this goal.
The stories we construct surrounding the disruption of our lives are essentially moral accounts. This is virtually the only way we can endow our reality with so much meaning. But, clearly, bad things happen to "good" people. We call this tragic or say it's a "tragedy."
When thrust into a different lifestyle, into an experience of otherness, we seem to require a moralizing antidote to mediate the experience of the radical shift in self-image. This experience has been canonized in the dramatic form called tragedy, which devolved from ancient Greek rituals of Dionysus, god of chaos and disruption and Apollo, traditionally the god of light and healing, but also disease.
We struggle in the moral dimension rethinking our values under assault from chaotic disruption. Thus, our faith in ourselves, or perhaps a higher power is either confirmed or disavowed. Some of that resistance gets directed at the status quo. At this point many people rebel against the limitations of conventional treatment and seek alternative treatments or healing for the soul and spirit, as well as the body. [3] Our internal dialogue on differences and normalcy is riddled with metaphors that reveal cultural foundations.
CHAPTER 4
Soul Support: Healing the Disordered Bodymind
"The gods have become diseases; Zeus no longer rules Olympus, but the solar plexus, and produces curious specimens for the doctor's consulting room." --C. G. Jung (1929, p. 37)
Carl Jung believed the soul or psyche to be autonomous from ego consciousness. Soul, according to Jung, is a manifestation of the collective unconscious: the deepest substrate upon which existence rests. Its function is to animate life. In Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious , Jung writes: "Soul is the living thing in man, that which lives of itself and causes life ….She is full of snares and traps, in order that man should fail, should reach the earth, entangle himself there, and stay caught, so that life should be lived…"
The voice with which Ivan Ilych dialogues, is that of soul. It is soul, the objective psyche, which inquires in the midst of one’s suffering "What is it you want?" Symptoms are generally believed to derive from an external event, or an internal neuro-biological imbalance. From this ego perspective, symptoms are in us because that is the way they are experienced. Symptoms are experienced as an alien other.
When our mental or physical health is suddenly disrupted, we are thrown into chaos. It can be likened to a "descent into hell," "dark night of the soul," "being dragged over the coals," a "bad dream," or "nightmare," "limbo," "falling into a black hole," "reaping the whirlwind," or a "brush with death." The chaos and disorientation is reflected most strongly in our hopes and dreams as we attempt to cope with onslaught of our body, mind and spirit.
It splits our perception into two separate realities -- "before and after," -- the known world of normalcy before catastrophe or disease struck, and the chaotic world of the dis-ease, mental or physical. All sources of disruption disturb the psyche. Our spirit is assaulted by the agents of chaos. We can feel let down or even betrayed by our bodies. It raises a host of issues, such as lasting, leaving, longevity, mortality, repetition, being left behind, compassion, isolation, abandonment, marginalization, etc.
The spontaneous human activity of creating healing narratives to restore order is the basis of psychotherapy, particularly talk therapy. However, the healing journey and milestones of all therapies, including biomedicine and energy medicine, are congealed in the narratives we produce spontaneously about our life journeys. The life journey is a core metaphor. We don't need to formally enter therapy for its directive power to come into play.
It is a guiding force. We can creatively employ this natural process to mobilize healing by helping the process along in an integrated way. We can address the needs of the whole person: the bodymind, with its need to restore a sense of emotional balance, order and meaning, and the moral dimension with its need for spirituality.
All human actions are worked out to the end, passing through the unforeseeable contingencies of a "world we never made." The conscious purpose with which we start is redefined after each unforeseen contingency is sufferance. At the end, in the light of hindsight, we see the truth of what we have been doing.
When we experience illness and health conditions requiring considerable medical intervention, we monitor and discuss our bodies. How we talk about them tells us much about the nature of embodiment and how cultural particulars influence the way we experience embodiment. How we talk also tells us much about the portrayal of bodily experience.
There is a connection between how people talk about their bodies -- bodily concerns and bodily experience -- and how they experience them. This action is a kind of natural history of the psyche's life. But action does not means deeds, event, or physical activity but the motivation from which deeds spring. The action this art seeks is to depict a psychic energy working outwards, the focus or movements of the psyche toward what seems good to it at the moment -- a movement-of-spirit.
A Moving Experience
Action is active: the psyche perceives something it wants, and "moves" toward it. Passion, or pathos (suffering) is passive. The psyche suffers something it cannot control or understand, and "is moved" thereby. But in our human experience action and passion are always combined.
There is no movement of the psyche which is pure passion -- totally devoid of purpose and understanding. There is no human action without its component of ill-defined feeling or emotion. Pain, lust, terror, grief, and passion continually arises out of the more formless pathos or affectivity. Purpose arises out of the passion of fear, and is given form through the continued effort to see how the common purpose might still be achieved.
When disruption occurs, the temporary or permanent destruction of our sense of "fit" with society calls into question our personhood, sense of identity, and sense of normalcy. It can strike at every aspect of life from self-image, to sexuality, life plans, even ability to get a good night's sleep.
Usually the theme is loss, but simultaneously many aspects of the experience may give life meaning, distressing though it is. Biomedical diagnoses shape our discourses on normalcy. Diagnosis makes concrete what was previously indeterminate. It creates the goal and desire to return to normal, which is also shaped by societal discourse.
Like good biographers, we instinctively edit our life stories into an "organic" form - the plot.
The purpose of plot-making is to represent one 'complete action.' We don't tell everything about ourselves, even to ourselves. We choose only those salient features which lead toward a satisfactory culmination, in the short or long term. We are being selective, rather than secretive, to lend coherence to our tale. It gives us a sense of greater consistency, and introjects a cultural or universal, as well as personal angle. Plot unfoldment is the unifying element of narrative.
Plot is the first principle, the very soul of tragedy. Plot-making forms story into an actual tragedy, bringing potential for catharsis or purging of the emotions of fear and pity. Purging us of our emotions helps us reconcile with our fate, because we come to understand it as the universal human lot.
Catharsis or purgation can mean either the cleansing of the body (a medical term) or the cleansing of the spirit (a spiritual term). It is a movement of spirit from ignorance to insight. A complete action passes through the modes of purpose and pathos to the final perception. Both action and character are formed of our ill-defined feelings and emotions, appetites and fears, but this element of pathos is essential.
Thus, tragedy speaks to the mind, soul, and spirit. The "end" of tragedy is the purgation of passion, and the embodiment of a universal truth, analogous to the purposes of spiritual ritual. Paradoxically, tragedy gives us pleasure, even with its images of conflict, terror and suffering.
Perhaps it is the promise of catharsis, which may or may not come, in an unpredictable real life tragedy. Poetry expresses the universal, but our histories express the particular. The appeal of tragedy is, in the last analysis inexplicable, rooted as it is in our instincts and mysterious human nature.
Our instinctive editing is in fact driven by cultural considerations about disruption, as its ritualistic aspect implies. Thus, the same topics emerge over and over again in stories by those from the same cultural background. They reveal what we consider most meaningful about our lives. Do we find ourselves sympathetic or unsympathetic characters in our own story? Or, do we or others judge us as simply pathetic ? Some themes remain dominant, while others recede into the background until another chaotic disruption brings them to the fore again.
Life Themes and Memes
Themes are cultural "memes" which also help us make sense of our experiences. Our stories may be highly influenced by a complex dynamic interaction of memes (cultural "viruses"), mirror neurons (biological capacity for imitation), poetics (emergent dramatic expression), and embodiment (embodied distress or normalcy).
The theory of memes describes them as a form of information that sculpts minds and culture as they spread through imitation. Memes are likened to informational "viruses," and the DNA of human society because of their ability to propagate. Because of their ability to replicate themselves, they influence every aspect of mind, behavior and culture.
Memes are the cultural equivalent of DNA. This notion undermines some of our cherished illusions about individuality. We are neither the slaves of our genes nor rational free agents creating culture, art, science and technology for our own happiness.
Blackmore includes among memes the stories, songs, habits, skills, inventions and ways of doing thing that we copy from person to person, including medical memes. Memes are to our minds what genes are to our bodies. Perhaps memes also evolve. Our culture has generated a host of medical memes about health, illness, and treatment. Our own stories morph over time varying with the meaning they embody.
[Richard Dawkins, "father" of meme theory] described the basic principle of Darwinian evolution in terms of three general processes—when information is copied again and again, with variations and with selection of some variants over others, you must get evolution. That is, over many iterations of this cycle, the population of surviving copies will gradually acquire new properties that tend to make them better suited to succeeding in the ongoing competition to produce progeny. Although the cycle is mindless, it generates design out of chaos. (Blackmore, 2000).
Human life is permeated through and through with memes and their consequences. Everything we have learned by imitation from someone else is a meme. But we must be clear what is meant by the word 'imitation' because our whole understanding of memetics depends on it.
Dawkins said that memes jump from "brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation." If in doubt, remember that something must have been copied. Aristotle named this principle of imitation the first tenet of his description of the mimetic arts, essentially the varieties of storytelling, chiefly epic, comedy, and tragedy:
"And with regard to each of the poetic forms, I wish to consider what characteristic effect it has, how its plots should be constructed if the poet's work is to be good, and also the number and nature of the parts of which the form consists. . .Let us then follow the order of nature and begin by taking up that which is by nature first: the basic principle of imitation. " [Second comes] "differences based on the means of imitation." (Aristotle's Poetics).
This dramatic imitation takes place in narrative, action, and manner and mode of presentation. But when Aristotle speaks of imitating action, he does not mean mere physical activity but a movement-of-spirit. By imitation, he does not mean superficial copying, but the representation of countless forms which the life of the human spirit may take through the arts.
This, peripherally, is why art therapy in all media is so effective as an aid to psychophysical recovery. It helps us express what we cannot put into words. Many of the arts combine imitation with harmony and rhythm. And so do our dramatic tales of our life journeys.
Ain't It Awful?
Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is whole and compete in itself and of a certain magnitude. As a whole thing it has a beginning, middle, and end. Differences arise from the object of imitation and the manner of imitating. The most important aspect of drama is the organization of the events -- the plot. It is in action that happiness and unhappiness are found. Everything that is passed from person to person through imitation is a meme. This is also revealed in the emergent style of drama, as described holistically by Aristotle:
"Just as in the other mimetic arts an imitation is unified when it is in the imitation of a unified object, so in poetry the plot, since it is imitation of an action, must be the imitation of a unified action comprising a whole; and the events which the parts of the plot must be so organized that if any one of them is displayed or taken away, the whole will be shaken and put out of joint; for if the presence or absence of a thing makes no discernible difference, that thing is not part of the whole. . . [P]ossbility means credibility; until something happens we remain uncertain of its possibility, but what has happened obviously is possible since if impossible, it would not have happened. . .It is clear then that the poet should be a maker of plots more than a maker of verses, in that he is poet by virtue of his imitation and he imitates actions. . .It is not only an action complete in itself that tragedy represents; it also represents incidents involving pity and fear, and such incidents are most effective when they come unexpectedly and yet occur in a causal sequence in which one thing leads to another...things that actually do happen by accident seem most marvelous when they appear to be intention...It is hard to believe that such things happen without design."
Aristotle goes on to describe elements of drama that seem reminiscent of chaotic dynamics. Some plots are simple; some are complex. In simple action, changes of fortune take place without a reversal or recognition. In complex plots, the change of fortune involves a recognition or a reversal or ideally both.
The action of perceiving, passing from ignorance to knowledge, is near the heart of tragedy. Pathos or suffering is also an essential element. The recognition and reversal follow from the preceding events toward a probabilistic outcome, but with a vast difference between "following from" (emergence) and "following after" (linearity).
Complications are influential events which happen outside of the range of the story, while the denouement or unraveling is the final turn of events, for good or ill, before the end of the story. In medical treatment, for example, the reveal comes after treatment with the prognosis.
Reversal is a change from one state of affairs to its exact opposite; recognition is a change from ignorance to knowledge. The best form of recognition is that accompanied by a reversal and springing from the events themselves. The three primary elements of tragedy include reversal, recognition and suffering (pathos), reflecting critical problems and their solutions. In drama and life, tragedy is never about one isolated character:
Neuroscientists are finding that much brain function is an interpersonal phenomenon. Not only do brain structures and functions provide the means by which we connect with and make sense of one another, but through relational experience, parts of the brain, literally, grow. In fact, the brain, as we know it, is inconceivable without social relationships:
“The traditional idea of the brain has been the single-skull view - an organ encased inside us whose functioning is determined primarily by our inborn biology,” says Siegel, who coined the term interpersonal neurobiology to describe how advances in research have created a conceptual bridge among biology, attachment research, development psychology, brain science, and systems theory. “But we survived as a species not so much because of our physical brawn, but due to our interpersonal capacity. More and more, we’re realizing that evolution has designed our brains to be shaped by our interpersonal environment.”
Siegel posits a “multiskull view” of the brain, a way of understanding that brain processes take place through people’s interactions with one another. “The best way to define the mind is as the flow of energy and information,” says Siegel. “That flow can happen between neurons in a person’s skull, as well as between two people. Without being reductionistic, the cultural transmission of meaning ultimately comes down to a neuronal process.”
A securely attached child develops the neural pathways for resilience. Even when his or her parents are upset or impatient, his or her brain’s wiring “knows” from experience that they won’t abandon her and will reconnect after the storm has passed. Kids who don’t get this kind of back-and-forth parental attention may grow up more or less at the mercy of their emotions, unable to manage their rage and aggression, calm their anxieties, console themselves in their sadness, or tolerate high levels of pleasure and excitement.
Furthermore, they’ll be more likely to suffer social disconnection: unable to interpret others’ social cues because of deficits in their orbitofrontal cortices, they’ll have trouble joining in the rhythm of relational exchange. In short, from the beginning, relating isn’t a discretionary activity, something we can do without. As an organ, the brain must make human connections to develop a healthy, working mind, (Wylie and Simon).
Narrative is fundamental to brain function and attachment. There’s no greater example of the brain’s innate powers of self-creation than the universal human practice of constructing narratives, of drawing from the raw stuff of experience the stories with which our brain explains itself—to itself and other brains. “Storytelling is central to every culture, and when you find that kind of universality, you know it’s not just social learning but reflects something deep-seated in our genes,” says Siegel, who believes that the neurological subplot, if you will, of the well-made story involves the integration of the brain’s left and right hemispheres.
“Coherent stories are an integration of the left hemisphere’s drive to tell a logical story about events and the right brain’s ability to grasp emotionally the mental processes of the people in those events,” he adds. Storytelling also relies on the prefrontal short- and long-term memory systems and the cerebellum - once thought to coordinate only physical movement, but now believed to coordinate different emotional and cognitive functions. Storytelling involves planning, sequencing ideas, using language coherently, shifting attention, and interacting appropriately with other people. The ability to tell a good story is a measure of mental health and a well-functioning brain.
The most striking empirical indication of storytelling’s role in mental health and development may come from a series of studies involving the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI), a research protocol that assesses the level of relational attachment. In the mid-1990s, Mary Main, the primary researcher, now at University of California, Berkeley, and then graduate student Ruth Goldwyn, found that a child’s attachment to a parent could be better predicted by listening to the how a pregnant couple related their autobiographical narrative than by measures of intellectual function, personality assessment, or socioeconomic status.
A year after the initial assessment, children’s attachment to their parent could be predicted with 75 percent accuracy, based on the AAI assessment. The idea is that by measuring the “coherence” with which people describe their life story—its emotional content, plausibility, completeness, relevance, brevity, and clarity—you can determine how securely bonded their child will be. Additional research suggests that secure children will then develop the capacity for coherent narrative themselves - good narrative is, literally, something their parents can pass on.
Tell me A Story
Why is storytelling paramount? Stories link the factual to the emotional, the specific to the universal, the past to the present. A child hearing a story thinks, “There are others like me.” A storytelling parent models coping skills and provides a template for self-expression, logic, and how to prioritize.
In sharing stories, parent and child are connected at many levels of mind, which translates to many levels of the brain. Siegel speculates: “For a parent to engage in the process of telling a coherent story about his or her life reflects a fundamental capacity for that parent’s brain to integrate memory, knowledge, and feeling. It appears that this ability in the parents’ brain nurtures their children’s own neural integration.” And the process of integration then guides their capacity for self-regulation and full adult development. (Wylie and Simon)
People tell their stories in therapy. That’s how they explain themselves. But they also learn to tell stories, learn how to organize and make something whole from sometimes chaotic feelings of pain and confusion. The enterprise of therapy is itself a kind of story: there are psychoanalytic stories, cognitive-behavioral stories, family therapy stories. Different stories resonate with the brains of different patients.
“Therapy evolved because language organizes the brain in some primary, fundamental way,” says Cozolino. “What we know of the brain suggests that therapy is successful to the degree to which it builds and integrates neural networks. In therapy, we teach clients that the more ways they have of interacting with others, experiencing themselves, and understanding life, the more likely they are to find new ways of approaching their problems. Therapy is a process of helping clients rewrite the story of their lives while simultaneously building neural networks and reorganizing neural integration.”
Psychotherapy is perhaps the area where the human brain’s capacity for storytelling is most deeply engaged—not only telling old stories, but making sense of what has always seemed irrational, and making up newer, better stories, with better plotlines, stronger characters, and more promising outcomes. Even the reduction of the mind to “nothing but” the physical brain, even the way the physical brain functions, become stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, providing meaning, worldviews, and political and social agendas. Our predisposition to stories probably explains our interest in brain science.
Neuroscience researcher Jaak Panksepp of Bowling Green State University posits what he calls a “seeking system” in the brain—the inner urge to find and get, to discover and learn, to understand, to satisfy curiosity. This system underpins primitive urges, like the urge to hunt. It informs complex behaviors, like the search for knowledge, spiritual connection, love. The need to satisfy curiosity about ourselves—where we come from, who we are, how we developed, what we’re made of—compels the creation of the evolving story of the brain and how it grows. As John Ratey puts it, “Whatever the advances of neurobiology and our ability to relieve symptoms, I don’t think that we’ll ever undo the need for understanding people’s history.” (Wylie and Simon).
From infancy and childhood it is instinctive for human beings to mirror others, to imitate. Our brains are endowed with specialized "mirror neurons" in our frontal lobes that move us spontaneously in this direction. Researchers have identified individual “mirror neurons in monkeys,” single neurons that fire both when a monkey performs a meaningful act, such as eating a peanut, and also when a monkey sees another monkey perform an act. Scientists think that this capacity for neural mirroring helps us interpret other people’s actions and feelings, and may be the neurophysiological basis for empathy.
With knowledge of these neurons, you have the basis for understanding a host of very enigmatic aspects of the human mind: "mind reading" empathy, imitation learning, and even the evolution of language. Anytime you watch someone else doing something (or even starting to do something), the corresponding mirror neuron might fire in your brain, thereby allowing you to "read" and understand another's intentions, and thus to develop a sophisticated "theory of other minds." ...
Mirror neurons can also enable you to imitate the movements of others thereby setting the stage for the complex Lamarckian or cultural inheritance that characterizes our species and liberates us from the constraints of a purely gene based evolution. . .their emergence and further development in hominids was a decisive step. The reason is that once you have a certain minimum amount of "imitation learning" and "culture" in place, this culture can, in turn, exert the selection pressure for developing those additional mental traits that make us human. And once this starts happening you have set in motion the auto-catalytic process that culminated in modern human consciousness. My suggestion that these neurons provided the initial impetus for "runaway" brain/ culture co-evolution in humans, isn't quite as bizarre as it sounds... the first great leap forward was made possible largely by imitation and emulation. (Ramachandran).
Scientists once thought the number of neurons and their interconnections was permanently fixed: the brain you were born with was physically the brain you died with. Now the rankest of neuroscience heresies that the brain produces brand-new cells in maturity has become generally accepted, as has the idea that the brain is changing and growing continuously throughout life, shaped as much by experience as genetic heritage.
Every passing sensation, everything we learn, every human contact we make causes millions of neurons to fire together, forming physical interconnections called neural maps or networks, the architecture of all our experiences. Some studies suggest that the process of neural growth can be startlingly fast.
The neurophysiological basis for empathy might logically be extended to include imitating the health-promoting, coping, or recovery behavior of another -- their healing arc, their healing story. It means taking elements from that story and making it one's own.
Tragedy reveals the complex dynamics of action. Dramatic tragedy is said to remove fearful emotions from the soul through compassion and terror through catharsis. Thus, our stories can also be instructive. Our painful tortures become transformative testimonials. They arouse the sympathy, empathy, even imitation of others.
Fabrega presents not only the vulnerability to disease and injury but also the need to show and communicate sickness and to seek and provide healing as innate biological traits grounded in evolution.
In Fabrega's view, sickness and healing are linked facets of a unique human adaptation developed during the evolution of the hominid line and expressed culturally in relation to the changing historical contingencies of social organization and complexity. This linking in which sickness and healing are two sides of the same coin rather than separate phenomena offers a new vantage point from which to examine the institution of medicine. After setting forth the idea that a complex, integrated adaptation for sickness and healing lies at the root of medicine, Fabrega goes on to trace the characteristics of sickness and healing through the early and later stages of social evolution.
He describes epidemiological patterns of disease and injury, and the associated cultural constructions of sickness and healing, for family- and village-level societies, pre-states, and states and civilizations up to and including the modern European and postmodern eras. The notion of "memes" --units of cultural information stored and used by members of any society, in this case.
"Medical memes" that relate to combating the effects of disease and injury--serves Fabrega in elaborating his concepts of the evolution of medicine as a social institution. Besides offering a new conceptual structure and a methodology for analyzing medicine in evolutionary terms, Fabrega shows the relevance of this approach and its implications for the social sciences and for the formulation of medical policy. The evolutionary formulation provides a common basis for the biological, social, and cultural investigation of medicine. (Fabrega, review).
It has been said that we each have a rather small significant number of influential people, decision points, and life-changing events. These influences are the dramatis personae and plot points around which the rest of our stories revolve.
In the language of chaos theory, we might call them the "strange attractors" of our lives -- those people and events without which we would not have become who we are. Often, the hoped-for end is not yet in sight. Our story remains open ended, pregnant with human possibilities, with healing possibilities.
Plot is the unifying elements of narrative giving it holistic cohesion and well as context. The change of fortune introduces a disruption for good or ill. It is this very change of fortune that reveals character, a person's habit of moral choice.
Many of the elements of our history come about by chance, fortune or misfortune. Universally, tragedy is depicted as growing out of an initial small plot point into a sizable magnitude and influence, through a close succession of probable events. This is reflected in chaos theory where sensitivity to initial conditions amplifies small changes into ones of tremendous magnitude and scale -- even global effects.
Character
Character: Have Some, Don't Just Be One
"Our distinction and glory as well as our sorrow, will have lain in being something particular." --Santayana
Perhaps part of the inherent problem of the medical model is that both practitioner and patient are encouraged to divorce themselves from their characters. Professionalism means succeeding in separating the practice of science and medicine from the character of the practitioner. As patients, we are encouraged to be objective about our condition, while our self-narrative is specifically our subjective healing fiction.
Self-knowledge appears and disappears as insight along the journey of life. Character is not a function of will but of the instinctual soul. Our characters are naturally wounded by our histories. Character ties psychology to society. It is a therapeutic idea. Character polishes us into a unique image. Unlike personality, it is impersonal -- an imaginative description, a cluster of characteristics, distinct from measurable talents and abilities.
What we do and how we do it is who we are, in fact, all that we are. Originally, character was not bent to fit moral strictures, but its uniquely defining characteristics have been co-opted by moralists (Bible-thumpers, Puritans, Victorians, etc.) into cultural notions of "good" and "bad" character. Our passion or pathos is more psychological than moral, per se.
A person of character may not necessarily be a moral exemplar. A person of bad character might be so due to little insight, drifting through events, clinging to stiff virtues, without linking to uniqueness. We are compelled and constrained by what we cannot control. Character forces us to confront each event in our own particular style.
Character doesn't need moral improvement, but metaphorical insight to live more fully. Character is embodied in traits, images, qualities. The usefulness of moral virtues lies primarily in their style of enactment. Character as images is revealed in our traits. Moral virtues are only part of the contents of character. We need insight, an intuitive sense of the images at work in our lives -- in the moves we make, the words we say, marking our style.
These characterological traits are the ways we stay authentic to our own nature. We are held within our personal bounds by the qualities particular to ourselves. Rather than knowing ourselves, we discover ourselves. Shame, guilt and low self-esteem aid character formation since they eat away at naivety and innocence. Hillman (1999) says, "Self-delusion is the mask of innocence in old age, much as innocence covers itself with denial earlier on. Shame which can make the body blush and writhe, confirms character's instinctive abhorrence of innocence."
Our healing stories are about characters both because others are so fundamental to our well-being in life, and because actions, passion, and motivations emerge from character . Characters are characters because they have specific characters. Character depends on differences, individuality.
Illness, aging, woundedness, and disruption can bring us face-to-face with our own character -- its delineation, core beliefs, self-concept, and self-image which is generally preserved and defended at nearly any cost. We are also moved by feelings we hardly understand as well as by ideas or visions which can be illusory. Thus unity of action or expression can be elusive.
The changes of old age, even the debilitating ones, have purposes and values organized by the psyche. Memory for recent events may falter, offering more place for long-term recollections. A heart condition in later life brings an opportunity to remove blockages from constricted relationships, while changes in sleep patterns allow the old to experience the profound elements of nighttime that we usually overlook. As Hillman says, "aging makes metaphors of biology." We don't realize that "oldness" is an archetypal state of being that can add value and luster to things we treasure, places we revere, and people's character. (Hillman, 1999).
Aristotle tells us action springs from two "natural causes," which are character and thought. Character disposes us to act in certain ways, but actually only in response to the changing circumstances of life. Thought (or perception) shows us what to seek and what to avoid in each situation. Are we afraid to look inward? What are we naturally curious about? There we find our passion. Thought and character together make our actions.
But action (praxis) here does not mean deeds, events, or physical activity. It means the motivation from which deeds spring. It is mainly a psychic energy working outwards. The focus or movement of the psyche is toward what seems good to it at the moment -- a movement-of-spirit.
Action implies the whole working out of a motive to its end in success or failure. Medically, that can mean cure, or healing even without cure, or failure to cure leading perhaps to death. Even in the face of biological failure to heal, however, we can heal emotionally and spiritually. It all depends on how authentic we stay to our characters, how we react to chaos and disruption, and how we want to end our unique story.
Pathos and Healing
There are as many healing stories as individuals. We intuitively craft our stories in the form of folk tales, drama, poems, prose fiction or essays that record the progress of an illness towards cure or death, stories that point the way to cure, and stories that may in themselves be healing medicine. We tell them to whoever will listen, or the story is that no one but ourselves will listen. Thus, we have stories from the point of view of the caregiver, the afflicted, the sick-room visitor.
Stories about diagnosis, denial, and protracted suffering; stories of courage and fortitude; stories about quick fixes and miracle cures; stories of apparent success then relapse or additional complications; stories of near-death, and mortality. Stories of medical failure; or medical success yet emotional or spiritual failure to heal. Stories about cultural plagues, such as tuberculosis, syphilis, influenza, cancer, and AIDS.
Stories involving healing modes such as neurology, psychology, hypnotherapy, psychiatry, homeopathy, chiropractic, modern drug medicine, surgery, and, traditional native healing, to name a few. Stories about cultural wounding, family sorrows, and the healing of men and women. Stories of crime and medicine. Stories of love and medicine. Stories of writers and medicine. Stories of war and medicine. Stories of the politics of medicine. Literature reveals many universal discoveries about the process of illness and healing. But no one else takes our particular journey.
Life's pathos is the royal road to healing. But, of course we can't substitute storytelling for needed medical treatment. No one would suggest such a thing. More accurately, it is in imagining through pathos, the pathologies and tragedies of life that healing occurs.
Hillman, in Healing Fiction, asserts that the way life is imagined is the way life is lived. The matter then becomes not one of healing persons, of curing diseases and addictions, but of healing one's imagination. It is a matter of healing our relationships with our stories, with the way in which these stories are imagined.
Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy, writes that tragedy gives birth to imagination. It is to this realm, through the tragic suffering of our pathos, that the daimon leads us back to the soul's purpose.
Individuals who experience suffering must not only go through pain and confusion, they must come to terms with the powerful cultural ideology of rational determinism. This emphasis on the ability of will power alone to influence normalcy colors people's attitudes toward illness, old age, blood ties, and the chaos resulting from change.
Becker makes it quite clear that the cultural shibboleth that life will be orderly and predictable is an illusion. More and more people experiencing disruption are finding fresh paths to meaning and personal transformation in these crises.
Hillman conceives and practices therapy as an imaginative art, intimately bound with poetics -- the making with words, fictioning. To heal the symptom, he argues, we must heal the person, and to heal the person we must first heal the story in which the person has imagined himself. He suggests therapy "...that is based on a respect for the creative imagery of the patient, for his real predicament in the world and his ultimate irreducibility to rote mechanism."
We have seen that as complex adaptive organisms we use certain mechanisms to create a sense of order from the chaos we live in, and this gives us a feeling of well-being. Culture and tacit paradigms or worldviews plays a big role in this process, and the metaphors we employ to foster that well-being and return to normalcy.
New Directions
We can help physical and mental healthcare students envision an integrative health system for the 21st century and help them identify the skills they may need to acquire to help them practice in such a system.
1. Examine the impact of culture, history and politics on the allopathic and complementary health practices.
2. Learn to respect a variety of healing practices.
3. Describe the mind-body healing paradigm.
4. Describe the spiritual faith paradigm.
5. Describe selected complementary practices.
6. Observe the demonstrations of the various treatment modalities.
7. Identify the major underlying philosophies of the complementary practices.
8. Show an awareness of the research resources available related to the selected complementary practices.
9. Develop a frame of reference from which they can better understand a complementary practice.
10. Distinguish between an appropriate and inappropriate use of a selected complementary therapy.
11. Explore the primary concepts of a selected complementary therapy or an allopathic therapy related to the student's own health and well being.
12. Interact with students from various allopathic disciplines in a small group setting.
13. Appreciate the importance of communication about a person's health orientation in the healing process.
14. Describe one way in which the allopathic and complementary practitioner can best collaborate to promotion of health and the prevention of disease.
Topics found to be effective, teachable and used by the public include: progressive relaxation, focused breathing, meditation, visualization, self-hypnosis, biofeedback, autogenics, nutrition, yoga, tai chi and exercise. The healing community has immense resources to assist students to "walk the talk" of physical, spiritual and emotional self-care.
Students who "explore their own capacity for self-awareness, self-care and mutual help, (who) open their minds to new approaches are far more likely to value and encourage these possibilities in their patients. If they are treated, and learn to regard one another with love and respect, they may well come to treat their patients the same way." (http://www.ahc.umn.edu/tf/cc.html).
This journeywork with narratives, however, is not the ultimate healing modality. It is meant to be the first 'baby-step' in a bottom-up look at the healing process. So, it remains quite inadequate when critiqued from a top-down viewpoint.
There are deeper processes which can be tapped, but we must consider the status and capacities of our clientele to make a quantum leap to this ideal, particularly when they are in the shock of catastrophic change. Transpersonal Psychologist, Richard Theiltsen has suggested a spectrum of healing with seven operative levels:
Just as there are levels of consciousness, of evolution, and of awareness, so are there levels of healing. This is a spectrum of possibilities. Process-work is essentially a non-cognitive process. Higher integration comes from methods of slowing or stopping cognitive processes so that the greater body-mind can in fact re-configure without the little ‘story’ mind getting too freaked out and in the way. It is the cellular level of the body and mind that does the re-configuring.
LEVEL 1
In level one healing, one has healers and clients and these clients have conditions that they would like to address. In pursuing level one healing, the healer may do something, give the client something, tell them something, or perform some type of manipulation on them. In short, the healer is the active person, and the client receives the effect of the action, and goes away either better or not, as the case may be.
Level 2
In level two healing, one has healers and clients and conditions. In level two healing, the healer acts as a source of information such that the client is educated and empowered to realize that the client has within themselves the main healing power. The healer may teach, give them resources, inspire, or even perform some action, but the main focus is on the client to come to some realization, understanding, or action to help facilitate their innate healing process. This healing process can take many forms such as the creation of meaning, a change of lifestyle, etc. This is level 2 healing.
Level 3
In level three healing, one has healers and clients and conditions. In level three healing, the interaction between healer and client goes on not on the verbal or physical level, but on the energetic level (for want of a better term). Here there is some interaction that goes on between the body, mind, or energy fields of the healer and clients. This can be conscious or unconscious for either party. In this level we find modalities such as therapeutic touch, prayer, shamanic work, etc. Simply being in the presence of a person who has a certain state of being will bring another person into resonance in certain ways. It is similar to the phenomena of induction in electricity. This is level 3 healing.
Level 4
In level four healing, one has healers and conditions, but no individual clients as such. In level four healing, one works on healing one’s own self. By working internally, one becomes more aware of and able to effect one’s state of health, thinking, feeling, or energetic body. This work may take may forms such as live style changes, cognitive changes, awareness training, and many others. The result is that by changing one’s own body, mind and energy, one has a profound effect on all those around themselves, and this is a source of level 3 healing for others.
Level 5
In level five healing, one has healers, but no more clients or conditions. At level five one works in consciousness to come to the realization that all so-called conditions are nothing but the perfect working out of cause and effect. So thus they can be seen as perfect, and not out of order. The realization and acceptance of this truth brings a great release from suffering. This release from suffering brings a great peace and change to one’s body, mind and energy field, and is thus a source of healing to all in one's presence.
Level 6
In level six healing, one has no clients, no conditions, and no healer. In this level the interior work in consciousness deepens to the point that the mental verbal stream of consciousness quiets and gently comes to an end. Since our since of self is based upon this stream of verbal consciousness, and since suffering is based on this sense of self, by quieting the verbal mind to this point, suffering ceases. This state of no self operates just as it is, moment to moment. This state of enlightenment and no mind is the state of great peace, which allows the body, mind and energy to harmoniously normalize and flow through the cycles of destruction and reconstruction. This great peace is the center from which all true healing can be shared.
Level 7
Level seven healing is difficult to distinguish from level 1. You have healers with clients and conditions performing certain appropriate actions or teachings. The difference is that the healer operating at level seven is doing all these things from the state of consciousness of level 6. So the benefits of whatever appropriate actions the healer may confer come from a place of deep quite peace, and this is transmitted at a very deep level.
Conclusions
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Notes:
[1]. Medical anthropologists study such issues as:
Health ramifications of ecological "adaptation and maladaptation"
Popular health culture and domestic health care practices
Local interpretations of bodily processes
Changing body projects and valued bodily attributes
Perceptions of risk, vulnerability and responsibility for illness and health care
Risk and protective dimensions of human behavior, cultural norms and social institutions
Preventative health and harm reduction practices
The experience of illness and the social relations of sickness
The range of factors driving health, nutrition and health care transitions
Ethnomedicine, pluralistic healing modalities, and healing processes
The social organization of clinical interactions
The cultural and historical conditions shaping medical practices and policies
Medical practices in the context of modernity, colonial, and post-colonial social formations
The use and interpretation of pharmaceuticals and forms of biotechnology
The commercialization and commodification of health and medicine
Disease distribution and health disparity
Differential use and availability of government and private health care resources
The political economy of health care provision.
The political ecology of infectious and vector borne diseases, chronic diseases and states of malnutrition, and violence
The possibilities for a critically engaged yet clinically relevant application of anthropology
[2]. In a recent survey of physicians published in the Journal of the American Board of Family Practice on attitudes toward complementary or alternative medicine, over 70% of the physicians surveyed indicated that they were interested in more training in the following modalities: diet and exercise, behavioral medicine, biofeedback, acupuncture, acupressure, hypnotherapy, massage therapy, megavitamin therapy, vegetarianism, prayer and herbal medicine. Issues to address include research, cultural awareness and sensitivity and the educational and the socialization process of becoming a healer. Complementary care is an emerging area of health care that demands academic leadership, excellence in complementary, spiritual and cross-cultural care. We need to conduct research and development of innovative, interdisciplinary models of education and patient care that reflect an integration of complementary, spiritual and culturally-appropriate approaches to healing.
The graduates of health professional programs should be 1) skilled in critical thinking and the analysis and application of research findings in complementary care; 2) cognizant of the diversity of healing systems; 3) experienced with interdisciplinary teams that include complementary practitioners; 4) educated in the importance of cultural belief systems; 5) capable of talking with patients regarding their use of complementary modalities; 6) aware of how and when to refer to a complementary care provider and 7) skilled in self-care.
Health professionals practicing today increasingly encounter patients who are using complementary therapies and have questions about them. Patients are also increasingly demanding a more collaborative relationship with their care providers, and expect providers to be aware of and sensitive to cultural, spiritual and emotional aspects of their health. Practitioners need basic competencies in complementary care, prevention/wellness care, critical thinking, cross-cultural health, self care and interpersonal relationships. The health professions are responsible for preparing future practitioners who have both the intellectual skills for evidence-based practice and the knowledge base for understanding patients' complementary care practices and initiating appropriate referrals to complementary care providers. Future providers need relationship skills to help patients make life style changes and gain greater awareness of the spiritual, emotional and physical aspects of their health.
Recommended directions: 1) Content on complementary/alternative care needs to be integrated, 2) Interdisciplinary education is necessary and desirable to help students acquire the knowledge and skills required to function as a member of a health care team. 3) The education of health professionals within the academic setting has produced graduates who are intellectually prepared for the healing profession. There has been less emphasis on developing the health professional's awareness and understanding of issues of personal health and well being as well as the transformational process critical to becoming a healer. 4) There is a need to re-evaluate pre-requisites for admission to health professional schools, to encourage applicants to explore what it means to be a healer and to strive to achieve increased diversity in the student population.
[3]. Develop a graduate-level interdisciplinary program of studies in the area of complementary/ cultural/spiritual health. Course offerings would include didactic, experiential and clinical courses in comparative health, cultural and medical anthropology, culturally-based systems of healing; alternative systems of healing such as naturopathy, homeopathy, Ayurvedic and Traditional Chinese Medicine; shamanism and spiritual healing; energy medicine; skill based courses in areas such as clinical hypnosis, imagery, meditation, and manual healing; clinical nutrition, herbal medicine, use of the arts in healing and research methods courses. Course offerings could be used to build a supporting program in an existing graduate program. As faculty are recruited and the curriculum developed, it is anticipated that this area of study would become a graduate level degree granting program.
The world views of researchers based in the biomedical model may differ from researchers and clinicians functioning in complementary/alternative care. Establish a comprehensive interdisciplinary program of research in complementary, cultural and spiritual care that focuses on the following broad areas of study: safety and efficacy of modalities, mechanism of action, elements of the therapeutic process between patient and practitioner which contribute to health and healing, role of patient's beliefs in the process of their healing, role of the healer's beliefs, strategies for clinical integration of allopathic and complementary health care and outcomes research that focuses on restoration of health and well being, symptom reduction, quality of life and impact of use of complementary care on overall utilization of health care resources.
*assess and recognize how a patient's cultural background, race/ethnicity, spiritual and religious beliefs, as well as gender and socioeconomic status contribute to proper diagnosis and treatment.
*recognize the importance of one's family and community in overall health and well-being.
*assess and recognize how one's own core beliefs and cultural, ethnic and religious background influences one's perceptions, behavior, and ability to listen, care for and recommend treatment alternatives.
*understand the underlying philosophy, therapeutic practices and research base of selected complementary modalities, systems of care and culturally-based healing traditions.
*evaluate the strengths, weaknesses and appropriate applications of a range of research methodologies.
*evaluate research as well as determine how research results impact clinical practice.
*work within an interdisciplinary health care team that includes complementary practitioners.
------------------------------------------------------
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"Our distinction and glory as well as our sorrow, will have lain in being something particular." --Santayana
Perhaps part of the inherent problem of the medical model is that both practitioner and patient are encouraged to divorce themselves from their characters. Professionalism means succeeding in separating the practice of science and medicine from the character of the practitioner. As patients, we are encouraged to be objective about our condition, while our self-narrative is specifically our subjective healing fiction.
Self-knowledge appears and disappears as insight along the journey of life. Character is not a function of will but of the instinctual soul. Our characters are naturally wounded by our histories. Character ties psychology to society. It is a therapeutic idea. Character polishes us into a unique image. Unlike personality, it is impersonal -- an imaginative description, a cluster of characteristics, distinct from measurable talents and abilities.
What we do and how we do it is who we are, in fact, all that we are. Originally, character was not bent to fit moral strictures, but its uniquely defining characteristics have been co-opted by moralists (Bible-thumpers, Puritans, Victorians, etc.) into cultural notions of "good" and "bad" character. Our passion or pathos is more psychological than moral, per se.
A person of character may not necessarily be a moral exemplar. A person of bad character might be so due to little insight, drifting through events, clinging to stiff virtues, without linking to uniqueness. We are compelled and constrained by what we cannot control. Character forces us to confront each event in our own particular style.
Character doesn't need moral improvement, but metaphorical insight to live more fully. Character is embodied in traits, images, qualities. The usefulness of moral virtues lies primarily in their style of enactment. Character as images is revealed in our traits. Moral virtues are only part of the contents of character. We need insight, an intuitive sense of the images at work in our lives -- in the moves we make, the words we say, marking our style.
These characterological traits are the ways we stay authentic to our own nature. We are held within our personal bounds by the qualities particular to ourselves. Rather than knowing ourselves, we discover ourselves. Shame, guilt and low self-esteem aid character formation since they eat away at naivety and innocence. Hillman (1999) says, "Self-delusion is the mask of innocence in old age, much as innocence covers itself with denial earlier on. Shame which can make the body blush and writhe, confirms character's instinctive abhorrence of innocence."
Our healing stories are about characters both because others are so fundamental to our well-being in life, and because actions, passion, and motivations emerge from character . Characters are characters because they have specific characters. Character depends on differences, individuality.
Illness, aging, woundedness, and disruption can bring us face-to-face with our own character -- its delineation, core beliefs, self-concept, and self-image which is generally preserved and defended at nearly any cost. We are also moved by feelings we hardly understand as well as by ideas or visions which can be illusory. Thus unity of action or expression can be elusive.
The changes of old age, even the debilitating ones, have purposes and values organized by the psyche. Memory for recent events may falter, offering more place for long-term recollections. A heart condition in later life brings an opportunity to remove blockages from constricted relationships, while changes in sleep patterns allow the old to experience the profound elements of nighttime that we usually overlook. As Hillman says, "aging makes metaphors of biology." We don't realize that "oldness" is an archetypal state of being that can add value and luster to things we treasure, places we revere, and people's character. (Hillman, 1999).
Aristotle tells us action springs from two "natural causes," which are character and thought. Character disposes us to act in certain ways, but actually only in response to the changing circumstances of life. Thought (or perception) shows us what to seek and what to avoid in each situation. Are we afraid to look inward? What are we naturally curious about? There we find our passion. Thought and character together make our actions.
But action (praxis) here does not mean deeds, events, or physical activity. It means the motivation from which deeds spring. It is mainly a psychic energy working outwards. The focus or movement of the psyche is toward what seems good to it at the moment -- a movement-of-spirit.
Action implies the whole working out of a motive to its end in success or failure. Medically, that can mean cure, or healing even without cure, or failure to cure leading perhaps to death. Even in the face of biological failure to heal, however, we can heal emotionally and spiritually. It all depends on how authentic we stay to our characters, how we react to chaos and disruption, and how we want to end our unique story.
Pathos and Healing
There are as many healing stories as individuals. We intuitively craft our stories in the form of folk tales, drama, poems, prose fiction or essays that record the progress of an illness towards cure or death, stories that point the way to cure, and stories that may in themselves be healing medicine. We tell them to whoever will listen, or the story is that no one but ourselves will listen. Thus, we have stories from the point of view of the caregiver, the afflicted, the sick-room visitor.
Stories about diagnosis, denial, and protracted suffering; stories of courage and fortitude; stories about quick fixes and miracle cures; stories of apparent success then relapse or additional complications; stories of near-death, and mortality. Stories of medical failure; or medical success yet emotional or spiritual failure to heal. Stories about cultural plagues, such as tuberculosis, syphilis, influenza, cancer, and AIDS.
Stories involving healing modes such as neurology, psychology, hypnotherapy, psychiatry, homeopathy, chiropractic, modern drug medicine, surgery, and, traditional native healing, to name a few. Stories about cultural wounding, family sorrows, and the healing of men and women. Stories of crime and medicine. Stories of love and medicine. Stories of writers and medicine. Stories of war and medicine. Stories of the politics of medicine. Literature reveals many universal discoveries about the process of illness and healing. But no one else takes our particular journey.
Life's pathos is the royal road to healing. But, of course we can't substitute storytelling for needed medical treatment. No one would suggest such a thing. More accurately, it is in imagining through pathos, the pathologies and tragedies of life that healing occurs.
Hillman, in Healing Fiction, asserts that the way life is imagined is the way life is lived. The matter then becomes not one of healing persons, of curing diseases and addictions, but of healing one's imagination. It is a matter of healing our relationships with our stories, with the way in which these stories are imagined.
Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy, writes that tragedy gives birth to imagination. It is to this realm, through the tragic suffering of our pathos, that the daimon leads us back to the soul's purpose.
Individuals who experience suffering must not only go through pain and confusion, they must come to terms with the powerful cultural ideology of rational determinism. This emphasis on the ability of will power alone to influence normalcy colors people's attitudes toward illness, old age, blood ties, and the chaos resulting from change.
Becker makes it quite clear that the cultural shibboleth that life will be orderly and predictable is an illusion. More and more people experiencing disruption are finding fresh paths to meaning and personal transformation in these crises.
Hillman conceives and practices therapy as an imaginative art, intimately bound with poetics -- the making with words, fictioning. To heal the symptom, he argues, we must heal the person, and to heal the person we must first heal the story in which the person has imagined himself. He suggests therapy "...that is based on a respect for the creative imagery of the patient, for his real predicament in the world and his ultimate irreducibility to rote mechanism."
We have seen that as complex adaptive organisms we use certain mechanisms to create a sense of order from the chaos we live in, and this gives us a feeling of well-being. Culture and tacit paradigms or worldviews plays a big role in this process, and the metaphors we employ to foster that well-being and return to normalcy.
New Directions
We can help physical and mental healthcare students envision an integrative health system for the 21st century and help them identify the skills they may need to acquire to help them practice in such a system.
1. Examine the impact of culture, history and politics on the allopathic and complementary health practices.
2. Learn to respect a variety of healing practices.
3. Describe the mind-body healing paradigm.
4. Describe the spiritual faith paradigm.
5. Describe selected complementary practices.
6. Observe the demonstrations of the various treatment modalities.
7. Identify the major underlying philosophies of the complementary practices.
8. Show an awareness of the research resources available related to the selected complementary practices.
9. Develop a frame of reference from which they can better understand a complementary practice.
10. Distinguish between an appropriate and inappropriate use of a selected complementary therapy.
11. Explore the primary concepts of a selected complementary therapy or an allopathic therapy related to the student's own health and well being.
12. Interact with students from various allopathic disciplines in a small group setting.
13. Appreciate the importance of communication about a person's health orientation in the healing process.
14. Describe one way in which the allopathic and complementary practitioner can best collaborate to promotion of health and the prevention of disease.
Topics found to be effective, teachable and used by the public include: progressive relaxation, focused breathing, meditation, visualization, self-hypnosis, biofeedback, autogenics, nutrition, yoga, tai chi and exercise. The healing community has immense resources to assist students to "walk the talk" of physical, spiritual and emotional self-care.
Students who "explore their own capacity for self-awareness, self-care and mutual help, (who) open their minds to new approaches are far more likely to value and encourage these possibilities in their patients. If they are treated, and learn to regard one another with love and respect, they may well come to treat their patients the same way." (http://www.ahc.umn.edu/tf/cc.html).
This journeywork with narratives, however, is not the ultimate healing modality. It is meant to be the first 'baby-step' in a bottom-up look at the healing process. So, it remains quite inadequate when critiqued from a top-down viewpoint.
There are deeper processes which can be tapped, but we must consider the status and capacities of our clientele to make a quantum leap to this ideal, particularly when they are in the shock of catastrophic change. Transpersonal Psychologist, Richard Theiltsen has suggested a spectrum of healing with seven operative levels:
Just as there are levels of consciousness, of evolution, and of awareness, so are there levels of healing. This is a spectrum of possibilities. Process-work is essentially a non-cognitive process. Higher integration comes from methods of slowing or stopping cognitive processes so that the greater body-mind can in fact re-configure without the little ‘story’ mind getting too freaked out and in the way. It is the cellular level of the body and mind that does the re-configuring.
LEVEL 1
In level one healing, one has healers and clients and these clients have conditions that they would like to address. In pursuing level one healing, the healer may do something, give the client something, tell them something, or perform some type of manipulation on them. In short, the healer is the active person, and the client receives the effect of the action, and goes away either better or not, as the case may be.
Level 2
In level two healing, one has healers and clients and conditions. In level two healing, the healer acts as a source of information such that the client is educated and empowered to realize that the client has within themselves the main healing power. The healer may teach, give them resources, inspire, or even perform some action, but the main focus is on the client to come to some realization, understanding, or action to help facilitate their innate healing process. This healing process can take many forms such as the creation of meaning, a change of lifestyle, etc. This is level 2 healing.
Level 3
In level three healing, one has healers and clients and conditions. In level three healing, the interaction between healer and client goes on not on the verbal or physical level, but on the energetic level (for want of a better term). Here there is some interaction that goes on between the body, mind, or energy fields of the healer and clients. This can be conscious or unconscious for either party. In this level we find modalities such as therapeutic touch, prayer, shamanic work, etc. Simply being in the presence of a person who has a certain state of being will bring another person into resonance in certain ways. It is similar to the phenomena of induction in electricity. This is level 3 healing.
Level 4
In level four healing, one has healers and conditions, but no individual clients as such. In level four healing, one works on healing one’s own self. By working internally, one becomes more aware of and able to effect one’s state of health, thinking, feeling, or energetic body. This work may take may forms such as live style changes, cognitive changes, awareness training, and many others. The result is that by changing one’s own body, mind and energy, one has a profound effect on all those around themselves, and this is a source of level 3 healing for others.
Level 5
In level five healing, one has healers, but no more clients or conditions. At level five one works in consciousness to come to the realization that all so-called conditions are nothing but the perfect working out of cause and effect. So thus they can be seen as perfect, and not out of order. The realization and acceptance of this truth brings a great release from suffering. This release from suffering brings a great peace and change to one’s body, mind and energy field, and is thus a source of healing to all in one's presence.
Level 6
In level six healing, one has no clients, no conditions, and no healer. In this level the interior work in consciousness deepens to the point that the mental verbal stream of consciousness quiets and gently comes to an end. Since our since of self is based upon this stream of verbal consciousness, and since suffering is based on this sense of self, by quieting the verbal mind to this point, suffering ceases. This state of no self operates just as it is, moment to moment. This state of enlightenment and no mind is the state of great peace, which allows the body, mind and energy to harmoniously normalize and flow through the cycles of destruction and reconstruction. This great peace is the center from which all true healing can be shared.
Level 7
Level seven healing is difficult to distinguish from level 1. You have healers with clients and conditions performing certain appropriate actions or teachings. The difference is that the healer operating at level seven is doing all these things from the state of consciousness of level 6. So the benefits of whatever appropriate actions the healer may confer come from a place of deep quite peace, and this is transmitted at a very deep level.
Conclusions
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Notes:
[1]. Medical anthropologists study such issues as:
Health ramifications of ecological "adaptation and maladaptation"
Popular health culture and domestic health care practices
Local interpretations of bodily processes
Changing body projects and valued bodily attributes
Perceptions of risk, vulnerability and responsibility for illness and health care
Risk and protective dimensions of human behavior, cultural norms and social institutions
Preventative health and harm reduction practices
The experience of illness and the social relations of sickness
The range of factors driving health, nutrition and health care transitions
Ethnomedicine, pluralistic healing modalities, and healing processes
The social organization of clinical interactions
The cultural and historical conditions shaping medical practices and policies
Medical practices in the context of modernity, colonial, and post-colonial social formations
The use and interpretation of pharmaceuticals and forms of biotechnology
The commercialization and commodification of health and medicine
Disease distribution and health disparity
Differential use and availability of government and private health care resources
The political economy of health care provision.
The political ecology of infectious and vector borne diseases, chronic diseases and states of malnutrition, and violence
The possibilities for a critically engaged yet clinically relevant application of anthropology
[2]. In a recent survey of physicians published in the Journal of the American Board of Family Practice on attitudes toward complementary or alternative medicine, over 70% of the physicians surveyed indicated that they were interested in more training in the following modalities: diet and exercise, behavioral medicine, biofeedback, acupuncture, acupressure, hypnotherapy, massage therapy, megavitamin therapy, vegetarianism, prayer and herbal medicine. Issues to address include research, cultural awareness and sensitivity and the educational and the socialization process of becoming a healer. Complementary care is an emerging area of health care that demands academic leadership, excellence in complementary, spiritual and cross-cultural care. We need to conduct research and development of innovative, interdisciplinary models of education and patient care that reflect an integration of complementary, spiritual and culturally-appropriate approaches to healing.
The graduates of health professional programs should be 1) skilled in critical thinking and the analysis and application of research findings in complementary care; 2) cognizant of the diversity of healing systems; 3) experienced with interdisciplinary teams that include complementary practitioners; 4) educated in the importance of cultural belief systems; 5) capable of talking with patients regarding their use of complementary modalities; 6) aware of how and when to refer to a complementary care provider and 7) skilled in self-care.
Health professionals practicing today increasingly encounter patients who are using complementary therapies and have questions about them. Patients are also increasingly demanding a more collaborative relationship with their care providers, and expect providers to be aware of and sensitive to cultural, spiritual and emotional aspects of their health. Practitioners need basic competencies in complementary care, prevention/wellness care, critical thinking, cross-cultural health, self care and interpersonal relationships. The health professions are responsible for preparing future practitioners who have both the intellectual skills for evidence-based practice and the knowledge base for understanding patients' complementary care practices and initiating appropriate referrals to complementary care providers. Future providers need relationship skills to help patients make life style changes and gain greater awareness of the spiritual, emotional and physical aspects of their health.
Recommended directions: 1) Content on complementary/alternative care needs to be integrated, 2) Interdisciplinary education is necessary and desirable to help students acquire the knowledge and skills required to function as a member of a health care team. 3) The education of health professionals within the academic setting has produced graduates who are intellectually prepared for the healing profession. There has been less emphasis on developing the health professional's awareness and understanding of issues of personal health and well being as well as the transformational process critical to becoming a healer. 4) There is a need to re-evaluate pre-requisites for admission to health professional schools, to encourage applicants to explore what it means to be a healer and to strive to achieve increased diversity in the student population.
[3]. Develop a graduate-level interdisciplinary program of studies in the area of complementary/ cultural/spiritual health. Course offerings would include didactic, experiential and clinical courses in comparative health, cultural and medical anthropology, culturally-based systems of healing; alternative systems of healing such as naturopathy, homeopathy, Ayurvedic and Traditional Chinese Medicine; shamanism and spiritual healing; energy medicine; skill based courses in areas such as clinical hypnosis, imagery, meditation, and manual healing; clinical nutrition, herbal medicine, use of the arts in healing and research methods courses. Course offerings could be used to build a supporting program in an existing graduate program. As faculty are recruited and the curriculum developed, it is anticipated that this area of study would become a graduate level degree granting program.
The world views of researchers based in the biomedical model may differ from researchers and clinicians functioning in complementary/alternative care. Establish a comprehensive interdisciplinary program of research in complementary, cultural and spiritual care that focuses on the following broad areas of study: safety and efficacy of modalities, mechanism of action, elements of the therapeutic process between patient and practitioner which contribute to health and healing, role of patient's beliefs in the process of their healing, role of the healer's beliefs, strategies for clinical integration of allopathic and complementary health care and outcomes research that focuses on restoration of health and well being, symptom reduction, quality of life and impact of use of complementary care on overall utilization of health care resources.
*assess and recognize how a patient's cultural background, race/ethnicity, spiritual and religious beliefs, as well as gender and socioeconomic status contribute to proper diagnosis and treatment.
*recognize the importance of one's family and community in overall health and well-being.
*assess and recognize how one's own core beliefs and cultural, ethnic and religious background influences one's perceptions, behavior, and ability to listen, care for and recommend treatment alternatives.
*understand the underlying philosophy, therapeutic practices and research base of selected complementary modalities, systems of care and culturally-based healing traditions.
*evaluate the strengths, weaknesses and appropriate applications of a range of research methodologies.
*evaluate research as well as determine how research results impact clinical practice.
*work within an interdisciplinary health care team that includes complementary practitioners.
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THE EMERGENT HEALING PARADIGM
THE EMERGENT HEALING PARADIGM
Progressive Medicine and Healing Arts in the 21st Century
by Iona Miller,
Institute for Consciousness Science and Technology, 2003
1. Introduction;
2. New Physics and the Emergent Healing Paradigm;
3. Embodying the Paradigm; 4. Scientific Revolutions;
5. Metaphysical Research Programs; Appendix, Notes, References
Abstract: All new scientific theories require some unifying idea, and that idea is, by definition, metaphysical -- essentially untestable. New positivism denies the existence of any metaphysical questions, therefore, it cannot be an ultimately satisfactory philosophical solution. Thus, in any metaphysical dispute, strong non-scientific arguments can propose new theories. Further, metaphysical disputes may also become scientific. There can be little doubt that speculative, metaphysical ideas have contributed much to the growth of knowledge. Today's heresies are tomorrow's dogmas. There is a strong intuitive feeling among many healthcare practitioners that we need a new paradigm to undergird treatment philosophy and therapeutic frameworks -- "metasyn" not just medicine.
A holistic Emergent Healing Paradigm is proposed rooted in relativity, quantum, holographic and chaos theories -- our models of nature's own forms of self-organization. It is suggested that emergent healing depends on nonlocal principles and self-organization, as well as on direct causal influences on the mindbody of the organism. It is further suggested that the interactive field present in the healing situation can be amplified intentionally through resonant feedback -- therapeutic entrainment -- to facilitate intervention in the psychophysical healing process. A metaphysical context is provided to justify such a paradigm shift from the purely causal mechanistic healing model. A viable research direction is indicated by examining cosmology, the role of the human family, epistemology, and a mode of ethical reasoning.
Each of us can learn to balance and optimize inner growth, intimacy, physical and spiritual health -- to discover emergence beyond our emergencies.
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"The main reason for healing is love." --~Paracelsus
"[Y]ou ought not to attempt to cure the eyes without the head, nor the head without the body, so neither ought you to attempt to cure the body without the soul. ... [T]he cure of many diseases is unknown to the physicians of Hellas, because they disregard the whole, which ought to be studied also, for the part can never be well unless the whole is well." --Plato: Charmides 156e
"[Though] the "clockwork universe" of Newton, Laplace, and Descartes has long been descredited by physicists, its vestiges linger on in the extant thinking of institutions, bureaucracies, economies, universities, software development methodologies, and general zeitgeist." --Munnecke
"All the biologicals are converting chaos to beautiful order. All biology is antientropic. Of all the disorder to order converters, the human mind is by far the most impressive. The human's most powerful metaphysical drive is to understand, to order, to sort out, and rearrange in ever more orderly and understandably constructive ways. You find then that man's true function is metaphysical." --Buckminster Fuller
1. Introduction
Today's heresies are tomorrow's dogmas. History has shown this time and again, and the history of science is no exception. That is why our culture has developed a system of academic checks and balances. What used to be called natural philosophy has become our allegedly objective science. We have had science less than 500 years, yet in that time it has transformed much of the world technologically, intellectually and physically. It is inherent in our nature to seek answers to life's fundamental questions: Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going?
Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that investigates principles of reality, transcending those of any particular science. It traditionally includes cosmology, ontology and speculative philosophy. Cosmology is the general philosophy of the universe considered as a totality of its parts and phenomena subject to laws -- the origin, nature and structure of the universe. Ontology is the study of being -- that branch of metaphysics which deals with the philosophical theory of reality, universal characteristics of all reality.
Epistemology relates to "how we know what we know." This branch of philosophy critically investigates the nature, grounds, limits, and criteria of any particular theory of cognition. It helps us analyze facts, thought processes and value-judgments.
The philosophy of science criticizes the "rules of the game" of science, methodological questions. Science is an experimental philosophy whose highest value is empiricism; it includes both theoretical and experimental avenues. This includes the science of medicine and the healing arts. The apparently "new" healing paradigm, which has been under discussion some 30 years or more, is actually a treatment philosophy, rooted in a worldview emerging from our current understanding of the nature of Reality. Like all things paradigms have momentum.
The search for truth in science is sometimes compromised by ideologies. Thus, "truth" is often defined from the perspective of utility or "value," often, for example, determining what gets funded. Truth can be protected by a bodyguard of lies. History suggests that often "objectivity" is well-agreed upon subjective experience. But even subjectivity suggests there is a subject. But our minds encompass all possible perception -- both intuitive and scientific. Still, it is problematical to investigate something that is transcendental to the mind, perception, and our physical embodiment. At this level of abstract speculation (the source of space, time, awareneness, matter), there is no assurance of grabbing onto anything solid, and we start to lose our grip on anything approaching meaning.
So it falls to metaphysics and paradigms to provide the ultimate narratives for the roots of such fundamental processes as the potential for cosmic evolution of forms of energy or matter-energy, the reality of time as cosmic change, the expansion of space, the natural evolution of life, and awareness. As we "unpack" these paradigms we reach a level of atomically unbound energy waves wherein neither molecules nor atoms can form from the quickly appearing and disappearing subatomic flux of particles. We have nothing to hold onto conceptually -- neither "somethings" of which to be aware nor "somethings" to be aware with, in order to focus and limit awareness into conscious minds. Matter, too, originates in unbound energy.
Just like proto-mind, proto-matter is that same "sea of potential energy." In that sea is the potential for both what will be drawn into form as experience and what will be drawn into experience as form. The source of matter and mind is ONE "[non]thing." Well, maybe: but because of the nature of language and reality, we cannot speak or even think of a "single-aspect monism" without creating more aspects in the process.
Understanding of the entire world beyond our own minds is a model based on the evidence of the senses. Much of it is necessarily based on extrapolation.
The problem is, in order to lay the groundwork for a fresh multidisciplinary theoretical framework, we have to explain the philosophical background to the scientists, the scientific background to the philosophers, both to the physical and mental healthcare professionals. In terms of treatment applications, pyschology must be explained to all of the above, and to interested lay-people as well. It is plausible to say that the main goal of psychotherapy is to enlarge the consciousness field modifying both aspects of "meaning" and "energy" (Koreck, 1998).
The wonderful thing about feedback is that all interested parties can, in return, explain it back in their own words, from their own experience and comprehension. By sharing how we have confronted and are resolving these issues in our own practices and disciplines we can contribute to the dialogue. So, we hope to develop some common language and metaphors to bridge the gaps.
Many times truth is defined from the perspective of utility or "value" in science, not objectivity. Objectivity is often well-agreed upon subjective experience, and this can determine, for example, what projects are funded. However, mind is all possible perception -- both intuitive and "scientific." There is a whole spectrum of response even among those sympathic to the holistic perspective, some more conceptually radical than others.
Hence, we've received such comments, (reflecting the effort to integrate a new perspective), as the following:
From a British surgeon: " From what I have read it is exactly the new paradigm which I am currently 'blossoming' into an understanding of for myself. It has been a long journey from studying neuroscience and then being a surgeon and I have little clue how to move forwards on a career level just yet, but it is coming for me."
From a Jungian-trained counselor working with at-risk teens: " The upshot is they do not approve of/understand the dynamic of the way I handle my kids by "being with" them instead of "doing to" them. They see our job (within the medical framework) as being one of "fixing" broken little people. I see my job as getting "along side" young psyches so that I can help them to "fix" themselves. . .Anyway, my point is, the "medical model" that we are working to change actually says more about the evolutionary level of those who hold it than it does about Truth. And I know that I just restated the obvious, but for me, this is a huge chunk of information that I am finally beginning to positively internalize. "
From a Chiropractor working with Energy Medicine: " The major problem with doing research on the energy medicine practitioner’s ability to detect the patient’s or client’s energy is that the “feeling” of the patient’s energy experienced by the practitioner is not as objective as many in the energy medicine field would like to believe. . . What one feels is dependent on what one is looking for and one’s belief system. This process can be very dynamic as when moving and following a patient’s energy in the field around their body. . .When the practitioner’s intention, as an energy or quantum informational or mind-stuff pattern, resonates with the information received from the patient via the non-local connection, this resonance can be felt or sensed by the practitioner. . . It is this resonance in the practitioner’s own mind and body that is sensed, not any direct energy from the patient. It is a process of finding the “best fit” within the practitioner’s conceptual model to what is happening in the patient based on the information unconsciously received from the patient. It is not an objective process and it is self-confirming. Almost any conceptual model will “work” in the sense of eliciting resonance feedback to the practitioner. Because a healing system works in this context it is not conformational evidence that it is correct.
However, the fact that a resonance response is elicited implies the therapy, in some manner of action, has therapeutic value. The quote from Neils Bohr applies here, "what we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” When working face to face with the patient, the patient essentially serves as a testing model for himself or herself. For some practitioners this resonance is easier to sense if the process of sensing it is unconsciously coupled to some physical action by the practitioner. The unconscious informational processing that occurs tends to optimize the therapy regardless of the practitioner's belief. "
From a Russian physicist: " Of all the intent-mediated phenomena we are aware of, there is no doubt that self-healing carries the most significant potential, or that (fortunately) it is the closest to becoming integrated into our medical system, thanks to decades of research into the body's neuroimmunologic and electromagnetic control mechanisms. While the substrate of the biofield may continue to defy intuitive understanding for decades to come, we are at the moment in a position to focus quite effectively on the principles regulating psychosomatic modulation and even bioinformation resonance between proximal systems (Gotovski, 2000; Sidorov, 2001). But it is doubtful that we will make meaningful progress along this path until we come up with a working (experimentally-friendly) definition of consciousness - and the great mystery of consciousness is, of course, its apparent non-locality."
From an Indian physicist: "No doubt that functional consciousness is important. But what I mean is that even though functions are based on consciousness they are untouched with it. And so, they are only functional appearances on the existence of consciousness. This follows from the property of consciousness as the singularity. In this new interpretation of singularity as consciousness, paradoxes like '[singularity as] the doorway to other universes,' etc. do not arise. Mind, universe, matter, energy, etc., are just appearances on the existence of consciousness which is again untouched by all the above. And so, everything should be 'apparently' originating from there. Therefore, even though consciousness is present in our reality, this reality is not there in consciousness. Consciousness is existence, our reality is an appearance. There are no achievements implied here. The property of singular consciousness remains whether we achieve the synthesis or not. Singular consciousness denies all schools of thought. . .When singular consciousness exists, the zero to the universe remains as a mere appearance. I have been drawing attention to the ignored singularity or consciousness to physicists from Profs. Amit Goswami to J. A. Wheeler. Responses have been varying from surprise, support, agreement to ignoring."
As we move into the 21st century we need to evaluate and revision how much of this new paradigm we have been able to implement, not merely conceptualize. As scientists, medical personnel, psychotherapists, pastoral, or alternative healers and counselors, the therapeutic framework becomes essential in determining where we go from here. Many people have a new sense of the importance of integrating spiritual principles with the material world.
Is it too much to ask that we address our infirmities at multiple levels, mobilizing not only medical technology but also the natural healing processes which foster our physical and mental well-being, as well as our spiritual health? Can we ever look forward to a wellness industry? The whole problem is also compounded by dynamic political forces and economic power struggles. All providers vie competitively for their share of the healthcare "pie."
We need metamorphosis, a new foundational vision, a new synthesis -- "metasyn" as well as medicine. Ancient philosophers equated the First Matter with the universal solvent, which dissolves all misconceptions, and called this immediate transformative comprehension the panacea , or Universal Medicine. Who is to say they were wrong in their apparently simple yet profound formulation?
What is at stake is whether, when seeking mental or physical healing, we will continue to promote and be treated by a healthcare industry under a mechanistic paradigm, or, in the healing arts under a holistic paradigm consistent with new science. We have to make science accountable to life. We are much more than a bag of skin containing a biochemical stew. Energy medicine has revealed that we are complex electromagnetic and possibly bioholographic entities. Our apparent skin boundary is quite permeable to these fields. Surely our minds are not confined to our brains, but permeate our psychophysical self in dynamic relationship with the environment.
In the new vision, we perceive ourselves holistically as complex adaptive organisms -- physical, emotional, mental and spiritual -- in intimate interaction with our surroundings. If anything, science has taught us that we need a more subtle conception of what is objectively real than materialism has given us. Something far richer than materialism is responsible for the universe as we know it. In every sense we are seamlessly welded with Cosmos, but we often lose sight of this basic fact, and immerse ourselves in illusions of separateness, of fragmentation. This is the source of existential alienation. The degree of our sense of separation is reflected in our worldview. It basically boils down to whether we see the world as a hostile or friendly place, where we can authentically express ourselves, thrive and flourish, or not.
Conscious or unconscious, each of us has a more-or-less coherent, all-inclusive frame of reference, our subjective view of the world and the sum of our experience. This philosophy of life includes life-giving elements, such as identity, an ethical base, and values which give meaning to our existence. We each grow up within an unconscious totalistic fabric, a naive inherited framework, which remains largely unsynthesized. But we must labor to produce our own unique, personal, and successful worldview that is internally consistent, pragmatically realistic, and personally fulfilling. In ancient times, this essentially spiritual quest was referred to as The Great Work. Jung called it individuation.
This personal synthesis helps us adapt or individuate and perhaps even self-actualize high well-being, or even extraordinary human potential. This comprehensive synthesis is mirrored in synoptic philosophy, which helps us fit the pieces of life into the whole mental jigsaw puzzle. Synoptic philosophy helps us achieve an all-inclusive view of our subject matter, seeing all parts in relationship to one another. To a greater or lesser degree, it erases the mental barriers that separate branches of knowledge in a holistic vision. Taken together, the personal synthesis of a holistic experiential worldview and the cultural synthesis symbolized by the synoptic wheel [1] is what we refer to here, in shorthand, as "metasyn."
This open-ended philosophic journey has certain milestones:
1). When you have any philosophical question proceed as far as possible with philosophical analysis, clarifying and drawing out all the hidden meanings that you can, dissolving the problem completely if possible.
2). If not, find out what philosophers of the past have thought about the problem.
3). Rephrasing the question in a variety of meaningful ways helps reveal what kinds of information will help solve it.
4). Develop an intuition for asking and reasking questions from different angles until they point to the data that illuminates them.
5). What fields most likely contain information related to the problem? Begin by asking questions about the problem and how it might connect one by one, to the various fields.
6). Go to these promising fields and gather information, looking for conclusions, hypotheses, and models currently used by field specialists. Keep asking questions relating the data to your central problem and cross-relating insights and drawing parallels from these fields themselves.
7). Network and integrate these insights refocusing new ideas on the initial problem to see what understanding and creative insights emerge. Weave these illuminative strands together into a glowing tapestry.
So, to envision our new paradigm we have to paint a multidisciplinary picture. We will draw on philosophy, physics, psychology, medicine, genetics, biology, politics, religion, anthropology, ecology, astronomy, geometry, mathematics, computer theory, economics, the humanities and the arts for our metaphors -- for our vocabulary -- to frame and reframe our questions.
Paradigms underlie the interplay of chaos and order in human culture, at the collective and individual level. They act as lenses through which all sensory data passes before it is experienced as perception. Some perceptions arrive relatively undisturbed while others are subject to immediate characterization and personal value-judgements. The nature of paradigms is such that those who embrace one of the seven typical viewpoints of the paradigm spectrum [2] are loath to listen to the arguments of those who embrace a different viewpoint, either more or less progressive. They don't have any common ground to serve as a basis for envisioning, reasoning, understanding, or intuition.
The established order, materialism, is entrenched at one end of this imaginal spectrum. Descarte argued for an absolute distinction between mental and material substance, institutionalizing the mind-body problem. Some materialistic positions go as far as denying any ontological or epistemic validity to consciousness, neither recognizing nor explaning anything beyond the functioning of brain circuits (Edelman, 2000). Other materialistic positions insist that although consciousness is generated by physical events in the brain, it is not reduced to them, but emerges from them.
Open-ended visions of an ideal world bracket the far end of the philosophical spectrum. In the polarization of materialism and idealism, all of reality consists of ideas and there is no "material substance" at all. By taking mind as the starting point, idealistic philosophies must take pains to explain matter in their theoretical framework. In this model blank awareness can be equated with the idea of potential energy, and matter is in some sense sentient or intelligent while conforming to the mathematical foundations of physics [3]. Could our experienced reality be a combination of our individual mental creations and some greater Mind's creations, or as some mystics have called it Universal Mind? [4].
The observer is entangled inseparably with the universe. The span in-between represents the dynamic interplay of chaos and order as old forms break down and new forms emerge. Nature's psychogenic forces manifest in localized quantum consciousness, where subjective and objective are in some sense unified, yet physically based. Most scientists themselves agree that pure materialism is untenable.
But flaws in the materialistic paradigm of science have appeared in recent years. These flaws have grown to a gaping rent, torn across the whole fabric of the materialistic conception of reality. Strained by the conflicts between Einstein and Bohr over the ultimate meaning of quantum mechanics, subjected to further stress in Bell's Theorem, and finally ripped through in recent tests by Aspect in France, the whole cloth of the materialistic picture of reality must now be rejected. (Walker, 2000).
But what are our other options? Reactionaries always find some opponents to struggle against; if an old opponent disappears, they quickly find new ones. Those vested in a conservative perspective are resistant to admitting new or contradictory evidence into their fundamental belief-system. Moderates, or centrists, are generally content with the status quo. Liberals lock in a struggle against conservatism, often to the detriment of formulating their next step forward. Progressives tend to be visionary and/or revolutionary. This is true whether the arena is politics, science, religion, the arts, or wellness. When an old model becomes untenable and crisis ensues, a revolution occurs -- again whether in new paradigm science or new paradigm politics.
The progressive paradigm is holistic and founded in the position that consciousness is a fundamental element of existence. Consciousness is a process not an object. Many physicists now hold this theoretical framework or view of reality (Walker, 2000; Goswami, 1993, 2001; Wolf, 1996; Bohm, 1980). In A Universe of Consciousness , Nobel Laureate, Gerald Edelman (2000) says that, "consciousness can be considered a scientific subject and [that] it is not the sole province of philosophers." Consciousness exists and is now being broached scientifically.
Over the past decade or so, however, something has definitely changed in the relationship between studies of consciousness and the neurosciences. Scientists seem less afraid of addressing the subject unabashedly, several books by neuroscientists have appeared, new journals have been launched, and studies have been conducted in which consciousness was actually treated as an experimental parameter. (Edelman, 2000).
Whether to understand the interconnections of will, to understand the most basic facts in quantum theory, or to discover the beginnings of the Big Bang universe, each path leads to the fact that there must exist a supreme Consciousness out of which everything else springs. It is Consciousness that began everything, that grows matter into a universe of existence; it is Consciousness that unifies and constrains all of us as individual beings; it is Consciousness that orders space and time out of a chaos of random events. (Walker, 2000).
The "new" paradigm recognizes that intuition, in addition to our normal sensory perceptions, is a faculty of discrimination which can be developed. Reaching beyond the dialectic of conservatism and liberalism, the progressive approach is based in viewing human beings, not as discrete entities, but as deeply embedded in the fabric of the universe -- the same essence as the universe. The new vision is 'soulful' while not necessarily promoting a religious notion of soul. It sees each individual as a meaningful mind/body/spirit, a microcosm of the macrocosm. It is thus rooted not only in egalitarian natural law, but in state-of-the-art cosmology, which is one of the four pillars of metaphysics [5].
It is a radical departure from the conservative view of ourselves as mechanical bodies within a clockwork universe. In that well-established model we are characterized reductively as meaningless cogs in the machinery of the universe, perhaps a source of depression or ennui. The organic process of change (and life processes) is such that as soon as any form congeals, it also begins to breakdown (entropy), to move toward another form. If we examine the universe at its absolute scale (large or small for theoretic and empiricial structures) this is what we find. Old structure must break down before new structure can emerge. Therefore, some sort of 'emergency' often preceeds 'emergence.' This is true in paradigm shift, and it holds true in the organic healing process.
Just as traditional medicine identifies itself with the past through the Hippocratic Oath, this new orientation also draws on the ancient Greek and Egyptian healing cults and our collective taproot back into 50,000 years of shamanic healing culture. Like traditional physicians seek to identify themselves with the Hippocratic ideal, we can embody this paradigm, this philosophy, by embracing a worldview which is seemingly new, but older than history -- medical intuition or spirituality. Only its recent implimentation in modern healing arts is new. It doesn't negate or even supersede the Hippocratic orientation; in ancient Greece both the complementary methods of healing mind, body and spirit were part of the cult of Asklepios.
When conventional means failed, supplicants went to the dream temples to heal their psyches -- their souls -- they entered the Mysteries. These healing dreams (which were never "interpreted" or "analyzed") somehow mobilized the nonrational elements of being and healing often emerged. But the ancient notion of soul was not disembodied; it meant the whole psychophysical organism. Ancient Vedic healers based their treatment in the philosophy that the common essence of humankind and cosmos is consciousness. Altering that primal essence, consciousness, could change one's state of health and well-being. It isn't really a case of activating mind over matter, but mobilizing what undergirds both mind and matter.
What, essentially, is this consciousness of which we speak? Can it be more than our functional subjective awareness, our existential experience -- the result of perceptual input and self-referential internal processing? Consciousness involves the integration of information, not just a passive array of information itself. We might conjecture that what does the connecting to more dimensions is one or more of the known fields: electromagnetic, gravitational, strong nuclear force, and/or weak nuclear force.
Every atom and molecule has all those fields. So, if any of them infuse information into consciousness, there should be a constant flow of information from everywhere there are atoms and molecules, not just the brain. Some still argue that quantum information is local and personal. But perhaps consciousness is the very basis of materiality -- a neutral essence more fundamental than energy or matter -- more fundamental than microstates of the complex functioning of human wetware?
In another corner of the scientific universe, neuroscientists have been trying to close the gap between brain and mind, to show that consciousness is simply an emergent property arising from brain cells, whose behavior can be explained with chemistry, the grammar of molecules and atoms. The mind arises from the laws of matter. So while some scientists are trying to reduce matter to consciousness, others are trying to reduce consciousness to matter. (Johnson, 1995).
David Chalmers, the distinguished philosopher and author of the 1996 book The Conscious Mind, has proposed that consciousness, like energy and mass, is a fundmental property of the universe, and exists to varying degrees in all things. According to Chalmers, consciousness is a universal phenomenon ...However, modern science tells us that light is dead, photons are merely massless "things" -- waves or particles depending on the way you look at them. (Schwartz, 1999)
James Newell (2003) suggests that there may exist an Absolute Consciousness as a field that (1) is always everywhere, (2) integrates information in all brains, and (3) usally makes conscious in individual brains only individual information, but occasionally also non-individual information.
In "Three Paragims for Psychology," Dr. Arturo Aguilar (1998) argues for assigning scale to functional consciousness:
Much of the confusion which exists in contemporary psychology would be greatly diminished if an integration of the main paradigms were to take place. On the other hand, although classical physics is the model science, the concept of consciousness is not necessary for the satisfactory solution of physical problems, except in the field of quantum mechanics; but it may be indispensable for solving most of the psychological problems. What I am proposing is a conceptual metaphor which assumes that all psychological phenomena (i.e. the expressions of consciousness) must be studied from three simultaneous points of view or paradigms: physiological, behavioral and cognitive. . .each class of data should be methodologically treated according to its own corresponding paradigm. Thus, the existence of congruence or consistency between the three aspects of consciousness could be verified and confusing shifts between paradigms could be prevented. Also, locating the system of interest (e.g. emotion) within its proper level of scale (form or kind of consciousness) permits an unambiguous identification of its corresponding subsystems and appropriate context.
Stapp (1993) argues that on the basis of certain mathematical characteristics classical mechanics is not constitutionally suited to accommodate consciousness, whereas quantum mechanics is. These mathematical characteristics pertain to the nature of the information represented in the state of the brain, and the way this information enters into the dynamics. This opens up the interesting possibility of representing the mind/brain, within contemporary physical theory, as a combination of the thoughtlike and matterlike aspects of a neutral reality.
Classical mechanics arose from the banishment of consciousness from our conception of the physical universe. Hence it should not be surprising to find that the readmission of consciousness requires going beyond that theory. The exclusion of consciousness from the material universe was a hallmark of science for over two centuries. However, the shift, in the 1920's, from classical mechanics to quantum mechanics marked a break with that long tradition: it appeared that the only coherent way to incorporate quantum phenomena into the existing science was to admit also the human observer (Stapp, 1972).
But the recent resurgence of interest in the foundations of quantum theory has led increasingly to a focus on the crux of the problem, namely the need to understand the role of consciousness in the unfolding of physical reality. It has become clear that the revolution in our conception of matter wrought by quantum theory has completely altered the complexion of the problem of the relationship between mind and matter, (Stapp, 1995).
Western empirical descriptions of consciousness have been due largely to Descartes and Kant. William James and Hermann Weyl have also made important contributions. Consciousness studies is a relatively new field attempting to conduct credible theorizing and research on the topic. It often deals more with the functional aspects of consciousness, rather than its ontological status as a prime mover. But those engaged in the multidisciplinary field speculate on both.
It is often maintained that no-one can define consciousness but there exists a clear empirical description of consciousness as an observation of the space, time and content of our minds (where the content contains intuitions and feelings). Another alternative is to embrace what seems to be an infinity of parallel worlds where there is no need for an observer to reduce probability waves, as in the Many Worlds theories of Everett and Deutsch.
The "many worlds" or "parallel universes" version of quantum physics states that the observer, in observing is actually becoming a part of the observed by noticing and remembering what he or she experiences. If a quantum system is capable of being observed in one of several possible states, then when an observation occurs, the system enters all of these states and the observer's mind splits into a companion state associated with each possible physical state of the system, (Wolf, 2000).
The idealist approach emphasizes a different philosophical value:
In searching for the fundamental basis of physical reality and the nature of the mind, Goswami (1993) has defined consciousness as "the agency that affects quantum objects to make their behavior sensible." In choosing this criterion he hopes to show how mind can effect matter nonenergetically because they share the same essence.
By making the leap from a universe based on bits of matter, to one based in consciousness, he hopes to logically and coherently resolve some of the major paradoxes of physics. He suggests that instead of everything being made of atoms, everything is made of consciousness. If quantum objects are waves that spread in existence at more than one place, as QM has shown, then consciousness may be the agency that focuses the waves so we can observe them at one place. Goswami labels this philosophy, "monistic as opposed to dualistic, and it is idealism because ideas (not to be confused with ideals) and the consciousness of them are considered to be the basic elements of reality; matter is considered to be secondary." Mental phenomena such as self-consciousness, free will, creativity, and ESP are explained anew in this reformulation of the mind-body in a fresh context.
As in both the mystical view and holographic universe (such as that described by Bohm), there is only the dynamic play of one great webwork of existence (Bohm's holomovement). This unified movement, a dance of creation and annihilation, has intentionality. However, Goswami does not propose that consciousness is mind; they are different concepts. In monistic idealism, the consciousness of the subject in a subject-object experience is the same consciousness that is the ground of all being. Therefore, consciousness is unitive. The domain of potentia also exists in consciousness. Nothing is outside consciousness.
Buddha tells us that, "There is an Unborn, Unoriginated, Uncreated, Unformed. If there were not this Unborn, this Unoriginated, this Uncreated, this Unformed, escape from the world of the born, the originated, the created, the formed would not be possible ." But there is this essential ground, and it is possible to "escape" spacetime, according to Buddha.
If the brain-mind is itself an object in a nonlocal consciousness that encompasses all reality, then what we call objective empirical reality is within this consciousness. The one becomes many through self-reference, fragmentation into tangled hierarchies of self-iterating information. The trick is to distinguish between consciousness and awareness. In processes of which we are aware classical models prevail. When we consciously see, consciousness collapses the quantum state of the brain-mind. Unconscious processing does not effect collapse of the quantum wave-function, pinning down quantum entities to one reality. Thus, unconscious processing permits the expression of nonlocal phenomena. (Miller on Goswami)
Consciousness is all things in totality.
Consciousness is reality. Or, perhaps consciousness simply emerges as natural processes unfold, (Satinover, 2001; Layzer, 1990). As we've suggested, the countertheory to emergent evolution is radical reductionism, which asserts that all the properties of complex structure or process are implicit in its components, which is clearly untenable. Consciousness is certainly a reality central to being and accessible to intuition. It is not beyond perception, but rather the means of perception and apprehension. Maybe the claim that no-one can define consciousness is frustration at the fact that no-one can adequately explain "Consciousness," or "Matter," either, for that matter (Green, 2002). [6]
Of course, it would seem easy to assert that small-scale processes will be described quantum mechanically, and large-scale processes will be described classically. But large-scale processes are built up in some sense from small-scale processes, so there is a problem in showing how to reconcile the large-scale classical behavior with the small-scale quantum behavior. There's the rub! For quantum mechanics at the small scale simply does not lead to classical mechanics at the large scale. That is exactly the problem that has perplexed quantum physicists from the very beginning. (Stapp, 1995).
I have studied a good deal of the newer writings on consciousness and neuroscience as well as those on consciousness and physics and on consciousness and philosophy. In the end, I have thrown up my hands. Perhaps it is my own limitations, of course, but here's what I've concluded: I doubt we will ever be able to show that consciousness is a logically necessary accompaniment to any material process, however complex. The most that we can ever hope to show is that, empirically, processes of a certain kind and complexity appear to have it. Perhaps it is an intrinsic "quality" of matter, like mass. Maybe it's somehow related to the foundational nature of "information." In any event, I have found almost all the writings on this topic singularly confused, filled with the wishful biases of the writers' professions. (Satinover, 2001).
These wishful biases are the unconscious paradigms at work behind the scenes -- the tacit belief systems. In our modern world, science has become our god -- but one that is fallible, that has failed to address our soul and spirit. The medical profession, in lock-step, expunged soul and spirit from its practice in an attempt to separate itself definitively from religion, magic, and superstition.
Science has its own beliefs and superstitions, despite its claim to total objectivity. It has sought to eliminate the undeniable subjective factor of our existence -- that which yields our awareness, our very consciousness of what it means to be human. The old healing paradigm simply isn't in harmony with what modern physics tells us of nature and our own nature. And, physics is the cornerstone of science. Modern medicine can implant an artificial or substitute heart, but can it put the heart back into its own practice, heralding a rebirth of spiritual medicine?
Based on the medical anthropology of cave painting and shamanism literature, consciousness has been a central component of healing since the beginning of human history. Recently, western medicine has re-established a priority of consciousness studies because of the failure of modern linear science to arrest the health crisis. Transpersonal medicine has again established a foothold in healing arts. Generations of distrust in self-appointed charlatans have eroded and almost destroyed the curriculum of skills inherent in consciousness healing.
As students begin their educations into these ancient and contemporary skills, they do so under new criteria of being "scientific" if these skills are to earn their rightful place in a medical profession. Yet, the typical designs formulated on linear statistics do not apply to the non-linear characteristics of consciousness. The co-creative nature between consciousness and healing cannot be measured in three dimensions and innovative methodologies have to be developed with a full appreciation of scientific reasoning and the mysteries of healing. (Lawlis).
There is a crisis in the healing arts -- the kind of crisis that leads to paradigm shifts. It is new meaning that changes what we think and believe, as well as our physical experience of the world, both personally and globally. It helps us turn possibilities into realities even though that is often not easy. Crisis science - as described by Kuhn - requires a fundamental criticism of the old paradigm and its meaningfulness. Barrow's Constants of Nature shows that (so-called) paradigm shifts are generally widening and deepenings of existing theories.
The Holistic perspective is such an existing theory undergoing a widening and deepening of its applications. We know intuitively that we are integral to nature, and yet our Western ideology tells us that our consciousness makes us crucially different -- controllers manipulating a largely unconscious world. As scientists and artists we hold up a mirror to nature. Even our creative arts reflect the deep structure of matter and foretell the possibilities for recreating society from the same impulses that share our creativity.
The same powers of creativity that gave birth to the universe and unfolding forms of the natural world are present and reflected in the human mind and imagination. Creativity in nature and mind manifests its power through "authentic exchange," nuances of operations emerging from creative center. In these exchanges, the kinds of emergent self-organization described in complexity takes place, leading to the power of "collective creativity." One manifestation of this is the power to remold our social institutions including the healing arts.
Progressive Medicine and Healing Arts in the 21st Century
by Iona Miller,
Institute for Consciousness Science and Technology, 2003
1. Introduction;
2. New Physics and the Emergent Healing Paradigm;
3. Embodying the Paradigm; 4. Scientific Revolutions;
5. Metaphysical Research Programs; Appendix, Notes, References
Abstract: All new scientific theories require some unifying idea, and that idea is, by definition, metaphysical -- essentially untestable. New positivism denies the existence of any metaphysical questions, therefore, it cannot be an ultimately satisfactory philosophical solution. Thus, in any metaphysical dispute, strong non-scientific arguments can propose new theories. Further, metaphysical disputes may also become scientific. There can be little doubt that speculative, metaphysical ideas have contributed much to the growth of knowledge. Today's heresies are tomorrow's dogmas. There is a strong intuitive feeling among many healthcare practitioners that we need a new paradigm to undergird treatment philosophy and therapeutic frameworks -- "metasyn" not just medicine.
A holistic Emergent Healing Paradigm is proposed rooted in relativity, quantum, holographic and chaos theories -- our models of nature's own forms of self-organization. It is suggested that emergent healing depends on nonlocal principles and self-organization, as well as on direct causal influences on the mindbody of the organism. It is further suggested that the interactive field present in the healing situation can be amplified intentionally through resonant feedback -- therapeutic entrainment -- to facilitate intervention in the psychophysical healing process. A metaphysical context is provided to justify such a paradigm shift from the purely causal mechanistic healing model. A viable research direction is indicated by examining cosmology, the role of the human family, epistemology, and a mode of ethical reasoning.
Each of us can learn to balance and optimize inner growth, intimacy, physical and spiritual health -- to discover emergence beyond our emergencies.
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"The main reason for healing is love." --~Paracelsus
"[Y]ou ought not to attempt to cure the eyes without the head, nor the head without the body, so neither ought you to attempt to cure the body without the soul. ... [T]he cure of many diseases is unknown to the physicians of Hellas, because they disregard the whole, which ought to be studied also, for the part can never be well unless the whole is well." --Plato: Charmides 156e
"[Though] the "clockwork universe" of Newton, Laplace, and Descartes has long been descredited by physicists, its vestiges linger on in the extant thinking of institutions, bureaucracies, economies, universities, software development methodologies, and general zeitgeist." --Munnecke
"All the biologicals are converting chaos to beautiful order. All biology is antientropic. Of all the disorder to order converters, the human mind is by far the most impressive. The human's most powerful metaphysical drive is to understand, to order, to sort out, and rearrange in ever more orderly and understandably constructive ways. You find then that man's true function is metaphysical." --Buckminster Fuller
1. Introduction
Today's heresies are tomorrow's dogmas. History has shown this time and again, and the history of science is no exception. That is why our culture has developed a system of academic checks and balances. What used to be called natural philosophy has become our allegedly objective science. We have had science less than 500 years, yet in that time it has transformed much of the world technologically, intellectually and physically. It is inherent in our nature to seek answers to life's fundamental questions: Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going?
Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that investigates principles of reality, transcending those of any particular science. It traditionally includes cosmology, ontology and speculative philosophy. Cosmology is the general philosophy of the universe considered as a totality of its parts and phenomena subject to laws -- the origin, nature and structure of the universe. Ontology is the study of being -- that branch of metaphysics which deals with the philosophical theory of reality, universal characteristics of all reality.
Epistemology relates to "how we know what we know." This branch of philosophy critically investigates the nature, grounds, limits, and criteria of any particular theory of cognition. It helps us analyze facts, thought processes and value-judgments.
The philosophy of science criticizes the "rules of the game" of science, methodological questions. Science is an experimental philosophy whose highest value is empiricism; it includes both theoretical and experimental avenues. This includes the science of medicine and the healing arts. The apparently "new" healing paradigm, which has been under discussion some 30 years or more, is actually a treatment philosophy, rooted in a worldview emerging from our current understanding of the nature of Reality. Like all things paradigms have momentum.
The search for truth in science is sometimes compromised by ideologies. Thus, "truth" is often defined from the perspective of utility or "value," often, for example, determining what gets funded. Truth can be protected by a bodyguard of lies. History suggests that often "objectivity" is well-agreed upon subjective experience. But even subjectivity suggests there is a subject. But our minds encompass all possible perception -- both intuitive and scientific. Still, it is problematical to investigate something that is transcendental to the mind, perception, and our physical embodiment. At this level of abstract speculation (the source of space, time, awareneness, matter), there is no assurance of grabbing onto anything solid, and we start to lose our grip on anything approaching meaning.
So it falls to metaphysics and paradigms to provide the ultimate narratives for the roots of such fundamental processes as the potential for cosmic evolution of forms of energy or matter-energy, the reality of time as cosmic change, the expansion of space, the natural evolution of life, and awareness. As we "unpack" these paradigms we reach a level of atomically unbound energy waves wherein neither molecules nor atoms can form from the quickly appearing and disappearing subatomic flux of particles. We have nothing to hold onto conceptually -- neither "somethings" of which to be aware nor "somethings" to be aware with, in order to focus and limit awareness into conscious minds. Matter, too, originates in unbound energy.
Just like proto-mind, proto-matter is that same "sea of potential energy." In that sea is the potential for both what will be drawn into form as experience and what will be drawn into experience as form. The source of matter and mind is ONE "[non]thing." Well, maybe: but because of the nature of language and reality, we cannot speak or even think of a "single-aspect monism" without creating more aspects in the process.
Understanding of the entire world beyond our own minds is a model based on the evidence of the senses. Much of it is necessarily based on extrapolation.
The problem is, in order to lay the groundwork for a fresh multidisciplinary theoretical framework, we have to explain the philosophical background to the scientists, the scientific background to the philosophers, both to the physical and mental healthcare professionals. In terms of treatment applications, pyschology must be explained to all of the above, and to interested lay-people as well. It is plausible to say that the main goal of psychotherapy is to enlarge the consciousness field modifying both aspects of "meaning" and "energy" (Koreck, 1998).
The wonderful thing about feedback is that all interested parties can, in return, explain it back in their own words, from their own experience and comprehension. By sharing how we have confronted and are resolving these issues in our own practices and disciplines we can contribute to the dialogue. So, we hope to develop some common language and metaphors to bridge the gaps.
Many times truth is defined from the perspective of utility or "value" in science, not objectivity. Objectivity is often well-agreed upon subjective experience, and this can determine, for example, what projects are funded. However, mind is all possible perception -- both intuitive and "scientific." There is a whole spectrum of response even among those sympathic to the holistic perspective, some more conceptually radical than others.
Hence, we've received such comments, (reflecting the effort to integrate a new perspective), as the following:
From a British surgeon: " From what I have read it is exactly the new paradigm which I am currently 'blossoming' into an understanding of for myself. It has been a long journey from studying neuroscience and then being a surgeon and I have little clue how to move forwards on a career level just yet, but it is coming for me."
From a Jungian-trained counselor working with at-risk teens: " The upshot is they do not approve of/understand the dynamic of the way I handle my kids by "being with" them instead of "doing to" them. They see our job (within the medical framework) as being one of "fixing" broken little people. I see my job as getting "along side" young psyches so that I can help them to "fix" themselves. . .Anyway, my point is, the "medical model" that we are working to change actually says more about the evolutionary level of those who hold it than it does about Truth. And I know that I just restated the obvious, but for me, this is a huge chunk of information that I am finally beginning to positively internalize. "
From a Chiropractor working with Energy Medicine: " The major problem with doing research on the energy medicine practitioner’s ability to detect the patient’s or client’s energy is that the “feeling” of the patient’s energy experienced by the practitioner is not as objective as many in the energy medicine field would like to believe. . . What one feels is dependent on what one is looking for and one’s belief system. This process can be very dynamic as when moving and following a patient’s energy in the field around their body. . .When the practitioner’s intention, as an energy or quantum informational or mind-stuff pattern, resonates with the information received from the patient via the non-local connection, this resonance can be felt or sensed by the practitioner. . . It is this resonance in the practitioner’s own mind and body that is sensed, not any direct energy from the patient. It is a process of finding the “best fit” within the practitioner’s conceptual model to what is happening in the patient based on the information unconsciously received from the patient. It is not an objective process and it is self-confirming. Almost any conceptual model will “work” in the sense of eliciting resonance feedback to the practitioner. Because a healing system works in this context it is not conformational evidence that it is correct.
However, the fact that a resonance response is elicited implies the therapy, in some manner of action, has therapeutic value. The quote from Neils Bohr applies here, "what we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” When working face to face with the patient, the patient essentially serves as a testing model for himself or herself. For some practitioners this resonance is easier to sense if the process of sensing it is unconsciously coupled to some physical action by the practitioner. The unconscious informational processing that occurs tends to optimize the therapy regardless of the practitioner's belief. "
From a Russian physicist: " Of all the intent-mediated phenomena we are aware of, there is no doubt that self-healing carries the most significant potential, or that (fortunately) it is the closest to becoming integrated into our medical system, thanks to decades of research into the body's neuroimmunologic and electromagnetic control mechanisms. While the substrate of the biofield may continue to defy intuitive understanding for decades to come, we are at the moment in a position to focus quite effectively on the principles regulating psychosomatic modulation and even bioinformation resonance between proximal systems (Gotovski, 2000; Sidorov, 2001). But it is doubtful that we will make meaningful progress along this path until we come up with a working (experimentally-friendly) definition of consciousness - and the great mystery of consciousness is, of course, its apparent non-locality."
From an Indian physicist: "No doubt that functional consciousness is important. But what I mean is that even though functions are based on consciousness they are untouched with it. And so, they are only functional appearances on the existence of consciousness. This follows from the property of consciousness as the singularity. In this new interpretation of singularity as consciousness, paradoxes like '[singularity as] the doorway to other universes,' etc. do not arise. Mind, universe, matter, energy, etc., are just appearances on the existence of consciousness which is again untouched by all the above. And so, everything should be 'apparently' originating from there. Therefore, even though consciousness is present in our reality, this reality is not there in consciousness. Consciousness is existence, our reality is an appearance. There are no achievements implied here. The property of singular consciousness remains whether we achieve the synthesis or not. Singular consciousness denies all schools of thought. . .When singular consciousness exists, the zero to the universe remains as a mere appearance. I have been drawing attention to the ignored singularity or consciousness to physicists from Profs. Amit Goswami to J. A. Wheeler. Responses have been varying from surprise, support, agreement to ignoring."
As we move into the 21st century we need to evaluate and revision how much of this new paradigm we have been able to implement, not merely conceptualize. As scientists, medical personnel, psychotherapists, pastoral, or alternative healers and counselors, the therapeutic framework becomes essential in determining where we go from here. Many people have a new sense of the importance of integrating spiritual principles with the material world.
Is it too much to ask that we address our infirmities at multiple levels, mobilizing not only medical technology but also the natural healing processes which foster our physical and mental well-being, as well as our spiritual health? Can we ever look forward to a wellness industry? The whole problem is also compounded by dynamic political forces and economic power struggles. All providers vie competitively for their share of the healthcare "pie."
We need metamorphosis, a new foundational vision, a new synthesis -- "metasyn" as well as medicine. Ancient philosophers equated the First Matter with the universal solvent, which dissolves all misconceptions, and called this immediate transformative comprehension the panacea , or Universal Medicine. Who is to say they were wrong in their apparently simple yet profound formulation?
What is at stake is whether, when seeking mental or physical healing, we will continue to promote and be treated by a healthcare industry under a mechanistic paradigm, or, in the healing arts under a holistic paradigm consistent with new science. We have to make science accountable to life. We are much more than a bag of skin containing a biochemical stew. Energy medicine has revealed that we are complex electromagnetic and possibly bioholographic entities. Our apparent skin boundary is quite permeable to these fields. Surely our minds are not confined to our brains, but permeate our psychophysical self in dynamic relationship with the environment.
In the new vision, we perceive ourselves holistically as complex adaptive organisms -- physical, emotional, mental and spiritual -- in intimate interaction with our surroundings. If anything, science has taught us that we need a more subtle conception of what is objectively real than materialism has given us. Something far richer than materialism is responsible for the universe as we know it. In every sense we are seamlessly welded with Cosmos, but we often lose sight of this basic fact, and immerse ourselves in illusions of separateness, of fragmentation. This is the source of existential alienation. The degree of our sense of separation is reflected in our worldview. It basically boils down to whether we see the world as a hostile or friendly place, where we can authentically express ourselves, thrive and flourish, or not.
Conscious or unconscious, each of us has a more-or-less coherent, all-inclusive frame of reference, our subjective view of the world and the sum of our experience. This philosophy of life includes life-giving elements, such as identity, an ethical base, and values which give meaning to our existence. We each grow up within an unconscious totalistic fabric, a naive inherited framework, which remains largely unsynthesized. But we must labor to produce our own unique, personal, and successful worldview that is internally consistent, pragmatically realistic, and personally fulfilling. In ancient times, this essentially spiritual quest was referred to as The Great Work. Jung called it individuation.
This personal synthesis helps us adapt or individuate and perhaps even self-actualize high well-being, or even extraordinary human potential. This comprehensive synthesis is mirrored in synoptic philosophy, which helps us fit the pieces of life into the whole mental jigsaw puzzle. Synoptic philosophy helps us achieve an all-inclusive view of our subject matter, seeing all parts in relationship to one another. To a greater or lesser degree, it erases the mental barriers that separate branches of knowledge in a holistic vision. Taken together, the personal synthesis of a holistic experiential worldview and the cultural synthesis symbolized by the synoptic wheel [1] is what we refer to here, in shorthand, as "metasyn."
This open-ended philosophic journey has certain milestones:
1). When you have any philosophical question proceed as far as possible with philosophical analysis, clarifying and drawing out all the hidden meanings that you can, dissolving the problem completely if possible.
2). If not, find out what philosophers of the past have thought about the problem.
3). Rephrasing the question in a variety of meaningful ways helps reveal what kinds of information will help solve it.
4). Develop an intuition for asking and reasking questions from different angles until they point to the data that illuminates them.
5). What fields most likely contain information related to the problem? Begin by asking questions about the problem and how it might connect one by one, to the various fields.
6). Go to these promising fields and gather information, looking for conclusions, hypotheses, and models currently used by field specialists. Keep asking questions relating the data to your central problem and cross-relating insights and drawing parallels from these fields themselves.
7). Network and integrate these insights refocusing new ideas on the initial problem to see what understanding and creative insights emerge. Weave these illuminative strands together into a glowing tapestry.
So, to envision our new paradigm we have to paint a multidisciplinary picture. We will draw on philosophy, physics, psychology, medicine, genetics, biology, politics, religion, anthropology, ecology, astronomy, geometry, mathematics, computer theory, economics, the humanities and the arts for our metaphors -- for our vocabulary -- to frame and reframe our questions.
Paradigms underlie the interplay of chaos and order in human culture, at the collective and individual level. They act as lenses through which all sensory data passes before it is experienced as perception. Some perceptions arrive relatively undisturbed while others are subject to immediate characterization and personal value-judgements. The nature of paradigms is such that those who embrace one of the seven typical viewpoints of the paradigm spectrum [2] are loath to listen to the arguments of those who embrace a different viewpoint, either more or less progressive. They don't have any common ground to serve as a basis for envisioning, reasoning, understanding, or intuition.
The established order, materialism, is entrenched at one end of this imaginal spectrum. Descarte argued for an absolute distinction between mental and material substance, institutionalizing the mind-body problem. Some materialistic positions go as far as denying any ontological or epistemic validity to consciousness, neither recognizing nor explaning anything beyond the functioning of brain circuits (Edelman, 2000). Other materialistic positions insist that although consciousness is generated by physical events in the brain, it is not reduced to them, but emerges from them.
Open-ended visions of an ideal world bracket the far end of the philosophical spectrum. In the polarization of materialism and idealism, all of reality consists of ideas and there is no "material substance" at all. By taking mind as the starting point, idealistic philosophies must take pains to explain matter in their theoretical framework. In this model blank awareness can be equated with the idea of potential energy, and matter is in some sense sentient or intelligent while conforming to the mathematical foundations of physics [3]. Could our experienced reality be a combination of our individual mental creations and some greater Mind's creations, or as some mystics have called it Universal Mind? [4].
The observer is entangled inseparably with the universe. The span in-between represents the dynamic interplay of chaos and order as old forms break down and new forms emerge. Nature's psychogenic forces manifest in localized quantum consciousness, where subjective and objective are in some sense unified, yet physically based. Most scientists themselves agree that pure materialism is untenable.
But flaws in the materialistic paradigm of science have appeared in recent years. These flaws have grown to a gaping rent, torn across the whole fabric of the materialistic conception of reality. Strained by the conflicts between Einstein and Bohr over the ultimate meaning of quantum mechanics, subjected to further stress in Bell's Theorem, and finally ripped through in recent tests by Aspect in France, the whole cloth of the materialistic picture of reality must now be rejected. (Walker, 2000).
But what are our other options? Reactionaries always find some opponents to struggle against; if an old opponent disappears, they quickly find new ones. Those vested in a conservative perspective are resistant to admitting new or contradictory evidence into their fundamental belief-system. Moderates, or centrists, are generally content with the status quo. Liberals lock in a struggle against conservatism, often to the detriment of formulating their next step forward. Progressives tend to be visionary and/or revolutionary. This is true whether the arena is politics, science, religion, the arts, or wellness. When an old model becomes untenable and crisis ensues, a revolution occurs -- again whether in new paradigm science or new paradigm politics.
The progressive paradigm is holistic and founded in the position that consciousness is a fundamental element of existence. Consciousness is a process not an object. Many physicists now hold this theoretical framework or view of reality (Walker, 2000; Goswami, 1993, 2001; Wolf, 1996; Bohm, 1980). In A Universe of Consciousness , Nobel Laureate, Gerald Edelman (2000) says that, "consciousness can be considered a scientific subject and [that] it is not the sole province of philosophers." Consciousness exists and is now being broached scientifically.
Over the past decade or so, however, something has definitely changed in the relationship between studies of consciousness and the neurosciences. Scientists seem less afraid of addressing the subject unabashedly, several books by neuroscientists have appeared, new journals have been launched, and studies have been conducted in which consciousness was actually treated as an experimental parameter. (Edelman, 2000).
Whether to understand the interconnections of will, to understand the most basic facts in quantum theory, or to discover the beginnings of the Big Bang universe, each path leads to the fact that there must exist a supreme Consciousness out of which everything else springs. It is Consciousness that began everything, that grows matter into a universe of existence; it is Consciousness that unifies and constrains all of us as individual beings; it is Consciousness that orders space and time out of a chaos of random events. (Walker, 2000).
The "new" paradigm recognizes that intuition, in addition to our normal sensory perceptions, is a faculty of discrimination which can be developed. Reaching beyond the dialectic of conservatism and liberalism, the progressive approach is based in viewing human beings, not as discrete entities, but as deeply embedded in the fabric of the universe -- the same essence as the universe. The new vision is 'soulful' while not necessarily promoting a religious notion of soul. It sees each individual as a meaningful mind/body/spirit, a microcosm of the macrocosm. It is thus rooted not only in egalitarian natural law, but in state-of-the-art cosmology, which is one of the four pillars of metaphysics [5].
It is a radical departure from the conservative view of ourselves as mechanical bodies within a clockwork universe. In that well-established model we are characterized reductively as meaningless cogs in the machinery of the universe, perhaps a source of depression or ennui. The organic process of change (and life processes) is such that as soon as any form congeals, it also begins to breakdown (entropy), to move toward another form. If we examine the universe at its absolute scale (large or small for theoretic and empiricial structures) this is what we find. Old structure must break down before new structure can emerge. Therefore, some sort of 'emergency' often preceeds 'emergence.' This is true in paradigm shift, and it holds true in the organic healing process.
Just as traditional medicine identifies itself with the past through the Hippocratic Oath, this new orientation also draws on the ancient Greek and Egyptian healing cults and our collective taproot back into 50,000 years of shamanic healing culture. Like traditional physicians seek to identify themselves with the Hippocratic ideal, we can embody this paradigm, this philosophy, by embracing a worldview which is seemingly new, but older than history -- medical intuition or spirituality. Only its recent implimentation in modern healing arts is new. It doesn't negate or even supersede the Hippocratic orientation; in ancient Greece both the complementary methods of healing mind, body and spirit were part of the cult of Asklepios.
When conventional means failed, supplicants went to the dream temples to heal their psyches -- their souls -- they entered the Mysteries. These healing dreams (which were never "interpreted" or "analyzed") somehow mobilized the nonrational elements of being and healing often emerged. But the ancient notion of soul was not disembodied; it meant the whole psychophysical organism. Ancient Vedic healers based their treatment in the philosophy that the common essence of humankind and cosmos is consciousness. Altering that primal essence, consciousness, could change one's state of health and well-being. It isn't really a case of activating mind over matter, but mobilizing what undergirds both mind and matter.
What, essentially, is this consciousness of which we speak? Can it be more than our functional subjective awareness, our existential experience -- the result of perceptual input and self-referential internal processing? Consciousness involves the integration of information, not just a passive array of information itself. We might conjecture that what does the connecting to more dimensions is one or more of the known fields: electromagnetic, gravitational, strong nuclear force, and/or weak nuclear force.
Every atom and molecule has all those fields. So, if any of them infuse information into consciousness, there should be a constant flow of information from everywhere there are atoms and molecules, not just the brain. Some still argue that quantum information is local and personal. But perhaps consciousness is the very basis of materiality -- a neutral essence more fundamental than energy or matter -- more fundamental than microstates of the complex functioning of human wetware?
In another corner of the scientific universe, neuroscientists have been trying to close the gap between brain and mind, to show that consciousness is simply an emergent property arising from brain cells, whose behavior can be explained with chemistry, the grammar of molecules and atoms. The mind arises from the laws of matter. So while some scientists are trying to reduce matter to consciousness, others are trying to reduce consciousness to matter. (Johnson, 1995).
David Chalmers, the distinguished philosopher and author of the 1996 book The Conscious Mind, has proposed that consciousness, like energy and mass, is a fundmental property of the universe, and exists to varying degrees in all things. According to Chalmers, consciousness is a universal phenomenon ...However, modern science tells us that light is dead, photons are merely massless "things" -- waves or particles depending on the way you look at them. (Schwartz, 1999)
James Newell (2003) suggests that there may exist an Absolute Consciousness as a field that (1) is always everywhere, (2) integrates information in all brains, and (3) usally makes conscious in individual brains only individual information, but occasionally also non-individual information.
In "Three Paragims for Psychology," Dr. Arturo Aguilar (1998) argues for assigning scale to functional consciousness:
Much of the confusion which exists in contemporary psychology would be greatly diminished if an integration of the main paradigms were to take place. On the other hand, although classical physics is the model science, the concept of consciousness is not necessary for the satisfactory solution of physical problems, except in the field of quantum mechanics; but it may be indispensable for solving most of the psychological problems. What I am proposing is a conceptual metaphor which assumes that all psychological phenomena (i.e. the expressions of consciousness) must be studied from three simultaneous points of view or paradigms: physiological, behavioral and cognitive. . .each class of data should be methodologically treated according to its own corresponding paradigm. Thus, the existence of congruence or consistency between the three aspects of consciousness could be verified and confusing shifts between paradigms could be prevented. Also, locating the system of interest (e.g. emotion) within its proper level of scale (form or kind of consciousness) permits an unambiguous identification of its corresponding subsystems and appropriate context.
Stapp (1993) argues that on the basis of certain mathematical characteristics classical mechanics is not constitutionally suited to accommodate consciousness, whereas quantum mechanics is. These mathematical characteristics pertain to the nature of the information represented in the state of the brain, and the way this information enters into the dynamics. This opens up the interesting possibility of representing the mind/brain, within contemporary physical theory, as a combination of the thoughtlike and matterlike aspects of a neutral reality.
Classical mechanics arose from the banishment of consciousness from our conception of the physical universe. Hence it should not be surprising to find that the readmission of consciousness requires going beyond that theory. The exclusion of consciousness from the material universe was a hallmark of science for over two centuries. However, the shift, in the 1920's, from classical mechanics to quantum mechanics marked a break with that long tradition: it appeared that the only coherent way to incorporate quantum phenomena into the existing science was to admit also the human observer (Stapp, 1972).
But the recent resurgence of interest in the foundations of quantum theory has led increasingly to a focus on the crux of the problem, namely the need to understand the role of consciousness in the unfolding of physical reality. It has become clear that the revolution in our conception of matter wrought by quantum theory has completely altered the complexion of the problem of the relationship between mind and matter, (Stapp, 1995).
Western empirical descriptions of consciousness have been due largely to Descartes and Kant. William James and Hermann Weyl have also made important contributions. Consciousness studies is a relatively new field attempting to conduct credible theorizing and research on the topic. It often deals more with the functional aspects of consciousness, rather than its ontological status as a prime mover. But those engaged in the multidisciplinary field speculate on both.
It is often maintained that no-one can define consciousness but there exists a clear empirical description of consciousness as an observation of the space, time and content of our minds (where the content contains intuitions and feelings). Another alternative is to embrace what seems to be an infinity of parallel worlds where there is no need for an observer to reduce probability waves, as in the Many Worlds theories of Everett and Deutsch.
The "many worlds" or "parallel universes" version of quantum physics states that the observer, in observing is actually becoming a part of the observed by noticing and remembering what he or she experiences. If a quantum system is capable of being observed in one of several possible states, then when an observation occurs, the system enters all of these states and the observer's mind splits into a companion state associated with each possible physical state of the system, (Wolf, 2000).
The idealist approach emphasizes a different philosophical value:
In searching for the fundamental basis of physical reality and the nature of the mind, Goswami (1993) has defined consciousness as "the agency that affects quantum objects to make their behavior sensible." In choosing this criterion he hopes to show how mind can effect matter nonenergetically because they share the same essence.
By making the leap from a universe based on bits of matter, to one based in consciousness, he hopes to logically and coherently resolve some of the major paradoxes of physics. He suggests that instead of everything being made of atoms, everything is made of consciousness. If quantum objects are waves that spread in existence at more than one place, as QM has shown, then consciousness may be the agency that focuses the waves so we can observe them at one place. Goswami labels this philosophy, "monistic as opposed to dualistic, and it is idealism because ideas (not to be confused with ideals) and the consciousness of them are considered to be the basic elements of reality; matter is considered to be secondary." Mental phenomena such as self-consciousness, free will, creativity, and ESP are explained anew in this reformulation of the mind-body in a fresh context.
As in both the mystical view and holographic universe (such as that described by Bohm), there is only the dynamic play of one great webwork of existence (Bohm's holomovement). This unified movement, a dance of creation and annihilation, has intentionality. However, Goswami does not propose that consciousness is mind; they are different concepts. In monistic idealism, the consciousness of the subject in a subject-object experience is the same consciousness that is the ground of all being. Therefore, consciousness is unitive. The domain of potentia also exists in consciousness. Nothing is outside consciousness.
Buddha tells us that, "There is an Unborn, Unoriginated, Uncreated, Unformed. If there were not this Unborn, this Unoriginated, this Uncreated, this Unformed, escape from the world of the born, the originated, the created, the formed would not be possible ." But there is this essential ground, and it is possible to "escape" spacetime, according to Buddha.
If the brain-mind is itself an object in a nonlocal consciousness that encompasses all reality, then what we call objective empirical reality is within this consciousness. The one becomes many through self-reference, fragmentation into tangled hierarchies of self-iterating information. The trick is to distinguish between consciousness and awareness. In processes of which we are aware classical models prevail. When we consciously see, consciousness collapses the quantum state of the brain-mind. Unconscious processing does not effect collapse of the quantum wave-function, pinning down quantum entities to one reality. Thus, unconscious processing permits the expression of nonlocal phenomena. (Miller on Goswami)
Consciousness is all things in totality.
Consciousness is reality. Or, perhaps consciousness simply emerges as natural processes unfold, (Satinover, 2001; Layzer, 1990). As we've suggested, the countertheory to emergent evolution is radical reductionism, which asserts that all the properties of complex structure or process are implicit in its components, which is clearly untenable. Consciousness is certainly a reality central to being and accessible to intuition. It is not beyond perception, but rather the means of perception and apprehension. Maybe the claim that no-one can define consciousness is frustration at the fact that no-one can adequately explain "Consciousness," or "Matter," either, for that matter (Green, 2002). [6]
Of course, it would seem easy to assert that small-scale processes will be described quantum mechanically, and large-scale processes will be described classically. But large-scale processes are built up in some sense from small-scale processes, so there is a problem in showing how to reconcile the large-scale classical behavior with the small-scale quantum behavior. There's the rub! For quantum mechanics at the small scale simply does not lead to classical mechanics at the large scale. That is exactly the problem that has perplexed quantum physicists from the very beginning. (Stapp, 1995).
I have studied a good deal of the newer writings on consciousness and neuroscience as well as those on consciousness and physics and on consciousness and philosophy. In the end, I have thrown up my hands. Perhaps it is my own limitations, of course, but here's what I've concluded: I doubt we will ever be able to show that consciousness is a logically necessary accompaniment to any material process, however complex. The most that we can ever hope to show is that, empirically, processes of a certain kind and complexity appear to have it. Perhaps it is an intrinsic "quality" of matter, like mass. Maybe it's somehow related to the foundational nature of "information." In any event, I have found almost all the writings on this topic singularly confused, filled with the wishful biases of the writers' professions. (Satinover, 2001).
These wishful biases are the unconscious paradigms at work behind the scenes -- the tacit belief systems. In our modern world, science has become our god -- but one that is fallible, that has failed to address our soul and spirit. The medical profession, in lock-step, expunged soul and spirit from its practice in an attempt to separate itself definitively from religion, magic, and superstition.
Science has its own beliefs and superstitions, despite its claim to total objectivity. It has sought to eliminate the undeniable subjective factor of our existence -- that which yields our awareness, our very consciousness of what it means to be human. The old healing paradigm simply isn't in harmony with what modern physics tells us of nature and our own nature. And, physics is the cornerstone of science. Modern medicine can implant an artificial or substitute heart, but can it put the heart back into its own practice, heralding a rebirth of spiritual medicine?
Based on the medical anthropology of cave painting and shamanism literature, consciousness has been a central component of healing since the beginning of human history. Recently, western medicine has re-established a priority of consciousness studies because of the failure of modern linear science to arrest the health crisis. Transpersonal medicine has again established a foothold in healing arts. Generations of distrust in self-appointed charlatans have eroded and almost destroyed the curriculum of skills inherent in consciousness healing.
As students begin their educations into these ancient and contemporary skills, they do so under new criteria of being "scientific" if these skills are to earn their rightful place in a medical profession. Yet, the typical designs formulated on linear statistics do not apply to the non-linear characteristics of consciousness. The co-creative nature between consciousness and healing cannot be measured in three dimensions and innovative methodologies have to be developed with a full appreciation of scientific reasoning and the mysteries of healing. (Lawlis).
There is a crisis in the healing arts -- the kind of crisis that leads to paradigm shifts. It is new meaning that changes what we think and believe, as well as our physical experience of the world, both personally and globally. It helps us turn possibilities into realities even though that is often not easy. Crisis science - as described by Kuhn - requires a fundamental criticism of the old paradigm and its meaningfulness. Barrow's Constants of Nature shows that (so-called) paradigm shifts are generally widening and deepenings of existing theories.
The Holistic perspective is such an existing theory undergoing a widening and deepening of its applications. We know intuitively that we are integral to nature, and yet our Western ideology tells us that our consciousness makes us crucially different -- controllers manipulating a largely unconscious world. As scientists and artists we hold up a mirror to nature. Even our creative arts reflect the deep structure of matter and foretell the possibilities for recreating society from the same impulses that share our creativity.
The same powers of creativity that gave birth to the universe and unfolding forms of the natural world are present and reflected in the human mind and imagination. Creativity in nature and mind manifests its power through "authentic exchange," nuances of operations emerging from creative center. In these exchanges, the kinds of emergent self-organization described in complexity takes place, leading to the power of "collective creativity." One manifestation of this is the power to remold our social institutions including the healing arts.
Soma Sophia
CONNECTIVE TISSUE 2005
MindBody Therapy: 6,117 words
CONNECTIVE TISSUE
SOMA SOPHIA
Body Wisdom, Creativity & Psychic Energy
By Iona Miller, 10-2005
“Unless bodies lose their corporeal state and unless bodies assume again their corporeal state, that which is desired will not be attained.”
~ Byzantine fragment, The Philosophical Egg
"The borders of our minds are ever shifting and many minds can flow into one another ... and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy" ~ William Butler Yeats
"The only truly natural and real human unity is the spirit of the Earth. . . .The sense of Earth is the irresistable pressure which will come at the right moment to unite them (humankind) in a common passion." ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
“Light and matter both behave like separate particles and also like waves. This . . . obliged us to abandon, on the plane of atomic magnitudes, a causal description of nature in the ordinary space-time system, and in its place to set up invisible fields of probability in multidimensional spaces.” ~ Wolfgang Pauli, Physicist
The Triple Union
We are truly psychophysical beings, composed of bodymind and spirit. Arguably, Carl Jung (1911) was among the first to apply the recognized concepts of physical energy to show that libido, or psychic energy obeys the same laws and is not only analogous, but identical. Psychophysical and emotional energy is associated with instinctual biological drives.
Though psychic energy is neutral, it can be literalized, somatized, sexualized, emotionalized, socialized, mentalized, or spiritualized. Symptoms, thoughts, images, fantasies, beliefs, emotions, forms of expression or behavior are all libidinal. Libido tends to flow inward or outward, a dynamic rhythm of introversion/extroversion. Jung attributed mana or personal power for a kind of shamanic or positive psychic contagion to those individuals who seem to have a charismatic influence on others.
Psychic energy tends to follow the same laws of physical conservation and entropy. Jung taught that within the psyche, libido: (1) creates entropy, (2) is generally conserved under the principle of equivalence, (3) flows through the psyche in channels that can be redirected, (4) can be either progressive or regressive, and (5) is transformed by symbols. In short, the psyche as, defined by Jung, is a complex system.
New physics, chaos theory, synergetics, and information theory describe our existence as complex dynamical systems. Entropy can only occur in system that is absolutely closed so no energy from outside can be fed into it. But the psyche is an open system, which exchanges energy and information with its environment and can be negentropic.
We can also have a negentropic influence on one another (Gladwell), perturbing, enlarging, creating new pathways and possibilities. Theoretically, behavior can ripple outward until a critical mass or "tipping point" is reached, changing the world. Gladwell's thesis that ideas, products, messages and behaviors "spread just like viruses do" remains a metaphor. Yet, highly sociable or connective people often become revolutionary leaders, bringing others together with a new perspective, a broadened worldview.
Life includes chaos and order, good and bad experiences, even catastrophes that require us to adapt or die. The important thing is how we meet and react to chaos, finding ways to replenish our depletion. Observation of the subquantal domain reveals an inexhaustible realm of negentropy from which we can draw our psychophysical sustenance. When healthy, our entire system is designed to reduce entropy, in different scales and domains.
The same is true for the superorganism of society. We are irreducibly entangled with one another and the environment. We are healthy only to the extent we resonate with our environment. We maintain our integrity and identity as a dissipative system only because we are open to flows of energy, matter, or information from our environment (Prigogine & Stengers, 1984).
We live in a persistent delusion of separateness. However, we are all nonlocally connected in an ill-defined yet tangible way at the subatomic, individual, group and global level, connecting and diverging Psychic energy or libido is a psychosomatic phenomenon analogous to the paradoxical nature of energy/matter or wave/particle. The human body is not an object in space, but seamlessly welded to spacetime. We are not merely a phenomenal body of flesh, but one of awareness, of consciousness, a living interface of inner and outer field phenomena.
We all experience visceral or gut reactions and know instinctively how our mental states affect our physical vitality, and vice versa. But often we loose the intimate relationship with our mindbody, with the source of our being, our aliveness, our passions. If we experience this flow at all, it ebbs and flows away. Our individual and collective creative potential remains largely unrealized.
How often do we pay attention to those vital signs, the innate wisdom of the body, inhabiting our minds rather than our flesh? We are increasingly not instinctual, but cultural, and we choose many of our behaviors for good or ill. We’re nearly all “sick and tired” of the way things are, but what do we do to change them?
We can learn simple techniques for self regulation, such as biofeedback, yoga, and meditation. Creativity, as an activity in several fields, brings many intrinsic health-promoting rewards. We can create new habits to help us cope with technocratic society that tone or recalibrate our systems and change our physical state. We all have to learn how to deal with personal and/or global catastrophe whether we want to or not.
The Golden Flesh
Do we actively value our psychic well being, our totality, psyche and substance? Are we living soulful, artful lives? Do we nourish our whole selves with self-love? Do we take the time to care for our body or deny it, drive it relentlessly like our servant, or treat it like a machine? Do we attend to our inner world of waking images and dreams? Can we come to our senses, deepening the quality and intensity of embodied experience?
Our felt-sense is our wise intuitive response if we but listen. It brings meaning and value to life. What is your body trying to tell you? The body has a mind of its own and speaks that mind in gut reactions, body language, psychosomatics, and literal symptoms.
When psychic energy is dammed up it manifests in unconscious or destructive ways, such as tension, withdrawl, alienation, anxiety, compulsions, depression, addictions, somatization, and suicidal tendencies. Some people learn early, even in the womb, that their world is not a safe place. Social patterns become maladaptive when an organism’s true needs are not met in a tangible, congruent way.
A confused person can react with pain, fear, hopelessness, cognitive dissonance, disturbed biorhythms, approach/avoidance, passive aggression, codependence, apathy, or self-defeating behavior patterns. Our biology and minds become confused. Fed enough negative self-talk the body will react with authentic symptoms, self-induced illness. This does not mean that all disease is self-inflicted nor that we are necessarily to blame for our ailments, in some version of “new age guilt”.
Both the alternative health fields and mindbody psychologies such as the humanistic, Jungian and transpersonal psychologies have sought the triple union of body, soul, and spirit much like the medieval alchemists. But only a fusion of those approaches can manifest the union of opposites in the golden flesh. We can learn to care for our mindbodies in new ways from the inside out, conceptually and experientially.
To truly nourish ourselves holistically we have to address the manifest needs of mental and physical well-being. Consciousness may have a direct effect on the subatomic particles of the body, especially those within the brain. A tiny change within the open system of the brain, for example, can result in a vast change to the overall health of the body because of amplification through feedback loops. Nonlinearity exists at many scales.
Soma Sophia
Sometimes we have to address the external realities of a situation and sometimes its spirit or essential nature. The same is true for our bodies and souls. Significance is extracted from the experiential responses of our whole being – soma significance, the felt-sense wisdom of the bodymind, which we can personify as Soma Sophia.
We can use the wisdom of the bodymind to face stress, pain, loss, illness, even catastrophe. Creative transformation of our instinctive reactions produces the gold, whether we call that essence health, art, flow, or inspiration. Psychic sustenance is found within. Once the mindbody connects with Source, all of our self-expression becomes soulful. We truly embody spirit.
That Source is the source of psychic energy, our libido, which becomes available for negentropic or entropic expression. Its tangible root lies within our very energy/matter as the plenum that science calls the vacuum fluctuation or zero-point energy, the groundstate of existence. It is a bit of the cosmos, of the universe that lies within our bodies, which are composed of elements cooked within the stars.
The body itself is the Hermetic vessel for the transformation of instinctual drives. That creative process can take place through trance, art, or meditation, or any combination of them. There are many techniques, which help us process pain, stress, trauma, or depression. Often therapies address higher levels of organization, often at the conceptual level, rather than reordering the physical core of distress, which inhibits our well-being.
A dynamic combination of focus, concentration and flow undergirds our conscious existence and how we relate to others and the world. In meditations such as biofeedback, Tai Chi or Yoga, we intentionally create dynamic changes in our psychophysiology. We temporarily drop our identification with the body only to reinhabit it with even more awareness or mindfulness. This is the artful life; creative fulfillment of our collective destiny.
The Field Body
We can return to Nature and our nature, collectively preparing a paradigm shift for a new shared reality and trajectory – physical, emotional, cognitive and spiritual coherence. The silent frictionless flow of living intelligence is beyond words and conceptual constructs. We are a process of recursive self-generation. This continuum, which is our groundstate or creative Source, is directly discoverable in the immediacy of the emergent embodied moment.
We are each a temple of living light. We arise from and are sustained by field phenomena, waves of biophotonic light and sound, which form our essential nature through acoustic holography (Miller & Miller), which is similar to the formation of matter via sound in cymatics. Cymatics is the science that describes how sound creates forms via resonance phenomena. Bioholography is thus a form of cymatics – acoustic holography.
Holography is the artform of producing virtual 3-D spatial images of objects. Its artifact is an ephemera, though the holographic plate which records the interference pattern is not. Projections are most compelling when they converge on the viewer. Virtuality is the condition of pure potential, non-actualization. Virtual images are created from diffracting lightwaves and reading the interference patterns.
But virtual particles from the vacuum potential (ZPE) pop in and out of our reality perturbing, even creating actual particles. Cybernetic virtuality involves interaction with a computer system to render certain potentialities actual within certain rules. In holographic systems, a body of fiction can potentially trigger future facts, opening new windows of reality. For example, rituals of quantum biofeedback, can manifest as nonlocal healing, whether through tangible interaction or the power of suggestion and placebo effect.
Our bodies are created from the virtuality of scalar field interactions with our 4-D reality of this spacetime. The mechanism is by projection via our DNA by biophotons or coherent light produced within the body. This coherent light transduces itself into radio waves, which carry sound as information that decodes the 4-D form as a material object, such as ourselves.
The study of this phenomenon of light and sound forming an organism using DNA as a holographic projector is called quantum bioholography (Miller). This process is true not only of formation of the body but also extends into its maintenance, a continual process of creation and renewal.
Light and sound carry the information that shapes us and our environment. In a sense we are essentially “frozen” light. Universe congeals within us each moment in a unique way, never to be repeated. Science now tells us this is so, that each of us extends nonlocally far beyond the skin boundary through our embedded field body (Pribram/Bohm, Wan-Ho).
Nature works through self-organization at the creative edge of chaos (Gleick, Peat), and so do we. Complexity is the fine line between chaos and order, "a chaos of behaviors in which the components of the system never quite lock into place, yet never quite dissolve into turbulence either" (Waldrop, 1992, p. 293). The creative edge of chaos is a transition phase.
Self-reinforcing, autopoeitic morphogenesis creates specific forms. Yet a meta-theory eludes us. We still don’t know exactly how that works; there is currently no consensus in quantum physics at the level of the unified field, but we have many working theories, which help us grope our way toward understanding. Likewise, there is no generally accepted paradigm in consciousness studies. Ambiguity surrounding our psychophysical Mystery also shows up in the split between conventional allopathic and energy medicine.
Mystics suggest even more subtle connections of soul and spirit through time and space, evolutionary intelligence. Even without a mystical approach, we can rest and refresh ourselves by aligning our intentionality with the very fabric of spacetime. Consciously participating in this universal process helps heal and integrate our mindbodies, psyche and matter. We can learn to self-soothe cumulative daily irritations by practicing self-regulation.
Cosmos resonates within each of us, but we have lost touch with that due to electromagnetic pollution and the distracting demands of modern life. But we can rediscover this integral context in which we are embedded as a field of timeless, radiant abundance. Spacetime is a plenum rather than an empty vacuum. It abides not just outside us in the depths of space but within the fabric of our being. We are pulsating dynamos of cells, organs, and dynamic systems.
We can learn to wrap our minds around this quantum reality that we are not separate from the ongoing process of creation, even if an energetic field of information defies detection. The source of creation always flows through rhythmic pulsation or waves of energy/matter. The manifestation of each so-called particle of our being is orchestrated through a self-organizing process (Penrose/Hameroff).
This dance is a harmonic continuum from the smallest to the largest scales, permeating all domains of assembly and observation – subquantum, quantum, molecular, chemical, even cultural, global, and cosmological. The evolution of our dynamic system obeys universal laws. Likewise our behaviors flow into manifestation from our beliefs, thoughts and emotions, including our self-image.
By opening to system dynamics we can reorganize away from the entropic, reductionistic, destructive habit patterns that plague our species. We can make stress-reducing negentropic choices for structural and psychological adjustment, which improve our quality of life. Integration is a synergistic process rooted in primordial bodymind consciousness.
The brain is not confined to our skull, but permeates our whole being through the intracellular matrix and sensory system, as well as the strong EM fields generated by the beating heart. Research suggests activities in the brain may be pre-conditioned by the DC field of the organism (Oschmann; Becker). Our molecular system extends beyond the nervous system and is the bedrock of intuitive, subconscious and unconscious processes.
Hypnosis suggests the fabric of the body also helps store our memories, embodying our triumphs and traumas. Ideomotor signaling (Rossi) can elicit revelations about ourselves not available from our conscious minds. There is a reciprocal action between our inchoate perceptions, thoughts and the chemistry of our bodies, and therefore our current and future states.
Jung (1932) identified at least five kinds of drives: hunger, activity, sexuality, creativity, and reflection. But he gradually came to conceive of "libido as a psychic analogue of physical energy,” a more or less quantitative concept, which should not be defined in qualitative terms, though libido includes drives, love, desire, aspirations. The important point is that this energy is never destroyed, but flows throughout the psyche activating now this part and now another.
Psychology describes psychic contents, including the role of the body, with psychic means. Psyche – the realm of soul -- is subject and object, medium and message, source and goal; there is no relative point of observation outside the human psyche. When we get down to it, we find only unprovable but assumed beliefs, which seem to work and therefore seem meaningful. We tend to have experiences that confirm our view or perspective of the world.
Physics, by contrast, pursues material reality both via and, to the greatest degree possible, beyond the human experience, but it also uses the mental medium in both its conceptions and inventions. All models of reality are “soft” technologies, but our beliefs and worldview condition the reality we experience. Just as matter is in a constant process of redefinition, so too must psyche and spirit be continuously redefined.
The psychic energy that directs and motivates the personality is called libido, which is simply a generic form of psychic energy which can be redirected or "canalized" into both sexual and non-sexual activities. Psychic energy balances the energy flowing between spirit and instinct. This non-specific energy can consciously be deployed and channeled for self-transformation.
Go with the Flow
Research has shown (Csikszentmihalyi) that self-teaching is strongly correlated with quality of life and the ability to experience refreshing concentration and flow in ordinary activities. Maslow called this quality self-actualization, first as an emergent property which can becomes a stabilized steady-state of personality. The “good life” is not only enjoyable and growth promoting, it reduces the sum total of entropy in the world.
Yet finding flow in our busy lives can be elusive. Flow is neutral, as a source of psychic energy, focusing attention and motivating action. It can be used for constructive or destructive experiences. The more we allocate to the negative, the less we have available for the positive. So we need to become jealous of our spare energy, spending it wisely as our psychophysical organism tells us through bodytalk and feelings.
The amount of energy available to our consciousness and will varies. We can respond to stress by being active rather than reactive. Self-regulation means scanning, listening to, and intentionally recalibrating the mindbody. It requires focusing and concentration our attention, then “letting go”, seemingly releasing all effort…self-accepting, non-striving mindfulness.
Some suggest there is a Platonic field (Symposium) that restores our energy. It is compatible with the description of stages of pure consciousness described by the Yoga Sutras and other Eastern traditions (Buddhism, Taoism, etc.). The secret of the universe lies within “empty” space, which turns out to be a virtual plenum of potential. It is a nourishing essence, which feeds our psychophysical being.
Non-locality is regarded as accepted fact by physicists. They say that the twin photons are aware of each other instantaneously even if they are at opposite ends of the Universe. Laszlo says this new concept has primacy over matter. Puthoff says that matter is driven by this energy source (ZPE). And so is our matter. The interconnections among EM fields are not the external interactions described by Maxwell's four equations, the interconnection is "in the deep" inside those interacting fields, our own fields.
Inexhaustible psychic energy is the single most distinguishing trait of self-teaching individuals. Most creative people are self-taught, often achieving breakthroughs by investing surplus energy playing with the apparently trivial. No matter the subject, each of their new little discoveries parlays into excitement at the moment of discovery, in a self-reinforcing reward. These rewards build motivation to continue.
Have the “creatively gifted” learned a subtle secret for drawing on the essence of the cosmos by investing in their curiosity and delight? Some learn how to draw this surplus energy from the psychic well early in life and drink deeply through their attempts to understand, invent, express and solve problems. They manifest a determination to participate as fully as possible in life.
Self-actualizers pay more attention to what is going on around them with surplus energy to invest their attention in things or people for their own sake, rather than for strokes or gain. Most people hoard their attention in self-absorption, material or emotional advantage rather than growth, empathy and compassion.
Most guard their energy for immediate role or stress responses, or become bound by those factors, numb or apathetic. Those less concerned with themselves actually have more psychic energy to experience life. Everyday giving is an antidote for self-obsession and negativity.
It’s a free-floating type of attention pursued without recognition or support, easily captured temporarily by any subject or interest, rather than strictly tied to goals and ambitions. Wonder, novelty, surprise, awe, and transcendence are boundary breaking allowing us to move beyond ignorance, fear and prejudice. Often this experience becomes a valuable element of later full-blown realizations – new synthesis.
We can cultivate this quality and it’s intrinsic reward by 1) doing whatever needs to be done, even the routine, with concentrated attention and skill, rather than inertia, and 2) approaching them with the care it takes to make a work of art.
Instead of using our leisure energy wastefully we can learn to direct it from passive activity toward new experiences, which only become interesting once we devote attention to them. Time management and husbanding of psychic energy can be directed to create increased enjoyment of life, here and now. In flow we forget ourselves, rather than wallowing in the apathy, worry and boredom of unmet personality needs. Life is too short to remain depressed or exhausted.
We need time and psychic energy to pursue our curiosity. So, we have to be alert for those issues and people who would negatively feed on us, draining, subverting, or sabotaging our creative flow. We can complain, reflect on our stuckness, or actively invest our psychic energy in harmonious relations and goals, creating positive feedback. Having clear goals helps us focus and concentrate, whether we achieve them, or not.
Owning our own actions helps us focus desires and priorities for an improved life. The self-motivated individual can concentrate more or less at will. Interest leads to focus and focus leads to interest. We take over ownership of our lives by learning to direct psychic energy toward our intentions. There is more consistency between inner desires and outer experience. When we learn to love what we have to do, the vector or arc of our development shifts.
When we learn to control attention, we learn to control experience, and therefore the quality of our lives. We invest less psychic energy in painful events and draining resentments, and more in self-affirming and rewarding activities, enjoying them for the control we acquire over our own attention. This simple process can lead to great leaps in transformation, and is also the basis of mystical practice simply for its own sake.
If you learn to love your fate, it reduces entropy not only in your own consciousness but for those you contact. In contact with source, you don’t have to feed on their energies in a negative way. We feel even better when creatively connected to something greater or more permanent than ourselves; it gives us energy. We can even find joy fighting a losing battle for a good cause.
Being in THE ZONE
Folklore has it that artists and sportsmen such as Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, Larry Bird can enter a state of consciousness where they are actively entangled with their surroundings and perhaps even the future. In tennis, the body must be in motion somehow anticipating trajectories even before the serve in order to return the volley. Surfing or boarding are also good examples. Gamers report a similar flow for their virtual states.
Likewise, artists enter a flow state in both inspiration and artistic production or performance. Artists, too, are often accused of anticipating expressing a symbolic change in collective culture, whether they are consciously aware of it, or not. They seem to have an uncanny knack for symbolizing the zeitgeist of the time.
Musicians speak of their own kind of telepathy among one another, especially when jamming or improvising. Someone playing a spirited fast musical break knows the flow is rolling on and at the same time they are aware of the details, although they couldn’t consciously decide each action.
Sudden alarm experiments explore how dominant field dynamics can happen faster than consciousness can respond, using purely internal physical mechanisms. Part of the role of consciousness as an overseer is to allow the conscious periphery to have immediate access in the case of a threatening signal.
We all know we can react with lightning speed automatically while only dimly aware of it. We are aware of it sufficiently to anticipate and react to save our lives. The critical advantage of subjective conscious comes in, even if it is almost subliminal and not consciously thought through.
The BITZ experiments explore the existence of entanglements beyond the human body. Books have been written on 'Being In The Zone' (BITZ). Most of us cannot repeat these super-athletic experiments. But, then, how many of us can smash an atom? We must trust the honesty and ethics of atom-smashing scientists. We just need a measure of BITZ that is not too subjective.
All of these examples are, in some sense direct verification of entanglement on a conscious level. But in practical terms we can still learn what qualities and practices lead to the flow state. In this subjective sense, BITZ has already been experimentally verified; indeed, we are all entangled with our environment, some more actively than others, but only a few can intentionally exploit it, though many have experienced it by accident or intent.
What we need to learn is how to deploy this capacity for creativity and/or healing. Anyone can learn through practices that require concentration in one area to translate that capacity to other areas, such as creativity. Certain orientations and qualities are involved and most of these can be adopted or developed. Many of them include the body, through kinesthetic muscle memory or other physical expressions that take learned behavior and put it on “auto-pilot”, making it seem virtually effortless.
Many activities elsewhere described as BITZ are actually products of a light trance state, such as flow state people report while driving a car.
Others, such as sports and music, explicitly require skill development to achieve fluency.
We can most easily apply ourselves to those things, which inspire a passion in us – those things we cannot help but do because the drive is strong, so motive and opportunity are there. But if a person has no passion, creative flow will remain elusive.
With passion you can always learn the techniques to accomplish your creative goals. Still, many wrestle with the experience of trying to maintain vitality, passion, and inspiration while getting caught up in the daily grind of paying the bills and other mundane necessities.
Reports of solutions include:
“It's a matter of intention. I try to make a conscious choice every day to do everything the best I can. For me, this has been a self sustaining and exponentailly growing energy sorce. The harder I work at doing things well, the better I do things, the better I feel about doing things, the more energy I have to work on doing things well, and so on, and so on.”
“For me, it's a matter of being Present, no matter what my external circumstances are. The loss of vitality comes not with the grinding work, but from the fact that we resist Life while doing that work. The only solution is to surrender to the moment, be present with what you are doing, and accept whatever comes as a result. Sometimes what comes won't be so pleasant, but as long as you accept that, then more and more often it will be pleasant things that come your way. “
“I feel like we can get through anything if we assert that it's only temporary. It's too easy to get dragged down by the slave paradigm, especially when you've got a higher mission you'd rather be tending to. We need to be that much stronger and clearer about our Great Work on this planet to get through the daily grind and seemingly endless servitude to the inane.”
There are two ways of looking at our predicament, one crippling, one liberating:
· COGNITIVE DISSONANCE: psychospiritual reality and mundane patterns are at odds with each other, bringing stress and a feeling of self-betrayal. This splits intent and energy, divides and conquers by lack of wholeness. Thwarted by a feeling of not living in sincere harmony with your true self Power (psychic energy) leaks away.
· METANARRATIVE: realize that mundane activities are a result of will or intentionality, and that you are manifesting the mundane patterns that you see before you, either by conscious will or by default. The life you've created can manifest as a song, a poem, an art project, a great disovery. When you chose to make it surface, your full power and as a manifestation engine emerges.
Flow in intellectual and spiritual processes emerges from removal of blocks to creativity (such as competing activities and focus; poor self-image; poor judgment, thinking and work habits; conventionality, mediocrity; numbness; intolerance of complexity or solitude) and certain positive attitudes and behavior patterns, such as commitment to vision.
The most often cited examples facilitating creativity include the following: fluency, flexibility, sensitivity to problems, problems, originality, curiosity, openness to feelings and the unconscious, motivation, persistence and concentration, ability to think in images, ability to toy with ideas, ability to analyze and synthesize, tolerance of ambiguity, discernment and selectivity, ability to tolerate isolation, creative memory, background of fundamental knowledge, incubation, anticipation of productive periods, ability to think in metaphors, aesthetic orientation, etc.
If your desire to be creative is strong enough, nothing will prevent you from applying yourself if you have passion. Can the flow state be far behind? It is a form of transcendence, whether it comes through the physical flow of the body, the conceptual high of the A-ha state, the absorption and aesthetic satisfaction of the artistic process, or any conditions, which promote emotional flow.
The latter might range from love, to the high encountered learning from one’s mentors, to the perception that Cosmos is facilitating your intention in a given direction, though the latter is a synchronicity – flow with the environment.
In trance states the process is largely automatic and unconscious; no “learning” is required. Trance possession and ‘white line fever’ arise from the same level, while the former includes a transpersonal experience. In artistic fervor the doors of the subconscious swing wide and there is mixing of the inner subjective world with the object world of tangible expression.
In pure creativity, including nonlocal healing and the bliss of meditative states, focus and concentration are consciously applied directly with intent. Trance, art and creativity are all forms of transcendence of the ego and connection with deeper than conscious levels of existence.
Exercising one’s talents helps remove the blocks mundane life would like to introject. Fluency, a creative ritual, a workstation, and making time available help increase the drive needed to carry a project to completion. Intentionality and a conducive environment increase the probability creativity will emerge.
But the secret is that connections or open channels to primordial SOURCE tend to provide a degree of flow, self-realization, or illumination. So, the real key to creativity in all its forms seems to be an enhanced capacity to connect tangibly with source bringing back some material or immaterial boon from that inspiration.
Conclusions
There are many plausible ways that quantum theory can help with these profound mysteries of the groundstate of energy/matter, consciousness, awareness and flow. It will likely be many decades before some understanding of the actual mechanisms are finalized. So, despite the pluses and minuses of existing quantum theories of mind, these kinds of theories should be encouraged. If consciousness is or is related to quantum effects then scientists will have to think in these directions to figure it out.
"Whether this vast homogeneous expanse of isotropic matter is fitted not only to be a medium of physical interaction between distant bodies, and to fulfill other physical functions of which, perhaps, we have as yet no conception, but also to constitute the material organism of beings exercising functions of life and mind as high or higher than ours are at present-is a question far transcending the limits of physical speculation.”, says Maxwell.
Most natural philosophers hold, and have held, that action at a distance across empty space is impossible. In other words, that matter cannot act where it is not, but only where it is. The question "where is it?" is a further question that may demand attention and require more than a superficial answer.
Arguably, every atom of matter has a universal though nearly infinitesimal prevalence, and extends everywhere; since there is no definite sharp boundary or limiting periphery to the region disturbed by its existence. The lines of force of an isolated electric charge extend throughout illimitable space.
No ordinary matter is capable of transmitting the undulations or tremors that we call light. The speed at which they go, the kind of undulation, and the facility with which they go through vacuum, forbid this. So clearly and universally has it been perceived that waves must be waves of something, something distinct from ordinary matter.
Faraday conjectured that the same medium, which is concerned in the propagation of light, might also be the agent in electromagnetic phenomena, and he called it “the ether”. Now we speak of it as the zero-point domain of virtual photon fluctuation. Romantically, we refer to it as the plenum, since it is infinitely full of potential.
Some philosophers have reason to suppose that mind can act directly on mind without intervening mechanism, and sometimes that has been spoken of as genuine action at a distance. But, in the first place, no proper conception or physical model can be made of such a process, much less how that deploys intentionality in distance healing.
Nor is it clear that space and distance have any particular meaning in the region of psychology. The links between mind and mind may be something quite other than physical proximity. Since we don’t know how it works, in denying action at a distance across empty space we are not denying telepathy or other activities of a non-physical kind. Brain disturbance or mindbody healing are plausible physical correlate of mental action, whether of the sending or receiving variety.
There is no consensus in physics, nor in consciousness studies, though there is a correlating theory for nearly every one proposed in physics. Spontaneous healing may bypass all of these suggested metatheories. A field becomes a nearly innacurrate term in the subquantual domain or metaphysical level of observation.
According to Hameroff, “Everything (matter, energy, you, me) is part of the hidden geometry of spacetime, of which the Platonic is one aspect. Smells and colors and melodic tunes are complex assemblies of fundamental qualia embedded as configurations in fundamental spacetime geometry.
The qualia in spacetime geopmetry *out there* caused qualia *in here* within us because there is spacetime geometry within our mindbodies as well. Because spacetime geometry is inherently nonlocal it could be that *out there* and *in here* are connected, or actually the same. Only in the classical world is there a spacelike distinction. Pure consciousness is the experience of a total lack of phenomenal content while still awake and alert, and thus able to remember there was nothing.
[Some theories alledge] cognitive functions reflect consciousness which exists in the universe. I am saying that quantum processes in the brain (related to cognitive processes) are connected to protoconscious quantum information inherent in the universe. The connection results in OR which is a moment of consciousness (the protoconscious/unconscious quantum information becomes conscious) But remember the universe/spacetime geometry out there is also in our heads.” Hameroff
Several Vedic and Taoist texts (and perhaps other traditions as well) suggest that, with proper refinement of consciousness, the “outside” world can be cognized holographically, in a superposed, interpenetrating state where everything is experienced in everything else. If evidence can support such claims, perhaps the human mechanisms of perception have the capacity to directly experience an uncollapsed universe in which what is normally unconscious is merged into consciousness (or vice versa). Its like a dream.
But somehow consciousness is; somehow creativity emerges; somehow healing works; somehow we are, and are interrelated. Perhaps real meaning comes from our struggle to try to understand how these things work, to struggle toward wisdom in both the material and spiritual realms. There is meaning in the struggle to create, to heal, to know, to be.
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Consciousness Studies; 4300 words
CONNECTIVE TISSUE
CONSCIOUSNESS: Quantum and Otherwise
By Iona Miller, Nov 1, 2005
Quantum Consciousness?
The paths of Wolfgang Pauli, coming from the advanced edge of physics, and Carl Jung, from the advanced edge of the psyche, crossed with interesting results for their generation. Pauli came away rededicated to unifying psyche and matter, to finding "the irrational in matter and the subjective in physics" and convinced of "the resurrection of spirit in matter." Jung came away with the idea of acausal connections -- meaningful coincidences -- an idea developed with the help of Pauli.
This collaboration raised the question of what it means to live in a world of where synchronicity is part of our experience. Each of the physical and psychological theories that have arisen since have also addressed implications about our existence and interconnections, not just theories. It is quite different to be essentially an ethereal wave-front in space than a solid meat body. But we rarely even conceive of ourselves this way, much less wrap our minds around the implications. We live in a fantasy of solid objects and conscious awareness.
Consciousness is more than simple conscious awareness or self awareness. It’s ALL in your mind, but not necessarily merely in your head. The universe is literally holistically contained within the mindbody and is the context of mindbody. Both physicists and mystics now tell us that there is noTHING “out there.” The Vedas said centuries ago that it’s all “mindstuff” and modern science is now confronting that. Wave forms and particles derive their energy from the inside of space. That energy is dynamic, always interacting from the cosmic to subquantal realms.
"The vast interplanetary and interstellar regions will no longer be regarded as waste places in the universe, which the Creator has not seen fit to fill with the symbols of the manifold order of His kingdom. We shall find them to be already full of this wonderful medium; so full, that no human power can remove it from the smallest portion of Space, or produce the slightest flaw in its infinite continuity. It extends unbroken from star to star; and when a molecule of hydrogen vibrates in the dog-star, the medium receives the impulses of these vibrations, and after carrying them in its immense bosom for several years, delivers them, in due course, regular order, and full tale, into the spectroscope of Mr. Huggins, at Tulse Hill.", declared James Clerk Maxwell.
The vacuum energy or Zero Point Energy (ZPE) can be viewed as the Qi energy field according to the ancient Chinese Qi theory or worldview. In the very beginning there was Wu (Nothing or Void), then there was "Hun Tun" (the Great Chaos), later formed the "Tai Chi", then formed the "Tai Shih" (the Great Beginning) permeated with Qi.
The Qi then splitted into two, the Yin and Yang two complementary Qi forces. The interactions of the Yin Qi and Yang Qi evolves all things including Life. To the Chinese, Everything has Qi. Everything functions through Qi. It is the Qi that keeps us alive. To the Chinese, Life is not the end product of an evolutionary process, rather Life Force Qi's existence necessitates Physics and Chemistry being what it is.
Roger Penrose, a mathematical physicist at Oxford University, believes that if a "theory of everything" is ever developed in physics to explain all the known phenomena in the universe, it should at least partially account for consciousness. Penrose also believes that quantum mechanics, the rules governing the physical world at the subatomic level, might play an important role in consciousness.
But physicists and metaphysicists seem to talk about Consciousness as a primal essence, and consciousness as a neurological state of an organism, including human. Consciousness is equated by mystically-oriented physicists with the very essence of cosmos beyond energy/matter, residing within us as the groundstate of Being. The reductionistic view is that it is just a sequence of awareness interacting with the environment which can become complex as self-awareness arises; hierarchically stratified neural processes.
But no one seems to really know what Consciousness or consciousness is, anymore than they know what electricity actually is. For some it is cosmic, for others the most mundane result of our brain functions. The distinctions between so-called objective and subjective consciousness is now moot. Physics has shown there is only subjectivity, though facts can exist.
"Almost everyone agrees that there will be very strong correlations between what's in the brain and consciousness," says David Chalmers, a philosophy professor and Director of the Center for Consciousness at the Australian National University. "The question is what kind of explanation that will give you.
Chalmers wants more than correlation, alledging we want explanation – “how and why do brain process give rise to consciousness? That's the big mystery.” The converse question would be how and why does Consciousness give rise to cosmos? The problem is, Consciousness and consciousness seem to be irreducible, try as we might.
According to Chalmers, the subjective nature of consciousness prevents it from being explained in terms of simpler components, a method used to great success in other areas of science. He believes that unlike most of the physical world, which can be broken down into individual atoms, or organisms, which can be understood in terms of cells, consciousness is irreducible. It’s an aspect of the universe, like space and time and mass. According to this view, consciousness is primal.
A theory of consciousness would not explain what consciousness is or how it arose; instead, it would try to explain the relationship between consciousness and everything else in the world. In another theory the boson involved is conformal gravity, aka dark energy, aka the vacuum, aka zero point energy. Anything that gets entangled (electrons, photons, etc) builds up consciousness. There are other theories of entanglement, coherence and decoherence.
Many say QM has the look and feel of consciousness. There are several types of explanation of quantum state reduction, an occasion of experience: Copenhagen (conscious observation causes collapse), multiple worlds (each possibility branches off to form a new universe), decoherence (interaction with environment contaminates superposition - though it doesn’t really cause reduction), some objective threshold for reduction (objective reduction - OR), or quantum gravity.
Popular QM notions seem to fall into two categories:
· Copenhagen-esque--"old school" explanations which dwell on quantum theory's non-intuitiveness and in fact seem to celebrate the "leap of logic" needed to accept the observer-based wave-function collapse postulate;
· New Agey Utopian idealism--"quantum theory is strange, consciousness is strange, therefore, consciousness is explained by quantum theory", entanglement is proof that "all points in the universe are connected by some underlying ineffable thing, so can't we all just get along", etc.
Quantum theory will probably play a role in explaining consciousness and its relationship to the brain. In some theories (Greenfield), mind is rooted in the physical connections between neurons, while consciousness is an emergent property of the brain, similar to the 'wetness' of water or the 'transparency' of glass. The electrical activity of the brain makes a `model' of a self in the world and our understanding of physical reality requires this `model' to exist `in the dark'. We don’t know if it’s basis is quantum or complexity, or some combination of quantum uncertainty and chaotic sensitivity.
There may be a link between chaotic sensitivity and quantum entanglement to create the ‘trick’ of consciousness (King, 2005). Synapses are making a potential energy landscape. High energy chaos explores the full phase space and attention lowers the energy until the dynamic either enters an existing attractor (recognition) or the system bifurcates to form a new attractor (new learned stimulus). It's a form of energy minimization.
Is there a link between global brain states and quantum phenoemena? Promising hypotheses link Freeman's model of chaos and bifurcation, Cramer's idea of transactional quantum entanglement, and Pribram's idea of the holographic brain and newer ideas of stochastic resonance and more theoretical ideas of quantum chaos. All these processes can interact together to make a viable basis for intentional subjective consciousness.
The brain is full of oscillations. The oscillations are chaotic in the time domain but holographic spatial oscillation in the space domain. Neural systems identify the oscillations that are in phase and they become the process that stands out from the out of phase noise. The in phase waves cause synaptic adaption and learning. When the brain goes from 'hunting' to 'eureka' there is a transition from chaotic out of phase excitation to phase correlated excitation.
This is the same process that happens in a quantum measurement, when we can only measure energy as frequency and can't directly sample wave amplitude of a quantum, so have to let enough beats pass to get an accurate frequency and thus don't know the time exactly. This is the uncertainty relation. The two processes are homologous.
Coherent oscillations in neurons are both the consequence of coupled areas and the cause of them over time. Chaotic excitations can, of course, be in or out of phase . It is the non-linearities which enable a number of harmonic oscillators to become mode-locked into phase or phase multiplicity, so non-linearity is the basis of all these phase locking phenomena, too (King).
According to Walter Freeman, "Consciousness may well be the subjective experience of this recursive process of motor command, reafference and perception. If so, it enables the brain to plan and prepare for each subsequent action on the basis of past action, sensory input and perceptual synthesis. In short, an act of perception is not the copying of an incoming stiinuIus. It is a step in a trajectory by which brains grow, reorganize themselves and reach into their environment to change it to their own advantage."
This `model' is an intellectual abstraction and in reality it is just spatial and temporal relationships between each piece of electrical activity. Every quanta is in the form of matter waves except at state reduction. The electromagnetic fields permeating neurons and synapses consist of real and virtual photons, in their wave states, and each of these are disturbances in the photon field.
Quantum Healing
Our experience of reality is based on mind and observation. Only our mental impressions, sensory filters, language categories, and concepts make us perceive things: things as separate from ourselves, the I and the not-I. But we are seamlessly welded to the Universe at the most fundamental levels. We cannot scientifically or spiritually distinguish ourselves from the subquantum ground of BEING, even if we feel separate or alienated.
But who among us has successfully abandoned the tendency to conceptualize observations as things, and compound that observation with qualitative attributions? We have experiences and later we say it was this or that. Some forms of meditation are based on disidentification from all aspects of existence and nominalism – neither this nor that.
But most of us still can’t wrap our quantum minds around it as a steady state of perception. Though science has extended our sight to the subquantal and cosmological levels, we still think provincially from the human scale of our natural senses. Our logic and metaphors are based in the senses. But our outer life comes from the invisible inner world, where we are literally in resonance with the Cosmos.
Concepts of matter, life, and mind have undergone major changes. Consciousness is not a material system and neither is Quantum Mechanics (QM). The world is quantum mechanical and we must learn to perceive it as such, but we don’t need to understand that to experience nonlocal healing, any more than we need to comprehend internal combustion to drive. Even physicists have a tough time reconciling what they know about the deep nature of reality with their mundane experience in the world of things.
So how does that mind and its underlying mechanisms relate to or produce consciousness? Is consciousness a quantum process, or does it underlie all process? Neurologists tell us it is a physical matter of wetware in the skull. However, the most we can say at the molecular level is that there are correlates of consciousness. The irreducible precursors of consciousness and matter are built into the universe. They just ARE, unified holistic process.
At the finest levels of observation, physicists contend the distinction between mind and matter becomes as paradoxical as the distinction between energy and matter, life and death (organic/inorganic). Quantum mechanics strongly suggests the Universe is mental. The substratum of everything, including our experience of being, has this mental character.
Healing theories, particularly nonlocal models, have drawn from theories in both new physics and consciousness studies, often compounding and confounding both disciplines. They mix levels of observation in theories, which seem to be largely conditioned by the favoritism of pet projects; thus each theory is generally associated with only one or two “brand” names of researchers.
Healers have been quick to parrot many of these ideas that support what they feel they have observed in intentional healing acts, or what validates the tenets of their school of practice. Often their comprehension of the scientific basis of the argument is slim to none. But this attribution is used to “explain” the phenomenon, with enough misapprehension to preserve the Mystery. However, it isn’t this confusion that makes it so. Are the enigmatic qualities of the quantum realm actually the same as the unity, coherence and other enigmatic qualities of the conscious one? The jury is still out.
There is no consensus among theories of what constitutes FIGURE and what constitutes the most fundamental GROUND, and it seems they share the same essential nature. Our perceived ‘content’ is not distinct from the ‘context’ in which it arises. It is one whole cloth of bubbling space-time. Nothing more, nor less. We have looked into the Abyss of spacetime and found it laughing back.
Ervin Laszlo points out regarding the finest level of observation, that because of “the quantum vacuum, the energy sea that underlies all of spacetime, it is no longer warranted to view matter as primary and space as secondary. It is to space or rather, to the cosmically extended "Dirac-sea" of the vacuum that we should grant primary reality.” Virtual particles pop in and out of existence like quantum foam.
Mass is the consequence of interactions in the depth of this universal field. There is only this absolute matter-generating energy field. This realization transforms our perception of life. Living systems constantly interact with the quantum vacuum, also called zero-point energy, vacuum fluctuation, or subspace. Wave-packets of matter are in a subtle interactive dance with the underlying vacuum field, a vast network of intimate interactions, extending into our biosphere and even Cosmos. Mind and matter both evolve from the cosmic womb of space.
According to Laszlo: “The interaction of our mind and consciousness with the quantum vacuum links us with other minds around us, as well as with the biosphere of the planet. It "opens" our mind to society, nature, and the universe. This openness has been known to mystics and sensitives, prophets and meta-physicians through the ages. But it has been denied by modern scientists and by those who took modern science to be the only way of comprehending reality.”
He goes on to propose a poetic metaphor: “Everything that goes on in our mind could leave its wave- traces in the quantum vacuum, and everything could be received by those who know how to "tune in" to the subtle patterns that propagate there.” In a mechanistic throwback, he likens it to an antenna picking up signals from a transmitter that contains the experience of the entire human race, reminding strongly of Carl Jung’s Collective Unconscious.
Worldviews color our perceptions of our Reality, even in science. Concepts are effective theories, useful not true. The universe is immaterial, mental and spiritual. The mind observes, but it doesn’t really observe “things”. It has a way of attributing certain qualities, subjective qualities and dynamics, to everything, even so-called “objective observation. This multisensory narrative becomes the content of our memories – how we remember what happens.
Our minds have a tendency to come up with reasons, whys and wherefores, for things as they appear to us. It is part of our survival mechanisms. However, physics has proven, through relativity theory, the uncertainty principle, wave/particle duality, and Godel’s theorem, that there can be no objectivity, no order or creativity without chaos.
The mind produces narratives. Archetypal forces act as lenses that cause us to cherish certain beliefs, which lead to a class of thoughts, and patterns of emotions and behaviors. It doesn’t matter if you come down on the side of preferring order or chaos, nature has her way. Ultimately, spontaneous or natural healing seems to by-pass this entire complex system, overriding our conscious perspectives in many cases. We may not “believe” in paradoxical healing, but it can still “work”, effecting psychophysical change at a deeper level through the emotional mind and through Mystery.
Healing is irrational. Perhaps the question we should really be asking is what causes us to imagine we are dissociated from a state of optimal health. This doesn’t mean our bodies will always work flawlessly. Chaos theory reveals that many systems in the body are self-organizing and regulated by stochastic processes that are naturally chaotic in nature. Chaos actually helps us reorganize, recalibrate our metabolism.
We can discuss it in terms of nested structured duality, superfluids, or an array of vortices, or a microtubule bank, or a dendritic cluster, hyper-neurons, glia and gap junction networks, or an entangled or collapsing wave function; still, we're merely talking about resonance between arrays -- patterns. This perspective leads to consideration of a Holographic concept of reality, the frequency domain, David Bohm’s implicate order.
Panpsychism aside, every bit of electrical activity is unaware of itself, is unaware of every other bit of electrical activity, and is unaware of all their relationships. This raises the question: why does consciousness exists at all and why is it a unity? What is synchronicity but a feedback between perceived reality and the emerging train of events. This is consistent with the transactional interpretation in which there is a handshaking between past emitters and future absorbers.
There are many plausible ways that quantum theory can help with these profound mysteries and it will be many decades before some understanding of the actual mechanisms are finalized. So, despite the pluses and minuses of existing quantum theories of mind, these kinds of theories should be encouraged. If consciousness is or is related to quantum effects then scientists will have to think in these directions to figure it out.
Conclusions
"Whether this vast homogeneous expanse of isotropic matter is fitted not only to be a medium of physical interaction between distant bodies, and to fulfill other physical functions of which, perhaps, we have as yet no conception, but also to constitute the material organism of beings exercising functions of life and mind as high or higher than ours are at present - is a question far transcending the limits of physical speculation.”, said Maxwell.
Of course, that was then and this is now.
Most natural philosophers hold, and have held, that action at a distance across empty space is impossible. In other words, that matter cannot act where it is not, but only where it is. The question "where is it?" is a further question that may demand attention and require more than a superficial answer.
Arguably, every atom of matter has a universal though nearly infinitesimal prevalence, and extends everywhere; since there is no definite sharp boundary or limiting periphery to the region disturbed by its existence. The lines of force of an isolated electric charge extend throughout illimitable space.
No ordinary matter is capable of transmitting the undulations or tremors that we call light. The speed at which they go, the kind of undulation, and the facility with which they go through vacuum, forbid this. So, clearly and universally has it been perceived that waves must be waves of something, something distinct from ordinary matter.
Faraday conjectured that the same medium, which is concerned in the propagation of light, might also be the agent in electromagnetic phenomena, and he called it “the ether”. Now we speak of it as the zero-point domain of virtual photon fluctuation. Romantically, we refer to it as the plenum, since it is infinitely full of potential.
Some philosophers have reason to suppose that mind can act directly on mind without intervening mechanism, and sometimes that has been spoken of as genuine action at a distance. But, in the first place, no proper conception or physical model can be made of such a process, much less how that deploys intentionality in distance healing.
Nor is it clear that space and distance have any particular meaning in the region of psychology. The links between mind and mind may be something quite other than physical proximity. Since we don’t know how it works, in denying action at a distance across empty space we are not denying telepathy or other activities of a non-physical kind. Brain disturbance or mindbody healing are plausible physical correlates of mental action, whether of the sending or receiving variety.
There is no consensus in physics, nor in consciousness studies, though there is a correlating theory for nearly every one proposed in physics. Spontaneous healing may bypass all of these suggested metatheories. A field becomes a nearly innacurrate term in the subquantual domain or metaphysical level of observation.
According to Hameroff, “Everything (matter, energy, you, me) is part of the hidden geometry of spacetime, of which the Platonic is one aspect. Smells and colors and melodic tunes are complex assemblies of fundamental qualia embedded as configurations in fundamental spacetime geometry.
The qualia in spacetime geopmetry *out there* caused qualia *in here* within us because there is spacetime geometry within our mindbodies as well. Because spacetime geometry is inherently nonlocal it could be that *out there* and *in here* are connected, or actually the same. Only in the classical world is there a spacelike distinction. Pure consciousness is the experience of a total lack of phenomenal content while still awake and alert, and thus able to remember there was nothing.
[Some theories alledge] cognitive functions reflect consciousness which exists in the universe. I am saying that quantum processes in the brain (related to cognitive processes) are connected to protoconscious quantum information inherent in the universe. The connection results in OR which is a moment of consciousness (the protoconscious/unconscious quantum information becomes conscious) But remember the universe/spacetime geometry out there is also in our heads.” Hameroff
Several Vedic and Taoist texts (and perhaps other traditions as well) suggest that, with proper refinement of consciousness, the “outside” world can be cognized holographically, in a superposed, interpenetrating state where everything is experienced in everything else. If evidence can support such claims, perhaps the human mechanisms of perception have the capacity to directly experience an uncollapsed universe in which what is normally unconscious is merged into consciousness (or vice versa). Its like a dream.
But somehow consciousness is; somehow creativity emerges; somehow healing works; somehow we are, and are interrelated. Perhaps real meaning comes from our struggle to try to understand how these things work, to struggle toward wisdom in both the material and spiritual realms. There is meaning in the struggle to create, to heal, to know, to be.
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Chris King suggests how chaotic sensitive dependence and quantum entanglement might be connected. Here are a few pointers to the core idea:
> 1. Cosmic symmetry-breaking causes the universe to develop non-linear fractal interac tive structures, leading to the origin of life.
> 2. Primal eucaryote cells had excitable membranes as a multi-quantum mode sense using chaotic sensitive dependence (the butterfly effect). There are three quantum senses vision (photon-orbital), hearing/touch (harmonic/soliton), and smell (orbital-orbital)
> 3. The amplification of quantum uncertainty by sensitive dependence gave these cells an anticipatory property through transactional entanglement (see below).
> 4. Complex nervous systems developed as fractally dynamic structures to enable this sensitive dependence to become global, using phase-front processing - the same basis as quantum measurement. This is different from fractal structure although the two are related.
5. The brain uses global excitations with phase front measurement, and chaotic sensitive dependence to make a resonance be tween the quantum and global levels ... this resonance is made possible by the scale-exploding properties of fractal dynamics.
6. There is direct experimental evidence that a single ion channel opening stochastically (a quantum transformation) can excite an entire hippocampal cell and that a single hippocampal cell can set off a global brain response. The brain critically poised in a decision can thus become quantu m sensitive. The phenomenon is called stochastic resonance, and it proves the brain is capable of such super-sensitivity.
> 7. The brain can then use computation to engulf the deductive aspects of a problem using transitions from chaos to order. Eureka for example is a transition from specific initial conditions Archimedes was facing in his problem and conscious lateral intuition in a transition from 'hunting' chaos to 'eureka' so the process is capable of complementing computation with intuition.
> 8. Most problems an organism faces are computationally intractable open environment problems in which there is not one optimum choice but many viable alternatives. Consciousness is not manifestly computation, but anticipatory awareness of the quantum of the moment which enables an animal to escape a predator.
> 9. Transactional supercausality shows collapse of the wave function can anticipate future boundary conditions. History, evolution and the Schrodinger cat all have a common basis in collapsing the super-abundance of quantum parallelism. Collapsing the wave function is a way the brain can complement computation with real outcomes generated by uncertainty through chaos when the situation is uncomputable. It is manifest in subjective consciousness and has potent survival value in anticipating imminent crisis.
MindBody Therapy: 6,117 words
CONNECTIVE TISSUE
SOMA SOPHIA
Body Wisdom, Creativity & Psychic Energy
By Iona Miller, 10-2005
“Unless bodies lose their corporeal state and unless bodies assume again their corporeal state, that which is desired will not be attained.”
~ Byzantine fragment, The Philosophical Egg
"The borders of our minds are ever shifting and many minds can flow into one another ... and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy" ~ William Butler Yeats
"The only truly natural and real human unity is the spirit of the Earth. . . .The sense of Earth is the irresistable pressure which will come at the right moment to unite them (humankind) in a common passion." ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
“Light and matter both behave like separate particles and also like waves. This . . . obliged us to abandon, on the plane of atomic magnitudes, a causal description of nature in the ordinary space-time system, and in its place to set up invisible fields of probability in multidimensional spaces.” ~ Wolfgang Pauli, Physicist
The Triple Union
We are truly psychophysical beings, composed of bodymind and spirit. Arguably, Carl Jung (1911) was among the first to apply the recognized concepts of physical energy to show that libido, or psychic energy obeys the same laws and is not only analogous, but identical. Psychophysical and emotional energy is associated with instinctual biological drives.
Though psychic energy is neutral, it can be literalized, somatized, sexualized, emotionalized, socialized, mentalized, or spiritualized. Symptoms, thoughts, images, fantasies, beliefs, emotions, forms of expression or behavior are all libidinal. Libido tends to flow inward or outward, a dynamic rhythm of introversion/extroversion. Jung attributed mana or personal power for a kind of shamanic or positive psychic contagion to those individuals who seem to have a charismatic influence on others.
Psychic energy tends to follow the same laws of physical conservation and entropy. Jung taught that within the psyche, libido: (1) creates entropy, (2) is generally conserved under the principle of equivalence, (3) flows through the psyche in channels that can be redirected, (4) can be either progressive or regressive, and (5) is transformed by symbols. In short, the psyche as, defined by Jung, is a complex system.
New physics, chaos theory, synergetics, and information theory describe our existence as complex dynamical systems. Entropy can only occur in system that is absolutely closed so no energy from outside can be fed into it. But the psyche is an open system, which exchanges energy and information with its environment and can be negentropic.
We can also have a negentropic influence on one another (Gladwell), perturbing, enlarging, creating new pathways and possibilities. Theoretically, behavior can ripple outward until a critical mass or "tipping point" is reached, changing the world. Gladwell's thesis that ideas, products, messages and behaviors "spread just like viruses do" remains a metaphor. Yet, highly sociable or connective people often become revolutionary leaders, bringing others together with a new perspective, a broadened worldview.
Life includes chaos and order, good and bad experiences, even catastrophes that require us to adapt or die. The important thing is how we meet and react to chaos, finding ways to replenish our depletion. Observation of the subquantal domain reveals an inexhaustible realm of negentropy from which we can draw our psychophysical sustenance. When healthy, our entire system is designed to reduce entropy, in different scales and domains.
The same is true for the superorganism of society. We are irreducibly entangled with one another and the environment. We are healthy only to the extent we resonate with our environment. We maintain our integrity and identity as a dissipative system only because we are open to flows of energy, matter, or information from our environment (Prigogine & Stengers, 1984).
We live in a persistent delusion of separateness. However, we are all nonlocally connected in an ill-defined yet tangible way at the subatomic, individual, group and global level, connecting and diverging Psychic energy or libido is a psychosomatic phenomenon analogous to the paradoxical nature of energy/matter or wave/particle. The human body is not an object in space, but seamlessly welded to spacetime. We are not merely a phenomenal body of flesh, but one of awareness, of consciousness, a living interface of inner and outer field phenomena.
We all experience visceral or gut reactions and know instinctively how our mental states affect our physical vitality, and vice versa. But often we loose the intimate relationship with our mindbody, with the source of our being, our aliveness, our passions. If we experience this flow at all, it ebbs and flows away. Our individual and collective creative potential remains largely unrealized.
How often do we pay attention to those vital signs, the innate wisdom of the body, inhabiting our minds rather than our flesh? We are increasingly not instinctual, but cultural, and we choose many of our behaviors for good or ill. We’re nearly all “sick and tired” of the way things are, but what do we do to change them?
We can learn simple techniques for self regulation, such as biofeedback, yoga, and meditation. Creativity, as an activity in several fields, brings many intrinsic health-promoting rewards. We can create new habits to help us cope with technocratic society that tone or recalibrate our systems and change our physical state. We all have to learn how to deal with personal and/or global catastrophe whether we want to or not.
The Golden Flesh
Do we actively value our psychic well being, our totality, psyche and substance? Are we living soulful, artful lives? Do we nourish our whole selves with self-love? Do we take the time to care for our body or deny it, drive it relentlessly like our servant, or treat it like a machine? Do we attend to our inner world of waking images and dreams? Can we come to our senses, deepening the quality and intensity of embodied experience?
Our felt-sense is our wise intuitive response if we but listen. It brings meaning and value to life. What is your body trying to tell you? The body has a mind of its own and speaks that mind in gut reactions, body language, psychosomatics, and literal symptoms.
When psychic energy is dammed up it manifests in unconscious or destructive ways, such as tension, withdrawl, alienation, anxiety, compulsions, depression, addictions, somatization, and suicidal tendencies. Some people learn early, even in the womb, that their world is not a safe place. Social patterns become maladaptive when an organism’s true needs are not met in a tangible, congruent way.
A confused person can react with pain, fear, hopelessness, cognitive dissonance, disturbed biorhythms, approach/avoidance, passive aggression, codependence, apathy, or self-defeating behavior patterns. Our biology and minds become confused. Fed enough negative self-talk the body will react with authentic symptoms, self-induced illness. This does not mean that all disease is self-inflicted nor that we are necessarily to blame for our ailments, in some version of “new age guilt”.
Both the alternative health fields and mindbody psychologies such as the humanistic, Jungian and transpersonal psychologies have sought the triple union of body, soul, and spirit much like the medieval alchemists. But only a fusion of those approaches can manifest the union of opposites in the golden flesh. We can learn to care for our mindbodies in new ways from the inside out, conceptually and experientially.
To truly nourish ourselves holistically we have to address the manifest needs of mental and physical well-being. Consciousness may have a direct effect on the subatomic particles of the body, especially those within the brain. A tiny change within the open system of the brain, for example, can result in a vast change to the overall health of the body because of amplification through feedback loops. Nonlinearity exists at many scales.
Soma Sophia
Sometimes we have to address the external realities of a situation and sometimes its spirit or essential nature. The same is true for our bodies and souls. Significance is extracted from the experiential responses of our whole being – soma significance, the felt-sense wisdom of the bodymind, which we can personify as Soma Sophia.
We can use the wisdom of the bodymind to face stress, pain, loss, illness, even catastrophe. Creative transformation of our instinctive reactions produces the gold, whether we call that essence health, art, flow, or inspiration. Psychic sustenance is found within. Once the mindbody connects with Source, all of our self-expression becomes soulful. We truly embody spirit.
That Source is the source of psychic energy, our libido, which becomes available for negentropic or entropic expression. Its tangible root lies within our very energy/matter as the plenum that science calls the vacuum fluctuation or zero-point energy, the groundstate of existence. It is a bit of the cosmos, of the universe that lies within our bodies, which are composed of elements cooked within the stars.
The body itself is the Hermetic vessel for the transformation of instinctual drives. That creative process can take place through trance, art, or meditation, or any combination of them. There are many techniques, which help us process pain, stress, trauma, or depression. Often therapies address higher levels of organization, often at the conceptual level, rather than reordering the physical core of distress, which inhibits our well-being.
A dynamic combination of focus, concentration and flow undergirds our conscious existence and how we relate to others and the world. In meditations such as biofeedback, Tai Chi or Yoga, we intentionally create dynamic changes in our psychophysiology. We temporarily drop our identification with the body only to reinhabit it with even more awareness or mindfulness. This is the artful life; creative fulfillment of our collective destiny.
The Field Body
We can return to Nature and our nature, collectively preparing a paradigm shift for a new shared reality and trajectory – physical, emotional, cognitive and spiritual coherence. The silent frictionless flow of living intelligence is beyond words and conceptual constructs. We are a process of recursive self-generation. This continuum, which is our groundstate or creative Source, is directly discoverable in the immediacy of the emergent embodied moment.
We are each a temple of living light. We arise from and are sustained by field phenomena, waves of biophotonic light and sound, which form our essential nature through acoustic holography (Miller & Miller), which is similar to the formation of matter via sound in cymatics. Cymatics is the science that describes how sound creates forms via resonance phenomena. Bioholography is thus a form of cymatics – acoustic holography.
Holography is the artform of producing virtual 3-D spatial images of objects. Its artifact is an ephemera, though the holographic plate which records the interference pattern is not. Projections are most compelling when they converge on the viewer. Virtuality is the condition of pure potential, non-actualization. Virtual images are created from diffracting lightwaves and reading the interference patterns.
But virtual particles from the vacuum potential (ZPE) pop in and out of our reality perturbing, even creating actual particles. Cybernetic virtuality involves interaction with a computer system to render certain potentialities actual within certain rules. In holographic systems, a body of fiction can potentially trigger future facts, opening new windows of reality. For example, rituals of quantum biofeedback, can manifest as nonlocal healing, whether through tangible interaction or the power of suggestion and placebo effect.
Our bodies are created from the virtuality of scalar field interactions with our 4-D reality of this spacetime. The mechanism is by projection via our DNA by biophotons or coherent light produced within the body. This coherent light transduces itself into radio waves, which carry sound as information that decodes the 4-D form as a material object, such as ourselves.
The study of this phenomenon of light and sound forming an organism using DNA as a holographic projector is called quantum bioholography (Miller). This process is true not only of formation of the body but also extends into its maintenance, a continual process of creation and renewal.
Light and sound carry the information that shapes us and our environment. In a sense we are essentially “frozen” light. Universe congeals within us each moment in a unique way, never to be repeated. Science now tells us this is so, that each of us extends nonlocally far beyond the skin boundary through our embedded field body (Pribram/Bohm, Wan-Ho).
Nature works through self-organization at the creative edge of chaos (Gleick, Peat), and so do we. Complexity is the fine line between chaos and order, "a chaos of behaviors in which the components of the system never quite lock into place, yet never quite dissolve into turbulence either" (Waldrop, 1992, p. 293). The creative edge of chaos is a transition phase.
Self-reinforcing, autopoeitic morphogenesis creates specific forms. Yet a meta-theory eludes us. We still don’t know exactly how that works; there is currently no consensus in quantum physics at the level of the unified field, but we have many working theories, which help us grope our way toward understanding. Likewise, there is no generally accepted paradigm in consciousness studies. Ambiguity surrounding our psychophysical Mystery also shows up in the split between conventional allopathic and energy medicine.
Mystics suggest even more subtle connections of soul and spirit through time and space, evolutionary intelligence. Even without a mystical approach, we can rest and refresh ourselves by aligning our intentionality with the very fabric of spacetime. Consciously participating in this universal process helps heal and integrate our mindbodies, psyche and matter. We can learn to self-soothe cumulative daily irritations by practicing self-regulation.
Cosmos resonates within each of us, but we have lost touch with that due to electromagnetic pollution and the distracting demands of modern life. But we can rediscover this integral context in which we are embedded as a field of timeless, radiant abundance. Spacetime is a plenum rather than an empty vacuum. It abides not just outside us in the depths of space but within the fabric of our being. We are pulsating dynamos of cells, organs, and dynamic systems.
We can learn to wrap our minds around this quantum reality that we are not separate from the ongoing process of creation, even if an energetic field of information defies detection. The source of creation always flows through rhythmic pulsation or waves of energy/matter. The manifestation of each so-called particle of our being is orchestrated through a self-organizing process (Penrose/Hameroff).
This dance is a harmonic continuum from the smallest to the largest scales, permeating all domains of assembly and observation – subquantum, quantum, molecular, chemical, even cultural, global, and cosmological. The evolution of our dynamic system obeys universal laws. Likewise our behaviors flow into manifestation from our beliefs, thoughts and emotions, including our self-image.
By opening to system dynamics we can reorganize away from the entropic, reductionistic, destructive habit patterns that plague our species. We can make stress-reducing negentropic choices for structural and psychological adjustment, which improve our quality of life. Integration is a synergistic process rooted in primordial bodymind consciousness.
The brain is not confined to our skull, but permeates our whole being through the intracellular matrix and sensory system, as well as the strong EM fields generated by the beating heart. Research suggests activities in the brain may be pre-conditioned by the DC field of the organism (Oschmann; Becker). Our molecular system extends beyond the nervous system and is the bedrock of intuitive, subconscious and unconscious processes.
Hypnosis suggests the fabric of the body also helps store our memories, embodying our triumphs and traumas. Ideomotor signaling (Rossi) can elicit revelations about ourselves not available from our conscious minds. There is a reciprocal action between our inchoate perceptions, thoughts and the chemistry of our bodies, and therefore our current and future states.
Jung (1932) identified at least five kinds of drives: hunger, activity, sexuality, creativity, and reflection. But he gradually came to conceive of "libido as a psychic analogue of physical energy,” a more or less quantitative concept, which should not be defined in qualitative terms, though libido includes drives, love, desire, aspirations. The important point is that this energy is never destroyed, but flows throughout the psyche activating now this part and now another.
Psychology describes psychic contents, including the role of the body, with psychic means. Psyche – the realm of soul -- is subject and object, medium and message, source and goal; there is no relative point of observation outside the human psyche. When we get down to it, we find only unprovable but assumed beliefs, which seem to work and therefore seem meaningful. We tend to have experiences that confirm our view or perspective of the world.
Physics, by contrast, pursues material reality both via and, to the greatest degree possible, beyond the human experience, but it also uses the mental medium in both its conceptions and inventions. All models of reality are “soft” technologies, but our beliefs and worldview condition the reality we experience. Just as matter is in a constant process of redefinition, so too must psyche and spirit be continuously redefined.
The psychic energy that directs and motivates the personality is called libido, which is simply a generic form of psychic energy which can be redirected or "canalized" into both sexual and non-sexual activities. Psychic energy balances the energy flowing between spirit and instinct. This non-specific energy can consciously be deployed and channeled for self-transformation.
Go with the Flow
Research has shown (Csikszentmihalyi) that self-teaching is strongly correlated with quality of life and the ability to experience refreshing concentration and flow in ordinary activities. Maslow called this quality self-actualization, first as an emergent property which can becomes a stabilized steady-state of personality. The “good life” is not only enjoyable and growth promoting, it reduces the sum total of entropy in the world.
Yet finding flow in our busy lives can be elusive. Flow is neutral, as a source of psychic energy, focusing attention and motivating action. It can be used for constructive or destructive experiences. The more we allocate to the negative, the less we have available for the positive. So we need to become jealous of our spare energy, spending it wisely as our psychophysical organism tells us through bodytalk and feelings.
The amount of energy available to our consciousness and will varies. We can respond to stress by being active rather than reactive. Self-regulation means scanning, listening to, and intentionally recalibrating the mindbody. It requires focusing and concentration our attention, then “letting go”, seemingly releasing all effort…self-accepting, non-striving mindfulness.
Some suggest there is a Platonic field (Symposium) that restores our energy. It is compatible with the description of stages of pure consciousness described by the Yoga Sutras and other Eastern traditions (Buddhism, Taoism, etc.). The secret of the universe lies within “empty” space, which turns out to be a virtual plenum of potential. It is a nourishing essence, which feeds our psychophysical being.
Non-locality is regarded as accepted fact by physicists. They say that the twin photons are aware of each other instantaneously even if they are at opposite ends of the Universe. Laszlo says this new concept has primacy over matter. Puthoff says that matter is driven by this energy source (ZPE). And so is our matter. The interconnections among EM fields are not the external interactions described by Maxwell's four equations, the interconnection is "in the deep" inside those interacting fields, our own fields.
Inexhaustible psychic energy is the single most distinguishing trait of self-teaching individuals. Most creative people are self-taught, often achieving breakthroughs by investing surplus energy playing with the apparently trivial. No matter the subject, each of their new little discoveries parlays into excitement at the moment of discovery, in a self-reinforcing reward. These rewards build motivation to continue.
Have the “creatively gifted” learned a subtle secret for drawing on the essence of the cosmos by investing in their curiosity and delight? Some learn how to draw this surplus energy from the psychic well early in life and drink deeply through their attempts to understand, invent, express and solve problems. They manifest a determination to participate as fully as possible in life.
Self-actualizers pay more attention to what is going on around them with surplus energy to invest their attention in things or people for their own sake, rather than for strokes or gain. Most people hoard their attention in self-absorption, material or emotional advantage rather than growth, empathy and compassion.
Most guard their energy for immediate role or stress responses, or become bound by those factors, numb or apathetic. Those less concerned with themselves actually have more psychic energy to experience life. Everyday giving is an antidote for self-obsession and negativity.
It’s a free-floating type of attention pursued without recognition or support, easily captured temporarily by any subject or interest, rather than strictly tied to goals and ambitions. Wonder, novelty, surprise, awe, and transcendence are boundary breaking allowing us to move beyond ignorance, fear and prejudice. Often this experience becomes a valuable element of later full-blown realizations – new synthesis.
We can cultivate this quality and it’s intrinsic reward by 1) doing whatever needs to be done, even the routine, with concentrated attention and skill, rather than inertia, and 2) approaching them with the care it takes to make a work of art.
Instead of using our leisure energy wastefully we can learn to direct it from passive activity toward new experiences, which only become interesting once we devote attention to them. Time management and husbanding of psychic energy can be directed to create increased enjoyment of life, here and now. In flow we forget ourselves, rather than wallowing in the apathy, worry and boredom of unmet personality needs. Life is too short to remain depressed or exhausted.
We need time and psychic energy to pursue our curiosity. So, we have to be alert for those issues and people who would negatively feed on us, draining, subverting, or sabotaging our creative flow. We can complain, reflect on our stuckness, or actively invest our psychic energy in harmonious relations and goals, creating positive feedback. Having clear goals helps us focus and concentrate, whether we achieve them, or not.
Owning our own actions helps us focus desires and priorities for an improved life. The self-motivated individual can concentrate more or less at will. Interest leads to focus and focus leads to interest. We take over ownership of our lives by learning to direct psychic energy toward our intentions. There is more consistency between inner desires and outer experience. When we learn to love what we have to do, the vector or arc of our development shifts.
When we learn to control attention, we learn to control experience, and therefore the quality of our lives. We invest less psychic energy in painful events and draining resentments, and more in self-affirming and rewarding activities, enjoying them for the control we acquire over our own attention. This simple process can lead to great leaps in transformation, and is also the basis of mystical practice simply for its own sake.
If you learn to love your fate, it reduces entropy not only in your own consciousness but for those you contact. In contact with source, you don’t have to feed on their energies in a negative way. We feel even better when creatively connected to something greater or more permanent than ourselves; it gives us energy. We can even find joy fighting a losing battle for a good cause.
Being in THE ZONE
Folklore has it that artists and sportsmen such as Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, Larry Bird can enter a state of consciousness where they are actively entangled with their surroundings and perhaps even the future. In tennis, the body must be in motion somehow anticipating trajectories even before the serve in order to return the volley. Surfing or boarding are also good examples. Gamers report a similar flow for their virtual states.
Likewise, artists enter a flow state in both inspiration and artistic production or performance. Artists, too, are often accused of anticipating expressing a symbolic change in collective culture, whether they are consciously aware of it, or not. They seem to have an uncanny knack for symbolizing the zeitgeist of the time.
Musicians speak of their own kind of telepathy among one another, especially when jamming or improvising. Someone playing a spirited fast musical break knows the flow is rolling on and at the same time they are aware of the details, although they couldn’t consciously decide each action.
Sudden alarm experiments explore how dominant field dynamics can happen faster than consciousness can respond, using purely internal physical mechanisms. Part of the role of consciousness as an overseer is to allow the conscious periphery to have immediate access in the case of a threatening signal.
We all know we can react with lightning speed automatically while only dimly aware of it. We are aware of it sufficiently to anticipate and react to save our lives. The critical advantage of subjective conscious comes in, even if it is almost subliminal and not consciously thought through.
The BITZ experiments explore the existence of entanglements beyond the human body. Books have been written on 'Being In The Zone' (BITZ). Most of us cannot repeat these super-athletic experiments. But, then, how many of us can smash an atom? We must trust the honesty and ethics of atom-smashing scientists. We just need a measure of BITZ that is not too subjective.
All of these examples are, in some sense direct verification of entanglement on a conscious level. But in practical terms we can still learn what qualities and practices lead to the flow state. In this subjective sense, BITZ has already been experimentally verified; indeed, we are all entangled with our environment, some more actively than others, but only a few can intentionally exploit it, though many have experienced it by accident or intent.
What we need to learn is how to deploy this capacity for creativity and/or healing. Anyone can learn through practices that require concentration in one area to translate that capacity to other areas, such as creativity. Certain orientations and qualities are involved and most of these can be adopted or developed. Many of them include the body, through kinesthetic muscle memory or other physical expressions that take learned behavior and put it on “auto-pilot”, making it seem virtually effortless.
Many activities elsewhere described as BITZ are actually products of a light trance state, such as flow state people report while driving a car.
Others, such as sports and music, explicitly require skill development to achieve fluency.
We can most easily apply ourselves to those things, which inspire a passion in us – those things we cannot help but do because the drive is strong, so motive and opportunity are there. But if a person has no passion, creative flow will remain elusive.
With passion you can always learn the techniques to accomplish your creative goals. Still, many wrestle with the experience of trying to maintain vitality, passion, and inspiration while getting caught up in the daily grind of paying the bills and other mundane necessities.
Reports of solutions include:
“It's a matter of intention. I try to make a conscious choice every day to do everything the best I can. For me, this has been a self sustaining and exponentailly growing energy sorce. The harder I work at doing things well, the better I do things, the better I feel about doing things, the more energy I have to work on doing things well, and so on, and so on.”
“For me, it's a matter of being Present, no matter what my external circumstances are. The loss of vitality comes not with the grinding work, but from the fact that we resist Life while doing that work. The only solution is to surrender to the moment, be present with what you are doing, and accept whatever comes as a result. Sometimes what comes won't be so pleasant, but as long as you accept that, then more and more often it will be pleasant things that come your way. “
“I feel like we can get through anything if we assert that it's only temporary. It's too easy to get dragged down by the slave paradigm, especially when you've got a higher mission you'd rather be tending to. We need to be that much stronger and clearer about our Great Work on this planet to get through the daily grind and seemingly endless servitude to the inane.”
There are two ways of looking at our predicament, one crippling, one liberating:
· COGNITIVE DISSONANCE: psychospiritual reality and mundane patterns are at odds with each other, bringing stress and a feeling of self-betrayal. This splits intent and energy, divides and conquers by lack of wholeness. Thwarted by a feeling of not living in sincere harmony with your true self Power (psychic energy) leaks away.
· METANARRATIVE: realize that mundane activities are a result of will or intentionality, and that you are manifesting the mundane patterns that you see before you, either by conscious will or by default. The life you've created can manifest as a song, a poem, an art project, a great disovery. When you chose to make it surface, your full power and as a manifestation engine emerges.
Flow in intellectual and spiritual processes emerges from removal of blocks to creativity (such as competing activities and focus; poor self-image; poor judgment, thinking and work habits; conventionality, mediocrity; numbness; intolerance of complexity or solitude) and certain positive attitudes and behavior patterns, such as commitment to vision.
The most often cited examples facilitating creativity include the following: fluency, flexibility, sensitivity to problems, problems, originality, curiosity, openness to feelings and the unconscious, motivation, persistence and concentration, ability to think in images, ability to toy with ideas, ability to analyze and synthesize, tolerance of ambiguity, discernment and selectivity, ability to tolerate isolation, creative memory, background of fundamental knowledge, incubation, anticipation of productive periods, ability to think in metaphors, aesthetic orientation, etc.
If your desire to be creative is strong enough, nothing will prevent you from applying yourself if you have passion. Can the flow state be far behind? It is a form of transcendence, whether it comes through the physical flow of the body, the conceptual high of the A-ha state, the absorption and aesthetic satisfaction of the artistic process, or any conditions, which promote emotional flow.
The latter might range from love, to the high encountered learning from one’s mentors, to the perception that Cosmos is facilitating your intention in a given direction, though the latter is a synchronicity – flow with the environment.
In trance states the process is largely automatic and unconscious; no “learning” is required. Trance possession and ‘white line fever’ arise from the same level, while the former includes a transpersonal experience. In artistic fervor the doors of the subconscious swing wide and there is mixing of the inner subjective world with the object world of tangible expression.
In pure creativity, including nonlocal healing and the bliss of meditative states, focus and concentration are consciously applied directly with intent. Trance, art and creativity are all forms of transcendence of the ego and connection with deeper than conscious levels of existence.
Exercising one’s talents helps remove the blocks mundane life would like to introject. Fluency, a creative ritual, a workstation, and making time available help increase the drive needed to carry a project to completion. Intentionality and a conducive environment increase the probability creativity will emerge.
But the secret is that connections or open channels to primordial SOURCE tend to provide a degree of flow, self-realization, or illumination. So, the real key to creativity in all its forms seems to be an enhanced capacity to connect tangibly with source bringing back some material or immaterial boon from that inspiration.
Conclusions
There are many plausible ways that quantum theory can help with these profound mysteries of the groundstate of energy/matter, consciousness, awareness and flow. It will likely be many decades before some understanding of the actual mechanisms are finalized. So, despite the pluses and minuses of existing quantum theories of mind, these kinds of theories should be encouraged. If consciousness is or is related to quantum effects then scientists will have to think in these directions to figure it out.
"Whether this vast homogeneous expanse of isotropic matter is fitted not only to be a medium of physical interaction between distant bodies, and to fulfill other physical functions of which, perhaps, we have as yet no conception, but also to constitute the material organism of beings exercising functions of life and mind as high or higher than ours are at present-is a question far transcending the limits of physical speculation.”, says Maxwell.
Most natural philosophers hold, and have held, that action at a distance across empty space is impossible. In other words, that matter cannot act where it is not, but only where it is. The question "where is it?" is a further question that may demand attention and require more than a superficial answer.
Arguably, every atom of matter has a universal though nearly infinitesimal prevalence, and extends everywhere; since there is no definite sharp boundary or limiting periphery to the region disturbed by its existence. The lines of force of an isolated electric charge extend throughout illimitable space.
No ordinary matter is capable of transmitting the undulations or tremors that we call light. The speed at which they go, the kind of undulation, and the facility with which they go through vacuum, forbid this. So clearly and universally has it been perceived that waves must be waves of something, something distinct from ordinary matter.
Faraday conjectured that the same medium, which is concerned in the propagation of light, might also be the agent in electromagnetic phenomena, and he called it “the ether”. Now we speak of it as the zero-point domain of virtual photon fluctuation. Romantically, we refer to it as the plenum, since it is infinitely full of potential.
Some philosophers have reason to suppose that mind can act directly on mind without intervening mechanism, and sometimes that has been spoken of as genuine action at a distance. But, in the first place, no proper conception or physical model can be made of such a process, much less how that deploys intentionality in distance healing.
Nor is it clear that space and distance have any particular meaning in the region of psychology. The links between mind and mind may be something quite other than physical proximity. Since we don’t know how it works, in denying action at a distance across empty space we are not denying telepathy or other activities of a non-physical kind. Brain disturbance or mindbody healing are plausible physical correlate of mental action, whether of the sending or receiving variety.
There is no consensus in physics, nor in consciousness studies, though there is a correlating theory for nearly every one proposed in physics. Spontaneous healing may bypass all of these suggested metatheories. A field becomes a nearly innacurrate term in the subquantual domain or metaphysical level of observation.
According to Hameroff, “Everything (matter, energy, you, me) is part of the hidden geometry of spacetime, of which the Platonic is one aspect. Smells and colors and melodic tunes are complex assemblies of fundamental qualia embedded as configurations in fundamental spacetime geometry.
The qualia in spacetime geopmetry *out there* caused qualia *in here* within us because there is spacetime geometry within our mindbodies as well. Because spacetime geometry is inherently nonlocal it could be that *out there* and *in here* are connected, or actually the same. Only in the classical world is there a spacelike distinction. Pure consciousness is the experience of a total lack of phenomenal content while still awake and alert, and thus able to remember there was nothing.
[Some theories alledge] cognitive functions reflect consciousness which exists in the universe. I am saying that quantum processes in the brain (related to cognitive processes) are connected to protoconscious quantum information inherent in the universe. The connection results in OR which is a moment of consciousness (the protoconscious/unconscious quantum information becomes conscious) But remember the universe/spacetime geometry out there is also in our heads.” Hameroff
Several Vedic and Taoist texts (and perhaps other traditions as well) suggest that, with proper refinement of consciousness, the “outside” world can be cognized holographically, in a superposed, interpenetrating state where everything is experienced in everything else. If evidence can support such claims, perhaps the human mechanisms of perception have the capacity to directly experience an uncollapsed universe in which what is normally unconscious is merged into consciousness (or vice versa). Its like a dream.
But somehow consciousness is; somehow creativity emerges; somehow healing works; somehow we are, and are interrelated. Perhaps real meaning comes from our struggle to try to understand how these things work, to struggle toward wisdom in both the material and spiritual realms. There is meaning in the struggle to create, to heal, to know, to be.
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Consciousness Studies; 4300 words
CONNECTIVE TISSUE
CONSCIOUSNESS: Quantum and Otherwise
By Iona Miller, Nov 1, 2005
Quantum Consciousness?
The paths of Wolfgang Pauli, coming from the advanced edge of physics, and Carl Jung, from the advanced edge of the psyche, crossed with interesting results for their generation. Pauli came away rededicated to unifying psyche and matter, to finding "the irrational in matter and the subjective in physics" and convinced of "the resurrection of spirit in matter." Jung came away with the idea of acausal connections -- meaningful coincidences -- an idea developed with the help of Pauli.
This collaboration raised the question of what it means to live in a world of where synchronicity is part of our experience. Each of the physical and psychological theories that have arisen since have also addressed implications about our existence and interconnections, not just theories. It is quite different to be essentially an ethereal wave-front in space than a solid meat body. But we rarely even conceive of ourselves this way, much less wrap our minds around the implications. We live in a fantasy of solid objects and conscious awareness.
Consciousness is more than simple conscious awareness or self awareness. It’s ALL in your mind, but not necessarily merely in your head. The universe is literally holistically contained within the mindbody and is the context of mindbody. Both physicists and mystics now tell us that there is noTHING “out there.” The Vedas said centuries ago that it’s all “mindstuff” and modern science is now confronting that. Wave forms and particles derive their energy from the inside of space. That energy is dynamic, always interacting from the cosmic to subquantal realms.
"The vast interplanetary and interstellar regions will no longer be regarded as waste places in the universe, which the Creator has not seen fit to fill with the symbols of the manifold order of His kingdom. We shall find them to be already full of this wonderful medium; so full, that no human power can remove it from the smallest portion of Space, or produce the slightest flaw in its infinite continuity. It extends unbroken from star to star; and when a molecule of hydrogen vibrates in the dog-star, the medium receives the impulses of these vibrations, and after carrying them in its immense bosom for several years, delivers them, in due course, regular order, and full tale, into the spectroscope of Mr. Huggins, at Tulse Hill.", declared James Clerk Maxwell.
The vacuum energy or Zero Point Energy (ZPE) can be viewed as the Qi energy field according to the ancient Chinese Qi theory or worldview. In the very beginning there was Wu (Nothing or Void), then there was "Hun Tun" (the Great Chaos), later formed the "Tai Chi", then formed the "Tai Shih" (the Great Beginning) permeated with Qi.
The Qi then splitted into two, the Yin and Yang two complementary Qi forces. The interactions of the Yin Qi and Yang Qi evolves all things including Life. To the Chinese, Everything has Qi. Everything functions through Qi. It is the Qi that keeps us alive. To the Chinese, Life is not the end product of an evolutionary process, rather Life Force Qi's existence necessitates Physics and Chemistry being what it is.
Roger Penrose, a mathematical physicist at Oxford University, believes that if a "theory of everything" is ever developed in physics to explain all the known phenomena in the universe, it should at least partially account for consciousness. Penrose also believes that quantum mechanics, the rules governing the physical world at the subatomic level, might play an important role in consciousness.
But physicists and metaphysicists seem to talk about Consciousness as a primal essence, and consciousness as a neurological state of an organism, including human. Consciousness is equated by mystically-oriented physicists with the very essence of cosmos beyond energy/matter, residing within us as the groundstate of Being. The reductionistic view is that it is just a sequence of awareness interacting with the environment which can become complex as self-awareness arises; hierarchically stratified neural processes.
But no one seems to really know what Consciousness or consciousness is, anymore than they know what electricity actually is. For some it is cosmic, for others the most mundane result of our brain functions. The distinctions between so-called objective and subjective consciousness is now moot. Physics has shown there is only subjectivity, though facts can exist.
"Almost everyone agrees that there will be very strong correlations between what's in the brain and consciousness," says David Chalmers, a philosophy professor and Director of the Center for Consciousness at the Australian National University. "The question is what kind of explanation that will give you.
Chalmers wants more than correlation, alledging we want explanation – “how and why do brain process give rise to consciousness? That's the big mystery.” The converse question would be how and why does Consciousness give rise to cosmos? The problem is, Consciousness and consciousness seem to be irreducible, try as we might.
According to Chalmers, the subjective nature of consciousness prevents it from being explained in terms of simpler components, a method used to great success in other areas of science. He believes that unlike most of the physical world, which can be broken down into individual atoms, or organisms, which can be understood in terms of cells, consciousness is irreducible. It’s an aspect of the universe, like space and time and mass. According to this view, consciousness is primal.
A theory of consciousness would not explain what consciousness is or how it arose; instead, it would try to explain the relationship between consciousness and everything else in the world. In another theory the boson involved is conformal gravity, aka dark energy, aka the vacuum, aka zero point energy. Anything that gets entangled (electrons, photons, etc) builds up consciousness. There are other theories of entanglement, coherence and decoherence.
Many say QM has the look and feel of consciousness. There are several types of explanation of quantum state reduction, an occasion of experience: Copenhagen (conscious observation causes collapse), multiple worlds (each possibility branches off to form a new universe), decoherence (interaction with environment contaminates superposition - though it doesn’t really cause reduction), some objective threshold for reduction (objective reduction - OR), or quantum gravity.
Popular QM notions seem to fall into two categories:
· Copenhagen-esque--"old school" explanations which dwell on quantum theory's non-intuitiveness and in fact seem to celebrate the "leap of logic" needed to accept the observer-based wave-function collapse postulate;
· New Agey Utopian idealism--"quantum theory is strange, consciousness is strange, therefore, consciousness is explained by quantum theory", entanglement is proof that "all points in the universe are connected by some underlying ineffable thing, so can't we all just get along", etc.
Quantum theory will probably play a role in explaining consciousness and its relationship to the brain. In some theories (Greenfield), mind is rooted in the physical connections between neurons, while consciousness is an emergent property of the brain, similar to the 'wetness' of water or the 'transparency' of glass. The electrical activity of the brain makes a `model' of a self in the world and our understanding of physical reality requires this `model' to exist `in the dark'. We don’t know if it’s basis is quantum or complexity, or some combination of quantum uncertainty and chaotic sensitivity.
There may be a link between chaotic sensitivity and quantum entanglement to create the ‘trick’ of consciousness (King, 2005). Synapses are making a potential energy landscape. High energy chaos explores the full phase space and attention lowers the energy until the dynamic either enters an existing attractor (recognition) or the system bifurcates to form a new attractor (new learned stimulus). It's a form of energy minimization.
Is there a link between global brain states and quantum phenoemena? Promising hypotheses link Freeman's model of chaos and bifurcation, Cramer's idea of transactional quantum entanglement, and Pribram's idea of the holographic brain and newer ideas of stochastic resonance and more theoretical ideas of quantum chaos. All these processes can interact together to make a viable basis for intentional subjective consciousness.
The brain is full of oscillations. The oscillations are chaotic in the time domain but holographic spatial oscillation in the space domain. Neural systems identify the oscillations that are in phase and they become the process that stands out from the out of phase noise. The in phase waves cause synaptic adaption and learning. When the brain goes from 'hunting' to 'eureka' there is a transition from chaotic out of phase excitation to phase correlated excitation.
This is the same process that happens in a quantum measurement, when we can only measure energy as frequency and can't directly sample wave amplitude of a quantum, so have to let enough beats pass to get an accurate frequency and thus don't know the time exactly. This is the uncertainty relation. The two processes are homologous.
Coherent oscillations in neurons are both the consequence of coupled areas and the cause of them over time. Chaotic excitations can, of course, be in or out of phase . It is the non-linearities which enable a number of harmonic oscillators to become mode-locked into phase or phase multiplicity, so non-linearity is the basis of all these phase locking phenomena, too (King).
According to Walter Freeman, "Consciousness may well be the subjective experience of this recursive process of motor command, reafference and perception. If so, it enables the brain to plan and prepare for each subsequent action on the basis of past action, sensory input and perceptual synthesis. In short, an act of perception is not the copying of an incoming stiinuIus. It is a step in a trajectory by which brains grow, reorganize themselves and reach into their environment to change it to their own advantage."
This `model' is an intellectual abstraction and in reality it is just spatial and temporal relationships between each piece of electrical activity. Every quanta is in the form of matter waves except at state reduction. The electromagnetic fields permeating neurons and synapses consist of real and virtual photons, in their wave states, and each of these are disturbances in the photon field.
Quantum Healing
Our experience of reality is based on mind and observation. Only our mental impressions, sensory filters, language categories, and concepts make us perceive things: things as separate from ourselves, the I and the not-I. But we are seamlessly welded to the Universe at the most fundamental levels. We cannot scientifically or spiritually distinguish ourselves from the subquantum ground of BEING, even if we feel separate or alienated.
But who among us has successfully abandoned the tendency to conceptualize observations as things, and compound that observation with qualitative attributions? We have experiences and later we say it was this or that. Some forms of meditation are based on disidentification from all aspects of existence and nominalism – neither this nor that.
But most of us still can’t wrap our quantum minds around it as a steady state of perception. Though science has extended our sight to the subquantal and cosmological levels, we still think provincially from the human scale of our natural senses. Our logic and metaphors are based in the senses. But our outer life comes from the invisible inner world, where we are literally in resonance with the Cosmos.
Concepts of matter, life, and mind have undergone major changes. Consciousness is not a material system and neither is Quantum Mechanics (QM). The world is quantum mechanical and we must learn to perceive it as such, but we don’t need to understand that to experience nonlocal healing, any more than we need to comprehend internal combustion to drive. Even physicists have a tough time reconciling what they know about the deep nature of reality with their mundane experience in the world of things.
So how does that mind and its underlying mechanisms relate to or produce consciousness? Is consciousness a quantum process, or does it underlie all process? Neurologists tell us it is a physical matter of wetware in the skull. However, the most we can say at the molecular level is that there are correlates of consciousness. The irreducible precursors of consciousness and matter are built into the universe. They just ARE, unified holistic process.
At the finest levels of observation, physicists contend the distinction between mind and matter becomes as paradoxical as the distinction between energy and matter, life and death (organic/inorganic). Quantum mechanics strongly suggests the Universe is mental. The substratum of everything, including our experience of being, has this mental character.
Healing theories, particularly nonlocal models, have drawn from theories in both new physics and consciousness studies, often compounding and confounding both disciplines. They mix levels of observation in theories, which seem to be largely conditioned by the favoritism of pet projects; thus each theory is generally associated with only one or two “brand” names of researchers.
Healers have been quick to parrot many of these ideas that support what they feel they have observed in intentional healing acts, or what validates the tenets of their school of practice. Often their comprehension of the scientific basis of the argument is slim to none. But this attribution is used to “explain” the phenomenon, with enough misapprehension to preserve the Mystery. However, it isn’t this confusion that makes it so. Are the enigmatic qualities of the quantum realm actually the same as the unity, coherence and other enigmatic qualities of the conscious one? The jury is still out.
There is no consensus among theories of what constitutes FIGURE and what constitutes the most fundamental GROUND, and it seems they share the same essential nature. Our perceived ‘content’ is not distinct from the ‘context’ in which it arises. It is one whole cloth of bubbling space-time. Nothing more, nor less. We have looked into the Abyss of spacetime and found it laughing back.
Ervin Laszlo points out regarding the finest level of observation, that because of “the quantum vacuum, the energy sea that underlies all of spacetime, it is no longer warranted to view matter as primary and space as secondary. It is to space or rather, to the cosmically extended "Dirac-sea" of the vacuum that we should grant primary reality.” Virtual particles pop in and out of existence like quantum foam.
Mass is the consequence of interactions in the depth of this universal field. There is only this absolute matter-generating energy field. This realization transforms our perception of life. Living systems constantly interact with the quantum vacuum, also called zero-point energy, vacuum fluctuation, or subspace. Wave-packets of matter are in a subtle interactive dance with the underlying vacuum field, a vast network of intimate interactions, extending into our biosphere and even Cosmos. Mind and matter both evolve from the cosmic womb of space.
According to Laszlo: “The interaction of our mind and consciousness with the quantum vacuum links us with other minds around us, as well as with the biosphere of the planet. It "opens" our mind to society, nature, and the universe. This openness has been known to mystics and sensitives, prophets and meta-physicians through the ages. But it has been denied by modern scientists and by those who took modern science to be the only way of comprehending reality.”
He goes on to propose a poetic metaphor: “Everything that goes on in our mind could leave its wave- traces in the quantum vacuum, and everything could be received by those who know how to "tune in" to the subtle patterns that propagate there.” In a mechanistic throwback, he likens it to an antenna picking up signals from a transmitter that contains the experience of the entire human race, reminding strongly of Carl Jung’s Collective Unconscious.
Worldviews color our perceptions of our Reality, even in science. Concepts are effective theories, useful not true. The universe is immaterial, mental and spiritual. The mind observes, but it doesn’t really observe “things”. It has a way of attributing certain qualities, subjective qualities and dynamics, to everything, even so-called “objective observation. This multisensory narrative becomes the content of our memories – how we remember what happens.
Our minds have a tendency to come up with reasons, whys and wherefores, for things as they appear to us. It is part of our survival mechanisms. However, physics has proven, through relativity theory, the uncertainty principle, wave/particle duality, and Godel’s theorem, that there can be no objectivity, no order or creativity without chaos.
The mind produces narratives. Archetypal forces act as lenses that cause us to cherish certain beliefs, which lead to a class of thoughts, and patterns of emotions and behaviors. It doesn’t matter if you come down on the side of preferring order or chaos, nature has her way. Ultimately, spontaneous or natural healing seems to by-pass this entire complex system, overriding our conscious perspectives in many cases. We may not “believe” in paradoxical healing, but it can still “work”, effecting psychophysical change at a deeper level through the emotional mind and through Mystery.
Healing is irrational. Perhaps the question we should really be asking is what causes us to imagine we are dissociated from a state of optimal health. This doesn’t mean our bodies will always work flawlessly. Chaos theory reveals that many systems in the body are self-organizing and regulated by stochastic processes that are naturally chaotic in nature. Chaos actually helps us reorganize, recalibrate our metabolism.
We can discuss it in terms of nested structured duality, superfluids, or an array of vortices, or a microtubule bank, or a dendritic cluster, hyper-neurons, glia and gap junction networks, or an entangled or collapsing wave function; still, we're merely talking about resonance between arrays -- patterns. This perspective leads to consideration of a Holographic concept of reality, the frequency domain, David Bohm’s implicate order.
Panpsychism aside, every bit of electrical activity is unaware of itself, is unaware of every other bit of electrical activity, and is unaware of all their relationships. This raises the question: why does consciousness exists at all and why is it a unity? What is synchronicity but a feedback between perceived reality and the emerging train of events. This is consistent with the transactional interpretation in which there is a handshaking between past emitters and future absorbers.
There are many plausible ways that quantum theory can help with these profound mysteries and it will be many decades before some understanding of the actual mechanisms are finalized. So, despite the pluses and minuses of existing quantum theories of mind, these kinds of theories should be encouraged. If consciousness is or is related to quantum effects then scientists will have to think in these directions to figure it out.
Conclusions
"Whether this vast homogeneous expanse of isotropic matter is fitted not only to be a medium of physical interaction between distant bodies, and to fulfill other physical functions of which, perhaps, we have as yet no conception, but also to constitute the material organism of beings exercising functions of life and mind as high or higher than ours are at present - is a question far transcending the limits of physical speculation.”, said Maxwell.
Of course, that was then and this is now.
Most natural philosophers hold, and have held, that action at a distance across empty space is impossible. In other words, that matter cannot act where it is not, but only where it is. The question "where is it?" is a further question that may demand attention and require more than a superficial answer.
Arguably, every atom of matter has a universal though nearly infinitesimal prevalence, and extends everywhere; since there is no definite sharp boundary or limiting periphery to the region disturbed by its existence. The lines of force of an isolated electric charge extend throughout illimitable space.
No ordinary matter is capable of transmitting the undulations or tremors that we call light. The speed at which they go, the kind of undulation, and the facility with which they go through vacuum, forbid this. So, clearly and universally has it been perceived that waves must be waves of something, something distinct from ordinary matter.
Faraday conjectured that the same medium, which is concerned in the propagation of light, might also be the agent in electromagnetic phenomena, and he called it “the ether”. Now we speak of it as the zero-point domain of virtual photon fluctuation. Romantically, we refer to it as the plenum, since it is infinitely full of potential.
Some philosophers have reason to suppose that mind can act directly on mind without intervening mechanism, and sometimes that has been spoken of as genuine action at a distance. But, in the first place, no proper conception or physical model can be made of such a process, much less how that deploys intentionality in distance healing.
Nor is it clear that space and distance have any particular meaning in the region of psychology. The links between mind and mind may be something quite other than physical proximity. Since we don’t know how it works, in denying action at a distance across empty space we are not denying telepathy or other activities of a non-physical kind. Brain disturbance or mindbody healing are plausible physical correlates of mental action, whether of the sending or receiving variety.
There is no consensus in physics, nor in consciousness studies, though there is a correlating theory for nearly every one proposed in physics. Spontaneous healing may bypass all of these suggested metatheories. A field becomes a nearly innacurrate term in the subquantual domain or metaphysical level of observation.
According to Hameroff, “Everything (matter, energy, you, me) is part of the hidden geometry of spacetime, of which the Platonic is one aspect. Smells and colors and melodic tunes are complex assemblies of fundamental qualia embedded as configurations in fundamental spacetime geometry.
The qualia in spacetime geopmetry *out there* caused qualia *in here* within us because there is spacetime geometry within our mindbodies as well. Because spacetime geometry is inherently nonlocal it could be that *out there* and *in here* are connected, or actually the same. Only in the classical world is there a spacelike distinction. Pure consciousness is the experience of a total lack of phenomenal content while still awake and alert, and thus able to remember there was nothing.
[Some theories alledge] cognitive functions reflect consciousness which exists in the universe. I am saying that quantum processes in the brain (related to cognitive processes) are connected to protoconscious quantum information inherent in the universe. The connection results in OR which is a moment of consciousness (the protoconscious/unconscious quantum information becomes conscious) But remember the universe/spacetime geometry out there is also in our heads.” Hameroff
Several Vedic and Taoist texts (and perhaps other traditions as well) suggest that, with proper refinement of consciousness, the “outside” world can be cognized holographically, in a superposed, interpenetrating state where everything is experienced in everything else. If evidence can support such claims, perhaps the human mechanisms of perception have the capacity to directly experience an uncollapsed universe in which what is normally unconscious is merged into consciousness (or vice versa). Its like a dream.
But somehow consciousness is; somehow creativity emerges; somehow healing works; somehow we are, and are interrelated. Perhaps real meaning comes from our struggle to try to understand how these things work, to struggle toward wisdom in both the material and spiritual realms. There is meaning in the struggle to create, to heal, to know, to be.
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Chris King suggests how chaotic sensitive dependence and quantum entanglement might be connected. Here are a few pointers to the core idea:
> 1. Cosmic symmetry-breaking causes the universe to develop non-linear fractal interac tive structures, leading to the origin of life.
> 2. Primal eucaryote cells had excitable membranes as a multi-quantum mode sense using chaotic sensitive dependence (the butterfly effect). There are three quantum senses vision (photon-orbital), hearing/touch (harmonic/soliton), and smell (orbital-orbital)
> 3. The amplification of quantum uncertainty by sensitive dependence gave these cells an anticipatory property through transactional entanglement (see below).
> 4. Complex nervous systems developed as fractally dynamic structures to enable this sensitive dependence to become global, using phase-front processing - the same basis as quantum measurement. This is different from fractal structure although the two are related.
5. The brain uses global excitations with phase front measurement, and chaotic sensitive dependence to make a resonance be tween the quantum and global levels ... this resonance is made possible by the scale-exploding properties of fractal dynamics.
6. There is direct experimental evidence that a single ion channel opening stochastically (a quantum transformation) can excite an entire hippocampal cell and that a single hippocampal cell can set off a global brain response. The brain critically poised in a decision can thus become quantu m sensitive. The phenomenon is called stochastic resonance, and it proves the brain is capable of such super-sensitivity.
> 7. The brain can then use computation to engulf the deductive aspects of a problem using transitions from chaos to order. Eureka for example is a transition from specific initial conditions Archimedes was facing in his problem and conscious lateral intuition in a transition from 'hunting' chaos to 'eureka' so the process is capable of complementing computation with intuition.
> 8. Most problems an organism faces are computationally intractable open environment problems in which there is not one optimum choice but many viable alternatives. Consciousness is not manifestly computation, but anticipatory awareness of the quantum of the moment which enables an animal to escape a predator.
> 9. Transactional supercausality shows collapse of the wave function can anticipate future boundary conditions. History, evolution and the Schrodinger cat all have a common basis in collapsing the super-abundance of quantum parallelism. Collapsing the wave function is a way the brain can complement computation with real outcomes generated by uncertainty through chaos when the situation is uncomputable. It is manifest in subjective consciousness and has potent survival value in anticipating imminent crisis.