Who Cares About Health

Who Cares About Health ?

Caleb Gattegno

Educational Solutions Worldwide Inc.

First published in the United States of America in 1979. Reprinted in 2009.

Copyright Š 1979-2009 Educational Solutions Worldwide Inc. Author: Caleb Gattegno All rights reserved ISBN 0-00000-000-0 Educational Solutions Worldwide Inc. 2nd Floor 99 University Place, New York, N.Y. 10003-4555 www.EducationalSolutions.com

Table of Contents Preface ........................................................................ 1 1 Introduction ............................................................. 5 2 From Disease To Health ......................................... 21 3 The Models Of Allopathic Medicine ........................ 37 4 The Models Of Psychiatry ....................................... 55 5 The Model Of Homeopathy.....................................69 6 Chinese Medicine ................................................... 81 7 Other Models......................................................... 115 8 A Hierarchical Concept Of Health .........................131 9 Assessing The Models........................................... 167 10 A Conclusion: Our Health, Our Responsibility.... 195 Further Reading ......................................................209

Preface

This book, completed two years ago, appears now after it was found that the content is still as relevant to our self-examination as it has been for some time when the project of writing was formed.

The main concern was to find a way of working on health when it is much easier to work on its negation, i.e. when illnesses are contemplated. The course followed was to ask the question of the title: Who cares about health? and to examine systematically whether western allopathic, homeopathic or psychiatric medicines do respond affirmatively to it and then to enquire whether Chinese medicine and some other approaches to sickness and to health have something to tell us that is helpful.

Soon it became apparent that the challenge reduced itself to an examination of the evolutions of thinking on these matters as they were developed over a long time in different parts of the world and to discover what health meant to the various groups in question, if ever they considered the subject.

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Since thinking takes place on a model rather than on reality, which is too complex to be manipulated intellectually, the content of this book can be said to be a study of models. Of course, we are referring all the time to a reality behind the models and we may know how to pass from one to the other and improve our grasp of reality, which in this case is: what we do with ourselves to remain healthy or to cure our diseases.

Working on models is what constitutes the sciences. Therefore we have the duty to examine not only how the various models differ from each other but also whether there is one that does some jobs better than others. After looking at six existing models in Chapters 3-7, a seventh is proposed in Chapter 8. This ad hoc model (i.e. not historically developed like the others) is my own. It is presented here in its schematized complexity knowing it is much more demanding of the readers than the others which, over decades and centuries, have been popularized in various social environments. Still we believe it is a more adequate model.

To prove this, a discussion of whether that model does what others do and more, is carried out in Chapter 9. This chapter is required by all scientists who may be asked to assess the merits of a new model. Whether that chapter convinces others as it convinced me I shall have to wait to learn from my readers. All I can say here is that in forty years of attempting to produce one which took care of all my demands, this is the first I am prepared to consider adequate to the task at hand and to offer the public for its scrutiny.

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The last chapter seems to me an obvious conclusion. Its theme (our responsibility) having been hinted at in a number of places in the book, it became possible to elaborate on it more fully since the model of Chapter 8 gave me some ground to think more clearly on the inevitability of everyone doing the job of maintaining health since no one else really cares for it on one’s behalf.

I owe many people something for making this book possible. In Chapter 1, I made reference to a physician who more than fifty years ago jolted me into accepting responsibility for my health.

Forty years ago, Jean Emile Marcault showed me how to work on the whole person and to minimize schematization. All my life I read widely and gained from many investigators one skill or another or a way of caution when attacking large challenges. To my old friends the publication of this text is my way of expressing gratitude. To the others a thank you for my edification may be sufficient since they remain anonymous and are too numerous.

New York, September 1979

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The view we have of ourselves has become too fragmented. The medical profession has adopted specialization to such an extent that neither we, nor the doctors whom we consult, ever look at the whole any more.

In this book I shall devote myself to the question of what each of us can do, individually, to take the responsibility for our health into our own hands and maintain it throughout our lives. I hope that through it new light will be shed upon our problems, and a common-sense approach prevail. *** It was the hard way that I discovered what I was doing to myself, and only many years of reflection, experimentation, consultation, and reading led me, bit by bit, to an understanding of how instrumental I was in bringing about my own diseases and undermining my own health. Circumstances were not always helpful; in fact, they often assisted me in following a path which was harmful to me.

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The account of how I dealt with each problem in detail need not be of concern to my readers. The facts I have arrived at will speak for themselves, and may help in shortening their search and increasing their skill in handling their own difficulties. This text is not a call for followers, but a statement I feel I must make, setting out what I know, which anyone can know as well as I, but may perhaps not have found yet, nor pursued in depth.

Like everybody else, I was born into a community. It was, like all others, shaped by time and space and its conscious and unconscious traditions. Indeed, at the time, I neither knew where, nor why, my birth was taking place. The people around me were what they were, knowing as little as had come their way, and utterly ignorant of vast areas of reality. They were, perhaps, not even interested in delving into matters leading to greater awareness.

I was biologically conditioned by my heredity, and the living conditions that obtained in my environment. To what extent this was so, it is hard to say; but it can be agreed that these conditions played some part in what I was to become.

I was socially conditioned by the conscious and/or unconscious tenets of the cultures found in the historic environment into which I came. For this conditioning to operate fully on me, however, I had to wait some time.

I was spiritually conditioned by the beliefs, dogmas, rites and rituals adhered to by those around me, and by the way in which

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these affected my idea of myself as it developed under the continual impact of taboos and prejudices.

In particular, I was conditioned by the dominant idea of who each of us was, per se, and in relation to the broader concepts of destiny, providence, divinity and nature, which affected our place in the cosmos and in society at large.

As is true for everybody else, the concept I had of myself at any one time encompassed a number of forms, so that some of my actions were dictated by routine, and others by reason or by a will to know, to fulfill myself, to realize myself. Not always, indeed rarely, was I aware of the consequences.

It was early on in my life that I began watching myself. This may be more common than I know of, and perhaps most children of six or seven could make the same claim. This early interest in watching myself led me to a great many observations about what went on within me, and today these form the backbone of my psychology and epistemology. I found rewards, also, in watching others closely and in examining the questions that arose in me, about them and their behavior.

For various reasons I became the locus of a number of physical complaints, which later led me to visit physicians. As early in my life as the age of 2 or 3 I had to pay attention to my eyes, which were prone to conjunctivitis on top of chronic blepharitis. My gums and teeth were constantly giving me trouble, and the dentists I visited did what they then believed in. Because of the state of my gums, I kept my mouth shut; I also lost a number of

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teeth, and almost all those remaining had to have work done on them. As a result, my digestion suffered and my digestive tube showed signs of swift deterioration from one end to the other.

My mental condition led to trouble in breathing. I had a skin condition which affected my feet, my hands and, with acne at adolescence, my face. All this was painful, irritating and humiliating. The doctors proposed superficial remedies and gave names to the complaints. On top of all this, my kidneys and bladder were playing their own tricks, the first developing stones, and the second a nervous reflex requiring constant attention. Some foods—chocolate and spinach especially— affected me particularly badly, and I avoided them when I could.

For years I suffered from nightmares, although during waking hours I was a very active boy, an acceptable member of the junior community to old and young alike. The adults around me neither tried to, nor could, do anything about my mental condition, which produced much oneiric activity clearly betraying a profound personal mental dysfunction.

By chance, a physician I consulted at sixteen (about my difficulty in breathing, which became worse as I approached the tense moments of sitting for official exams leading to the baccalaureate), said a few things which forced me to revise my idea of myself. He told me that I should be ashamed of displaying symptoms that were so unbecoming to a strong young man. He gave me no medicine, only the injunction to overcome the condition.

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Of course, I was baffled and shocked. Was it really my fault if I suffered from this condition, or indeed any other? The learned doctor seemed, to the utterly ignorant adolescent, to be saying exactly that; and he shook my concept of myself. It occurred to me that perhaps, since I was a watchful person, I could turn the light of watchfulness inwards, and start looking at the phenomena of reality in their complexity as they affected me. At that age I had already furnished my mind with a certain number of literary masterpieces, and acquired a method of literary analysis propagated in schools. But I had met neither philosophical works nor psychological studies as yet.

My benevolent doctor kept me as a friend after dismissing me as a patient. He was forty years my senior, and seemed at the time infinitely wiser and infinitely more learned than I. On my own, I studied treatises which opened up to me branches of the sciences which were the special field of physicians, and I discussed my problems with him. Three years later he conceded that, in some areas, I was more up to date than he, and he consulted with me on matters of physics, chemistry, mathematics and cosmology (relativity and quantum theory).

I discovered, slowly, that he held prejudices; that there were areas in which he was not quite careful enough about saying, “I believe” or “I don’t know”, and was instead, like most other people, moved by passion and “politics”, molding his actions to his biases. I am still grateful to him for showing me so many of the things I needed to learn, but most of all I am grateful for his warning about the dangers inherent in the interference of the mind upon one’s health. His biases prevented him from being fair to a number of thinkers. He could not, for one moment, 9

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consider Freud worthy of his attention, so I did not discuss psychoanalysis with him. He accepted nervous diseases, but they were to be understood in material and clinical terms such as were compatible with what he had learned at medical schools in Europe, forty or so years earlier (ca. 1890). He believed in germs, but was less sensitive to the work of hormones, enzymes and vitamins, all latecomers in his life. He made me read J. Hughlings Jackson’s exposition of medicine, which I came to value as much as he did.

As I worked my way through sorting out the multiple facets of the world I was encountering, finding it ever more complex, elaborate, and full of surprises, and clearly impossible to fit into one simple, definitive picture, I came across many of the decisive influences which affect human beings in space and time. The Western sciences, together with the religions of the world, were contributing to the widening of my horizons, showing me the necessity of being very careful in my generalizations, and impressing on me the importance of maintaining a serious approach at all times. The need for a permanent watchfulness was thus reinforced; and I have made it the mark of my life.

From the sciences I learned to look for neutral statements, referring to matters that could stand on their own. At best I could be a witness to facts, whose existence was contingent neither upon myself personally nor upon my actions. Their right to exist was intrinsic. I did not create them, but made myself sensitive to their existence, and acknowledged it.

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From the religions, I learned to discern the difference between the significant and the insignificant. I definitely knew myself as insignificant with respect to the totality of the universe.

However, I saw that since, through my inner reality, I could be an active witness — in another way than I was when confronting the facts of science — I could therefore gain some significance by making an original contribution to knowledge.

My inner life was as mysterious and complex as the cosmos— and in the cosmos I knew there was still more for me to perceive and to discover. My inner life was, in fact, co-extensive to all the other aspects of my life, and I could perhaps see what was within better, since I was closer to it, than that which was without, which required laboratory instruments to make it accessible.

Those who dedicate themselves to the study of the facts of science establish the truth of the world of perception. Those who perceive the reality of their inner life objectively can claim, as seriously as the scientists, that there are facts of awareness whose reality does not gain more than confirmation when other people also are able to testify to their existence.

Neither the scientist nor the religious person can deny that the other is studying reality. But reality has to be worked on in order for it to include the totality of the experiences of all people, and not remain simply an idea. Indeed, ideas themselves change meaning because people adhere to them; thus scientists can become men of faith, and religious people sectarians. There are scientists who take it upon themselves to deny reality to what they do not comprehend, or who simply reduce the unknown to

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what they can reach by working with what has been produced up until their time. There are religious people who are unaware that their symbolism has a historical origin and does not exhaust the possibilities of religious life.

In spite of their shortcomings, all groups of people of good will who are serious in their efforts at understanding themselves-inthe-world and the world-in-which-they-are, can contribute to a proper grasp of the challenges of truth and reality. We shall see how the findings of all those who have let truth guide them in their serious examination of reality, taken together, will help us reach some objective recommendations for becoming healthier, which will be acceptable to all.

The criterion of acceptability to all those who enquire seriously into any matter is that which makes science so much more readily acceded to by mankind than any of the religions, and we shall make it our criterion here too. *** All sciences start with some awareness or awarenesses. It is therefore appropriate here to state the awarenesses with which we begin this study of health, so that out readers will know from the beginning what is being assumed.

1

Each of us is more than a body.

Indeed, the word body is applied in physics to any object that occupies space and has matter or mass. Since each of us does 12

1 Introduction

weigh something, and does occupy space, we all know ourselves as bodies. It follows that the laws of physics apply to us. We can fall; we can be pushed or pulled; we cannot occupy space already occupied — although we can adjust and occupy less space if need be (in crowded buses or subways for example). But we can utilize some of the energy available within the body to make it move, which physical bodies generally can’t. This use of energy alone would make us more than a body.

We shall speak of soma rather than body when we want to distinguish our physical structure when we are alive from what it will be when we are dead.

To say that we are a soma already shows that we consider that something exists which animates the body and directs its movements.

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Each of us is a will.

Without a will we would not be able even to lift a finger.

Our will is demonstrated all the time in our soma: when we open our eyes, when we swallow, when we stand up, and in every one of the somatic activities which involve change. Because we are so familiar with its functioning we don’t notice it any more, except when we have to summon it for some purpose. We know that we are a will when we oppose, when we grasp tightly, when we have to make an extra effort to obtain a certain end; and every day we have such opportunities, even if we do not use them to generate the awareness that we are a will.

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3 Each of us has energy in reserve that can be gathered by the will.

Although the experience that we use energy all the time is subtle, and escapes our awareness when consumption is routine and takes place at a level below a certain threshold, we all know that there is some in reserve when, for example, a fright makes us run a considerable distance at full speed. If we watched ourselves carefully over a continuous period of time—say from the moment of awakening till the moment of sleep—we would find that we use energy when we stand up, when we walk, wash, dress, chew, swallow, get ready, go somewhere or do our work.

This energy in reserve is located in our soma, available everywhere for use in fingers, toes, hands, wrists, forearms, arms, shoulders, chest, abdomen, legs, ankles, feet, etc. When babies learn to hold their heads up, they place some of that energy in the muscles of their necks. Everywhere, muscle tone is the witness of that energy in reserve. Our will acts upon that energy, mobilizing some to put at the disposal of the activity in which one is involved, and regulating its functioning by increasing or diminishing it so that actions can be carried out.

4 We are more than muscles and structures on which muscles are hooked so as to be able to produce the movements of our soma in the environment, or inner movements such as holding sphincters closed or open.

Indeed, we can find in the (dead) body organs such as the brain, the liver, or the ductless glands, which are neither muscle or

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bone. They too use energy. Although its flow in the organs differs from that in the muscles, it is needed there too. That energy maintains the organs in their state of functioning. The blood that runs through them has, among other functions, that of bringing to their cells the energy needed to keep them going.

Our organs can use energy in ways other than as it is used when objectified in its locked-up form in our bones, for example, or in its semi-locked up form in the tone of muscles susceptible to being increased or decreased. Our sense organs receive energy from the outside and process it, mostly with the help of the brain. Other organs also process energy at the chemical level, transforming air and food intakes into reserves to be used in time of need.

Watchfulness will clearly tell us that we are an energy system all the time, working constantly and in many different ways on the energy of the system, adding to it to avoid depletion, storing some, and using some in subtle transactions at the microscopic level of the cells. This most important finding (that we are essentially an energy system) will help us understand much better what health is and why we have diseases.

5 Energy affects instruments which witness its presence.

There are instruments with considerable inertia (i.e. locked-up energy) and they witness energy at their scale. There are others with so little inertia that they are upset by minute variations in its balance. To break a thick layer of concrete we need a pneumatic drill or a sledgehammer moved by huge machines.

To displace a molecule in a chemical requires little energy.

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We must realize the existence of such mixed viewpoints in our minds, since they lead to unnecessary confusion. That is why we said above that instruments witness energy changes at their scale. If we are first aware of our gross somatic inertia, which includes that of our bones and muscles, we shall measure energy transactions against these and speak of “minute” amounts when they are only small if they are compared to the first, and speak of “huge” amounts if the first seem minute compared to them.

To generate a flexible approach we need a relativistic outlook.

We need to acknowledge that the spectrum of existing energy will be spread over universes, that what it can do in these produces realities in which more and more of it can be locked up, and thus create inertia at different scales.

In our collective historical dialogue with energy we first became aware of it at the scale that corresponds to the availability of energy in our soma. We encountered energy as human work.

This first awareness (which generated the chapter of physics called mechanics) has been repeatedly rediscovered in all civilizations on earth. So it became the yardstick of all measures of energy, and “extremely small amounts of energy” meant that they could not be perceived or witnessed (measured) by the instruments created for that scale.

As a consequence, physicists consider themselves the arbiters of whether a particular expenditure of energy is meaningful or not.

Physicians, following physicists, use the same scale when they consider biological phenomena, and both have a model of the

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soma in which “calories� rather than micro- or nano-calories are the units. Therefore the subtle ways in which the will, for example, can affect somatic transactions have no place in this model. The general public, unaware of the implications of thinking in one scale, may trust experts and in so doing miss the reality which could be obvious in a model at another scale.

In this book we shall use all the scales available, in order to produce a model as flexible as is necessary for us to become watchful at the true level of the phenomena we are considering.

Thus we shall avoid being forced to describe reality through instruments incapable of entering the aspect concerned, as would happen if we looked at a planet through the wrong end of a telescope.

6 Once we become aware that there is an observer of reality in each of us, and recognize that we can use energy freely for movement even when there may be no necessity to do so, we have the opportunity to make that free energy in each of us the object of our attention. Free energy is needed a thousand times a day to do what is not dictated by conditioning and necessity, like squeezing an orange to make a drink instead of getting a glass of water, or writing a poem instead of hunting game to eat.

That we have free energy available to do what strikes our fancy is a very new awareness, but a momentous one.

Singling out this awareness by giving the free energy a name (and we choose to call it the self) suddenly makes available to us, as thinking people, a new model with many new possibilities

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and opportunities to be explored. We can witness the movements of our own life; and its use of itself as free energy at every moment will, as we shall see, transform our world altogether.

7 We can recognize now that every human being is of four realms: 1) the realm of atoms and molecules, which constitute the cosmos ultimately and our planet earth in particular; 2) the realm of the living, characterized by a cellular constitution which makes each of us part of the vegetable and animal kingdoms; 3) the realm of behaviors, which are capable of creating structures to support the functions that go to making each individual into a constellation of specific functions and specific instincts characteristic of the various animal species; and finally 4) the human world in which it is permitted to each individual to transcend the species by getting rid of all instincts.

Belonging to the four realms, and particularly to the fourth, is what generates our vulnerability to so many impairments to our health, as we shall see in detail in the next chapters. But it also gives us the means of generating a kind of health we could not otherwise conceive of, and conceive of it as available to all of us on earth: health which is illumined by awareness and insights and can be lived through our will, at first only by those who understand, then by all those who can be made to understand, and finally, through an integral and universal education, by all.

As we progress in our study we shall survey a variety of models for understanding ourselves which correspond to partial, truncated visions. These have nonetheless been held as total and

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complete descriptions of human beings, thereby closing the door to reform and to the adoption of more adequate models. We shall need a special synthesis to bring them together, and to amend the weaknesses of each of them by inserting into it the impact of the others. Finally, we shall reach a vision of ourselves as integrated beings capable of giving each component of us its due, while not letting any one of them gain the upper hand.

Although this present historic moment is just another of the many on the spectrum of time, and no final answers to eternal questions are at hand, we have today a double advantage over our forebears, in that, due to the work already done by others, we can bring together evolution and relativity, and in so doing make every moment of life and every movement on earth meaningful and significant so as to give ourselves a place under the sun.

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In entering upon the subject of this chapter, the only preparation I shall assume of my readers is that they have somehow taken steps, as I did, to avoid being deceived by themselves or by others, and that they have examined how their minds work when confronting as big a challenge as the one we entertain here.

There was a time when I looked up to many people who seemed so much more learned than I. I believed much of what I read and of what was stated authoritatively. I worshipped knowledge and strove to have as much of it as I could. I saw ignorance as a sin and believed that it would be eradicated one day—perhaps soon. Knowledge was a panacea for all evils, and those who had it received my respect, even my deference.

Slowly, I came to understand two things: 1) that I could never have enough even of the existing knowledge to be on top of what came my way; and 2) that ignorance and knowledge are two separate entities, i.e. that rather than being complementary parts of a whole—so that when one increases the other

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decreases—they mean very different things when we become aware of them. Ignorance is intrinsic to the human condition, which keeps each of us within boundaries, able to concentrate on this or that, to perceive this or that but never all, remembering only so much. The immensity of the cosmos, the multitude of beings in existence, the fact that people of unique backgrounds go through what they live at the same time as others in different parts of the world without an attempt at or even a possibility of sharing their experiences—all this and a lot more precludes our relating to our condition and our world as if it could ever be reachable in its entirety. This is what makes us essentially ignorant, inevitably ignorant, but closer to ourselves when we accept that fact than when we ignore it.

Knowledge, on the other hand, is the product of what we do to ourselves in order to hold in the self that which is singled out because of our doing. Knowledge is the product of knowing and knowing is a functioning of the self; rather, there are many ways of knowing which produce a variety of knowledges. Those we objectify—as when we write a book—gain an existence not only for ourselves but also for others who entertain them. But knowledge is neither perceptible at all times and transferable from one person to another, nor is it regarded by ourselves as such. For example, we all know how to digest, but very few of us would label the act of digestion “knowledge”. We may accept it as a know-how, using the word “know” in preference to all others, but cancelling its impact with the particle “how” associated to it. A neutral, dispassionate way of looking at things will make us notice that we used the word “know”, and lead us to wonder why.

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According to whether we put the stress on knowledge or on ignorance, we create an inner climate which may be of enormous importance in what we do with ourselves and in our ways of coping with challenges, including those met in the field of health.

If we consider the phenomenon of the accumulation of knowledge, together with what we feel and think about it, we may be helped in clearing our minds and in preparing ourselves to progress in our grasp of the challenges we want to work on.

Only part of what each of us experiences can be expressed either to ourselves or to others. That part is what can be objectified into knowledge, which can be passed on from one person to another. Whether it is the most important or the most valuable part of one’s experience is a question which has perhaps never been asked.

The fact is that only expressed experience can be reached by others. What people leave behind when they die is, therefore, what they have objectified; all the rest goes with them, a fact which makes our personal ignorance the more poignant.

Thus, collectively, we rely on what is perhaps only a very small fraction of what potentially, we collectively, know.

It is the feeling of this potential knowledge that we transfer to our minds and which makes us believe that, if only we could know all that is potentially knowable, we would know all there is to know. This in fact precludes our approaching knowing, either alone or collectively, in any way other than by seeing knowledge

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as that which is contained in all the books in all the libraries or on all the computer memories in existence—and this is not accessible to anyone.

The actual processes of knowing—one or more—are accessible to each of us. We can know knowing through awareness-while-weare-knowing. This will mean different things at different moments of our lives, the more so when we have reached awareness of our awareness.* What I want to stress here is that we can benefit from developing a watchfulness in ourselves concerning what convinces us, what makes us into believers. If we can change by becoming critical minds that see whether truth is present in, or absent from, a statement about ourselves, made by ourselves or by others, we may advance in our search for truth.

For example, when we are functioning well we do not become aware of the functionings involved and consequently have no knowledge (or, more precisely, awareness) of their existence.

But as soon as a functioning is out of order we notice it and wish to do something to restore it to what it was, i.e. enable ourselves to live with it and forget about it.

Dysfunctions are called dis-eases because of the loss of ease involved, but we have not yet felt the need to label what works.

Perhaps if we can take the steps of considering very closely what is behind the functionings when they work well, rather than

* A development of this proposition can be found in The Science of Education, Chapters 2, 3, 4, 5.

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negating the negative to obtain the positive, one of the results of this will be that health will be known to us for what it is rather than as the absence of disease.

That is the theme of this chapter. *** We are engaged every day in a multitude of activities which we take for granted and which work routinely. I select this word rather than “automatically”, to distinguish what we do again and again and have lost interest in watching from what we may find very difficult to reach because it is deeply seated in our history and has been placed in the unconscious so as not to occupy us, so as to free us to tackle new tasks. In the “routine” category we may include daily evacuation, and in the automatic the bloodflow. We have an entry into the first since we can easily start observing what happens and note specific details which we otherwise rarely find need our attention. To gain an entry into the second, however, we need to create elaborate instruments and even give ourselves a very special training.

Still, there are similarities between the two and what we gain in watchfulness of the first may well serve to open doors into knowing the other. We shall find that this is indeed the case.

It is clear that some discipline will be called for in the study of our routines if we want to educate ourselves so as to become people who are aware of health rather than shocked into wanting this awareness when disease strikes us.

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To acquire such discipline we can force ourselves, intellectually, into accepting that not one of the things we do has been automatic from the beginning of time. For instance, it was only after we were born that we began feeding ourselves, or being fed, and therefore digesting. It took us weeks to make our digestion work well, and many of us still find it necessary to intervene in order to re-establish regular evacuations (one of the many components of digestion). Similarly, we did not have to chew until we had teeth, and more especially molars. When these came we had to learn to chew, and may not even necessarily have done a very good job of it. Chewing is to be considered routine rather than automatic. Swallowing is associated with chewing. There are nervous reflexes at our disposal which make the shift to swallowing seem automatic; but it is in fact routine and we can become watchful of it as well as of the other. Beyond this passage from the mouth to the esophagus things become more hidden, until we reach evacuation which can be considered routine rather than automatic because—with the exception of diarrhea—it can be watched and can lead to awareness of what we do with ourselves in this particular field of our lives.

Thus in the area we selected first (digestion) we find that we can give ourselves exercises to increase awareness of the world of routine, that world in which a bridge can be constructed that may lead us to the awareness of health, and to its “routine” monitoring.

We shall see later how we can develop greater expertise in watching ourselves. First, let us extend the range of routines which can engage us.

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We have two hands, and use them for many purposes throughout the day. Very few of us are equally able with both hands. Consequently we can, every time we enter an activity in which we use our hands, watch how we position them, what kind of grasp is selected and which hand is called on for which tasks. In this way we may gain another entry into how we relate to the functionings of our soma, those functionings which we worked on for years in early childhood in order to bring them to their present state (excepting where an accident has deviated that course).

Most of us are surprised when we discover the number of roles played by certain parts of ourselves, in a multitude of different situations, when for one reason or another such parts are affected. A boil on a little finger; the pressure of a shoe on a toe causing soreness which prevents one from wearing shoes and makes walking very difficult; a stiff neck; a sprained ankle; a backache; a painful elbow; a knee complaint; all these are too common not to have been experienced by most people. And the list can easily be added to: becoming suddenly prone to breaking glasses or crockery; finding that one’s hand trembles after carrying an awkward package for a short while, and so on. These dysfunctions can be linked by each of us to what we have been doing: to what we have allowed to happen to us, to the effect of time either in the form of age or, if an exercise is involved, of duration also.

We can note the effects of climbing up some steps at different speeds and in different states, or the manner in which we relate to lifting a suitcase or a typewriter—i.e. the placing of our hand (or hands) and of our fingers, the angle of our arms, the shape of 27

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our spine, etc.—and whether it is the outcome of a quick assessment of the situation, an immediate adaptation to the physical challenge, or the result of experience, of counting on one’s strength, etc. All these things are directly accessible to us if we learn to be watchful.

If it happens that we have to open jars, and find that some resist our grip, we can study the various ways in which we tackle the challenge, and see how we assess improvement in relation to it either as sufficient to justify the hope of succeeding soon or as insufficient and leading to our giving up.

Itching is an interesting involvement which some of us can handle better than others; that is, some of us can make it subside by not scratching. The need for food at mealtimes often leaves us if we let the pangs go unsatisfied for an hour or so.

Appetite can be watched and known in its components.

Having come full circle back to our first example, feeding, we can leave our list where it now is, although many, many examples could be added which would teach us different things.

Except for some dysfunctions mentioned here and there, most of our routines are functionings that we may profit by looking at when they work well and when they lead to a consciousness of limits, limitations, excitement, involvement, transformation, success, abandonment, etc.

We need to be aware of the complexity of most challenges, even when they are met routinely (such as getting up from one’s chair), and of the fine intermingling of the various components

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which are present (such as the work of the will, the summoning of adequate amounts of energy, the polarization of effort, change of strategy for achieving an end, the role of perception, of judgment, of experience, etc.) to recognize that whatever we become engaged in is far from being simply a reflex or the result of inherited capabilities. In fact, these first studies of our routines are very important for we need to knock down as soon as possible the naive view of ourselves as lived systems, all given, each one of us launched on the perfect path by a benevolent force and merely unlucky when struck by some disease. We need to return complexity to its place at the center and to force ourselves to become aware that we are at one and the same time extremely resilient and extremely vulnerable and that both components are present in the maintenance of healthy living as well as in dysfunctions, albeit in different proportions, some balancing each other and others breaking the balance.

If we were just plants we would be totally dependent upon the chemicals available in the soil we were growing in. We would be able to go on forever if conditions for the process of maintaining our routines were right, or would wither away if we were in a soil in which what went to make our substance was exhausted.

If we were purely animals we would find in our instincts the protective boundaries which would make us avoid certain actions and engage in others, dividing the world into what could reach us and stimulate us, and what was excluded and could not.

But we are only partly plants and animals, and we live at moments of history which embrace not only the sum of the work

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of those alive around us, but also actions of the past which linger in our midst.

We cannot, as humans, consider that our condition is only cosmic and telluric; it is also social, historical, economic, and above all, deeply connected to our level of awareness, which we may call spiritual. Our human environment is not merely natural: it is social, historical, religious, economic, and psychological. If an alteration in the composition of the water we drink can generate goiters and other diseases, alterations of components in the economic, social, political and other textures of the environment may produce effects which are as visible as goiters, even if less easily remedied. In later chapters we shall have opportunities to examine closely what we can transfer from one field of observation to others. For the sake of clarity in this chapter we shall mainly concentrate on the shift of perspective mentioned in the title, that from disease to health.

It is clear that only when the cause of the growth of the neck glands that constitute goiters was found was there any hope of moving towards curing the complaint. People lived—sometimes even happy and long lives—with goiters, the main disadvantage of which seemed to be their external appearance since beauty could not be maintained in their presence. People could be considered lovable, kind, and helpful; and a community could thrive even when a good number of people (mainly women) had huge necks. It was, therefore, more of a nuisance than a catastrophe. The discovery that drinking water was at the source of the growth, and that a change in its chemical composition could check the repetition of the condition and alleviate its effects on people, only caused a superficial change in the 30

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communities. They have lived since almost exactly as they did then, only their appearances having altered.

Seeing human conditions as simply the multiplication of the above example would make us into plants, in whose environments a change in the chemicals of the soil is all that is needed to keep life going and growth taking place. Still this is a very common outlook in many parts of the Western world. It is commonly believed that in time we shall meet each complaint by the appropriate drug, if only we can understand the chemical basis of a disease and then rid the world chemically of it. Some spectacular events such as the elimination of poliomyelitis, pneumonia, cholera and smallpox have reinforced the basis of this outlook.

But the elimination of some diseases has only eliminated the cause of some deaths, not death itself; and people continue to die of other diseases. Today cancer, heart attacks, and stress are great killers. These are being considered as new opportunities for developing new drugs, and the outlook remains as strong as it ever was. Research funds are mainly available to those who hold that outlook. Establishments hold views about health and disease; and, in the Western countries, that view depends as much on ideology as it does in the so-called socialist countries, which are openly materialistic in outlook.

So long as we have not shown definitely that matter produces social systems and that social systems behave like matter, we may doubt that only matter matters and that there are only molecular diseases or rather diseases at the molecular level,

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curable by some chemicals put into the system orally or by injection. So long as we have not proved that ideas are generated each by a particular chemical compound reaching the brain, we may be permitted to give ideas their own reality, perhaps sui generis, and to study how they can affect behavior, our animal component. It is difficult to understand the idea of materialism, if ideas are the outcome of some mechanistic functioning of the brain. Computers can perform many mechanical tasks, some of them very complex; but computers did not create themselves in the way ideas create themselves, at least in some of our minds.

But if it is possible to understand how ideas are generated in some minds and accepted by other minds as such, and if ideas can lead to suicide, or aggression or other troubles, they must find their place in our overall vision of our total performance in all planes and activities. Since ideas prevent other ideas from occupying room in our inner mental space, and since ideas can affect our actions and our behaviors, they must be counted as components in what will be our health or absence of it, in the same way as do the social circumstances of our life which include feeding habits, rituals, taboos (which can be seen as ideas too) and training.

Rarely is it asked of us that we make a tabula rasa of everything in our minds and that we examine everything we hold to be real or true. If we give ourselves that commitment, and find 1) that we stop being critical 2) that we are prepared to accept a great deal that is neither clear, nor definite, as such and 3) that we refuse to go beyond a certain point in our own examination, we may perhaps discover a way of being truly open-minded.

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The insidious way in which we let ourselves be convinced and stop seeking can, once discovered, lead us towards meeting the work of our self-interest, which distorts most visions. Selfinterest is felt by many as visceral, as the primal guide which cannot be wrong. Sometimes we call it our sense of truth, although in fact it is the mechanism which blocks truth and does not allow it to do its job, which is to enlighten us. Self-interest is a concept and a deep-seated one, located in our psyche, and capable of deceiving us for ends that our reason cannot fathom.

Once our self-interest has become apparent to us, it can yield— and indeed has yielded a number of times—to the light of truth, leading to conversions which can certainly not be explained as the result of some chemistry. That self-interest can be seen as opposed to one’s best interests, and can be challenged by oneself, and transformed, may be one of the steps which can contribute most to our illumination; in particular, it can lead us to knowing health for what it is. Indeed, in self-interest our intellectual and affective intelligences meet. Self-interest is felt as residing in our guts, a primitive force which sometimes resembles a survival instinct. It is thought of as the intellectual arbiter in the verbal forum where we judge events involving us.

Occasionally some other trait of ours may bring out the fact that our self-interest is selfish, narrow and even prejudicial to our avowed best interests, leading to our replacing our former view of ourselves by another in which the opinions no longer obtain.

This, however, is a rare occurrence.

Human beings, having developed the power of becoming aware, have at their disposal the means with which to go back over their own life story and make discoveries which, however, are only possible if the model of themselves as systems which function 33

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under the strict laws of nature (such as are studied by physicists) is abandoned. If each of us were to give some serious thought to the possibility that on a particular occasion we accepted a vision of ourselves for which there was not enough evidence, or rather for which the main evidence was the word of others, who had influence over us, we would not adhere as stubbornly to that view and would begin asking questions which might lead them to important truths. Without this first cleaning of the walls to reveal the existence of doors, permitting one to think that behind such doors there may be some life spaces worthy of exploration, little can happen to one’s self.

I shall therefore assume some willingness on the part of my readers to entertain such roads to discovery, to acquire a discipline which makes sure that we can see more clearly in this field, since only then can our efforts bear fruit.

In the world of our functionings, the discipline provided by watchfulness is not usually required, and most of us only use it— if ever—in some particular area which becomes our specialty.

For an entry into the complex world of our health, we need precisely that discipline above all, even more so than such gifts as intelligence and a good memory. Indeed, how shall we know that we are remaining in contact with the challenge rather than being carried away by the desire to score a point, or follow a rule, or obey an existing law, or respect a cherished opinion or person, etc., none of which may have anything to do with tackling the challenge? The discipline involves watching that we do not slip into anything which distracts us from remaining in contact with the real problems of the challenge, and further that we bring ourselves back to them and hold our attention to them.

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Questions such as: “Have I access to other serious investigators’ research in that field?”, “Can I read more than one language?”, “Can I make sure that translations exist and that I consult them when I consider these matters?”, “Do I know what is required of me in order to be really prepared to tackle that question?”, “Do I believe that by taking specific courses, acquiring a special jargon and instruments, or listening to certain points of view, I have become qualified?”, “How can I cope with the complexity and magnitude of some challenges?”, “Have I ever asked myself this question, or have I simply turned my back to it?”, “Do I know what qualifications will make me capable of entering seriously into that study?”, “If I have not entered into it, on what grounds do I hold any views on it?”. These are a few of the questions I need to have asked myself before I can consider that I have given myself the discipline which will lead me to serious answers to that very important challenge.

In fact, had I not asked myself such questions, would it not be time that I did so, and considered the foundations of what I think?

A person may be totally insensitive to the fact that he knows nothing about health even when he enjoys it, but can at the same time be extremely responsive to the slightest dysfunction. His sense of what he goes through may then be exaggerated, so that instead of putting up with some discomfort he complains about the slightest increase in the feeling of pain and acts as if he were enduring tremendous strains. Medical people have, for millennia, known this temperamental echo to discomfort; parents have known it in their children and children in their parents; but few have drawn the correct conclusion from it: that 35

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the phenomenon tells us that we are more than a soma, and that somatic complaints may be reduced by recourse to the will rather than to medicine.

Slowly, from around 1850 onwards, it has become permissible in the West to think that there are individual patients rather than absolute diseases, and that rather than look for a cure “to� such and such a disease, it is more reasonable to treat patients and see how they respond. In particular, the concept of psychosomatic conditions has been allowed to spread.

In the latter case the change was in agreement with the facts known to clinicians. Nonetheless, they still held on to all the other concepts which they had acquired in medical schools as if these were completely compatible with a vision of their patients as a complex psychosomatic system. That is, treatment by the administration of drugs and massive doses of chemicals were preferred and ordinarily prescribed. In the next chapter we shall consider this matter. Here we need only point out that the views of those who were involved in the field of medicine were modified. That views can change is not to be lightly acknowledged, but should be considered seriously and integrated as an essential part of our makeup. In fact, without it we labor in vain however strong our position or eloquent our statement. A change in viewpoint can come about, but will it? It is essential if we want to move from considering illnesses to remaining in contact with health, as we all should.

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If the approach adhered to by most western doctors were the only way of looking at disease, we would not need to give it the special label of “allopathic� medicine. In later chapters, some of the alternatives which have been tried out will be considered.

Here, we shall examine the contributions which the approach of western allopathic physicians has made to health.

Histories of western medicine give a detailed account of the development, over two and a half thousand years, of one main tradition integrating the original ideas and discoveries of countless investigators and careful observers. Medical students know only too well what an enormous body of tradition had already been created in the profession long before it could even be organized as such. They find themselves confronted with a vast number of volumes, which it takes a very considerable amount of time to study and assimilate. Years of careful nurturing by their seniors, and stiff qualifying examinations channel the newcomers into the main branches of the tradition,

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forcing them along with barely enough time to absorb these, let alone for becoming truly informed about other, conflicting traditions. In a way, to become a physician is to join a sect and share the views and opinions of the elders until one becomes an elder oneself, and indoctrinates the newcomers in one’s turn.

It is possible to summarize the western tradition of allopathic medicine as it is to be found at work today in the hands of perhaps millions of physicians the world over. As a history of ideas, what follows will of necessity leave out a vast number of important contributions, though I believe nothing of real significance to our study will have been omitted, since my intention is to gain as deep an understanding as possible of where modern western medicine stands in relation to the problem of health.

My study is that of the facts that have gone to shape the tradition which permeates medicine as we know it today. It is a tradition which, at one and the same time, allows its practitioners to do so well what can be done well through it, but also prevents them from considering those radical alternatives which do not agree with its premises. *** From the Greeks, mankind received the gift that I shall call a geometrical model of the world. The Greeks neither knew algebra nor cared to try to reach it. What they cultivated deeply, intellectually, was their sense of space and of the harmony of forms. When they looked at the human body they sought its

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beauty and its proportions. Their fascination with anatomy was extended to the inside of the body; and since this could not be reached systematically on healthy, whole bodies, the Greeks resorted to the study of anatomy in corpses.

This is a point of great significance. Geometry is implicit in anatomy, and working on corpses makes an increasingly deeper study of the organs possible. Since, however, it is on corpses that the study is done, the only thing that is really accessible is, in a sense, their geometry. Students of anatomy were to develop their techniques over the centuries, but always towards producing a finer geometrical description of the organs.

Even today, anatomy is presented in medical courses as a spatial description of the content of that in which we are contained, of the “bag� we are in. No one would dream of presuming that any thinking about a person’s condition (or for veterinarians that of animals) could take place without an explicit reference to anatomy. If physicians are aware that they cannot make the slightest mental move which does not imply a thorough acquaintance with anatomy, they are rarely aware of the fact that this makes all their thinking geometrical, and that while this outlook yields certain benefits, it precludes others if it is chosen as an exclusive bias.

Physicians knew from the start that their concern was with the living, and that what they were investigating was a human condition. What they observed were certain appearances, otherwise called symptoms, and they knew they had to use their minds to link these to the organs, whose geometry was known to

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them through anatomy. Clinical medicine, over the centuries, has consisted in noting symptoms and their vicissitudes, and in associating what were essentially appearances with some organ or organs by assuming that the latter were involved in their generation. The patient’s condition, and a knowledge of anatomy, were the bases on which treatment was suggested—a treatment which, in allopathic medicine, was more often than not that which countered the symptoms.

Of course, over the centuries there were fads, and treatments which produced improvement in some conditions were extended to others where they were inappropriate. Such treatments became discredited as a result, and had to be abandoned: bleeding and cupping are examples.

Three or four hundred years ago apothecaries, men who were learned in pharmacology (or the effects of certain substances) and dispensed a large number of potions from their shelves, organized themselves into colleges of physicians, demanding of all members a vast knowledge of pharmacology. To this day, pharmacology is one of the basic courses required in medical schools, although considering the number of new medicinal products which enter the market every year it has become very difficult to be up to date in the field.

What a learned doctor knew of biology four hundred years ago was far less extensive than what a high-school student can find in his biology coursebooks today. On the other hand, visiting patients, and seeing them recover, taught physicians what no book can transmit: to develop a sensitivity towards the overall

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condition of the patient. This invaluable clinical experience could be acquired at the side of a master, as in any other apprenticeship. Colleges of physicians made both clinical studies and the study of pharmacology a requirement, regarding these as being the two disciplines which were essential to a practitioner serving the community which would call on him for help when disease struck. Anatomy remained the intellectual background for diagnosis, on the basis of which remedies were prescribed.

During the course of the last couple of centuries the biological sciences stopped being descriptive and became, instead, experimental, allowing the influence of chemistry and physics.

Around 1825 the concept of physiology (the study of biological functions as distinct from biological structures) took hold, and by 1854 it had become possible for a physiologist to say: “It is the function which creates the organ,� thus relegating anatomy to second place in the hierarchy of those sciences needed by physicians. In medical schools, research branched out, extending far and wide, and major discoveries followed from it, which considerably influenced the practice of medicine. Still, the family doctor of fifty years ago was not much more aware of the application of many of these new discoveries than his predecessors had been a century earlier. Tradition has been the enemy of progress in medicine as much as in all other fields of human endeavor.

In the field of surgery, some of the discoveries that were made brought radical changes. Before the role of germs was known, the most learned of surgeons did not need to wash his hands before operating, nor were the instruments he used disinfected.

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Death by infection after an operation was not understood, since there was no intellectual frame of reference by which to explain why the successful ablation of diseased tissue should not result in the patient’s improving. The discovery of germs gave rise to the need for hospital sanitation; that of the reduction of pain via anesthesia and analgesics brought surgery to patients who could not formerly have been touched.

From Liebig’s time (the first quarter of the 19th century) on, chemical factories replaced nature as the source of many medicines. Patented medicine produced more and more drugs, to be made available to physicians now concerned with countering more and more symptoms. The bias of the study of curative medicine had become that of how to make symptoms disappear. Hence the name of allopathic medicine, given to this general practice which has been adopted by the vast majority of western physicians.

Through the microscope, microbes were revealed to the eye, and their presence in tissues came to be considered the cause of all the diseases they could be associated with. A number of challenges became central in biological medical studies. First, it became necessary to learn to isolate the microbes, study them under the microscope, describe them and label them; and this produced the science of bacteriology. Then, it became necessary to look at the ways in which they grew and multiplied, and to find out whether specific ones produced specific conditions called infections. Thirdly, clinical studies of how certain organisms responded to the presence of specific microbes, and in particular of why some patients were overcome by these little creatures while others managed to overcome them, were 42

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undertaken by some researchers. Fourthly, the drug industry attempted to find the specific drug capable of helping the organism either to stop an infection or to get rid of it.

Immunization and vaccination were born of this research, and a number of diseases which were potentially epidemic, and in some cases already endemic, were slowly dominated and eliminated from the face of the earth. Such successes confirmed in most minds that western medicine was on the right track: diseases would yield to the assault of the pharmaceutical industry. Where microbes could not be seen, no one doubted their existence. The obvious course was to develop more powerful microscopes, better techniques for finding them.

Germs replaced microbes when viruses were discovered. These were not considered to be plants (bacteria), or animals (protozoa), but as most probably being large molecules, capable of multiplying by simply breaking down into parts, each of which attracted other molecules to reconstitute the original one.

After viruses, ultra viruses, much smaller and undetectable without new, sensitive instruments, made their appearance.

The medical world in the West adopted a model for thinking of diseases which portrayed the body as a battlefield for invading germs: these attempted to occupy the invaded territory by growing in numbers, while the body fought back, either alone or with the help of appropriate drugs, by killing as many of them as possible. Certain glands in the body were specialized in producing the warriors that fought on its behalf.

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This picture was rendered somewhat more complicated when the same kind of medical biological research started revealing other causes of disease. Other microscopic entities existed besides germs. Hormones, enzymes and vitamins were the newcomers and could, by minute shifts, upset the chemical balance in the whole body. Nutritional diseases made their appearance, although malnutrition had been endemic for millennia. Here, too, treatment meant providing chemicals, which were extracted from living systems or synthesized in factories and were introduced into the blood stream either orally or by injection. There was no need to change the model, it integrated the newcomers so easily that drug companies only had to expand, creating new plants to produce new drugs, new patent medicines.

It was by eliminating diseases that one could reach health, a really elusive entity in a world full of invisible enemies which jumped on one wherever one was, without one’s even noticing until it was too late. It became possible to see the human body as a locus in which every kind of germ was already present, but in which not all found favorable conditions for their multiplication.

As soon as such conditions existed, the until then latent disease became patent, and one was acknowledged as being sick. Good health was a fortuitous state; the norm was to be ill, due to the myriads of diseases to which we were all susceptible and which came to the fore—one rather than another—because of specific circumstances.

The model of the body which is that of its being immersed in an environment full of chemicals capable of eroding its fundamental structure by selectively altering the conditions of 44

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its funtionings has led those in charge of public health to establish laboratories which survey the air, the water, the foods, to find out which chemicals cause diseases. A count is also being kept of radiation levels, germs, and their carriers. Thousands of workers have been put in the position of needing to justify their jobs in terms of the existence of dangers to the population in being exposed to what is current in the environment.

Still, the authorities certainly know—since it is now known to all—that the many victories which have been achieved in specific areas do not carry with them the elimination of what cannot be treated within the terms of the model and with the means available.

The enormous effort and expenditure involved in the fight against cancer has not deterred researchers and physicians from pursuing what they have conceived, and their failures have not made them question their thinking. Because they do not do this, they only ask perfunctorily: “What else could it be?”

In the model employed in the West, what seems to be scientific is very much a hit or miss operation. When treatment by radiation was introduced, “side effects” were not anticipated; and if there were any, they were dealt with only as they appeared. When cortisone was hailed as a miracle drug its “side effects” were not anticipated either, and it seemed normal to physicians to attempt to eradicate certain symptoms with the drug irrespective of whether the subsequent overall condition of the patient would lead to a healthier life after treatment or not.

This story has been repeated so often, and is indicative of the

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extent to which the mode of thinking of western medical people affects trends in medicine—a much greater extent than anyone suspects. The body of western physicians are optimistic because of their successes, and forget that there are many gaps in their model and that, with all the progress which technology and biology have made, they are still no nearer than they were decades ago understanding: tooth decay; the common cold; eczema (and many other diseases of the skin); the role of the nervous system in the defense mechanism; why aspirin works; how anesthetics produce their effects; why the brain is what it is and in particular immune to pain; how to be safe in using selective counter-measures against germ carriers which replace one evil by another; how to really think of preventive medicine and make it work.

Because in this book we are concerned with health and not with diseases, we must examine the object of medicine and its role in the model created as seriously as we can. In the West, the object is still the care of the “body”, to a very large extent. There is no denying the victories scored by Western medicine in the fields where the model has been applied: they are many and spectacular, and must serve to stress the fact that the model is in some ways adequate. Nonetheless, we may easily miss important entries into ways of improving the model or, if we see them, fail to encourage their coming into existence if we go on unaware of its gaps, weaknesses and occasional errors of perspective, and continue to refuse both to obtain necessary data and to examine it when it is available.

Because there are so many unresolved challenges confronting physicians—and because it may very well be that these 46

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challenges will be the only ones they will confront once they have automated and computerized those conditions which can yield to definite treatment—we see today’s Western Medicine at an impasse which calls for the drastic step of looking for, and finding, a better model.

We have seen that although within western medicine there is an attempt here and there at transcending the “body” and its place in the environment, there is little chance that the weight of tradition will yield until a model is proposed which preserves what good Western medicine has managed to produce and at the same time takes care of what the existing model fails to account for. Psychosomatic medicine has tried to add the psyche to the model. But the psyche was considered, from the start, as a secretion of the brain, subordinate to matter, and many of the treatments in psychiatric institutions remain drug oriented, or are predominantly physical, such as shock treatment or lobotomy. The model itself has overpowered that which could have produced changes in it.

It will perhaps be possible, after we have looked at alternative models in the next three chapters, to make a proposal which is acceptable to open-minded allopaths who seek to understand why there are so many questions in their field which they don’t know how to approach, and why challenges remain untackled for so long.

Two discoveries in the field of biology are worth including here, although they may not seem to be part of the main argument of this book. As an educator, I include them here because they

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represent a step in the direction of learning how outlooks are changed and one which has already been taken spontaneously

by Western biologists.

The first discovery concerns the understanding of the dynamics of procreation in humans, although several problems remain untouched in that area. For millions of years mating, as found in the animal kingdom, has been the method used by humans to start off a process which ends up in offspring. Not until fifty or so years ago did we manage to understand the phenomenon.

This is evidence that we rarely examine the familiar. Once it was studied, menstruation revealed itself to be a remarkably well orchestrated set of functionings. The newly discovered hormones, and the complicated interconnection between small quantities of some of them, produced the appearances that had earlier been all we could recognize from the outside.

Menstruations could be understood as the consequence of fertilization not having taken place. The details of the menstrual cycle justified it on the basis of function (although its length, and a possible connection to the phases of the moon, remain mysterious).

Here we had a beautifully worked out model which took into account all the facts, those immediately visible and those connected to the interferences derived from an understanding of how a few of the ductless glands introduced specific chemicals (hormones) into the blood stream to obtain specific behaviors of the female reproductive system, within the overall system. Some of these behaviors were accessible to sensitive subjects in whose soma they were taking place; others, only to investigators equipped with sensitive instruments. A complex system in which 48

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small amounts of substances, acting selectively on local systems sensitive to their presence or absence, could trigger other phenomena which did not need to be of the same scale as the triggers and which permitted or excluded consequences related to the control system. Small amounts of energy controlled the uses of large amounts in a cybernetic system where the functions, looked at from outside, had little to do with what took place inside.

The new biology which allowed the creation of such a model still held to a materialistic approach, preserving from the traditional model what it could. The new model produced social consequences so huge that social engineers use it to change the shape of the world populations and enter into projects which could not have been conceived of not so long ago. Spiritual consequences have also followed in that now love-making does not necessarily end up in procreation, giving a freedom that was unthinkable fifty years ago to love partners, who can now act responsibly when they are with each other.

The second discovery concerns molecular biology, a field in which biologists are being forced to consider what happens at the smallest possible scale of life. This maintains them in contact with phenomena which, although they are taking place in a space so minute that only the electron microscope can reach them, and although their durations are so small that they baffle the imagination, have great consequences.

Molecular biology is, today, training biologists to become considerate of “nothings� and to be respectful of events at the

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smallest scale, even though they may be looking for phenomena at the scale of the body. Of course, not all biologists, and still less all physicians, are experiencing the salutary effects of such training. Some, such as heart surgeons and psychiatrists, may consider molecular biology to be a specialty offering interesting, new and curious phenomena, but irrelevant for the most part to their main area of concern. Until they integrate the new outlook with the old to produce a fresh way of looking at what they are doing we shall have a science of biology which is fragmented, one which fragments wholes merely for the purpose of coping more comfortably with the fragments.

It is nonetheless possible to integrate what we have learned over the centuries, including the present one, into one harmonious whole. This we shall attempt in Chapter 8. *** Although in many respects Western medicine has come a long way in the last two hundred years due to the constant acquisition of new knowledge, it remains bound within a channel which is preventing it from taking its fullest form. This channel is the mode of thinking which maintains anatomy in a position of greater importance than the very functions which justify the structures; and this in spite of Claude Bernard’s vision of 1854, which could have been given the serious attention of all physicians since. This mode of thinking gives the chemical foundation of the body the all-important role of explaining all the phenomena in it. It is clear that all living bodies are made of matter and are therefore essentially

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chemical, but until the subtle thoughts of biologists are produced by matter as chemical reactions, we may be permitted to consider such a model wanting. Even when anatomy and physiology are blended, the dominant mental component is spatial, while life demands that time rather than space be the referential for all biological events.

We shall see in the following chapters that an effort was made a hundred years ago to produce a shift, but that it has not yet succeeded in making a sufficient impact to justify its being called a new departure for the whole of Western medicine. The dominance of matter remains unshaken. Western doctors, like western philosophers, believe that any reference to any component that is reminiscent of theology must be systematically avoided. The enormous success Western sciences have achieved in such a short span of time—which has been able to generate the incredible change visible in the standard of living in a technologically directed environment—can be traced to a move away from theology and to an acceptance of the power of the human intellect to question the forces of nature producing phenomena. Objectivity is the attitude, objects what it is applied to. Dialoguing with the universe of matter, unlike dialoguing with the universe of sin, yielded tangible results, and it has now become part and parcel of the western mode of thought, which turns its attention only towards certain kinds of facts (perceptible through one’s senses or through extensions of them called instruments) and avoids others, so to say “instinctively”.

As long as the analytic-intellectual-experimental methods were sufficient to handle whatever challenges confronted the medical world, it seemed reasonable to go on with what worked, and 51

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reap the benefits of this limited approach. It seems that today we are facing crises due to 1) the excessive use of drug treatments producing side effects which may turn out to be worse than the conditions treated and 2) the excessive use of surgery, which has compounded the medical problems by adding heavy economic factors.* Must we have irreversible crises in order to force a collective reexamination of the way of thinking of western physicians? Or can we, in the future, avoid the worst of the crises by moving instead towards a scientific attitude which requires that we face the challenges which are pressing?

However much we may be dazzled by open-heart surgery, organ transplants, the control of epidemics, birth control, molecular biology etc., we cannot simply expect that what we don’t know how to handle will vanish of itself. If we do, have we really left the religious mode of thought based on faith and the belief that we are deserving of divine aid? Can we be wholly objective and tell ourselves the full truth, which includes that we are not only ignorant of much that we could know if we really opened our minds, but that we are biased and lean emotionally on escape from the pressures of the present state of affairs in medicine into the illusion that we have already arrived at a final solution?

* It is probable that the economic factors cannot be dealt with by those whose specialty is biology. Since they can threaten the whole fabric of surgery by requiring increasingly expensive operating rooms and more hospital equipment, produced by engineers for ends not related to health and pushed by business people for profit, the need for a new point of departure is felt beyond the world in which biologists move.

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With these words let us open the discussion of alternative ways of looking at the same universe, but from a radically different point of view.

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Barely a hundred years have elapsed since some established professors of medicine in Paris and Nancy, in recognizing that the causes of certain illnesses could be placed elsewhere than in the cells, opened a new branch of medicine. The conditions which they now presented as curable diseases had, until then, baffled physicians. It became possible to force facts upon the world which called for a re-examination of the materialistic basis of medicine.

Because it was hypnosis, and not drugs, which made some of these symptoms disappear, the distinguished professors in their hospitals were shaken in their beliefs, and they in turn shook their colleagues. The diseases had been recognized as such before, causing those suffering from them to be admitted into hospitals for treatment, but the existing models of the body did not allow for an understanding of the conditions, and the treatments had failed to restore health to the patient and had often resulted in worsening instead.

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Hypnosis was not part of the arsenal of the apothecaries. It was this, however, which proved that another cause of illness existed besides the then so recently discovered germs. Unhealthy muscular conditions could be made to vanish under hypnosis, and bodily functions which had appeared to be blocked and not working were released, enabling them to work again without further intervention on the part of the physician.

As is usual in our world, a flare-up of interest in what became known as psychopathology produced a flow of facts. These generated a literature which caught the attention of lay people as much as that of professionals.

It happened that one physician, among the many who were attracted to the hospitals where Charcot and Blenheim taught, was free enough to rethink on his own what he knew and what he was seeing. This was Freud, who unfortunately, over 100 years later, still remains one of only a handful of real thinkers in that field.

This is not the place to retell the well-known story of Freud’s almost single-handed development of what is now a thriving branch of medicine though still a controversial one and one which is opposed by many allopathic doctors because it requires them to move away from somatic to psychosomatic concepts.

But this is the place to study how the model of a complex universe of experience is formed, added to, established, and then either transformed beyond recognition or adhered to without alteration.

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Central to this enquiry is the fact that it is diseases, illnesses, that we start with: the clinical component still dominates. It was Freud, the doctor, who found that cocaine selectively dulls sensation on the cornea, thus showing himself to be of the school of users of, and experimenters with, drugs and their selective behaviors in the soma. Nonetheless, he could not deny that it is not necessary for all conditions to have reached expression at the physical level in order to be considered illnesses and treated. He achieved his following among physicians because he took on patients whom no one had been able to help, and because he always insisted on testing his insights clinically. His patients in turn educated him, by making him widen his concepts whenever he met a new challenge.

Nonetheless, he could not, and perhaps did not wish to, make tabula rasa of all he knew, and we find intermingled in the complex proposals he made, the acceptance as givens of a large number of traits which are in fact cultural and social in their origin. A man ahead of his time, he remains a man of his times in the historical perspective.

By definition, a model is much less complicated than the reality it tries to represent. This does not make it useless. Perhaps, on the contrary, it is helpful, since it does away with a number of components which, for some purposes, are irrelevant. A city street map, which is so helpful to drivers for getting from place to place, fails to warn where the pot holes are, or where the ugly buildings, or factory or market odors are.

Freud’s model of the overall functioning of a human being no doubt included the one which was current at the time he did his medical Studies. His stay in France after qualification as a 57

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physician in Vienna must have set in motion his imagination for, and his alertness to, phenomena to which he had always had access but which had not until then Urgently claimed his attention. When he found that in most households there were more than a few patients—in the middle classes from which his clients came—he felt compelled to give all his attention to their conditions. He did not invent psychopathology. He was not the only one to collect data on all the interesting pathological cases found in the publications of that time. But it was he who recast his thoughts to account for them within the broader framework of the model of a human being as a psychosomatic entity which became a body only at death.

The stimulation of his affectivity resulting from the continuous discoveries which were generated by new challenges and which actually produced adequate solutions must have made the process of replacing an inoperative model by a succession of more viable ones easier for him—at least as far as his temperament, upbringing, courage and good fortune permitted.

He was aware that he was changing his models. He only accepted one as final when, in 1923, he had reached the state in which he did not see how, in this life, he would be able to sift the evidence which he had been unable to reduce to his model.

In his clinical history he was struck by the fact that physical symptoms appeared which had no physical cause and that these symptoms disappeared when the “mind” was in a certain state.

He therefore had to add functionings of the mind to the causes of physical conditions. Hypnosis could be construed as a physical intervention affecting the functioning of the brain, but it was more difficult to give a physical basis to an idea such as a 58

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fear of being abandoned or imagined guilt. Freud had to reconcile his medical training, which had been connected with several of the natural sciences, with the fact that his patients were inflicting somatic conditions upon themselves simply by allowing themselves to be concerned with certain thoughts.

Since they did not seem to know that, he had to assume that some movement within them was taking place, as inaccessible to them as their digestion or the filtering process of their kidneys.

Since motion assumes energy he had to call in a biological energy as the source of the dynamics within that part of the mind which was not conscious and which he called the “unconscious�.

Thus, the unconscious became a receptacle, a space-like universe in which things happen which must be located, and their depth and connections identified. For Freud, that space was somehow similar to that occupied by the brain and, like the brain, was stratified and endowed with energy. But to find an energy which could actually function within that space he had to wait until he understood sexuality.

Since life is in time, it became necessary for Freud to consider the content of the unconscious and how it accumulated, always in the perspective of finding how mental diseases could come about, last for some time or, equally, vanish. As instruments for exploring the unconscious, phenomena such as dreams were proposed quite early. Clearly, anybody who identifies consciousness with wakefulness would say that the activity of dreaming belongs to the unconscious. But it was also necessary to develop an understanding of the methods used by the dreamer to send messages to the consciousness at work in the 59

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waking state. This involved understanding symbolism, for it was soon obvious that the dreamer and the person awake did not use experience in the same way.

Freud specialized in the study of what was not apparent to the observer in the waking state, and found much to fascinate him in the dynamics of the unconscious, which he structured as three regions or layers: the deep unconscious, the subconscious, and the preconscious. The latter was the easiest to define, and to set aside, so to speak. In it he placed all that which is not called upon at this moment for the performance of conscious tasks, but is readily available as functionings which can respond at once to such needs as speaking, calculating, naming.

The subconscious, often extended to the rest of the unconscious, contains these elements of one’s experience loaded with emotions, i.e., energy. It has a dynamic sui generis which Freud was the first to explore extensively and thoroughly. Among his findings—and one which he himself found astonishing—he counted the fact that the process which kept repressed elements in the unconscious was itself unconscious. Clearly, he had already endowed repression with the attribute of energy, and in this he distinguished two levels: the energy repressed and the energy involved in the process of repression. These energies produce the dual dynamics which analysis was to expose. As soon as consciousness was removed, as in sleep, these dynamics would begin moving the content of the subconscious in the form of images. Dreams would organize themselves, using all sorts of devices which the subject rarely understood when and if he could catch the dream in terms of plot, of the characters involved, of the scenery and the situation.

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Freud specialized in dreams which related to a broad component of life: sexuality. He developed a vast arsenal of symbols, subterfuges, complex situations and distortions, extracted from the dreams of his patients. Sexuality, as seen by him, became all-pervasive, and he found it necessary to extend it beyond the limits of puberty, where it was considered normal, to the entire continuum of life from the first post-natal manifestations of feeding on.

This movement towards early childhood (and even life in utero), which Freud found inescapable because of the material gathered in analyses, brought the subconscious closer to the deep unconscious, which contains the automatic functioning of the soma, and blurred the boundaries between the two. In the deep unconscious the evolution of the race leaves its impacts (through the genes). Carl Jung exploited that model much more than Freud. Archetypes and their life in the collective unconscious (called the “id� by Groddeck and the first psychoanalysts) were exploited by the Jungians as an explanation of conditions and behaviors in their clients. They preferred this content of the unconscious to the dynamics of sexuality, especially infant sexuality which shocked their mores.

A narrower and less popular version of the dynamics of the mind was developed by Alfred Adler, a disciple of Freud who, like Jung, preferred his own insights to those of his master. The energy he chose in order to understand the movements within the psychosomatic entity formed by each of his patients was that of the struggle between a feeling of inferiority, inevitable when each of us becomes aware of our helplessness as small children

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compared to the mighty adults, and the powerful desire to dominate. Others followed over the decades.

However deviant the “theories” of analysts of the various schools, all of them are concerned with illnesses, mental or psychosomatic; they are all guided by the life of the sub- or unconscious, they all tend to detect the causes of illness in the behavior of an energy which is affected by events in this life or, through the chromosomes of the parents, in the past of mankind.

Freud, Jung and Adler—three of the names still encountered in this field—slowly moved away from the somatic origins of their models and invested more and more in the production of a purely psychological organization of the individual in which the body was an appendage capable of carrying out the objectification of the dynamics of the mind. Since there was a great wealth of material in the areas they studied they made many discoveries which both occupied their time and prevented them from looking for a more adequate model.

Events form the substance of the numerous anecdotes which are the attraction of psychoanalytic literature. Events, being inaccessible per se because of their complexity, are replaced by schematizations, which inevitably reflect the biases of the analyst. This leads to the generation of separate schools, to their closing off from one another, and to sectarian behavior which threatens to render them sterile. Younger generation analysts are enthusiasts of either one or another of the theories presented to them or—when they cannot compete with the

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giants—eclectic, i.e. they adopt the explanation that seems closest to the evidence produced in their analyst’s office when they are unable to develop their own deeper understanding of the challenges.

Of course, many practical suggestions have been made over the decades since Freud founded psychoanalysis. Therapies of all kinds exist, each claiming success for its specific proposals. All of them, taken together, are taking care of an army of people in need of mental help. All of them, taken together, have introduced important notions that medicine of even 50 years ago was not prepared to consider for the treatment of diseases.

“Social medicine” in particular could not have seen the light of day without the influence of the various mental therapies.

The fact that we can, today, consider social conditions as being the direct cause of the condition of certain individuals who are being treated as sick is indeed an indication that a revolution has taken place in the models held by physicians. For example, it was known for some time that in certain areas of the world the chemical composition of the food produced certain diseases (such as pellagra) which disappeared with a proper change of diet, but it was not stated categorically that eliminating poverty was the first step to be taken to remedy a host of illnesses which will disappear then and only then. It was also not stated at that time that some mental conditions would not present themselves if there were more love available in the homes of young children.

These statements about love and care, about social environmental conditions, are now made by physicians whose

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model of the causes of diseases has widened to include social conditions and dynamics. Doctors do not fight, on grounds of their professional knowledge of medicine, against the allocation of funds to projects that are purely social, such as indoor bathrooms, sewage systems, clean air and water, considerate tutoring of the “learning disabled” etc.

There are social illnesses which afflict large groups and the individuals in them. For these, drugs are not considered to be the answer; social remedies, on the other hand, are.

The models of the analysts which have wrought such changes in the model of allopathic doctors, opening them up first to the concept of mental diseases with mental causes and psychological treatments, then to the concept of socio-economic diseases, with social, historic and economic causes, and social remedies,— these models are at work around us and augur well of the possibility of a deliberate effort at producing a more comprehensive and cybernetic model, one which would correct itself as new facts came to the surface and imposed themselves.

Models are generally not pure. They can be the outcome of the hybrid mixing of two or more existing models. For example, there are many physicians who accept “mental diseases” as a category in their catalogue but who believe that a treatment, to be successful, must be via brain surgery or by the administration of specific drugs which act selectively on parts of the brain.

There are psychiatrists who treat socially disruptive behaviors via drugs (tranquilizers) or, worse still, via lobotomy, while

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others develop special institutions (a social move) for the isolation and treatment of antisocial individuals.

Occasionally, there are psychiatrists who diagnose a somatic symptom—such as a cyst or a glandular inflammation—as being caused by some mental mechanism, and suggest that by working on the mental cause the cyst or other condition will disappear.

The advent of psychiatry, of psychoanalysis and the various psychotherapies in the last hundred years or so has forced all those concerned with diseases to widen their classification and to see “the normal state of health” as being still more vulnerable than the physicians of the past considered it. If germs are not visible with the naked eye, they become objective under microscopes of greater and greater resolutions, but if one refers to “the jealousy of one’s father” in early childhood, how is it possible to make this objective since it is essentially subjective?

Only a revolution in the way in which evidence not classifiable in the material world is gathered can satisfy that rigor of objectivity which is necessary if outsiders are to treat real diseases. Thus, it may be that we shall have to start altogether afresh, and reach health such that it can, of itself, take care of all dysfunctions along the entire spectrum of human manifestations which we call diseases: of the soma, of the functionings, of the mind, of societies, of the world as a whole.

In Chapter 8 I shall make a proposal in that direction. I hope readers will take it seriously, merely because we are suddenly facing problems of global magnitude and because on earth we

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are still divided in so many ways: by country, religion, social cast and class, by language, wealth, education etc.

The giant step taken by that branch of medicine which so recently established the concept of the psychosomatic entity, has shown us how to create a workable model of humans in their natural and social environments. However, large as that step is, it is not yet sufficient to bring together all the ways in which man can know himself.

For example, many psychoanalysts describe the mystic as a neurotic, without providing an opening for a study of the specific qualities of mystics. This is an example of a certain arrogance in the field, and it impoverishes us in two ways. First, it generalizes neurosis as if it were indeed the most common of human conditions and, second, it closes the way to examining human manifestations which may reveal what is as yet unknown except to a few individuals. Any true model of man will be capable of avoiding such reduction and will permit its recasting in order to make what is at present exceptional into part of what is implied in the human condition.

It is one of the weaknesses of weak models that they ask for total acceptance when they are clearly only experiments in model making. The inclusion of mental diseases among diseases has forced the rejection of the total adequacy of the allopathic medicine model (in spite of its many revisions) and forced the consideration that perhaps there is a model which will satisfactorily handle somatic and psychosomatic diseases. Its absence from the scene to date does not mean that it is

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impossible to produce, only that none has so far been proposed.

Another route offered itself to me: rather than solve the oppositions between physicians of the body and physicians of the mind, I chose to leave these oppositions aside and attempt to integrate not only what western medicine has contributed, but also what other civilizations have found. However, before examining what a new model would add to previous ones, the science of model making needed to be entered into.

The model in this chapter has served us to focus on the fact that diseases are not the unifying principle and perhaps their role as central may be dropped profitably.

Three more chapters will be needed to prepare the ground so that readers get a closer look at the role and importance of models in studies like this one.

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The inclusion of the model of homeopathy as a chapter in this book does not come from the desire to balance the picture of Western medicine, which is mainly allopathic, but from the importance that homeopathy has as an alternative model of the soma and its conditions.

I am not sure that all, or even a few, of the homeopathic doctors will agree that I have presented a model resembling the one they hold of their field. It is my own; and it has been suggested to me by my acquaintance with homeopathy and my thinking about it.

Hahnemann, the founder of homeopathy, invited physicians to consider three departures from the traditions of his time (1755 1843): 1) He asked them to classify every person according to a dominant atom which today can be either carbon, phosphorus, or fluorine, but 2) He asked them to accept that it was not the chemicals that affected the soma of their patients, but their dilution, which is a physical property. 3) Rather than treat conditions with what opposed them he asked physicians to use

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the items that produced them. Because of (2), Western medicine divided into homeo and allopathic branches.

Chemistry in the soma was the backbone of the work of the physicians we met in Chapter 3. It led to the pharmaceutical industry and its dominance in the politics of Western medicine.

So allopaths reject homeopaths, not only as a threat to their practice, but also as heretics within the broader church of Western medicine. Homeopaths fervently long to be accepted as orthodox by the majority of Western doctors who in turn cannot reduce homeopathic arguments to their usual ones.

Indeed the opposition between the two factors can be said to be theological. In terms of chemistry many homeopathic prescriptions do not contain any substance measurable chemically, and their opponents accuse homeopaths of fooling their patients on that count. If they get better they don’t owe it to the treatment; only to their faith. The considerable number of successful homeopathic treatments have stood the minority well when the leaders of the majority have attempted to ban them from the profession. In Europe, they operate as a minority and have been that for some time; often in the past hundred years despairing of having a fair hearing from the governments and those who dispense funds, but they are slowly finding a place in the sun.

I said above that homeopathic doctors use a physical treatment and not a chemical one. Here is what I mean.

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For the reason of point #1 above which allocates to each of us a nature labeled by a particular substance, the homeopathic doctor will prescribe his medicine as a particular substance, but he will prescribe it at a certain dilution. From the point of view of chemistry it is paradoxical that the most powerful homeopathic medicines are those in the highest dilution.

Empirically then homeopaths have reached the conclusion that “high potency� means less and less of the supposedly effective substance and more and more of the solvent. A very effective medicine in fact does not contain any of the substance considered required in theory. Little wonder that chemically inclined allopaths do not understand.

Let us first make clear the process towards high potency medicine. The whole explanation is straightforward and can easily be understood if the reader goes slowly over the calculations that follow.

Sulfur, for example, has a molecular weight of 32. That is to say that 32 grams of pure sulfur will produce exact chemical reactions with certain exact amounts of, say, Hydrogen (2 gr. to produce 34 gr. of H2S; 32 gr. of Oxygen to produce 64 gr. of SO2, and so on).

Let us say that we mix 1 gr. of pure lfur and 99 gr. of a pure sugar and that the mixture is homogenized. We then take 1 gr. of this mixture and dilute it in 99 gr. of pure sugar and homogenize it. From it we take 1 gr. and dilute it in 99 gr. of sugar and so on as many times as we wish. These are called centesimal

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Hahnemannian dilutions. At each step of the homogenized mixture the one gram selected to be further diluted has theoretically 1/100 of the preceding one in terms of Sulfur.

Hence if we recall that 32 gr. of S contain approximately 6.06 x 1023 actual atoms of S (Avogadro’s number), each gram of S contains approximately 2 x 1022 atoms and each dilution diminishes their number by 10-2 to 2 x 1020, 2 x 1018 up to 2 x 1010 respectively for the first ten dilutions.

Since it has been found empirically that higher dilutions produce so called “high potency� remedies and since at the 15th dilution there would be no atoms of S left in the sugar, we are faced with the fact that it is not the atoms of the matter dissolved but their effect on the solvent that produces the medicinal impact.

Sugar is replaced by distilled water for liquid solutions.

Homeopathic remedies are not all inorganic. Many would be poisons if taken in non-infinitesimal quantity like arsenic or mercury. Taken in high dilution they can produce cures where allopathy could not.

We are squarely confronting a challenge in which the impact on the soma can only occur from a physical source. It has been hypothesized that the energy of the shaking process needed to homogenize the solutions or the mixtures, somehow affects the electrical capacity in the atoms of the solvent and that an unknown effect on the atoms is active on atoms of the soma, with specific results.

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This theory was not part of Hahnemann’s when he founded homeopathy. Still, something similar to it is required if we are to understand in modern terms the effects on some people, oftentimes out of proportion in positive or negative terms, reported in the homeopathic literature, after oral intake of these ‘harmless’ pills or potions.

We shall see in the next chapter that the understanding of Chinese acupuncture in Western terms poses a similar problem.

Although homeopaths do not look at the space occupied by our body as a variable electromagnetic field, it remains that it is. It is a field barely studied and therefore barely known. Still in it phenomena are taking place all the time which would be the substance for an understanding of 1) the nuclear transmutations of atoms detected by chemical analysis where material once lacking from the organism and needed by it, is found to exist in it although it has not been received from outside*, 2) how Chinese medicine is so pinpointedly effective, and now 3) how high-potency homeopathic “remedies” can be effective.

If we look at the soma as made of atoms and molecules we can say that Hahnemann’s view of us is that we are cosmic beings susceptible to cosmic disturbances, however small, and that diseases are these disturbances viewed through the instrument of a cellular organism, in which the disturbances affect energy in a manner and on a scale very different from those outside this cellular instrument. While allopathic medicine concerns itself with masses of organic matter forming the tissues in the soma

*

Louis Kernan, “Biological Transmutations”

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and affects them, also massively, presenting drugs in quantity, homeopathic medicine sees the inorganical atoms (as they are in Mendeleev’s Table) as characteristic of the balance that may be called health. Specific atoms—the dominant ones for each temperament and oscillating in special ways for each of us— prepared (energized) in certain ways, can have immediate results which could be the restoration of health in some cases; death in others.

Whether we emphasize death or cures, evil or good effects, there is no doubt that homeopathy is forcing us to recast our model of what we are. We can welcome the opportunity to see what we failed to see because of adhering too much to one model, developed in time under a vast number of influences, beliefs, theories, and experiments. Certainly most physicians considering themselves as allopaths are not conscious that this eclectic model of a human being is the one to which they refer.

A small shift from organic chemistry to mineral chemistry, or the reverse, imposes a very different outlook on health, the soma, diseases and medicine. Since the systems differ radically, they can both be correct. This is logically possible because each system ignores something the other stresses. What is found contradictory here is (in superficial terms) that one cannot conceive that one is talking of the same reality when two totally different models are being used.

There are many examples around us where we find a similar situation. We can have a stack of maps of the same country with only the outline in common. One is made to describe relief, one

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population, one climate, one agriculture, one industry, each telling a different story because of the choice of how to look at the country. Our soma is more complex than a country and we can look at it in many different ways which are neither complementary nor contradictory. Perhaps we need them all at the same time, as we do for a country, in order to obtain a true view of our soma.

Specialists of one view may do a lot with their view. This says nothing about the other views, only that this one is valid to that extent.

Homeopaths are right when they say that their view of their patients is a workable one. Allopaths likewise. What neither can say is that one view is better than the other. Perhaps they are preferred for reason of temperament, not of truth or of reality.

In the past, the discoveries of biological science may have been more easily absorbed by the allopathic trend of medicine. But this is no argument against homeopathy. Perhaps because of the clear successes in practice of homeopathy, biologists would be well advised to study the soma in new ways, guided by what has been achieved over almost 150 years of fruitful work by homeopaths. Only then will there be a fair chance of understanding how it is possible to obtain what these nonchemical remedies that are so powerful do. Only sectarians, partly politicians, narrow-minded people guided (or misguided) by self-interest, can deny to a working model when it works well in skillful hands, that it participates of the truth we are all seeking.

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We may not understand how Hahnemann established his categories by gathering appearances that he made into criteria, but we can see that honest, dedicated and studious doctors have selected the road of homeopathy even after they have been trained as allopaths.

Unlike the general allopathic practitioner or the specialist physician, who concentrates on the symptom, homeopaths aim at a medicine of the “whole person”, although they do not suspect that there may be more to the whole person than what they hold as a model. At least they say that they want to remain in contact with what makes one an integrated entity and they think it is those substances which define a person in their catalogue of categories. They consider that the mental make-up of someone can be deduced from the characteristics associated with the basis of a “temperament” equated to the presence of one or more dominating atoms.

Because of this, homeopathy remains a view of man that cannot serve as the model however much homeopaths would wish it. It is at best an interesting one and, very certainly, a useful one. No true overall model shall be acceptable that does not do at least as much as homeopathy does in the areas where it produces the spectacular results which could not happen at random, or follow from a false model.

In 1953-54, on a grant from a British medical association, I made an investigation involving homeopathic materials. I could find evidence of somatic sensitivity in particular subjects who were holding in their hand a small bottle containing a high-

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potency homeopathic preparation. One subject could describe in words an effect on his soma of the remedy contained in a numbered bottle prepared by someone unknown to all those involved in the experiment and placed among other identical bottles also numbered. The effect could also be picked up on the tibia of that subject by an instrument invented for very different purposes but very sensitive. An outside observer, using words to describe the pattern traced by the measuring instrument, would have come up with a statement strikingly in accord with the statement made by the subject who was describing the impacts on his soma.

I have no doubt that high potency corresponds to a physical entity in the electromagnetic universe. I have no doubt that we are all endowed with the means to generate, affect, regulate and sense at the local level, electromagnetic impacts which can be triggered by homeopathic remedies.

I cannot state categorically how we could map and keep tabs of the vicissitudes of this inner electromagnetic variable field. But I can see that when we are concerned with model making, homeopathy presents us with one that is plausible, however partial it may be. Homeopaths, like everybody else, need models to initiate, pursue and expand their work. The one they offer— and as I dared present it best—led me to contrast a chemical view of the soma with a physical one. I cannot say that I have been able to recast their model in my terms and come up with a physical basis for the selection of the categories of Hahnemann.

My inability to do so does not invalidate his premises, for it is likely that he found in himself (in a sense better examined in the last 3 chapters of this book) the justification (physical) for his 77

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model-making processes. Like the subjects I studied in the experiments mentioned above, it is likely that Hahnemann (or any of the skilled homeopaths) was directly affected in his unique entity (made of his soma, his mind, his experience and perhaps much more) by the state of some atoms in the patients he worked with and studied.

The challenge of homeopathy is different for those who accept it as a legitimate field of study and as a practice, and for those who cannot find in themselves the affective and intellectual resources to contemplate it honestly and dispassionately.

Homeopaths have the duty to find out whether they hold indeed a complete picture of what they are in contact with. As far as I know, they don’t. Homeopaths are doing all they can to understand how they work, why they succeed and, when they fail, why. Considerable research in Europe goes on in many directions, helping to produce the required climate for the correct appreciation of this “recent� development in medicine.

As to the indifferent or hostile colleagues of theirs, it may be said that one day they may wake up having lost their patients to the other camp. Indeed, truth can be ignored to a certain point.

Facts cannot be hidden from those who know that they exist.

Allopathic medicine is at a crossroad, over-specialized, overtechnologized, mostly dehumanized. Homeopathy looks so much more human, so much closer to the whole person and capable of at least as many cures as general medicine, costing far less and often more spectacular. Counting forever on the protection of the State may be a sure way of failing to obtain

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what an invisible and thinking adversary can have available to claim the clientele who every day lose confidence in official medicine. Politics is powerful, but it cannot always win against truth.

Today allopathic medicine has many adversaries. Homeopathy is the least likely to be ignored for too long.

By being concerned with the whole person, homeopathy deliberately attempts to give itself a model that takes into account explicitly the environment, heredity and circumstances.

Its research remains mainly concerned with diseases and pathological predisposition; but it cannot escape opening itself up to influences that exist in the world of biology, chemistry and physics in competition with the official allopathic research.

What it brings to the fore can only be disturbing to the official trend because it cannot be reduced to allopathic models.

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6 Chinese Medicine

I must state from the outset of this chapter that I am not writing it as a scholar, for I have not prepared myself by reading all there is to be read on the subject and assimilating its contents.

In fact, I cannot claim to have read much on the subject, only to have studied it a great deal over 27 years, concerning myself mainly with the questions which form the substance of this chapter. Readers will, I hope, find it more useful than any summary I could have made of the available literature.

When, in 1951, I came across the treatises of Soulie de Moran (mainly translated from classical Chinese texts), the most important question raised for me was: “How is it possible?�

Indeed I, as a Westerner acquainted mainly with clinical and allopathic medicine and, to a certain degree, with the homeopathic and psychiatric alternatives, found it unbelievable that premises which were in absolute contradiction to those I entertained, could be the basis for a practice which scored the successes claimed by Chinese herbal treatments and acupuncture.

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I was attracted by the stories I heard about Chinese medicine, particularly by the stress on maintaining health and preventing disease. I learned that doctors were paid when their clients were in good health and that they paid their clients when they failed to maintain that good health. That arrangement could only be workable as long as the doctors did not become bankrupt one after the other. Obviously, the doctors could only accept such a risk if they had a correct and lasting understanding of what happened in human somas.

Chinese doctors, then, openly state that something known as health exists and can be maintained, that diseases are dysfunctions which can be prevented and that health can be restored by the appropriate means. In the case of herbal treatments, these may seem analogous to chemical treatments.

In the case of acupuncture the assimilation of models is harder.

Preventive medicine and psychosomatic ailments began to be discussed in many parts of the West after World War II. The World Health Organization, established by the United Nations, has the word “health� in its name and many who work in it, and for it, believe in preventive medicine. Psychosomatic trends became stronger around that same time and started appealing to a larger public. As a result, when I met the concepts which the Chinese have held for centuries, I found myself emotionally prepared to reflect on them, rather than to dismiss them as so many of the physicians around me did.

There are two mysterious elements in Chinese medicine which kept me wondering.

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First, how was it that our idea of objectivity did not allow us to consider the so-called Chinese acupuncture points as real? Why was it that the Western entry into somatic reality could only take the route of histology, and only through the microscope? That the Chinese acupuncture points, supposedly cutaneous, could not be found by looking at the skin in the same way as when we found the various specialized elements in it led to the conclusion which was the only accepted one: that they did not exist, that acupuncture was a hoax.

Second, why do Chinese doctors rely so heavily on the information they gain through palpation of the radial pulses?

Western doctors are taught to take the pulse to obtain information about the heartbeat and circulation and to relate the rate of the beats to the condition of the soma. Were the Chinese doctors smarter observers than the Westerners, and had they found meanings that could lead them to be closer to the state of the patient by asking more questions of the pulses, or is there a deeper entry into the soma, not cultivated at all in the West, which is part of the Chinese tradition?

The content of this chapter gives my provisional reply to these challenging questions.

I know I would not help Western readers by hiding behind a Chinese nomenclature which might make my text appear more scholarly but would be neither more scientific nor clearer. I shall therefore use my own terminology as found in the chapters of this text and other texts of mine.

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The Chinese see health as the balance between the two components of one and the same energy, which is basic to our soma. Imbalance generates dysfunctions. Some conduits, appropriated to the ways the two components express themselves, will take the imbalance to certain points in the soma and produce visible symptoms. To the Chinese physician symptoms are indicators and are not in themselves the matter to be worked on. When a symptom disappears this is because the dysfunction or dysfunctions that produced it have been reached and properly dealt with.

To the Chinese physician the concepts at the basis of his tradition are alive and are proved or reaffirmed again and again every day. He does not feel he needs to change his concepts since he sees that, of those who come to him, the sick get better and in the others health is maintained. But these same concepts make little sense to western educated physicians, since the Chinese consider elementary what is complex to the former.

Earth, water, air, fire and metal cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be considered elements in the terms of the table of Mendeleev.

A way of looking at Chinese medicine which makes sense to western doctors and respects the facts of fifty centuries of inquiry in China may be possible today because in the West we have refined our own thinking and are prepared to recast our theories in the face of new facts. I myself have been witness to a large number of instances in which the first diagnosis has been made by a western doctor and the patient has subsequently been treated by a Chinese physician. I know that I am confronting facts as much here as I am when I see a toothache suppressed by 84

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a dentist who takes the appropriate steps, or a detached retina made to work again by surgery.

Although we are facing facts here, we are also facing what seems to be an irrational way of thinking about these facts. In Chapter three the mode of thought of western allopathic physicians was spelled out, in Chapter four that of psychiatrists and that of homeopaths in Chapter five. Each of these groups find justification for their own thinking on a foundation which generates their models, although quite often physicians of one of the groups do not consider those of the other groups to be serious. We shall, in this chapter, be concerned with Chinese medicine per se, and try to translate it into Western terms for Chinese and Westerners alike. Although Chinese doctors may not need this lighting when they work in areas of the world which have traditionally accepted them, they may find such a study significant if they are surrounded by western physicians.

Since anatomy is not the basis of the Chinese concept of the soma, it is assumed by Westerners that the Chinese cannot really know as well as they what is wrong with a patient. Yet before the advent of the microscope physicians (or what passed for physicians then) in Europe could only use what they knew, and in all societies there was a “kind of medicine� at work for the treatment of existing ailments which was based on knowledge derived from observations. Before the very recent advent of biological engineering, there were millions of qualified physicians who had been practicing under the Hippocratic Oath, who were acceptable to their colleagues and feared by their patients but who knew nothing of modern medicine. The basis of all science is observation (and not technology, which normally 85

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follows the development of sciences) and the Chinese, like all other humans, made observations of their world and their lives and classified them in a manner which was developed and refined by each successive generation.

It is always possible to begin our observations by noting what causes conditions rather than examining the conditions themselves; when this approach is taken it is likely that one will formulate questions in which conditions are seen as guides rather than as ends. Lay people use such a way of thinking when they have diarrhea and ask themselves “What did I eat?” or “What did I do to create this condition in myself?” But lay people do not systematize such thinking. Chinese physicians, who see a subtle energy at work in every part of a functioning soma, examine their patients in terms of what must have happened to the distribution of energy in the soma for this, and no other condition, to manifest itself. Treatments are concerned exclusively with restoring the energy to a state which is as close as possible to the one that allows the soma to cope successfully with the demands of life at every moment.

We need to look a little more closely at the energy in the soma and at its workings. The picture that follows is not extracted from Chinese literature; it is an attempt at finding a spatiotemporal model which makes it possible to use western terms for what may well be exclusively Chinese concepts. ***

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The fact that we know in the West that energy exists—and takes several forms, i.e. thermal, radiative, chemical, electromagnetic, gravitational, nuclear—has to be merged with the fact that in one life we grow from an egg to a complete adult system using the energy available first in the mother’s blood and later in the food and the air. Besides the intake of food as a source of energy, there are somatic functionings which store reserves and regulate their distribution during the hours between meals. Hunger is an inner signal which moves us to maintain our overall energy at a level which can take care of the routine needs of life. We therefore all know (so to speak, instinctively) that our basic energy must be maintained at a certain level.

Looking more closely, we can see that there exist in our soma regulating systems which work directly on our energy. If it is hot we perspire, using energy to counter-balance the intake of heat by expending energy in sweating. If it is cold we shiver, using our somatic energy to produce a quick movement of the superficial muscles of the soma to counter the cold by generating heat. Of this we can all easily become aware. There are many other ways in which we regulate our expenditure of energy. We do so when we develop a fever, when we accelerate our heartbeat, when we decide to rest. These, too, are accessible to our direct observation. The regulation of our blood-sugar level involves many energy transactions resulting from the cooperation of the various stages of our digestion to transform food into an assimilable stuff. Furthermore, the browning of our skin in the sun and its paling when less exposed; the effects on us of different kinds of foods; the application of cold water to our bodies when hot, or of clay to wounds or burns; the blisters in our mouth caused by food that was too hot, or the reactions of 87

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our skin breaking out in allergies, can all be seen in terms of the dynamics of energy. We counter an intake by an expenditure.

Observations made systematically in circumstances as varied as those in which a large population lives in different social conditions, different climates, different geographical reliefs with different faunae and florae, made over centuries with brilliant thinkers contributing their genius to opening new vistas, have led the Chinese to generate an extensive body of knowledge arrived at purely clinically and therefore more concerned with functions than with structures.

If one actually does not have images of anatomy in one’s mind, and instead sees the soma as the locus of a large number of energy exchanges at the local level as well as the total somatic level, one can try to capture the movements of energy anywhere they can be found. There is first the total energy that gives the “tone” of the individual and how he or she relates to its potential. It expresses itself as much in one’s eyes, one’s glance, one’s tongue as in many other somatic indicators such as one’s hands, their stability or shakiness, the color of the skin and so on.

Then there is the state of the energy in each organ. Is it excessive or wanting? Is it well connected with the other organs through the blood-flow and the nervous system? How far has the leakage of energy gone or the excess of energy accumulated? When the energy diminishes in one organ and it becomes flabby and soft, it may be that the amount of energy reserved for its functioning has been displaced towards other organs, or that a reduction in

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the total energy results from leakage to the outside world through the available channels: the intestines, kidneys and bladder, lungs, muscles. If the energy increases beyond the balance point, then the organ becomes hard and taut and does not do its work properly.

Chinese physicians educate themselves to reach as subtle a contact with the energy in the organs as their sensitivity (through the impact on their finger tips) can develop. In fact, the Chinese clinical diagnosis is made on the radial pulse. Since this has been going on for a very long time and since, in the West also, taking the pulse of the patient is an established method of diagnosis, it would be of interest to try to understand how palpitation of the radial arteries relates the physician to something fundamental in the patient.

In our Western model, based on anatomy, the arteries receive the blood pumped from the heart. Except for the blood sent to the lungs to be oxidized, the blood from the heart must be sufficient to take the blood through narrower and narrower arteries (the capillaries) to the cells of all the tissues, some as distant as our toes. The model cannot be satisfactory if only anatomy is involved. Knowledge from mechanics and the theory of fluids, or hydrodynamics, must be summoned in order to understand that the blood, though losing more and more of its pressure can still find its way to the small veins and to the large veins that will return it to the heart to complete the cycle.

One thing is certain; and that is that arteries and veins have their own muscles which are used 1) to add their work to the

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original impulse from the heart and 2) to create an increase of pressure in the flow of blood so as to make it reach the heart again.

Independently of any connection (in our minds) between these movements on the surface of the circulatory system and the nervous system, the mere fact that the arteries are not rubber tubes but living tissue that needs to be fed to generate its own consumption of energy, should make us consider these channels as being at least capable of being affected by the composition of the blood. They can be more than the echo of the heart doing its job of sending out the blood.

As to the two radial arteries, because they are unequally distant from the heart, the one on the right wrist may well tell a different story from that on the left, but both tell the heartbeat (as is taught in western medical schools) and other things besides. For Chinese doctors, those other things are numerous and precise and are the basis of their diagnosis.

Anyone alerted to the fact that the pulse is one of the sounding boards for the state of 1) the energy of the whole soma and 2) the particular quality of the energy localized in the various organs, tissues and functionings, would attempt to gain access to the information available on the radial pulses and to relate it to health and illnesses.

Within the terms used by Westerners to understand the soma, it is clear that if a disease strikes, the condition of the whole soma may be affected. When we include the arteries in that whole we

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must accept that their condition, too, would display something of the state that forms the sickness. Just as a thermometer tells the temperature of the soma in which it is placed, a sensitive fingertip can be told a number of things.

In fact, if we place three fingers against a radial artery at the level of the wrist, and if we concentrate on the messages sent by the artery to the observer’s sensitivity, we can define a minimal touch beyond which we lose contact with the artery. The minimal touch we shall call level 1 in this context. If we then press as hard as we can so that we feel the bones as well as a faint flowing of blood, we can call this maximal touch level N. Between the levels 1 and N there is a continuum of levels, which we shall lump together as level 2; N then becomes 3.

Having defined these touches we can now practice a number of exercises which we shall call the reading of the pulses.

One exercise will consist in knowing exactly what kind of pressure to put in our fingertips, originating in our will, and in establishing in our mental, or nervous system that we can manage to be just touching. Then, when we want a greater pressure and know which one, we will be able to manage this one too. This keyboard sensitivity which we grant musicians related to their instruments we can also grant able physicians on the keyboard of the pulses.

The second set of exercises concerning an increase of sensitivity to the numerous messages which become separated from each other by making a finger tip be more in contact with the artery

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on one side or other of where the tip was in the exercises of the first group. The slightest movement of the tip above or below the point where the tip was pressing while maintaining the level of the pressure, will generate new information that we can learn to receive, learn to hold, learn to interpret and test. If we establish a table of what we have learned in the two kinds of exercises we find the following:

below

above on

below

above on

below

tip 3

on

tip 2

above

tip 1

Level 1

“

“

“

“ “

“

“

“

“

Level 2

“

“

“

“ “

“

“

“

“

Level 3

“

“

“

“ “

“

“

“

“

This gives us 27 constellations that may produce 273 syntheses of levels of energy for one wrist and 273 for the other, or about 40,000 combinations. This number (40,000) only refers to the palpation itself. If to any one of the position-level-tip-finger configurations (PLTFC) we associate the feeling of the impact as “soft”, “hard” etc., which are perceptible qualities, it may be possible to define a doctor’s sensation for what is “normal” for every one of these configurations.

In the same way as we can perceive a scar on any part of our skin and can say to ourselves, for example, “I fell on my brow one day” or “I have had my appendix out,” a sensitive doctor feeling the pulse can recognize a greater or lesser hardening of 92

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one of the PLTFC positions and conclude that some ancient trauma is still present whose consequences may have effects lasting to this day. Westerners speak of chronic diseases and intellectually have no trouble in doing so. Chinese doctors sense dysfunctions and trace them back sometimes over a number of decades. They, of course, can teach themselves to sense differences of a touch on the same place and level, for the same patient on different occasions. They retain the sensation received or record it, if possible and desirable. Thus they extend their experience.

In the training of a Chinese doctor we included the associations made by generations of physicians that such a quality of the pulse means that such an organ or function is in a certain state.

Within the overall vision that energy is capable of a number of states in any organ, and of the consequence of that state on the pulse, it becomes possible to tell oneself: “His or her general energy is in a state of imbalance causing all the functions to be in need either of upgrading or drawing,” or “The general energy has such a configuration that it is experienced, for example, as one in which the top part of the soma (from the diaphragm up) is depleted while the lower part has energy in excess;” or “The energy is absolutely too low or too high, generating lethargy or tension overall;” or “The energy in this organ is of such quality that it can be described as lacking in reserves;” or is “excessive for what is needed,” or is “disorganized,” etc. or “The energy in an organ is such that to cope with its state, the organ transforms it into one of its possible forms which get the names stones, abscesses, tumors, etc.”

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Clearly what we obtain from the pulses is information; and information, while depending on what is being transmitted, also depends on how it is received and by whom. Hence the individual differences experienced by the same patient in the same condition, when examined by different physicians. In the West, all doctors’ opinions vary because of certain factors: sensitivity, experience, knowledge, the way instruments are read, reports from pathologists. Likewise we can expect that some Chinese physicians more than others will have learned to use themselves as accurate blenders of their readings of the pulses and the accumulated experience gathered from books and clinically. Nevertheless, a Chinese physician who has access first, through his finger tips, to the whole state of the client and then within that state to the various states of the various organs—all easily recapitulated if need be, by a second immediate reading of the pulses—cannot escape seeing his patient as one person, alive and having put himself in such a condition.

From that knowledge the proposal that such a move in the patient must be helped by either acting upon the general energy, or by a shift of energy from or to an organ, so as to restore the “normal” conditions of functioning, is arrived at. Tradition has established empirically that certain “plants” are triggers for such ends. These “herbs” are in some of the numerous forms energy has taken in the realm of the living. A matching of condition as understood on the pulse and a pharmacopoeia as established traditionally, is the object of the education of Chinese physicians in Chinese medical schools. From this connection what the patient receives is a treatment and will perceive, when the choice is the right one, that his or her health is restored. For 94

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Chinese doctors, cure means a return to the state of health that may have existed once in the case of this patient. Treatments lead to cures if the correct readings of the pulses have taken place and these have suggested a certain course which, when followed, will put everything back, as far as energy is concerned, to the state of proper functioning.

But to understand Chinese treatments we have to remember that the symptoms must not be taken to be the dis-ease.

Symptoms disappear not when they are worked on directly, but because the treatment has reached the cause of the trouble which happens in this case to have produced these symptoms. If a dentist knows that the decay of some teeth is caused by some intestinal dysfunction, and he suggests to his client that he look after his intestine rather than come to him with some teeth to fill or pull, he will be acting as a Chinese physician. But if he only treats the consequences of the condition through local work on damaged teeth, he tells his client, “I only know how to handle symptoms locally, surgically.�

It is not my purpose to study the science of prescribing herbs from a reading of the pulses, but it is my purpose to understand how the Chinese physician suggests a direct attack on the patient’s energy state by prescribing herbs which, when swallowed by the patient, can produce substances that are circulated through the system and affect an imbalance sensed (on the pulses) to exist at a particular place. On subsequent visits, besides the verbal report the patient gives concerning his or her state, the physician will know through the pulses that the required change has been set in motion. On each visit he will prescribe an altered remedy capable of handling the present 95

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state of affairs. Some of the remedies must produce changes almost at once, others after a few weeks. The patient is given definite amounts of “herbs” to take and asked to come back for pulse checking at definite dates, sooner or later depending upon the nature of the treatment.

Since all herbs are taken orally, their effects must be compatible with their being digested. Like the digested food, the remedy is transported to all cells.

In the West, we have evidence of the fact that oxygen and other chemicals find their way into every cell of the body from the brain to the toes. This enables us to see the Chinese natural compounds handled by digestion and doing their work at the local level by supplying at a given point what seems to be required to restore a balance. The cascade of interconnections available in the soma serve to transform symptoms—as perceptible dysfunctions—into a working system which no longer presents them. By putting gas into a car tank, we enable the car to use the parts that had come to a standstill, not because they were faulty but simply because they were dependent. To repair non-working, but not necessarily faulty parts, instead of providing the energy to the part by giving it to the whole, would be useless as everybody knows.

We use concepts at work in Chinese medicine when we hear a knock in our car engine and go to a gas station rather than to a mechanic. Checking the gas gauge tells us that an enhancement of energy level is needed for our car to perform well. We could elaborate on the analogy if we enhanced the energy level with

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lubrication, a battery recharge and cleaning the points and replacing spark plugs, ensuring clear and good connections.

There are two long processes for a Chinese doctor to go through if he wants to go into practice and make a living of it: the study of pulses and of the herbs. The hardest one seems to be to acquire expertise in the correct reading of the pulses. In this, memory is of a lesser help than with herbs, where tradition and literature can be of help and the study of both is open to all.

When a Chinese doctor places his finger tips on a client’s pulses, in modern Western terms he actually becomes several instruments which we can describe mechanically, although for the Chinese themselves, it is simply the traditional way of diagnosing the state of the somatic energy.

Let us imagine that a very sensitive probe such as a carbon microphone adjusted so as to cover a fraction of the radial artery and capable of being in touch with the artery at three determined pressures (level 1, barely touching; level 2, compressing the artery to approximately half its diameter; and level 3, compressing the artery completely by reaching the bone) and let us obtain tracings of the results by any one of the means available: pens on rolling paper, cathode ray tube photography, galvanometer graphs, etc. These tracings will be as varied as we can think of in terms of finger palpation of the pulses. But they will require that the reader synthesize as the mind of the Chinese doctor does, all the impulses with the shades of meaning that come from a special vulnerability to extremely small alterations.

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Such an instrument will provide many surprises to those who have not made themselves sensitive to the fact that an artery is live tissue, a microcosm reflecting the state of energy of the whole soma. For instance, the laws of hydrodynamics established in glass or rubber tubes, tell us that if we place a greater pressure on the artery we should expect that the flow of blood fight harder to get through and therefore tracings at levels 2 and 3 would definitely show sharper indentations in them than those of level 1. This is not always the case; in fact, it is only the case when arteries have hardened for some reason. I have obtained tracings of level 2 or level 3 in a position on the radial artery in which all pulse activity had ceased. The fact that such tracings exist has forced me 1) to reject the concept that the arteries are essentially conduits for the distribution of the blood (which they are, but not only) and 2) to see them as a sounding board because they are, as tissues, susceptible, like the rest of the soma, of interaction with all the effects of energy changes in any part of the soma.

My tracings, as I have said, are far less easy to synthesize than a diagnosis by a competent Chinese doctor; nonetheless they are so complex and so rich, that their reading even at a reduced rate, yields a great deal of information about any subject. What I can say here relates to two main contributions that all objective observers can test and confirm.

1

The notion of the general state of the energy of the soma can be seen as an underlying curve found in the tracings at the 3 levels. If it is too flat it tells that the state of energy is too low; and if it is too broad with a considerable distance between the

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maximum (crest) and the minimum (depth) it tells that too much energy is loose in the soma.

Between these two extremes there is a “harmonious” curve which we may dub “the normal state”, i.e. the one when not too much and not too little energy is available all the time to hold the various functionings of the soma.

2 Grafted on this general swell there are as many variations of impulses as one can dream of, but, being objective, it is possible to define for each of them the aspect that we may call normal. Thus the instrument can serve to describe conditions of the state of functioning at the various positions and levels of the artery as Chinese doctors use them, and reach a consensus of what will be called “normal” for each organ or functioning.

For example, it may be possible to use automatic Fourier analysis of the complex tracings and gather frequencies in bands and associate with the bands the corresponding levels of energy.

Statistical methods in conjunction with diagnosis by teams of doctors (Western and Chinese) may establish whether or not such a tracing actually defines a condition that can be labeled objectively as normal or diseased.

In particular, we would be brought into contact with a way of considering health as a reality (stretched over time) both as a whole, through the overall swell, and in detail, through the local morphology of the tracings.

The Chinese model is Chinese because of its origin and its tradition. But the facts referred to are universal and human. So

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we are able to transcend cultures, through a proposal that takes into account the sensitivities of the Chinese physician and involves instruments which record, at least in part, what he experiences when he relates to the variable energy of the soma of his patient.

Truly, we have been able to bridge the gap created by tradition only because energy—which was for a long time a concern of the Chinese—has begun to matter to the Westerners too, particularly when we consider very small amounts and their very small variations.

Central to our study of the Chinese model has been the vicissitudes of energy locally and globally, but it would not have occurred to us had the Chinese not reached so very long ago the correct vision that the radial pulses could serve as a sounding board of both forms. *** Many people think of Chinese medicine as acupuncture. Indeed, acupuncture is specifically Chinese, but since before treatment, diagnostics is required, we had to consider as more fundamental for the understanding of the Chinese model of health how pulses can be used for diagnosis. We have done this in the preceding pages. Now we shall turn to the other remarkable challenge to the West, presented by Chinese medicine—that of acupuncture as a proper way of treating functional diseases.

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Totally alien to the West because of the absence of an anatomical basis for its main contention, acupuncture has scored so many spectaculars that the West cannot ignore it and remain open-minded and honest. This decade, it was acupuncture anesthesia, that above all surprised Westerners.

When, in 1951, I was confronted by the challenge above, I asked myself whether in our Western science we knew of phenomena that could serve us to understand how it was possible to speak of well localized Chinese acupuncture points and not have them visible under the microscope. Since invisible nerve endings for the various sensations had been found and studied on the skin and the tongue and nose, a similar expectation existed. The inability of finding them, even with the most powerful microscopes, led to the negation of the reality of the points rather than to a questioning of the validity of the process within the research. Still there were a number of facts that I gleaned by reading treatises, as accessible to others as they had been to me, which told me that 1) research of these points via histology must be replaced by a more adequate one and 2) that we must try another concept of what we were confronted with, that first, did not deny its existence and second, moved towards reaching its true reality.

Electromagnetism since Faraday and Maxwell (over a century ago) had developed a whole new outlook on reality that did not use Aristotelian and Newtonian models. Fields of force came into being with Faraday; theoretically established through Maxwell’s mathematical treatment, they were demonstrated to exist by Hertz and made part of classical science by Lorenz,

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Planck and Einstein, and many others at the turn of the twentieth century.

A century earlier, electrostatics had established with Coulomb’s model, adopting Newtonian mechanics (as Gauss’ theorems did for magnetism), that electricity affected space. For instance, when a spark was created to balance the potential of two plates on a condenser, it was visible in space for a very short duration in the way lightnings are. In Coulomb’s time it had been found that it was possible to divide space electrically into two complementary regions via a screen made of a conductor of electricity (a metal, usually copper). That meant that a closed conductor such as a sphere, was capable of isolating its inside from its outside electrically; and that whatever happened inside had no means of affecting electrically what happened outside and conversely. This is known as “the theorem of the electrostatic screens or shields”. Thanks to this fact—proved in the theorem—it was possible to do research in a laboratory provided it was surrounded by a conductor screen to be sure that outside phenomena would not interfere. At the same time it was possible to protect the outside world from the sparks produced in the lab.

This interesting phenomenon was needed at the onset of the science of electricity and became absorbed as time went on as a routine fact of which one spoke only exceptionally.

One of the occasions for taking note of it was protecting buildings against damage from thunderbolts. It was found that if a metal rod was placed atop a building and from it a net of wires

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running on the outer walls reached the ground on which the house was built, a thunderbolt could hit the house and get lost in the ground with no damage to the house.

When Maxwell’s theory (1865) became known, a number of laboratories began studying the shape of the electromagnetic fields connected with meshes of different shapes and sizes to determine to what extent the fields produced inside or outside could be found outside or inside of the cage made of metal wires (invented by Faraday and bearing his name).

From the time of Hertz (late last century) electromagnetism has not only been studied more precisely but it has created a new technology that 1) has filled our earthian space with an additional number of fields, always becoming more numerous, as well as 2) allowed us to detect radio signals from the cosmos, which therefore are in the cosmos.

Today it is common knowledge that every spot on earth is the locus of a large number of electromagnetic fields that could be separated from each other to a certain extent if we used as a probe a radio receiver or a TV set or any one of a number of other devices created by electronic engineers. The manmade electromagnetic fields are known and can be catalogued.

Electromagnetic fields in the cosmos were studied before World War II for β‐rays frequencies, X‐ray frequencies, light frequencies and those on both ends of the visible spectrum, and since that time they have been studied for radio frequencies. Since charged particles such as X‐rays and cosmic rays carry with them electromagnetic fields we must accept that forever the universe

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around us has been crisscrossed by electromagnetic fields that form the natural habitat of all living organisms on earth.

Having made this introduction, I can present a new concept that I have called elsewhere “the electromagnetic man” (cf chapter 5 of “The Mind Teaches the Brain”) and that I believe leads to a valid understanding of acupuncture in western terms.

In the West, we are ready to concede a capacity of our soma to develop defenses against germs and against some chemicals if ingested in small quantities so as not to overcome us, against conditions such as heat (by browning) or abrasion (by callouses) and so on. If we now ask how we cope somatically with the variations in the also invisible electromagnetic field, there is no forthcoming reply because we have not considered it as a threat to our life except in radiation labs and atomic explosions.

What we propose here is that nature did not wait for us to think of our immersion in an electromagnetic environment to produce an adaptation system. It is this system that was discovered by the Chinese, who only needed to be conscious of energy and not, like us, of electricity, to see it as a network of meridians, for us of electronic currents forming a Faraday cage around our soma.

This network is objective but not anatomical, because functions are as real as structures. The use of a medium more subtle than the atoms and molecules, known in chemistry and physics as capable of forming atomic and molecular dynamics, can allow us to know what happens between elements of matter. Chemical energy was understood when we reached the level of interchange of electrons between layers that we situated in space

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around the matter of nuclei, and when we saw how to use that energy in either producing new substances or in extracting it for other processes such as heating water to get steam.

Electrons moving in space generate electromagnetic fields.

Variable electromagnetic fields can cause electrons to move and even to be directed to places where they produce certain effects by exchange of energy, as is the case on a TV screen covered with a luminescent substance.

Nature has endowed us with the capacity to generate electric phenomena on our skin. These phenomena can be studied with laboratory instruments that measure resistance, intensity of currents, and difference of potential; and researchers have used some of them in, for example, the study of emotions. “Lie detectors� are such instruments. The physiology of the expression of emotions is such that minute amounts of energy can be detected in subtle variations at local sites on the skin.

Such is the scale at which we are working here. Electrons need very little energy to move, but a measurement of their electromagnetic inertia exists (and has been determined). As soon as they move, electrons generate electromagnetic fields which have the property of being additive; that is, at one point in space a number of fields combine to produce a resultant field which can be enhanced by receiving impulses of energy from outside itself (we say amplified) or diminished by absorption of some of its energy (we say dumped).

When we put together the theorem of the screens and the existence of electrons within environmental electromagnetic

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fields, we can see that for the soma to cope within itself with the variations of electricity outside, it will be sufficient for the soma to surround itself with a set of electronic currents running along the skin and producing their own magnetic fields which would be instantaneously adjustable to any variation at a certain scale in the electromagnetic fields of the environment.

The theorem of the screens as treated by Faraday requires that only a very small fraction of the skin (wirelike) be mobilized to produce as good a protection as a continuous shield. A network of electronic currents on our skin creates this protection. There is no need for wires to produce a dynamic stability in such a network; the resultant field can be calculated and even measured at every point and its variations followed faithfully. Its dependence on the amount of light (which is an electromagnetic field) received will make it a diurnal function, a function of the hour, the place we live in, the season and the altitude.

If we want to demonstrate the existence of that network in electromagnetic terms, we need to make use of a probe which can divert some of the energy running into the spatial network of electronic currents, amplify it, and map its vicissitudes. This I did in the early fifties and found that most of the Chinese points which could be seen on the maps which the Chinese have added to over the centuries coincided with skin points showing minimal resistance to a current flowing from a metal point made to scan areas of the skin. The Chinese points could be linked by stretches of low resistance lines on the skin—lines called meridians—on which the points were characterized by a much lower resistance; about 1/10 of the other. This systematic and non-medical investigation produced the discovery of some new 106

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points not known to the Chinese. Some points known to the Chinese could not be proved to exist in this way, since they are on damp surfaces in the mouth where an electric current would cause injury.

That the Chinese could find such a network without the assistance of an electric probe is remarkable, as are the observations of the sky made by some Bantu tribes of Africa without the help of a telescope, and could start us thinking about the human mind as the inventor of probes rather than the follower of probes. We can therefore contemplate two roads from here. Either we accept that we now have a Western proof that acupuncture is founded on facts and adopt it as another set of means of serving patients to recover their health as the Chinese have done for millennia, or we recast our thinking so as to take in the new component of the electromagnetic man. The first will generate a swifter way of taking care of some health problems worldwide where Western medicine with its expensive technological trends is not economically feasible. The second will open a new era for man’s knowledge of himself as a cosmic and telluric being which will broaden the scope of human life while integrating all the inhabitants of the earth at the level of their ability to develop the means to function effectively in a world which is no longer only chemical. Matter as energy will be given its place when energy becomes recognized as the most comprehensive notion we have attained thus far in our evolution. ***

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We still have to understand in Western terms how it is that needles placed at specific points by Chinese acupuncturists produce effects that are remarkable: a foot which functions normally after years of dysfunction following an accident, or a pain in a back that lasted for months disappearing suddenly, or a growth in a womb which subsides and disappears without any surgical intervention, tonsils once easily infected no longer diseased, and hundreds of other conditions which are treated daily in hundreds of places on earth.

As we did in the case of the herbal treatment associated with the pulse diagnostic, we must have recourse here to an understanding of the work of energy at the local level of the cells and as an interchange of electrons between substances at the molecular level. It is not matter which affects the economy but energy, so rather than bring in a medicine orally which must find its path through the blood to the locus where there is a deficiency, acupuncture will change the state of the electromagnetic fields within the soma and force a shift of energy in the form of electronic currents affecting other electrons to produce a balance which may have existed before the complaint or one that was required but had not yet been produced in the life of this patient.

The components here are: 1) acupuncture manages to penetrate the electromagnetic screen which protected the soma from the environment, 2) the placing of some needles at some specific points results in the generation of a resultant field with a maximum effect in the region where the electrons can affect those other electrons already present but not doing their job, and 3) the successive sessions guided by pulse diagnosis bring 108

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the effects of treatment closer to acting pinpointedly on the dysfunction that is truly the cause of the condition being treated.

Let us imagine a Faraday cage which has exactly the shape of the human body and which is made of current lines that exactly follow the Chinese meridians. Let us empty the inner space of all its substance and make the network into a three-dimensional system with points of least electric resistance at the intersection of the vertical lines with the horizontal lines. We must conceive of these lines as the paths of variable electronic currents which are compatible with each other and which generate around the lines electromagnetic fields that take one shape in the outer environment and another in the inner one. The outer one shields the soma from the environmental fields active at that instant. The inner one merges with the somatic fields wherever these exist. For the moment, since we made that space empty, the inner fields can be left to be what they would be if we had an actual material Faraday cage, on which energy was poured from an electric machine placed outside.

Let us choose a constellation of points and place in each of them one metal needle so that a certain length of each is in the inner region. We can now generate a flow of electrons through those needles that will produce a resultant field in the inner space.

This will be a unique field with its special features which may be such that at specific places it has its maximal intensity and at other places its minimal intensity. It is conceivable that the placing of the needles on specific locations may become the equivalent of a polarized beam of electrons, reaching a particular spot although only obtained from the combination of a number of fields. If this transformation of a set of concomitant 109

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fields—produced by electrons emerging from a constellation of needles placed deliberately at spots that can affect each other to produce a pinpointed firework or a shower of intense electrons— can be used as if it were a beam we may have found an instrument that can affect tissues in a manner we did not know about before. It is a very precise instrument. The needles bring only their electrons into those spaces, and the fields generated by these electrons can merge only with each other to produce a resultant field. Once this field is generated into that inner space it acts as fields do; that is, it affects electrons, if they are there, and this brings about specific movements of electrons.

What we have to ascertain is that specific constellations of needles produce features of fields that can be described as increases or decreases of electronic impacts in such or such a region of the space considered, particularly if it is possible to selectively locate fields as resultant fields in every region of that space. According to the intensity of these fields we may give ourselves an instrument which will work in as precise a manner as Penfield’s probes did in the brains of his patients.

If we can do this, then it may lead us to find which needle or needles must be placed where so that the inner field will be located so as to block the movements of electrons in some parts of the middle brain and prevent the ordinary connections of nervous cells that produce the sensation we call pain.

Acupuncture anesthesia would then be perfectly understandable and functional.

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In order for our understanding of the mechanism of acupuncture to go deeper, we still have many challenges to consider. Molecular biology has made us aware that all phenomena in the soma can be seen if we look at them at the scale of the molecules. Things actually happen in the cells; and from there we can come back to our scale by compounding the local effects. Acupuncture is the first example of molecular medicine although obtained empirically thousands of years ago and by means totally unrelated to modern molecular biology.

What we are seeing here is how a study of functions—made by observers who had very sharp intellects but lacked the instruments of Western Science—could produce a model of the functionings of the soma in terms of energy and its dynamics and obtain shifts of energy in a large number of somas, perceptible first on the pulses and then in the behavior of the whole soma by a practice of needling which was empirically developed (though guided by vision). A balanced energy at every location resulted in a healthy person with an overall balanced energy. Conversely, a healthy person was one who could through subtle inner systems cope with temporary imbalances whose cause could be anything and manage to restore the balances.

Physicians intervened by simply needling when that helped, in case the patient could not restore balance by himself. Thus acupuncturists were, like herbalists, guided by “health must be maintained” and dis-eases prevented.

They were also in need of the sounding board of the pulses to reach the spot where the enhancement or the depletion of the local energy was required.

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If empiricism does not seem sufficient to convince the West that Chinese medicine has something very valuable to contribute to the study and understanding of health, and if what is asked for is experimentation in terms compatible with the historical development of Western science, we can today perform some decisive experiments which will: 1

give us an entry into every one of the facts of Chinese medicine without requiring that we accept their model as well,

2 widen our model of the soma to include in it the vicissitudes of energy in several pinpointed manners.

3 develop a concept of somatic functionings that takes us out of the narrow and mechanistic world where we are now and brings us closer to the findings of molecular biology which gives us the basis for an understanding of ourselves-in-theworld.

These experiments will no doubt require that we perfect the two instruments mentioned in this chapter: one that will keep us constantly informed through the pulses of what we are doing; the other, the Faraday cage to alter electromagnetic fields locally. The number of experiments to be performed will depend on whether we only want to get an entry into the reality of Chinese medicine in our own terms, or whether we wish to express in a new model all that both the Chinese and the Westerners can do and have done within their own models.

Years of work will be needed for the second; only a few hours may suffice for the first.

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*** From the Chinese we can learn that health can be thought of in terms of energy and medicine can be seen as having above all ends the maintenance of health. This naturally leads to preventive medicine which may be easier to finance and administer worldwide than any other way of coping with diseases.

But since people learn nothing from what works and are alerted to question when things stop working, we shall remain in need of physicians to take care of patients who go to see them when they no longer can take care of themselves. Whether we use Chinese or Western medicine will depend on our preferences and our dedication to one or more modes of thought. Essentially we would not need physicians if we were constantly watchful enough to catch each dysfunction before it appears at the scale of a symptom and wise enough to take steps to stop it from growing. For this we need more than somatic medicine.

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It is easy to imagine after reading the previous chapters that there are perhaps many more models at work than we suggested by selecting those few. I must confess my ignorance of all the ways of considering health and diseases held by the many American native tribes from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. I know they had and still have medicine men, and they must have had a model upon which their work was based and which provided a framework for the carrying on of traditions over the centuries.

But my ignorance stretches over other continents and other periods of history. I know nothing of the model of ancient Egyptians, of that of the Assyrians, of the proto-Greeks, of the many black tribes of Africa, etc., who all must have needed and no doubt had, a kind of physician to gather the population’s experience of how to take care of common complaints, at least.

My ignorance could have been remedied through a number of years of study. But would it have improved this text? In fact, even where I seem to have engaged in some study about the content of the chapters of this book, there is so much that I have not encountered, which might invalidate what I retained from

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my encounters, that the value of this book cannot be found in the extent of its survey of the field. Hence I feel less compelled to give every contributor and every culture its due. I selected the material I think relevant to my objective, which is to become more articulate about health. *** There are two models I can think of with some ease in spite of the difficulty of the challenge. One is that which allows yogis to reach integrative powers in themselves and sometimes pass their knowledge on to disciples. Another is the one held by healers known in most cultures and also operating among us.

I will use the name yogi to designate those people in India and outside of it, who have reached self-knowledge to a point that allows them to objectify in their own life ways of being in which consciousness permeates all functionings, somatic, mental and spiritual.

Our question concerns that aspect of self-knowledge that produces a model of health not accessible to those who have not attained it.

Two of the great yogis of the last hundred years in India, Ramakrishna and Ramana, died of cancer. Whether that means that cancer is not one of the conditions to which their selfknowledge allows them to relate; or that they wanted, like Christ dying on the Cross, to create a difficult problem for their enlightened followers—who would have to reconcile such an 116

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evolution of the spirit with an inability to bring about selfhealing—I leave to my readers.

The manifestations of the yogis are on the whole invisible from outside. So observers of yogis may be altogether unable to observe what is important for them and how things take place in them. But some yogis, like Vivekananda, Aurobindo, and Krishnamurti, have spoken about their experiences and even attempted to propagate their findings.

What I see at work here is that health is present when 1) the self is integrated by integrating all the functionings and 2) all causes of distraction in the outer and inner life, are prevented from operating.

So, for yogis, health is one with being in control of all the somatic, intellectual, social and spiritual functionings so as to direct them to contribute to a life chosen for what it will bring to the yogi.

Thus, when health exists there is no need to be concerned with disease. If one must consider it, say by encountering it in the environment as is told in the story of Gautama the Buddha, then diseases are mainly seen as resulting from distractions.

We have here a model of health which does not begin as the negation of illness. Health will be spoken of as a by-product of a proper understanding of what one is and how one expresses oneself in the human condition. As a by-product it cannot be the aim of special ways of being. So yogis do not offer their teaching 117

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as a way of maintaining health. They found out that if they do what is required by the truth and the reality of being at a certain level of consciousness, one of the appearances is that one will be healthy and know it from within.

In this model, in contrast to what psychiatrists did, the stress is on consciousness. Health is coextensive with what is accessible to consciousness and affected by its presence. Hence, yogis regard their soma as a seat of consciousness in the same way as their mind, their psyche, their affectivity, which, because they are supposed not to be somatic, are more commonly considered akin to consciousness. Passions, desires, images, and ideas, although further and further away from material substances, are deeply related to the functionings; and since consciousness is in control, it maintains health and avoids diseases.

The yogis recognize that the functions of the organs, which in the West are called physiological, are what maintains the structure in good state and that these functions are accessible to consciousness. They then work on the function so that it cooperates with the overall use of oneself towards that end in this life that one has given to oneself. For instance, they neither deny evacuation nor feeding or breathing. But they look at them to affect them so that they are either subordinated to the overall life, or worked on to produce their contribution to one’s evolution. Feeding becomes selective and controlled and appetite tuned down. Breathing made conscious serves the involvements of the total person and is never left to be routine and unconscious. To maintain health the yogi finds there is no need to dissect corpses and know anatomy intellectually. The knowledge of structure is through the functions associated with 118

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it. The knowledge of the growth of the structure in utero, early childhood and adolescence, is reached in so far as it is accessible, through the functions; not through the scalpel. In this study of functions, yogis may reach the basis of temperament, and specify to themselves whether a certain set of behaviors is reachable for a particular temperament. Thus, they avoid placing themselves, and others, in front of a challenge which is unreachable.

But they can also achieve knowledge of physiological functions in manners excluded to those who begin with anatomy and place functions in its parts. For example, in the West we label as involuntary many muscles which are only met as such because of a definition, not because the subject’s will cannot affect them.

Yogis know how to work through their will upon “involuntary muscles” and voluntarily reverse some physiological processes (such as the one-way flow of liquid from the bladder)—a fact inconceivable to Western physicians. Whether it is a very difficult power to acquire or not, is immaterial in this discussion. What matters is that it is at all possible. The clash is not between facts, but between models used to fathom the mysteries of the world. If we start with consciousness we do not have to end up describing the same world as when we start without it. The description concerns the model which it also determines, and conversely.

Once it has been integrated into the overall functioning of oneself, every part of oneself can be taken care of by just giving it the correct amount of energy and attention. The act of integration becomes an act of freeing; and the soma and the mind, thus educated, contribute to one’s health rather than 119

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distract energy and attention for what is not essential in that kind of life.

The yogis are exceptional people only because not too many of us are prepared to pay the price for that kind of self-knowledge.

They are witness to the possibility and this is what we want to stress here.

When Ramakrishna found that some dysfunction was settling in his throat (labeled by physicians as cancer) he only wanted to know what it meant for him to receive this gift from the same sources that made him other gifts. His cancer was part of the process of evolution as he understood it, and he did not want to do anything to get rid of it. His health would not have been restored by removing the cancerous tissues; but it might have been, had he been able to attain an understanding of what in his functioning was inadequate for his life. Ramana yielded to the pressures from his devotees to be treated by Western physicians, although he told his disciples that he had to understand life with cancer as his lot in this life. His disciples who had only reached a certain level of enlightenment were fragmenting their master into a soma that can get diseased and needs to be treated by physicians, and the rest, which Ramana himself could take good care of. But for the yogi all was one, and the happening of the cancer was as acceptable, in spite of the pain suffered, as an offering of a meal.

Health, as such, and particularly at the somatic level, is not the concern of those who know that it is only the sign that the overall work of integration of all experiencing into one conscious

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state, is taking place properly. They do not work towards it, though they would know through definite criteria, whether it is being achieved as a by-product. The adopted diet, the regimen of exercises and hours, contribute to eliminate all dysfunctions of the soma caused by excesses of materials and of some chemicals placed in that soma. Frugality is not a virtue, it is demanded by the kind of life one leads; vegetarianism is adopted because of the metabolism that goes with it; relaxation, concentration, dedication to the tasks selected, are all equally demanded by a contact with the energy of the self and its own economics. Thus yogis, although immobile, do not experience cramps; although their eyes are shut and their ears not processing impacts, they are fully awake and remain so for hours on end. Sleep is barely needed since there are almost no matters lingering in their mind and requiring attention. The thermostat in the soma indicates that heat is being produced by conscious breathing rather than by combustion in the cells of food stuff from the blood.

Indeed, this model is very different from those held by the three Western groups of physicians (homeopaths, allopaths, psychiatrists) and also by the Chinese. What is objective to the Indians springs from awareness, which is an inner movement, and from self-awareness particularly. Since this awareness in the grownups allows them to manage better at the spiritual level, the concept of health achieved by them gives a central place to awareness and awareness of the functionings in particular. Diseases are then the result of errors in the spiritual functions of concentration and of “being with�. If these are attended to in certain ways, diseases do not appear and health is the real, as well as the apparent, state.

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We are not advocating the generalization of what we can learn from a study of health among the Indian yogis. But here we have an opportunity to come into contact with another way of looking at ourselves and our functionings, and to learn to assess the significance of a completely different set of outlooks (hypotheses).

The ordinary Indian person having a spectrum of choices at his or her disposal in the community which has integrated part of the past may choose not to follow those of the yogis who have achieved spiritual health. They can then be as susceptible as any Westerner to the assault of germs and their corresponding illnesses. Yogis’ defense systems work differently and they do not contract many of the diseases which attack others, as if there were a state of being that gives the soma what immunity gives ordinary people, chemically. In the next chapter we shall attempt to work out a rational justification for this spiritual control of the somatic immunization system. *** Healers exist; I can vouch for it. In the summer of 1951, I, an unbeliever in this field, allowed a medical doctor from Italy to spend a few minutes doing to me what he always did when he laid hands on people. I told him of an accident I had had in 1942 in a swimming pool, which affected my vertebral column at the level of the lumbars, and which several times every year since had produced extremely painful seizures that would last up to three days and immobilize me almost completely. At the time, I was investigating through the Gayograph (the instrument for

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measuring energy changes on the skin mentioned in other chapters) the vicissitudes of our energy in the soma. So, I was hooked on to the recorder and I relaxed my mental opposition to being involved in such a “witchcraft” session. The impact of Francesco Raccanelli’s hands on me was at once registered by the Gayograph and the effect on me was real. For the more than 27 years since then, I have never had an attack, never again displaced my vertebrae, and have become as I was before the accident; capable of lifting and carrying luggage or heavy objects. The test was conclusive. I had been healed by someone who only kept his hands (one or both) on the traumatized region of my spine and moved them for a few minutes above it, at about 15 or 20 cm. distance.

I know of other facts, but I shall restrict myself to what happened to me as a subject since I know that best and it makes certain, for me, that I am concerned with a real “rational” phenomenon.

Healers construct models for themselves, but they agree that they would prefer that some scientific community took it upon itself to investigate what they do and why it works. Rarely have authoritative groups volunteered to undertake this needed job and we are left with some proposals that are technically and methodologically unsatisfactory. Mainly based on analogies and influenced by the latest discovery in physics, the models speak of flow of fluids, of magnetism, of radar-like effects and so on.

Healers say that unbelievers block the effect on them of the healing powers that work on believers; and so-called neutral investigators refuse to be believers. Hence, there is a lot of material (anecdotic mainly) but little that can convince the 123

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scientific community which expects that the healers and their patients should do the research work in terms acceptable to them. This has not happened, so far.

Still I, as someone who received the benefits of healing without being a believer, would try to elaborate a model which satisfies my needs as a scientist without requiring that the terms and the frame of reference used be those of the past, when no one was actually concerned with such phenomena. The scale at which I considered the phenomenon from which I suffered was of nerve fibers caught between vertebrae that slipped one against the other. This was a purely mechanical phenomenon, and at my scale. But the phenomenon of my healing was not at that scale since there had been no manipulation of the column of the sort that some osteopaths apply in similar cases to relieve their patients from their pain. There had been only a contact of the skin of the hand of the healer and the skin of my back plus some movements of his hands above that area. The appearance was certainly not the reality. The invisible interaction of these systems of cells could be reduced either to what is known by the community of scientists (physicists mainly) or to something not yet known until this time, i.e., to nothing.

We know of a few cosmic fields: gravitational, electromagnetic, electrostatic, or magnetic. Had it been any of these, it would be possible to devise methods to amplify and measure the effects and to attempt to understand how things work out. For instance, it is known that there is electricity on our skin. When two electric systems come close, as the air between them is not a conductor of electricity, they form an electrostatic condenser allowing a discharge from one plate to the other when the 124

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difference of potential between the two plates reaches a certain level. Then a spark may show such a discharge. We can discard such a phenomenon on the basis that no discharge is witnessed by the subjects or the observers.

But in the chapter on Chinese medicine, we saw that it is possible to have an idea of what goes on in acupuncture, by assuming the existence of a Faraday cage-like system of very small currents (small at our scale) running in the meridians, a function of time (the hour), climate, altitude, etc. We therefore can offer an alternative explanation of healing as I described it here. A healer is someone who has discovered empirically that there are areas of increased density of those small currents on his body and on his hands in particular. Hence, in some spatial arrangement of these “circuits”, at definite distances from the skin of the subject—and perhaps a “permeability” of the subject to the healer’s electromagnetic impact—some effects, of the kind experienced with acupuncture, may result. These may be local or on the total energy available to the subject, as in the case in acupuncture.

To be clearer about this model we must take a few steps we did not take when we developed the Faraday cage idea.

First, we must remember that if white light cannot penetrate our body, X-rays can. An electromagnetic field of appropriate frequency can ignore the field existing between the meridians and even get through the thickness of the cage (that is that of the body) and affect a photographic plate, in the way we can see

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through (a museum model of) a Faraday cage in which a subject is enclosed.

Second, we must remember that electromagnetic induction and electrostatic influence affect space (geometrical) to change it into fields (physical), the space remaining geometrically unchanged while fields in it can act upon each other (as electric probes demonstrate) and can vary.

Third, in our discussion of the scale at which we study phenomena we may work at a scale in parts of a model when other scales are needed to make sense of a given phenomenon.

Because of the scale of mechanics as we apply it in osteopathy for example to restore into function an unfunctioning back, we come to believe that effects to be operative need also be at that scale. Hence, we discuss the idea that minute shifts in energy can cause effects equal or superior to the mechanical effects on the scale of the body. Still what happened in fact in my case is that no mechanical force was used. Though there may be confusion in the thinker’s mind between models used, the strength of fact against theory says that, whatever that healer did at the scale at which he worked was to the point, while what the other physicians did barely concerned the point. What the healer did (a fact) and what he and others believe he did (a theory using a particular model) are not at the same level. Facts are compelling; theories may be attractive. But some people are prepared to dismiss facts to protect theories.

There is no doubt that I was healed definitively by a healer who laid his hands on my back and nowhere else. There is no doubt

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that, when I agreed not to think of anything, and to let the instrument decide on what happened to the somatic function to which it was sensitive, a change in the tracing took place; one which, in the general interpretations of those tracings, could only be interpreted as a transfer of energy from outside to me.

That outside, was the healer’s presence. There were no other possible causes, however crafty I could be in dismissing the reality of the phenomenon.

So, energy (of what kind I do not yet know) did flow from him to me. An instrument can only be affected by what it is made to register. The Gayograph is affected by energy. Variations of energy are needed for a tracing to show anything. If an ongoing tracing shows a sudden bulge or a shift of its axis in a certain direction, or both together and for some time, it must be understood as a lasting impact on that which affects the instrument—here, energy—rather than voltage or amperage, which are not being measured.

Thus the facts we have to put together are: 1) energy has been passed from the healer to the patient, 2) this energy was received by one soma, through a penetration on the lumbar region of the back and emanated from another soma using the healer’s hands as the channel, 3) the reading of the instrument reflects an impact on the overall energy that affects the probe of the instrument and not an indication that it had a local effect, and 4) the healing that resulted expressed itself locally as if the place of entry of the additional energy given by the healer was more receptive because of the condition of the patient, and capable of instantaneous integration with the total energy with which the instrument is in contact.

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The model capable of accounting for such a happening may be described as follows: An accident (or any other impact that affects a selected part of the soma, also re-organizes the flows of energy established in the soma before its happening. Flows that are askew with the initial one take place so that some of it affects sensory nerve endings in certain ways, producing what we call pain; other energy flow affects the muscle tone of some of the muscles. The healer’s energy is used to act selectively on these new flows which become old in chronic cases so that excesses in muscle tone are recuperated and placed in the general flow; diminutions are compensated locally since there is more energy available, impacts on nerve endings cease to be different from what they are in the non-traumatized areas and recognized as normal by the brain.

In a number of applications of my own hands, I noted considerable local increases of temperature and a considerable activity whenever I lay them close to parts of the soma of subjects which the subjects themselves considered diseased.

This direct experiencing of energy shifts in myself as an instrument, I cannot deny; and I know them to be caused by the condition of the part of someone else’s soma in contact with which I find myself. The phenomenon may exist whenever two people touch each other, but it may become noticeable when in an area in trouble the components of the energy flow in it are affected. People know that an increase in temperature at any place on the skin means that some battle is taking place between invaders and defenders; that a boil is a symptom of an acute fight between germs and phagocytes. So if a laying of hands produces in the healer and the subject a sensation of heat, it is 128

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clear that energy is being mobilized at the heated spots. This does not mean electric energy, although it could also be electric.

Our way of using language for energy transactions leaves open the existence of new forms. Last century a number of forms were discovered and the stress was placed on how the same amount of energy moved from one form to another. Physics only asked that these changes be numerically equivalent but did not attempt to give a final model for what happens to energy from gravitation to radiation.

Perhaps if we only required that the word energy be used all through, we would keep some pseudo-problems from making their appearance. Knowing that our soma is responsible for the way we structure our universe of knowledge, in categories connected to what we experience within our system seen as an instrument, we can say that above anything else, an energy system called the soma, affects and is affected by other energy systems which include other somas.

Healing, like many other treatments we met in various chapters of this book, is concerned with a special dynamics of the energy which is present in our soma in a number of forms.

We have not, as a collectivity of researchers and investigators, by any means exhausted the supply of new problems and, in the attempt at solving them, new instruments. It is necessary to keep our minds open to the discoveries that phenomena such as those we are studying here, will make possible. Healing, like dousing and other “mysterious� phenomena, not reducible to

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existing models, are welcome because they force us to revise our constructs and to distinguish between the reality of facts and the facts of our believing that what we think is the whole of reality.

I am grateful to life for bringing me into the presence of a true healer who not only gave me the smooth physical use of my soma, but made me into a more careful scientist.

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8 A Hierarchical Concept Of Health

The survey we have been engaged in makes it clear that there are many models of the human condition. Most of these have been developed not in contrast to each other, but independently one from the other, often in a profound relationship to a specific culture or civilization.

This chapter is an attempt to make explicit a proposal of a model hinted at in a number of earlier publications which were not directly concerned with the concept of health. Perhaps each study, to which a monograph was devoted, can be considered as having made a contribution towards the statement of this chapter.

Health is pervasive. There is not a special day when it is achieved and maintained. . When we treat of it we must include all the environments from the womb on. Because of heredity we must refer to previous generations and to the way their conditions can affect ours.

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There are two characteristics of the model proposed here which will serve as its introduction. The first is that each of us must be considered of four realms: the cosmic, because we are molecules and atoms; the vital, because we are cells and tissues; the animal, because we organize and display constellations of behaviors; the human, because each of us is unique in that we can change our mode of being through the exercise of our will.

The second characteristic is that we begin with an energy that we call human although it is also cosmic, vital or biological, and behavioral, at the same time, in the way cosmic energy can be seen as heat, work, chemical, radiation, gravity, electricity, magnetism, while it always remains energy, a single entity. This human energy works in the four realms, one of its processes being to lock part of itself into what we call objectifications, of which the soma is a prime example, another being its maintenance of certain amounts of itself about the objectifications to produce the dynamics in them and between them.

To conceive of these proposals more easily, readers may be helped by thinking that cosmologists see matter as a form of energy which in turn creates the energy of gravitation that helps condense matter into atoms and produces the evolution of matter in the cosmic laboratories called clouds, nebulae, novae, stars etc. Matter is locked-up energy and it generates another form of energy which can be locked up in turn to produce still another form and so on. At each level, the nature of the

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dynamics involved is that greater variety is achieved at a lesser expenditure of energy.* The model we are concerned with here sees energy as capable of directing uses of itself in the way in the field of electromagnetic induction a circuit in a certain field finds that a current is generated in itself, which in turn will generate—if it is variable— its own field that can produce other electric effects.

It is necessary to have a complex model to account for complex phenomena. Since the soma is being produced in time, in utero, as a functioning organism, exchanges between the various forms of energy are required. An embryo and a fetus are viable within the uterus, although they would die if placed in the environment in which they will survive after maturation. The directing energy, or self, will integrate the energy and the matter brought to the embryo in the mother’s blood to what is already there and produce its own substance that becomes the locked-up energy of the soma. So each of us gives ourself a soma that includes a brain, sense organs and ductless glands, which are not only produced as structures but as functioning tissues. Some functions are meant to maintain the organs within the whole; others are for the use of the organs. The first are studied by physiologists; the others by a variety of professionals: perception psychologists for sense organs, epistemologists for how we know, psychiatrists for how we feel, educators and trainers for how to improve the use of ourselves, neurologists and brain surgeons for how we remember and process

* cf. Evolution and Memory

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information, etc. A new kind of researcher concerned with the whole is coming into being. Cybernetics started the trend in the early 40’s, and interdisciplinary teams broadened it. This kind of research is required before we can tackle questions as wide as health. *** Because we are in time, at each moment health is the by-product of the harmonious integration and subordination of what exists so as to free the self to engage with the activities of the present to permit the future to descend.

Because we are in time, this overall way of working of the self will look very different as we shift from moment to moment.

What already exists conditions what can be done, and what can be done transforms the functions of what exists. These transformations may only differ in terms of the new functions they display or allow.

Because we are in time, the point of greatest vulnerability is where the self at work has not yet transformed the energy into that objectified form which produces the new whole as an integrated unit in which the self’s dominance is proved by the obedience of what exists to what needs to take place now.

Health, then, is not obtained once for all, is not of the past and what had been done then, but a new proposal of every moment in the care of the self, which alone knows how to produce the harmonious work of an integrated whole.

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Because we are in time, we cannot be lived and be healthy, unless this means that part of ourselves is kept functioning and maintained at one level, but that the self is at work beyond the maintained. In each animal species which is kept alive by the working of its instincts, this is the case. Humans, to be truly human, express themselves by being in time, i.e. outside of all instincts (cf. Evolution and Memory). A working model for man’s health must account for the distinction between men and animals and for their distinctive vulnerabilities and ways of coping with what results from our universal existence as individuals in the environment. The model must also be selfcorrecting, so that when new facts are noted by observers, the model can accommodate them by changing.

Because we are in time, the models that the self gives itself to continue its job as self-with the minimal energy requirement to keep the past going and the maximal energy requirement for what is absorbing it at this moment—will look as different or as similar as the realities demand. Models are not all translated into words and diagrams in the way we are doing in this book.

They exist so that the self can give them to itself at the level at which it is working, to take care of what it has to do in the dual job of maintaining that which exists within the demands of what needs to be done. The jobs of maintenance and of coping in the present will be either blended, as is the case for animals, or more distinct according to one’s humanization during this life.

Because we are in time, time means different things at different levels of being. It stops gaining new meanings only when the self surrenders its function and identifies with living at a level already existing and practiced for the maintenance of the past in 135

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a specific present. Then present is past and past present, and to go on no future is required. Health in time implies change of the meaning of time, or simply the change of time into a different entity at each moment. Health and time will be “functions of time” and the model must display this fact. This is, in fact, the true meaning of being in time.

Because we are in time, as soon as, in addition to individuality, plurality is considered, we see time gain the meaning of chronology and its impacts upon living in an environment that is not only natural but also social, cultural, historical, collective.

The complications that result from these impacts must be integrated into the model and produce the new model that takes care of their existence and their reality. “Being in time” may, for example, require that a new meaning be given to time to account for being of one’s time as well as of one’s group, which implies the history of the group.

Time as a concept is many-faceted. This results from the use of time, the word, in such a way that it gains other meanings and is no longer one concept, one reality. Superficially, because one word is used, it is possible to remain intellectually in contact with one concept and miss noticing that new demands appear in certain activities. This lack of care or of watchfulness, generates the confusion. Time being all-pervasive, ambiguities in its usages may result in losses not only of clarity, which is obvious, but of possible yields. To eliminate these losses, we can make ourselves sensitive to the shifts of meanings and attempt to move with them.

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Because we are in time, our substance is not one and the same all through life. Nor are the collective involvements of men in groups, one and the same. Individuals and collectivities differ from each other because of what each does with its time. Time gains thus the meaning of being the most primitive substance, the substance of all substances. If we can perceive the attributes of substances which separate one from the other, by perceiving time for what it is—the matter of what is—we may acquire the instrument needed to handle complexities and keep these as complex as they are in the dynamics of living.

Because we are in time, we cannot say that we start living when we can offer ourselves a drink at a bar, nor when we engage in any special activity. Living is concerned with the economics of time—which we are given when we are born on a moving earth— and with its exchange for something else as a result of our actions. The something else goes to make the appearances and also the reality of the appearances. Time exchanged over time available, and constantly renewed, generates both living and the possibility of considering this graft of time on time. As a result extreme watchfulness is needed to be with one or the other or with both. Time is both a form and an attribute. As form it can be isolated and perceived as such. As attribute it assumes the existence of something else of which it is attribute.

Energy and time begin by being closely related. They can be identified and distinguished totally, according to which instruments we use for relating to them. We are clearly as much energy as we are time. Energy, to exist, presupposes time and time, to be perceived, presupposes energy and both presuppose

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a self in order to become knowable, to remain known and reachable.

At this moment in my life, I have taken so many steps that still give me feedback that they were taken by me that I cannot deny the call from an entity that transformed its time and its energy into what I have become. Awareness of my identity is transformed into awareness of my integrity placed in what I call myself. I must give to this fundamental awareness its place and its precedence and this I do by starting with a self that is endowed with the power of knowing itself as energy in all its forms (as I shall be able to label them later separately because of their distinctive attributes) and that generates time by its being and what it does—time that is susceptible of becoming the object of the awareness of that self.

Thus energy alone is not capable of being the sole brick of the model. Time is not to be borrowed from outside and thrust upon the model. We must give ourselves simultaneously a self and some other elements: energy, that bridges the gulf between the self and the non-self; objectification, as a property of the self and of energy for giving itself forms; and awareness as an attribute of the self which makes it know itself. Some others that we shall encounter as they impose themselves in the process of keeping in touch with truth and reality will be added later.

Together they may produce the needed complexity as well as a workable model from which we will be able to derive benefits not available otherwise. ***

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Observations over millennia were accumulated by numerous individuals belonging to numerous groups. Observation assumes that perception pre-exists; that retention pre-exists; that expression, of one kind or another, pre-exists; that reflection preexists; that re-examination is possible; that association pre-exists; that transmission is possible and takes place, for observations to be passed on from one generation to another. Not all observations were made at the same time. Not all were of the same kind. Not all used the same instruments.

But all assume an observer and something to be observed. That something comes into being because it is being observed. It has two kinds of existence: one assumed, because the self knows that the non-self exists, and one resulting from the activity of the self in being with it. When the two co-exist in one’s awareness, its reality is no longer questioned; it becomes legitimate to state its existence. Its acceptance makes it part of Reality: objective.

The self separates in itself what it has done to make it exist; and this we call objectification. At the same time separating also becomes a reality. The objectifications result from the stressing of the separation. This last move is awareness, a function of the self. Awareness and its opposite, as functions of the self, together produce retention which becomes a separate function of the self. Retention plus the possibility of setting awareness on what has been retained produces memory whose most important attribute is recognition or the possibility for the self to become aware of what has been retained at the same time as of its holding the properties that were there when it had been retained.

All these attributes of the self are attributes of energy and are energy themselves. The connections of the objectifications, 139

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which are part of the self by definition, are also energy and also of the self. So the self can reach them as energy and become aware of them. They have been made in time and took time to be made. The first connection is the time-background of a life, the one that belongs to the self as such and has the tone and the intimate properties of the self which characterize to the self what is that life—that unique life of that unique individual—only recognizable from within. The second connection is the time of the event, in the event, the kind of energy involved with its potential, its intensity, its features that alter the timebackground, while riding over it, and produce the unique throbbing, the pulsation of the local-time recognizable per se, and also, only from within.

In the here-and-now when the event is lived, the energy of the self is used pinpointedly and produces what we place in the local as against the global which results from the passage of time and which produces a second system of reference in the self, for the self. In a life we produce a system of systems-of-reference by the mere fact that there are a number of times, and we find them in our living in time, in being in contact with time. The time of the embryo, the time of the fetus, the time of birth, the time immediately after birth, the time of perception, the time of action, the time of perception and action, the time of affectivity, the time of thought, the times of social actions, the time of intuition, the time of evolution and more.

Since in a way time is also energy and an attribute of energy because all these times are reachable to the self through awareness, they are all characterized by the fact that they have an attribute called duration which is more than the length of 140

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time as measured by a clock. Duration as a lived phenomenon, is accompanied by all the attributes of times that are co-present.

Thus the time of that duration is a reality fraught with energy and the duration of that time a phenomenological event because of what actually happens in the self to the energy involved. Both can be evoked and separated by awareness, as they have been in the act of living.

In this enormous complexity of living, the self manages to take care of its jobs at every moment by specific moves which are accessible to it in retrospect when it is free to look at them.

One of these moves is the production of automatisms. These are creations of each self. Indeed we take time to make them one by one. The time-background for the making of the somatic automatisms, for example, is, for humans, in utero, and we know from embryology that we must count it in long months given exclusively to those jobs. The time for learning to speak the mother tongue so as to have it at one’s disposal, is also counted in months, as is the generation of many other automatisms.

Automatisms are therefore processes of the self by which the self gives itself the freedom to get on with the new jobs of one’s life.

But because objectification is directed by the self and involves energy, we must look at automatisms as functions created by the self for the self, doing its jobs with the exact amounts of energy needed for their good working; and we must regard automatisms as functions that will remain within the self, with as little supervision as they require to work well.

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In a way, the self wanting to get on, moves on, and in order to be free and powerful as it meets the future, enters into the consideration of finding out how little presence, and what kind, is needed so that the past will be available but not absorbing more energy than is adequate to the task. Automatisms are the answer, and economy the guiding principle. Hence we find in the self the pattern: an amount of energy is locked up in the objectification, another amount is left connected with the first to keep it going, and some also left over to link it to the self, in case of need. These amounts of energy are integrated as time goes on so as both to keep the self informed and to produce the integrated objectified self. The existence of automatisms represents the care taken by the self to ensure at the local level the proper functionings while making it possible for the self to devote as much of itself to the challenges involving it which are unknown, and not caused by itself.

As time goes on, that is, all the time, the self in its operations of transforming energy into objectifications will leave behind, in its own past, a residual energy increasing all the time in quantity, power, and importance, and in the variety of jobs it is capable of handling, thereby allowing the self the freedom it needs.

Together, this part of the self—a watchdog of the functionings, an arbiter that things are working well in the local and on the whole—will receive a name. We call it the psyche of that self.

A companion of the self, a creature of the self, specialized in the depth of what the self did from the start, the psyche has been entrusted with the supervision of a growing conglomerate of the objectified self and, in turn, has had to devise processes which made this task possible. The psyche has command of the 142

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nervous system which is concerned with the automatic life, and of the endocrine system which is capable of obtaining with expenditures of minute amounts of energy, chemical reactions of varying sizes working selectively in local areas. It has control of the muscle tone in all the muscles and plays variations on that keyboard obtaining changes in a number of them and coordinating them to obtain an end willed by the self in activities such as speaking or writing. The psyche, as taught by the self, operates with a remarkable economics, obtaining a great deal for as little as possible in terms of energy. It is the psyche that makes the feats of athletes possible; for it alone can remove obstacles at the local level, in the path of mobilizing what is required for the activities involved. The psyche is that aspect of the self which acts upon what has been objectified, what has been stored, what is left over from the acts of living and resembles the past. The psyche, trusted necessarily by the self which gave it all that power in order to be free and be concerned only with the future, may be presented with circumstances in the dynamics of living which induce it to abuse those powers. For example, habits which resemble automatisms but are not as deeply engaged in the workings of the past, are allowed to take over and reduce the freedom of the self through using the time of life that could be given to growth in contact with the unknown, in a repetition of acts past. Another abuse by the psyche is the withholding of the working of intelligence, which has been created by the self as one of its instruments to serve as a supervisor of what the psyche brings to the tasks in which the self is engaged. The psyche can elect to withhold the emergence into consciousness of what is required at a certain moment, thus reducing the role of the needed and existing equipment the self gave itself for such jobs.

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We are finding in the case of the psyche the same dual role of time that we found with the self. Functional and necessary as a saver of time in the here and now, the psyche’s energy can become on the time-background an altogether different reality.

To learn to cope with the psyche we need to return to its inception and discover how the self operates to make possible its movements in time.

It is now known that, in utero, the objectification of the soma follows a certain line. The DNA and the mother’s blood provide the path and the energy that will allow a self to synthesize its cells and tissues and produce all the organs. In that process, which is seen by all students of the subject as taking place independently at the physicochemical level, we can see a self at work. Selecting at a very early stage to work on the latest integrative function through whatever part of the nervous system is already objectified, in order to subordinate what exists to what is being created, the self is present in two different ways in its objectified part. First, it is intensely engaged in the use of energy to produce the function that will use the already objectified and the incoming energy supply to produce the organs that will serve that function; and second, it is in contact with the objectified via the residual energy left in it at the previous stages. The second presence is far less intense; in fact, it is a delegation to a small part of oneself through a hierarchy of functions already integrated and in the process of being integrated in the new whole, descending in the form conceived by the self in the here and now. As the soma becomes more complex and more complicated, the self, to be able to continue its job and remain free for all emergencies which might arise in this moment, will endow with some of its energy a function 144

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resembling that of the psyche, but now turned towards the future, i.e. uncommitted, but more intimately in contact with the objectified than the self wishes for itself in order to preserve its freedom as much as possible. This energy in question does not accumulate as it does in the psyche; it is more a delegated one from the self so that functions which are not of the psyche can take place in a way resembling that of the psyche, i.e. counting on all the self has given itself so far. If we call this energy affectivity, we find it, by definition, to be the one that links with the psyche, with the objectified, but not serving in the maintenance, and the surveying and monitoring, as this is the job of the psyche which is adequate for it.

Affectivity is a component of the self needed by the model we are constructing, because the here and now holds some of the future and the self took care of the past (near or remote) through the psyche and the soma, and now must take care of the meeting of the future through the arsenal already existing but also by being adequate to the demands of the here and now shaped by the descending future. For example, when at birth environmental conditions suddenly become totally different for the newborn, the baby must cope with them through the use of organs which are part of him, but which he has never used. The residual energy of affectivity gets into these organs to make them function while the self adjusts the whole system to integrate the past and subordinate it to the demands of the new environment.

Once the energy of affectivity has done its job, the self gives to the psyche the custody of the functions integrated in the new whole which now subordinates the commanders of the past and gives back to affectivity the use of its energy, to be ready for the next uses ordered by the self.

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The presence of the self in its own past, which has the dual form of the locked-up energy in the objectified and the all-pervasive energy of the psyche, is tenuous, and is almost never felt. We need this presence to account for the integrity of the objectified universe that responds to the calls of the self. But the process which has created the automatisms and subordinated them to the functions that have integrated the whole, permits the self to be present by proxy through the psyche. The self looks through affectivity onto these functions and the energy stored in them in the usual conditions of living.

The perception of a danger is a function of the self; the recourse to certain actions is the function of the self assisted by affectivity that turns to the reserves of energy of the psyche to activate the automatisms so as to make them conform with the project held by affectivity. This project can have the form of an escape or of a fight among others.

The perception of a task, such as jumping over a hurdle, will bring affectivity into play first; and when this recognizes what needs to be done, the psyche is invited to supply its reserves and the locked-up energies. Affectivity will act on the muscle tone maintained at its level of functioning by the psyche, meeting the demands of the project in the here and now. Affectivity and the psyche cooperate to give the self what it asks for to meet what does not yet exist.

Every time the self contemplates the near future, affectivity is let in with the mission to descend and meet the psyche where it is

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and to let it do its share as the guardian of the functioning past required in this particular project.

In our model, the soma is as much energy as the self of which it is a part. We changed the name of the energy that dwells in the soma in the ways required to produce bones, muscles, blood, tissues and organs; and particularly we have seen that the energy in the local actions, as much as in the overall or global actions, is created to cope with projects of the self immersed in the non-self. The psyche is the entity in the model which as a function of time is to be considered present as soon as the self has to delegate functions in order to remain free to encounter the unknown. The psyche, as a part of the model, will gain further significance when we consider more closely what it is supposed to be doing in its province or in contact with the other creatures of the self created to enable the self to cope with what comes. In time, the psyche will gain the autonomy that is compatible with its functions and if circumstances cause the self to lose the awareness of its freedom, it may look as if the psyche is the self and psychic functioning all that a human can afford.

In such circumstances affectivity will lose its identity too and all behaviors appear as if emerging from the psyche, the new initiator of all that is visible of that person.

But other circumstances may not obliterate the self; and the trio: self, psyche, affectivity, will be at work all the time as the model permits us to display.

At this stage of the construction we can see that a model exists that can serve to define health as the balance of energy in the

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soma maintained by the shifts which a psyche in contact with it constantly supervises directly and via all the various systems that inform it locally and generally, so that the self can use it to enter into contact with the descending future. The self, for its realization in the non-self, specialized a certain amount of itself as affectivity which remains in contact with the soma and the psyche to execute the projects of the self.

At this stage, we can see the thalidomide “monsters� as healthy humans, for they have survived and used themselves as all other fetuses in the circumstances obtaining in utero.

In order to cope with a breakdown of health we need to widen our model to include what we do beyond our purely somatic evolution.

Awareness expresses itself in the prenatal period as a movement of the self that keeps it in contact with its presence in what it has objectified, what it has delegated, what it does with its energy. It is not less real because it is nonverbal. It is even easier to grasp it in its nonverbal reality. Presence is required in our model to accept the responsibility of the syntheses that lead to our soma, our psyche, those aspects we shall live with, all our lives. The intimacy we all have with our soma and our psyche (that no one needs to learn from anyone else) is there to force us to consider self-awareness as an attribute of the self from the start.

Awareness of all the centers of sensation spread on our skin and everywhere in our cells, is something we come with in the world, when we are born. With age we may be distracted and lose that cause of the presence, that awareness. As very young babies we

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know better than any physician what to do to restore some lost balance due to some aggression to our soma.

But human living ex-utero is not only biological, and we must widen our model in order to redefine health at the various stations of our evolution. *** At birth, a child may be equipped to be born and to activate the functions of survival, but he can’t do anything else; the rest is now the responsibility of the community.

Seen from outside he seems totally vulnerable and dependent.

But what he has learned to do for himself in utero is still at his disposal. For instance, in order to acquire all the new skills of survival, his self, his affectivity and his psyche are working together on what matters. He keeps at bay perceptions of the outside world by delaying the myelinization of his sensory nerves, and concentrates all his attention on the acts of breathing, swallowing, sucking, digesting, evacuating.

The few weeks that this takes, we may call the time of survival in the world or the time of the conscious integration of the vegetative functions, during which take place the ordering of the impacts of the air on the bronchi and the walls of the lungs; the filtering of that air in the nose and throat; the passage of food through the mouth, esophagus, stomach and intestines; the passage of water through the kidneys and bladder; the practice

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of the cooling and warming cutaneous systems; and coping with mistakes in all of them.

Perception of the self by the self, or propioperception, is clearly involved in all this. Learning to cope only requires the self and the practice of counting only on oneself that has lasted as long as the baby’s life so far. For instance the baby activates all the nerve endings that are involved and knows exactly how to interpret each impact so that he can sneeze or cough to expel foreign elements attempting to enter his system. Thus, he uses links which exist in the soma but have not been tested before.

Outside observers call them reflexes.

The apparent state of sleep of very young babies is the continuation of life as it was lived in utero, and tells of the capacity of each baby to give himself fully to the job of educating himself to use best what he is and what he has, for the meeting of the unknown.

Sleep will alter its function in the successive periods of development. In the one immediately following birth, the main function of sleep is to bring the self back to the job of recasting the past so as to bring it into harmony with the present. An intensive study of breathing has to be done in early infancy so that the psyche can integrate the functionings of the three sets of muscles involved, and know exactly what the diaphragm, the intercostal muscles and the thoracic muscles do separately and in conjunction, what is the extent of one’s capacity for air and how deep or shallow breathing can be. Crying is a probe that assists in that learning, enabling it to be as thorough as it seems

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will be required for life in the environment of one’s birth.

Concentration on the intake of air gives the walls of the nose the criteria needed, and the walls of the mouth, including the tongue, will learn to assess the air thrown out.

During that time to be healthy means to engage in these exercises so that one learns once and for all how to meet such challenges. New automatisms are produced. The psyche is enlarged by their presence and it becomes more significant because it now holds new strings for survival.

The self then allows the process of perception to be activated by its mere presence. Sensory nerves become paths for chemical, electrical, radiative and heat energy, and for weeks the self is involved in educating itself as a perceiver. Perception of the world around includes the self within, for only it can learn. To be healthy, then, means to be fully aware of what to do with oneself when energy from outside reaches one’s system via any one of the sense organs. If it is some “poison” in one’s food, the mastered functions of the previous stage will produce the vomiting reaction, but perhaps a knowing nose will command a refusal to take in the food by simply shutting one’s mouth, not swallowing, or turning one’s head if this movement is already available.

Here we see at work another attribute of the self, the will which was present from the start but was not required as part of the model. Now we cannot escape introducing it, for it has jobs to do that only it can do. Voluntary muscles are at both ends of the digestive tube and the presence of the self in them to relax them

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or to contract them can now be described as the work of the will.

Being energy, like all other components of the self, the will when copresent with awareness, adds or subtracts energy to and from the existing energy locked up in the muscles from their start.

Awareness feeds back that the work was done and in what way.

Weeks of practice of the will accompanied by awareness, lead to the establishment of criteria which will soon operate automatically so that for example we would know how to order our eyes to move by required amounts in affecting our ocular muscles, or affect our grasp to make it responsive to specific requirements; to open our eye lids or close them to allow specific amounts of light to reach our pupils which also further contributes to the control of the intake of energy.

To move one’s head to orient one’s ears to receive varying impacts, is a function of the will accompanied by awareness that can then shift to the perception of sounds and their conscious analyses.

Perception is a complex world which has attracted scholars for more than a century. Each baby is a different kind of student of perception. In the baby’s study, awareness is the constant guide, and the self is a good learner, sending to the psyche every day new findings in terms of new functionings barely visible from outside.

To be healthy during early infancy is to be fully engaged in being with what one is doing, in not allowing distractions, in assessing the truth and reality of what one is receiving. Clearly because it is an energy intake that correctly describes the reality of the

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trigger of perception, the self can know exactly what it is receiving. In terms of quanta, in the case of light, in terms of overall heat, chemistry, mechanical pressure, in the case of touch, taste, smell or hearing. So each baby is a complex of instruments placed in the laboratory that the soma is, sifting, analyzing, storing, classifying for hours and hours while at the same time maintaining the ongoing work of the mastered functions and readying oneself to meet new challenges.

Because the baby is manipulated by the people in the environment, he appears dependent and passive, mainly because he cannot at that time choose the modifications to what the environment does to him, to harmonize these interferences with his grasp of the world. In fact, in the areas that are really his, he exercises his independence and autonomy at as high a degree as is permitted by his circumstances. Certain as he is that for some things he must rely on others, he knows how to count only on himself and to keep an open mind for what is out of his control. At once, babies know their place and live within it, unless they are misled by people in the environment who present them with experience that cannot make sense within the universe they are exploring masterfully.

This observation brings us to the point at which we must introduce four new components for our model to be adequate for this time.

We have maintained that the six words self, psyche, affectivity, soma, will, awareness, are all needed to understand what is done at the prenatal stage and at the beginning of life in the world.

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From the start, the self operated through a dual process of stressing and ignoring and it is clear that as soon as the baby was born survival required that it ignore perception while stressing vegetative functions. Earlier the same self making itself as embryo selected from the mother’s blood what was needed for the chemical syntheses and ignored other elements which were present in it.

Stressing and ignoring are components of health, because they are true functions of the self and will remain necessary all through life.

We need two other terms to allow us to account for the loss of efficacy of such precise workings of the self when we immerse it in the environments of life.

One of them is immanence. To illustrate it let us think of ourselves in front of a radio or TV set before we turn it on. The object that will soon reveal the existence of any number of programs emitted by many stations, is not telling us, in its inert state, anything but that it exists as an object. In relation to what the sets can do, we say that the programs are immanent. They could have an existence reachable to perception if we acted on a button and changed the state of affairs.

Around us there are many universes to which we may or may not have access and which could be made to manifest themselves, not because of what we are but because it has been made possible, and we can be informed of that. Until they are manifested, we can say that these universes are immanent.

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The fact that we may or may not have access to the immanent will give it another attribute, making it part of reality if we can have access, of transcendence if we cannot.

Because we are in time we are all confronting the immanent all the time, and much of it may be transcendental for some time.

At this point our model can gain greater flexibility and allow the introduction of dis-eases into the picture.

We were prepared to call the thalidomide “monsters� healthy, knowing very well that no one would agree with us. We strove to produce a model for health that would correct itself as it took on more and more elements of reality. Now we can see that, while operating alone, an individual may know all the time what to do with himself to remain healthy, but operating within an environment such performance sometimes cannot be kept up.

The copresence of various times within any one environment produces ipso-facto the existence of immanent universes and transcendental events which can affect us as soon as we are unable to ignore them.

Observers have often stated that young people seem to go through cataclysmic events without any scars. Such events as wars, earthquakes, avalanches, and financial ruins may pass us by at certain ages and stages, as non-events. Psychoanalysts, by contrast, have made a profession of discovering the hidden effects of much smaller mishaps.

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In fact, at certain times of life, our resilience is expressed by our ability to ignore some of the impacts, pressures, and constraints we meet in our environment.

So long as they are transcendental, and therefore inaccessible to our awareness of the moment, their immanence is experienced as a small alteration of our energy and their impact is insignificant.

But because of our ability to stress rather than ignore we can also do ourselves a great deal of damage. Indeed, if we are masters at a certain level we have all the criteria for deciding whether what the environment presents to us is to be received or not. We can say a definite “no� to a pressure or request, and go our way tranquil and unconcerned. But if we are affected in an area where we have no mastery as yet, and we are presented by what remains transcendental to us but cannot ignore, the working of the self is no longer what it used to be, and elements which have not been sifted by consciousness get exalted in the psyche and distort the inner life of the individual. Sleep, instead of being the time of restoration it is meant to be, is the locus of nightmares and betrays dysfunctions in the self.

We are now able to construct the following model: Surrounding the objectified soma, soaked in a psyche which is energy activating its functionings, there is a class of sources of energy that can interact with that duality. Besides the soma and the psyche and all the dynamics between them, the self entertains amounts of energy that hang on to themselves. These

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amounts of energy are loosely related to the psyche, and are capable of affecting the workings of the psyche, including the soma, but they do not aid in the soma’s functions. On the contrary, they distract energy from some functions forcing them to cope with the “capricious” pressures which emanate from them. These sources, since they are not being integrated into the whole, do not submit to the normal subordination, and can even themselves subordinate functionings.

The self, having mistakenly chosen to stress some immanent events instead of ignoring them, has inserted into itself a nonfunctional element that will soon become the past and appear to belong to the psyche when in fact, the psyche rejects it as nightmares witness. Affectivity can still operate for what it is, but it remains parallel to that energy, never meeting it spontaneously, as if each of these energies selected its own grounds and did all it could to remain separated.

Thus functioning normally, the self, in its freedom, can give itself an impulse which it cannot assess properly, and instead of following the path of health, in which integration and subordination go hand in hand, it offers itself a chance to mobilize parts of its energy as if to cope with what circumstances present. The fact that that energy is connected to what is immanent and transcendental precludes the descent of the future in which affectivity has a place. Because the self holds the psyche, this coagulated energy seems to move to join the psyche, but it is kept separated since it is not a way of working of the psyche that is involved here. The only common attributes between the psyche and such an “abscess” are that both are

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energy, and both belong to the past of that person immediately after the event that produced the stressing.

While the psyche has to be postulated to become a component of the model, the “abscess� makes itself felt and intrudes in the actual life of the person who now can be called sick. The visibility of the symptoms of a dysfunction makes it easier to perceive diseases than the health which each of us produced through the smooth functionings of the various components of the self within that self.

While the self has no wish to get rid of its psyche, it has a deep desire to recover its integrity; and the inner life of the sick person is a battlefield. The self only knows how to operate within the various dynamics of energy it has created (including what is done in sleep), and now all this is inoperative. In sleep, the self transfers to the waking state, through the nightmare that wakes him up, the problem which cannot be worked on in that state. And the dilemma perpetuates itself.

In the sickness we have just described, we made the self responsible for the event and its consequences, simply on the basis of the existence of the stressing and ignoring mechanism in the self and the contact of the self with the transcendental which we placed in the non-self. But besides this participation of the self in making itself sick, there is also a place for the non-self to accept some responsibility. This has to be integrated into the model to make it still more adequate to what we can perceive in our universes of experience.

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*** Even when we do not stress the transcendental, there is in the non-self a co-presence of selves functioning in different time systems, and who are engaged in different awarenesses. Because there is something common to all selves, which is human energy manifesting itself in the cosmos and on earth, the phenomena of induction can take place. People operating in the same layer of time can easily affect each other, and they do, involving themselves in activities which they seem to share and enjoy.

Games are easily classified with such temporal criteria. When people operate in layers which are slightly apart, some are capable of inspiring others to move in their footsteps; and others of aspiring to do just that. People operating in layers far apart either remain without impact on each other or produce what we considered above to be a source of dysfunction.

Inspiration and contagion are words that can serve to link persons living at different levels of awareness but capable of what we shall call a “spiritual contact�. When inspiration is at work, a self specializes the working of its affectivity so that it will enhance its health, because the projection of energy into the future mobilizes all one is and all one has, in contact with a reality that is in harmony with the present and the past and is mobilized for the future growth of oneself. Though immanent, the spiritual achievements of the inspirer are normally in a transcendental universe for which one feels that there is an access. One attributes to the inspirer the movements in the self that the self is energizing; and that gives to the immanent and to transcendence attributes acknowledged as reachable by one’s own self.

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When this dynamics is at work one feels good and health is acknowledged to exist, as it was earlier because of the harmony between all the components of the self.

But sometimes the people living in other layers do not know that they may be presenting someone else with a task that makes no sense in the time in which that person is living. It may be that neither inspiration, nor even a desire to reach the transcendental, is at work in a person when others request that he move with them at their level. The situation is typically one of conflict and the self of the one requested is forced into activities denied by that person’s sense of where he is and what he should do with himself. The self is then traumatized. If it cannot create for itself an alternate life in which its sense of truth is sustained and not violated, the consequence is a disease. Indeed, rather than take care of what needs to be looked after in one’s life, the energy of the self and one’s time are used to attempt to cope with the source of the trauma. Not taking care of one’s growth and evolution, and taking care of what is not of one’s own, creates a double dysfunction. Compounded, if it lasts for some time and becomes part of one’s past, it becomes in such cases part of one’s psyche. Then the responses of the person under pressure are psychic responses; one is wanting to preserve the past that appears to be functionally correct, with a climate of harmony that resulted from this functionality. Abandoning the future—which is one’s evolution—is a spiritual disease, perhaps the greatest disease for humans, for it opens the gate to all other diseases.

In our model, growth and evolution are the outcome of the self’s movements to be always meeting a descending future capable of 160

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creating its own universes, in each of which there are: a different sense of time, different objectifications, different dynamics.

Health is that state of movement towards the future. But if such movements are stopped and replaced by either marking time or exalting the past, the workings of energy cannot maintain the health which existed till then. Abandoning the functions of the self, reducing the hold which integration and subordination had on the psychosomatic functions to make them work in harmony with the totality of the self and its projects, gives back to the soma and the psyche functions they had surrendered willingly to higher levels of consciousness. Having lost the protection obtained from the proper workings, the psyche and the soma can now be assailed.

In the hierarchy we maintained from the start, human living is at the top, in the self, free to meet at every level the unknown that life brings to the self to meet, free to integrate, and thus transform oneself into a person who can do more with oneself and particularly evolve in awareness of what the self is and can be. That kind of living is health.

When that living is not permitted for whatever reason, then disease is present and we see that the human disease most to be dreaded is the condition of a person whose self has surrendered its function of keeping life at its apex. In our model, this is the worst disease, because none of the other conditions impose this disease onto the self.

Once the self is no longer in command, the psyche takes over.

Concerned essentially with the past, it now has to do a job for

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which it was not created. Turning itself to the present it no longer supervises the functions which had their energy inputs and outputs controlled by the tighter psyche. Functional diseases are possible besides the mental conditions expressed and considered, in social terms, abnormal. Physiological dysfunctions lead to somatic trouble and structural injuries.

Contrary to the ordinary vision of the Westerners indoctrinated in the model of allopathic medicine, in which diseases are acknowledged to exist only if the somatic structure is attained, in our hierarchical model, the structural conditions are the last stage of the conditions we called diseases. Having been made first, the soma and the functions which animate it and determine that the organs are what they are, are the last to suffer when the health of the individual is violated. At the apex we place the self as the distributor, the� controller, the governor of its energy and capable of objectifications. To lose one’s health is to let the self step down from this position. So, the first human disease is always a spiritual one from which all others follow in a cascade. Psychic troubles come next, and they in turn produce psychosomatic conditions leading finally to structural troubles.

In our hierarchical model the human level is the first and the last, and the human energy of the self can work on atoms and molecules in the way cosmic energy works; on cells and their substances as vital energy works; on the dynamics of behavior as instinctual energy works; and they all coexist in the soma of every human. Because of this, when the self is in command, the functions that belong to the three realms (the cosmic, the vegetable and the animal) are transformed and behaviors are integrated in the free self while they integrate the mechanisms 162

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of the cells which direct their chemical aspects. Thus the physical health at the level of the atoms and molecules results from the cellular health which in turn results from the use of the structure by the behavioral functions which in the human are mostly learned and not inherited. The self, in one life, takes the functionings it creates to wider and wider areas redefining health in each of them for the duration of its dwelling in each. *** We have dwelled at length on the functionings at the prenatal and early childhood stages. The postnatal period in our world of today is itself divided into the time of perception that takes 5 years, the time of action, which may take 5 years, and the time of affectivity that might take 5 more years, followed by the time of the intellect that may last for the rest of one’s life unless the time of the social intercourses is grafted onto the preceding ones, to last the rest of one’s life. When humans stop their evolution at either of these five levels of awareness, they lead a life that today we can call prehuman, simply because there is still another, a sixth, level available to all, a truly human level, where man, aware of his self, encounters the whole of himself and lives at his apex, holding together all the previous levels and humanizing them all in the process. When living at that level man does not permit social, mental, functional or somatic diseases to happen.

At any one of the other levels he opens himself to the possibility that at that level he can be attacked and he can display an illness on this level or any of the previous ones.

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Stresses and heart ailments are the lot of those who live at the social level only, concerned with social dynamics that include activities such as politics, corporate life, or the military.

Neuroses and other mental complaints are the lot of those who live either in their intellectual universe unconcerned with social dynamics and affective realities, or in a schematized social universe in which principles and preconceptions reign.

Ulcers, emphysema, asthma, glandular troubles and probably many forms of cancer, are the lot of those who have abandoned the functioning of their will and entrusted it, for whatever reason, to entities that would presumably take care of oneself, but in fact cannot: examples are in the family, the church, and the institutions (unions, colleges, departments etc.)

Skin diseases, blood conditions (such as diabetes), allergies, may be seen as the result of neglecting at some stage, the integrationsubordination process when the alarm system for detecting the onset of a dysfunction was not activated. The individual only notices the dysfunction when aggressions have reached a certain level, usually advanced.

Susceptibility to succumbing to germs’ attacks constantly present in the environment, and the transformation of these attacks into infectious diseases, can be linked with a lowering of the vigilance of a psychic system that normally maintains at bay the multiplication of these germs in the soma, even if the environment favors that multiplication as in the case of epidemics. When a number of selves have done the same thing

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and gotten ill, they cooperate with the environment to extend the epidemic.

Because we have, personally, a place in the etiology of diseases we can look at that place and see it as expressed not only in personal hygiene and acceptance of vaccination but also as accepting our responsibility to understand better how we can take care of ourselves in our dialogues of the inner life and with the environment.

To this we devote the last chapter of this book.

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In each of the previous chapters we found one or more models which were used by people in the process of making sense of the challenges of health and disease. Occasionally we hinted at some comparison of the instruments they represent for those who hold them and use them in their work as physicians. Would it be possible to assess the advantages or disadvantages of each one?

Is there one model which better describes the reality we are confronting?

Of all the models presented here, the only one which is a hybrid is the one held by the allopathic physicians. All others were created to be consistent and to present one view of the person they intend to understand.

Let us introduce abbreviations to save space in the following printed discussion. MA will refer to the model of allopathic physicians; MH that of homeopathic doctors; MC, MCH and MCA to the Chinese, one for the herbalists and one for the acupuncturists; MP to that of psychiatrists; MI to that of East

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Indians; Mh to that of healers; and MG to my own model, proposed in the previous chapter.

MA can be summarized by saying: it is a geometrical model in which some space is filled with chemicals reacting in certain ways. When all reactions are what they should be, the subject is healthy. When some reactions go haywire, either chemicals are put in the system to counter the trend of these reactions, or some physical agent is brought to bear on that space in order to affect the physical conditions prevailing in that space.

MH is also geometrical and chemical, but the concept of treatment is connected with a system of classifying people according to dominant atoms, and the intervention of physical agents which alter the electric potentials within the space of the patient.

Mp represents two possible views according to whether 1) all ailments considered are the result of some material dysfunction handled as chemical and treated by drugs or shocks, or 2) the condition is purely psychological and is treated by psychological means.

MCH and MCA both see a patient as an energy system which 1) can be balanced overall and locally with health ensuing or 2) presents imbalances over all or locally and the balance must be restored. Both establish the diagnosis through palpation of the pulses but differ in the treatment, one being assimilable to a chemical treatment by the ingestion of herbs which presumably act as chemicals, and the second assimilable to a physical

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intervention in the space by the planting of needles at specific points on the skin.

Mh is also concerned with an energy system susceptible to the impact of similar energy systems which are persons—apparently specially gifted to emanate by simple contact with other persons.

The physical effect of the additional energy passed on from one system to the other is the agent for the restoration of health, or at least the elimination of the cause of some symptoms.

MI is a hierarchical model, stating that the state of consciousness of a person influences all functionings representing the various involvements of people in their cosmic life on earth. By bringing about the needed states of consciousness, somatic and psychic functions are held together and under control and illness does not present itself.

MG is an ad hoc model especially constructed to account for the co-presence of elements of the four realms in the space occupied by the dynamic “bag” of each individual and the constitution in time of the instruments for the expression of the individual as a human integrating the energies at work in the three realms: the cosmos, the vegetable and the animal, and keeping in command that of the fourth realm or human. Treatment is education or reeducation of awareness to bring the self to live at its apex. *** All models—except MA, because it allows surgery—are concerned with energy either explicitly or through the bias of chemical 169

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reactions or physical fields. Those that do it explicitly see each patient as an energy system—as is obvious—and treatments as energy acting upon energy. The detailed working of that impact makes the differences between the models.

Since medicine has not yet been established as the science of health, and many beliefs and opinions are found in the minds of physicians, we are confronted with a political scene in which the beliefs and the interests of the adherents to these models clash more often than they coincide. The fact is that all the models belonging to schools of medicine have served well at some times and not at all times; that some notion essential in one model has no place at all in another; that some complaint is viewed as a disease in one and not as such in another.

Except MG, which is, we repeat, an ad hoc model, these are historically developed systems with considerable or even enormous amounts of clinical evidence to support their claim as models worthy to be held by people who qualify as physicians.

The usual criteria for preferring one working model to another do not seem to play a part in the contrasting of medical models.

We may be allowed to attempt in this chapter to examine 1) whether it is possible to show that one system is a Special case of another one; 2) whether the challenges insoluble in a given system are soluble in another. If this is the case, the commonsense rule in the field of model making will apply; and one model will be shown to be preferable to others. ***

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MG compared to MA In MG the soma is made by the self according to the imprints of heredity and the contents of the mother’s blood, and is therefore a biological entity synthesizing its substances progressively to produce a viable unit at birth, carrying an integrated set of functions capable of using the structures that objectify them.

Anatomy is the expression in space of these structures while physiology is the way these structures are used in time. The concept of soma integrates space and time, as living requires.

The concept of body separates them.

Thus MG begins with the advantage over MA of maintaining the integrated way which provides at every moment and every locus the hereditary influences, the embryonic unfolding, the indissoluble penetration of every cell with the impacts of energy transactions which result: 1) from chemistry, as it affects atoms and molecules; 2) from physics, by concretizing the various fields present in the soma at every moment and at every point, re-uniting the environments within and without the bag of the skin.

Because of these energy transactions, foods, climate, air and water intake, habits of work and rest, etc., all affect the state of the soma. This allows us to see, in a more precise and articulated way, what needs to be taken into account when one is looking at balances between humans and their environment.

In MG, from the start, the self is present (and processes its time in the constitution of the psyche which is the guardian of the

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soma being made and maintained). Thus an element neglected altogether in MA makes its appearance, permitting us to account for uses of the soma in relational life, in particular in social life.

Energy transactions at the level of these relationships at once present themselves; and their importance and significance can be stressed, both for health’s sake and for the understanding of dysfunctions.

Rather than having to add each finding in its totality to a preexisting model, and thus create difficulties for the user of MA in accounting for that finding in terms of what existed before it, MG is by construction open to revisions and to being recast. The dynamics of the presence of the self that is energy has different aspects in the various objectifications: locked up, in the somatic structures; residual, and concerned with the past in the psyche; residual and concerned with the present, the immediate pasts and futures, in affectivity; and, through the self, making possible the mobilization of the will, actions, concentration, alertness, observation, understanding of what goes on, interpreting pain and its vicissitudes, being with what is necessary to restore functions. All this makes MG a much more flexible and useful model (for the individual) than MA, where all these are absent by choice.

If MA can account for diseases by the actions of germs, so can MG, since it holds anatomy and physiology within it, but in contrast to MA, in MG these are not separated. In the unit of the soma, MG can account for immunization from within, as well as for the struggles between germs and antibodies; this makes it easier to provide a framework for the etiology of infections.

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MG can make plain the multiplicity of vulnerabilities of each individual; MA cannot. MG can do it by construction, since the individual is conceived as of the four realms, and can be assailed: 1) at the level of the cosmos (on earth), where photons, particles, atoms and molecules can affect their kin in the soma; 2) at the level of the cellular organization, where other organisms can transact with the cells of the soma and their needs for maintenance in the environment; 3) at the level of behavior, where the conditions of animal evolution on earth create the competitions and the cooperations for survival which span from the needs of insects to human wars; and 4) at the level of the human, where selecting a course for one’s life may enhance the beneficial effects of evolution for oneself and others, and reduce the retrograde movements towards the other realms. None of this is part of MA. MA can serve those who adopt it for specific purposes, but cannot serve them in their effort at making overall sense of life.

It is too fragmented, made up of bits and pieces brought together by chance and circumstances. It does not represent a deliberate effort at seeing more clearly what occupies the mind of physicians. The fragments may be adequate for each specialist who uses one of them. But it forces the specialist to remain narrowly limited within his or her specialty and to be as poorly equipped as a layman outside that specialty.

MG by construction strives to be synthetic and dynamic, to make it possible for all levels of living to be represented and all events to have the impacts they can have, to account, at least as well as MA could, for any of these impacts.

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MG’S accounting for surgery is ad hoc: surgery has no place in health; it is not considered in it as a branch of medicine; it is an affirmation of our collective incapacity to understand phenomena and our resort to a tardy intervention to make life possible under the circumstances. Advertised because of its success (within its parameters) which have resulted from the technologies available today and some of its spectaculars which have saved, for a while, a few lives (a very minute proportion of mankind), it is held as a branch of medicine when this is seen as combating diseases, but has no place in the realm of the maintenance of health. Whether surgery is needed or not, is not our question here. We are comparing models, and MG can only integrate surgery as human action to cope with human ideas about man and health. In MA it overlaps fighting invasions of the body and replacing or eliminating broken parts. Socially prestigious, because of the earnings involved (in capitalist societies) and the costly equipment involved, its position in medicine is a symptom of the gulf between a dedication to maintaining the public’s health and a late intervention that perpetuates a dysfunctional life.

Physicians brought up on MA do not suspect that it is possible to produce other models more adapted to the realities involved in their fields, let alone that an MG can be suggested. MG will only serve physicians if they meet it before they adopt MA and find in the former assistance in handling their problems at least as well as their colleagues who make use of MA exclusively. ***

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MG compared to MC The model of the Chinese medical people was replaced by what it became in this book when 1) the traditional elements were not taken into account, 2) the practice alone—and mainly the diagnostic—was made part of it and expressed in terms that belong to modern western science and when 3) a new garb was given to the treatments, particularly those of acupuncture. We must therefore not consider that the comparison is of MG and what goes on in the minds of Chinese physicians but between two models produced for the purpose of studying problems that this writer encountered in his studies of health and disease.

Nevertheless, it is believed that for model makers this comparison is valid since it gives more instances of what we do in our scientific discussions. Perhaps at the same time, some components of the actual Chinese models become more evident and serve some other cause.

MG included what became evident to the writer in the early 1950’s while studying simultaneously the human dynamics made more evident with the use of the yograph and the notions of energy found in Chinese medical literature. While “yin” and “yang” as composing “chi” were descriptions met in books, it was clear that we were in contact with the energy as it is found in the soma every time we place the probe of the Gayograph on any part of the soma. When the radial pulses were recorded by the Gayograph in 1951-52, it became much clearer that the energy known to the Chinese was the one we were studying. The instrument replaced the long experience required by physicians,

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by demonstrating that there are accesses to the states of all parts of the body via the detailed morphology of the tracings of the activity in the pulses, or that, in these studies and in Chinese medicine, we met energy in its reality.

Thus the connection between MG and MC is a fundamental one.

Both begin with the energy that goes to produce the soma and keep that energy at the center of the model. In MG the same self, through objectification, produces the soma, and through its presence in it, the functionings that maintain it. In MC there is no reference to a self. Rather, the total energy of one person is accessible to another person (the physician who has learned to find it and describe it in terms of local balances) but not accessible to the person examined. In MG awareness is stressed and some people can use it to know directly, for themselves and sometimes for others, the state of the self in the soma, globally and locally, and in other parts of oneself not identical with the soma, such as the psyche and the mind. In MC, awareness is a passing component. In fact, a good physician who himself must have it to sense the reality in the pulses, is the only one who needs to have it as a concept. The sensitive physician feeling the pulses can tell his patient what sort of life will permit him or her to restore health. The patient can benefit from the advice and make it part of the way of living without any awareness of why it is good for him. Awareness is not part of MC, but is essential in MG. MC includes instead a socio-somatic entity which takes care of the causes of some conditions which life in society generates.

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integration into the socio-somatic reality of Chinese society and life.

MC is the model that takes care of functions and through them of the structures. MG includes the prenatal construction of the soma as a functioning entity in which time has been given at every moment to produce the locked-up as well as the residual energies. These articulate upon each other and are linked to the self that is not only a latent energy but the arbiter, the monitor, the purveyor of the states at the local and the global levels.

When the self is seen as latent energy only, it becomes the “chi” of MC. When the psyche and affectivity, instead of having the initiatives of different kinds we consider in MG, are also seen as the latent residual energies working in the local, they become the “yin” and the “yang”. Which is which, will depend on which is dominating at the moment. Since in MG the psyche is endowed with the custody of balances in the local (the past activity of the self which has become objectified), when the self works to restore a depletion or an excess, it will provide the psyche with a yin or yang attribution. If affectivity, in the present, is called upon, it can be seen as the movement of the chi that goes to serve the yin or the yang to restore the balance. It will then be qualifiable as one or the other.

Nothing was said in MG about what we called MCA, the model we constructed in order to understand the mere fact that acupuncture exists and has been empirically successful for millennia. MG was developed as a model capable of taking care of the constant demands of life upon each of us. There could be no place for the production of the electromagnetic system (what we called the Faraday cage of the soma) in our evolution, and so no 177

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appeal to it was possible in the construction of MG. Because it is conceived as the adaptation of the soma as it comes into the world, to the existence in the non-self (the environment) of electromagnetic fields, it is an ad hoc response of the self to a reality it can handle. It made the system responsive to the vicissitudes of the fields in the environment, a non-evolving system.

The Chinese took advantage of the existence of this system to work on the balances of energies in the local, even when they did not know its nature as electromagnetic. MCA is an ad hoc model compatible with MCH, and Mc is truly their parent model—they differ only in that one displaces and one adds energies in the soma.

Constructing a model like MG makes it possible to conceive that the Chinese physicians are using what we call MC, and to propose that it represents at least part of what they have in mind when they work within their traditional model.

If we consider that which, in MG, refers to something other than a somatic function, we find that it is totally absent from Mc. The Chinese have not developed the concept of awareness in their everyday life and therefore do not use it in their study of mental processes and their impacts on the soma. Hence MG is a wider model than MC. If MG can also account for what MC explains, or help us to understand it, MG will be a more comprehensive model when working on the phenomena in which Chinese people may be involved (but which are not somatic and on which MC has nothing to say). As a result it seems possible that

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MG could be adopted by the Chinese and specially developed to be of use in their medicine, which MG respects as does MC. Such a development would give to the non-somatic functions of the self an energy basis as was already the case for somatic functions. Since the non-somatic cannot be deduced from the existence of the five elements, these are not needed for the expansion. Since MC, as we presented it, also does away with the five elements, expanding Mc may result in an MG that is in its details much more explicitly concerned with the overall health that includes: the mind and its work; society and its institutions; the unknown future of evolving people.

If Mc can become an MG and take on a more adequate approximation of reality, the synthesis of millennia of work in two civilizations would begin to seem possible. *** MG compared to Mp Psychiatrists, being medical people, begin with the pathological.

When they need to refer to energy they invoke a biological one.

For their model to account for the non-pathological, psychiatrists have either to extend their fundamental notions, for example, by considering everybody as neurotic, or by becoming concerned with non-medical matters, such as the collective unconscious, which are related to historical studies and the imagination.

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Mp is a set of models. We gave (in Chapter 4) more space to Freud’s than to any other because Freud felt the need to make his model explicit. Students of psychiatry know that all contributors to Western psychiatry are concerned with the universe of the unconscious, and that some dynamics must be added to its content in order to account for what happens in it.

They also know that the role of the brain is barely considered, that the environment is mainly social and cultural, that the individual is lived by forces for which he is minimally responsible and of which he can have only indirect knowledge, mainly thanks to his analyst and to the analyst’s school of thought.

MG has the advantage of maintaining the fourfold contact: with the cosmos, through the atoms and molecules in the soma; with the Earth as the habitat, through the cellular structuration of the tissues and organs; with the animal kingdom, through locating the energy of behaviors in the various components such as muscle tone, neural and cerebral activity, “instincts” and their interactions within individuals; with the human world by making life into a conscious evolution structured by the times allotted to distinct activities in the successive layers coinciding with the successive hierarchical learnings.

In a number of my writings since 1942, a selection of phenomena commonly encountered in psychiatry have been given some alternative treatment. Because these writings are concerned with stage fright, children’s drawings, games and play, subjectivity and objectivity, attachment-love, conflict, dependence, dynamics in dreams, sleep, absolutes and transcendence, the education of awareness, the emergence of 180

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independent thought, adolescence, prenatal life, early childhood, boyhood and girlhood, old and new psychosomatic phenomena and several others, my preoccupation as an author was clearly to find a comprehensive model capable of handling matters normally treated in one or more of the MP’s but also to put some order in them as well as to include phenomena left out because the existing models were insufficient for their treatment. Today MG is what can be offered to replace the various MP’s, provided we add to it a new chapter about the coexistence of generations requiring a general theory of relativity blended with a theory of evolution that can account for the multitudes of inner lives represented in mankind. This work, started in 1940, is not yet ready for publication.

MG has been presented as the model ascribed to one evolution through one life of one individual. To do more requires further tools which are not yet at hand.

When passing from MP to MG, the model maker drops some of the constituents and adds others. When passing from MG to MP one has to show how the dynamics allowed in MG in themselves generate the salient features of MP and keep them as convincing in MG as they were in MP. For instance, can the self that generates the psyche and is endowed with intelligence, understand why we dream, what dreams are made of, and why the psyche selects a particular content?

I believe that MG is incomparably more comprehensive in this role than the MP’s and that it has allowed human beings to understand for the first time the relationship of sleep to the

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waking state which is taken for granted in MP, although not accounted for satisfactorily.

Further on in this chapter we may have occasion to mention other reasons which militate in favor of preferring MG to any or all the MP’s. If we work out the details of specific challenges met in psychiatry in both models, and we see them as everyday occurrences in MG but not in MP, we shall have one further reason to consider seriously this new and comprehensive model of human lives. We contend that this is the case. *** MG compared to MH MH has been offered in this book as the model used by homeopathic physicians. This is our saying, not theirs. In acknowledging that one of Hannemann’s basic notions was absent from our MH, we may have invalidated altogether our attribution of that model to that group of people who consider themselves his followers. Still since our study in Chapter 5 allowed us to state that the main difference between allopaths and homeopaths is that the first see the biology they use as a field of chemistry and the second as a field of physics, we may have found a substitute for Hannemann’s notions and generated at the same time a new possibility for understanding the phenomena encountered in homeopathy.

Homeopaths want to be considered first as physicians concerned with healing the conditions in their patients and only 182

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secondarily as people who see the world in a definite way. They want to be acknowledged for their deeds (numerous cures) in cases abandoned by allopaths as beyond them, rather than for their vision.

Leaving aside once more that family quarrel among physicians, let us concentrate on the possibility MG offers to generate a model like the one used by homeopaths, namely MH. This will imply that MG includes MH and that MH is a version of MG when we ignore a number of features and components of this model.

Because the self makes its soma out of the imprints in the DNA and the chemicals in the blood of the mother, it is conceivable that a predilection of that self will leave its mark somehow in the edifice which Hannemann picked up as the dominant atom characterizing an individual’s make-up and the basis of his temperament.

But because the soma is bathing in the psyche—in a manner resembling the presence of the blood in all the tissues—in MG we have a component which is absent from MA (hence, from MH, since homeopaths don’t deny their medical education). This component is energy in close contact with the tissues, energy that, by definition, is of the self and of the other three realms.

Because it is of the self, its vicissitudes are monitored so as to convey that they are maintaining the functionings as they should be, as created in time by the self, or that otherwise something in them is to receive extra attention. Because it is energy like the one in the cosmos it can be affected by “cosmic” changes within the space of the soma. The psyche is the agent of the restoration

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of energy conditions in the local and it may receive that energy from a source which is chemically neutral but not physically so, as it was hypothesized that high-potency homeopathic remedies are. The psyche in its unity can receive the energy impulses orally and take the effect where (experience of observers said) they need to be taken, in the way the blood does for chemicals.

The psyche being energy and being omnipresent in MG, can do that job. So homeopathic treatments can have a reality which the intellect could not conceive of outside a model resembling MG .

Our reason for using the psyche rather than somatic elements, as is suggested by everyone else, is that there is another component in the phenomenon we are studying, and that is that there is in the picture a knower who tells that this or that remedy is to be taken at this or that potency. Our study of the sensitive subjects (cf. p. 76) was clearly concerned with the aspect of the energy in the soma that belongs to what we call the psyche. The self of the sensitive subject notes the effects of the fields on the energy latent in his soma, i.e. the psyche, and states his conviction that it has to be interpreted in such a way and no other. The soma speaks via the psyche, left by the self in its objectification of the soma, precisely for that purpose.

If MH does not assume a psyche and a psyche is needed to understand the phenomena the selves encounter, then a model that assumes a psyche is to be preferred. MG respects all the aspects of reality the minds of physicians consider and therefore they will lose nothing (except the illusory comfort that habitual thinking provides) in adopting a more comprehensive model that does the job they want done best. Perhaps when they come 184

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in contact with some other features and properties of MG they may find help in areas where they are not the knower, the specialized expert—and those areas include most of our lives. In particular, they may be helped to know their own place and that of others in the social stage where medicine acts. *** We shall leave to our readers the exercises of comparing MG with other models they may know of. We shall also leave out the comparison with the models which—as we suggested in Chapter 7—may be the ones yogis and healers use in working upon the challenge of health during the course of their lives.

To close this chapter we still have one task. Is it possible to use MG to shed some light on some problem which still baffles everyone? Could we, for instance, understand cancer better in MG than has been done in MA, MH, and MC? Let us try. *** Cancer is a multitude of somatic conditions and is recognized in all these conditions as manifested by a loss of the control upon the stabilization of tissues and by a trend of the cells to proliferate within those tissues. Any tissue can become cancerous. The millions of cases studied have not been sufficient to lead to a full understanding of what may cause the condition, maintain it, extend it. All the tools for thinking about it which are part of MA or MH, have been extensively tested, and the

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challenge, instead of yielding, appears to become harder to grasp every day.

It would appear that the difficulty resides in the inadequacy of MA to cope with the facts. Therefore, a constructive course of action, instead of pursuing further and further each lead compatible with the content of MA, would be a search for another model which is based on a set of different assumptions and which can be used to tackle the set of observations under a new light.

MG qualifies as such a model. The following discussion may serve to give it a place as an improved model for physicians. *** We look at the objectification of the soma in utero as the responsible job of a self capable of using all the hereditary triggers found in the DNA constituted with the blending of two gametes in the newly formed egg and all that is in the mother’s blood. This is an always-present variable since the blood’s composition varies with the intake by the mother, with her digestion and assimilation. It is already known that some variations of the mother’s blood composition have consequences that affect, sometimes deeply, the child to be born. This is the case of the well-documented tragedy of the Thalidomide babies.

It is not yet clear how the DNA affects the functionings to come and whether it can be held responsible for a predisposition to cancer. We shall leave this matter open.

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In MG the dynamics of energy accounts for all that actually takes place in the bag all through life and awareness of this is what serves to place the responsibility upon the individual self, for good or for evil, at any level of functioning.

During the development in utero when the tissues and the organs are being made, there are also placed in them and between them, agents of the self whose function, in a few words, is to maintain health. The meaning of this at each moment is actually different, but throughout the weeks or months of gestation, it looks as if the self keeps its commanding position by working through a chain of delegates whose autonomy is limited to that on which they work. These delegates subordinate their activity to the orders of those above them, and functionally integrate the work that their subordinates do, and have to do.

The hierarchical model MG holds together because this double activity of the self, that integrates the past into the present also subordinates what the past was doing so as to make it do what is right in the present, as it is in part tinted by the future. The presence of the self is the key notion. So long as the automatisms are established so as to liberate the self to meet the challenges which are forthcoming, and so long as the self has led the production of the functioning to be endowed with enough energy to take care of its needs and harmonize it with the existing functionings, we can say that it can reduce its presence to a strict minimum. Health, locally, means precisely this.

Health, overall, means the harmonization of the local healths, and a free self to transcend what exists in order to meet the unknown.

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We therefore see three possible causes for a dysfunction. One, that at the moment of objectification the energy locked up was not what was needed (either too much, or too little, or not of the kind that would leave behind processes to take care of what comes). Two, that the integration and the subordination of the function which goes with the structure being made for its performance has not taken place to lead to a harmonization of the whole. The tissue or organ can then either operate autonomously because of the absence of subordination which normally results from a proper integration, or it operates through the associated functions as if they were integrated, until such moment when the lack of integration obtaining permits energies to be released. Such energies may then perform acts which are already exemplified in the development, and cell proliferation is one of them.

The third possible cause of dysfunction, which may degenerate into what is described above (in point two), is an overall relaxation of the self away from maintaining itself in the place of command that has been held from the start and was seen in the dual job of integrator and subordinator of the objectified, and of the energies that go with it to keep it dynamic.

In MG the individual is both resilient and vulnerable.

Vulnerability covers a whole spectrum because life is made of the various times we needed to call into account for the many diverse activities we all engage in hierarchically. What is integrated is resilient, and therefore less easily upset, because it can count on the network of all that which goes to make the objectified dynamic self of that moment and that can procure the additional energy, if needed, and make it immediately 188

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forthcoming. If at any moment in life, at any age, for whatever reason, the self engaged in meeting the unknown receives an energy shock which is too much, and cannot cope with it, that self may leave wide open a passage through which assaults can be let in. An unevenly developed person results. Vulnerability in such cases means weakness. The self always solicited to cope with new challenges may not find the time or the means to do the restructuration needed to proceed on the initial road of the properly integrated person he was until now.

Since the energy transactions, in one life, are far from being all at the somatic level, the position of the self at every moment may involve each of us in either a continuously harmonious development which is possible though perhaps less frequent than we would like, or in a development showing bruises from the shocks we may encounter anywhere and at any level. If those shocks concern a point on the integration-subordination process where the energy let loose can operate via the psyche, on a tissue or organ on the path of the integration, the process of transformation of the energy into cells can be started again and cancer makes its appearance. Shocks can be of any kind: accidents, germs, chemical products, electric fields, emotions and even thoughts. But, in order for cancer to follow, we need to relate the shock to those moments in one’s life when we left incompleted the job of integration through subordination of the existing into what comes. Generally we do these jobs well for at least the first few years of our lives unless our mother’s blood brings to us weakening components. Because integration with subordination goes on beyond the somatic level, we must clearly see that in the hierarchical model a shock at a later level may cascade into a loss of command leading to insubordination at a 189

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point where energy can penetrate to affect the system, which may result in a proliferation of cells.

The above tells us that cancer is only one form of dysfunction which is generally associated with the soma. But in MG the same phenomenon may exist with different appearances in the various layers of our lives. Cancer is by nomenclature a somatic disease. But perhaps it is not at all a disease; not more, for example, than age, being simply the form some dynamics of our energy takes in the hierarchically objectified self we gave ourselves. If we view it in that way, it seems possible to start looking for some preventive measures. This is the best course we can take now, since it has not been possible to develop a treatment that represents a cure, and since some people have managed to stop their cancer through means such as prayer, belief in some healer, change of diet, or relaxation, which are not part of the arsenal of the medical treatment of cancer.

Preventive measures cannot be found successful until a time when statistics show that far fewer people develop the condition than at present, simply because the population studied has adopted some measures.

By asking people to give up smoking because more smokers than non-smokers develop the condition called cancer of the lungs, we acknowledge that to avoid smoking constitutes a preventive measure in the case of lung cancer. Giving up smoking or refusing to begin smoking makes sense in MG but not in MA, since such advice is extra-somatic. When the will yields to mental or social pressures and a person adopts habits that are

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hard to eradicate, we shift from a somatic system regulated by biology to a person who owns a will, a vision of life, and can decide to adopt behaviors required by an intelligent self.

Intelligence is part of MG but not of MA. *** On the surface it may look as if we have been storing up a few words and some simplistic ideas about a challenge that has baffled the entire scientific community for quite some time; or that the suggestion of adopting MG to replace MA is meaningless and childish. On the surface, this is true; but in fact it is far from it. Indeed, MG is the only model produced to date that displays the following features: 1

It is concerned with the dynamics of energy operating simultaneously in the four realms studied by cohorts of scientists, and it integrates their findings;

2 It has in it as many systems of reference as are needed and it integrates time into the model, which the other models do not attempt.

3 It gives precedence to function over form and integrates both function and form in the lives of people in the world in a hierarchically detailed objectification of the forms that display the functions; 4 It does not exclude interactions of the four realms upon each other while it excludes that any one

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realm is sufficient for the grasp of the whole, as some other models imply; 5 It proposes ways of looking at the unfolding of every life over time which have led to numerous findings which escaped workers so far; some of these are in this book and in this chapter; 6 It proposes that we view the simultaneous processes of integration and subordination as one, and as being the way of working of the self manifesting itself at all levels. This can serve as an instrument capable of guiding the study of problems affecting human beings in their soma, in their psyche, in their social intercourses; 7 It gives a functional definition of health met in its reality preceding the onset of diseases. These are seen first as dysfunctions, and second only as somatic modifications, while the latter seem required by other models in order to ascertain the existence of diseases; 8 It works as easily in the large as in the local; 9 It accommodates relativity and evolution for the individual and can be extended to accommodate groups. *** It seems possible to formalize MG further and to give it a mathematical form* such as can be handled by present-day

* Attempted already in 1944. Cf. “Analyze Générale et Topologie de l’Espace des Connaissances” bulletin de l’Institut d’Egypte, Cairo.

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mathematics. The model as we presented it in the previous chapter and in this one, may gain acceptance from people other than physicians, only because it is not couched in terms which are too abstract and technical.

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Our journey through the many ways peoples of the world have looked, or failed to look, at health, and through the few models emerging from a conscious examination of the field, leads us to the encounter with yet another challenge: “Who is to care for our health?”

The only acceptable answer is: “Each of us, personally!”

Indeed, it is clear that we did accept this responsibility as an embryo and, for most of us, for many months after birth. Then it became harder, because the knowledge and the ignorance of the people in the environment became part and parcel of what happened to us. The food we were given, the conditions of life, the care we were given, the way our needs and our gifts and personality were met, all played important roles in the shaping of what we might do for ourselves and for others.

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Whenever we look at ourselves as conditioned by the environment and what others in the environment do, we face a hopeless situation. The natural and social environments, of course, play a part in our lives. But are we indeed so totally conditioned? There are other ways of looking at ourselves which, while acknowledging that outer forces affect us, bring to the fore our part in keeping them from being all-powerful.

Let us take an example which can help us introduce shaded views where generally a black-and-white one is held. During the period of gestation, a person confined to living within the uterus of the mother is clearly totally dependent on what the mother sends to it through her blood. At first the mother does not always know on the conscious level that she has conceived a child, and she may for weeks or even months pour into her blood what results from her intake through the air, the food and drink or from the impact of circumstances upon her metabolism which may include strong emotions. The very small creature in her womb at the beginning of pregnancy, receiving all its basic materials from the mother’s blood would be infinitely vulnerable if the embryo was seen only as an object of the environment. If, on the contrary, it is conceived of as an autonomous system in contact with all the transformations of matter and energy required to produce one’s cells, tissues and organs, helped by the hereditary imprints that are part of the DNA and other large molecules, it becomes possible to see an embryo, and later a fetus, as endowed with a biological awareness and a biological know-how which permit it to filter some substances or neutralize others. The environment of the embryo is taken into account so as to permit processes to go on by integrating the modifiers and producing what is a new balance of the energy at 196

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molecular levels. For instance, the thalidomide “monsters” can be seen as what results from processes that are made compatible in the embryo or fetus, since indeed life and growth go on in the prevailing circumstances. The viable system produced tells us that these “monsters” are normal in these circumstances and that, because they are not all affected in one and the same way, to be normal is to act individually. The unborn baby attempts to handle the “aggression” represented by the presence of certain substances in the mother’s blood and chooses to come up with a certain solution to the problem of compatibility. This is the way we see responsibility at the prenatal phase of our life.

Of course, such fundamental compatibility in utero does not mean functionality in a social environment. But its consideration may teach us a way of working which (if extended to other levels) will make us newly competent to encounter certain challenges.

The assumption that we can be intimately related with what we do with ourselves in many moments of our life is a new component of the total picture. Although it is easy to prove it exists, it has been left out until now because we use the models we use and in them this component has been neglected along with so many others.

If, besides our vulnerability, we consider the resilience shown by each of us under so many daily aggressions, we shall have better instruments to work with. Vulnerability is needed so that one may be touched; and resilience, in order to go through all those random experiences whose source is not our self and which may

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affect us. Some impacts are inevitable (as in the example of thalidomide), but many can be kept in check. Every reader, in his or her life, can find a large number of illustrations of this resilience without which all of us would be wrecks.

Both vulnerability and resilience are functions of the self, as we saw in the previous chapter. We need both to do more than survive in the world. By including them in our thinking we shall be closer to reality as well as find it easier to sort things out.

Resilience is the left-out component in the existing models.

It is easiest to meet resilience in the context of social pressures.

We hear small children use the word “no� so systematically, and feel their resistance and opposition to pressures. It is harder to know resilience at the somatic level when this is isolated from the rest of our reality. For example we do not see a number of our physical conditions which may be called diseases, as indications that our resilience is at work. We suffer from a backache and want to get rid of it, instead of seeing that it is the way our self has integrated what we are with demands that result from our dynamics of relationship. By concentrating on pain and how to get rid of it, we lose sight of the fact that the pain may be there in order to draw attention to a handling of ourselves that violates the functionings that produce harmony.

So removal of the pain may be impossible so long as we do not concern ourselves with its deep causes; and other means of alleviation may, at best, act as palliatives for short durations. If instead we hold the pain as it is (so long as it is not of the kind that we find devastating and shattering), we can find that it opens up new vistas of ourselves as people who can cope with dysfunctions, people motivated to learn from what happens to 198

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ourselves. As soon as we see dysfunctions as the objects of the self’s workings we can see that pain—as a signal, a forerunner of something else—will leave us when we reach the cause of the dysfunction and replace it by a proper function.

For example, pain from jealousy or from being abandoned by one’s beloved one, might vanish when we find either that we are possessive—but can love without possessiveness—or that we have trespassed in thinking that we are entitled to limit other people’s freedom. In the same way backaches may lead to their own disappearance if they are caused by emotional involvements, and they may also disappear if we watch what we do as we move under various circumstances, and develop uses of our musculature to avoid such moves. Often simply taking an aspirin tablet and letting two hours pass without the sensation of pain will bring about a state that copes with the cause of that pain at the somatic level. It becomes evident then that that pain had shallow causes.

Pain as a signal is a blessing because it leads us to a dysfunction.

If we take it seriously, it is even more valuable. We can count as part of the equipment we bring with ourselves when we are born, the ability to read such signals and to do something about them at once, if it is in our power to do so. In those cases we learn to exercise our responsibility, although there may also be many cases which show us as powerless. For example, when we develop a condition, in early childhood, which we do not at once associate with pain, but which can become painful when left unattended, we can become sensitive to its form prior to pain, and become alerted to do something about it. For instance, a rise in temperature at the onset of an infection may be, when we 199

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are young, noticed much earlier than at a later age. We may at once enter into a coma as our way of taking care of the aggression, thus indicating, first, our vulnerability to the energy changes in our system; second, a know-how of what would correct the dysfunction; and third, a determination to concentrate on what is required.

All this tells us that we are equipped to maintain our system in a state that gives the functionings what they require to function well. That is equivalent to saying that each of us has known directly what health is. Today—in other stages of our life—we have a nostalgia for that state. We have in our background (which is always with us) entries into the various functionings, and while these are going on well we do not receive any message that we have to do something for them; when there is a beginning of dysfunction messages start being sent to the centers capable of supplying the support required, whether we see it as pure energy, or chemicals or electricity; when this support is insufficient or cannot be supplied, more of the system becomes involved and the trouble can reach consciousness via pain or other indicators. It is then that we are aware of dis-ease.

Because the state of health does not attract attention, it is hard to conceive of it as consciousness at work. But, in the perspective of our model, in which time is integrated, we can see that the presence of the self in every one of the objectifications, every one of the functionings, acts as much to maintain each in working condition as to sense that any one of them is at this moment not doing what it was created for. Hence, if one has the capacity for early detection of a dysfunction, that is a

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characteristic of health. The earlier the disturbance is noted, and the closer to the place where it originates, the better.

Between the happening of a local modification and its sensing by the self, a long time or no time may pass according to whether one is given to distractions or one has educated oneself in watchfulness. The deterioration may have reached a certain magnitude in the first case, and may require a much more drastic intervention than is needed in the second case.

Because we can educate ourselves to remain closer to what we do with ourselves at all levels, we can say that our health is our responsibility. Conversely, we could say that, in so far as we have yielded to the pressures around us, and have been distracted from some aspects of the requirements of remaining close to what we do with ourselves, we are also responsible for our diseases. Some psychiatrists may accept this conclusion for the area of mental conditions. Our model tells us that we must accept it for all areas.

To be close to one’s health cannot mean being worried about it, nor being anxious that this or that may make us ill. Thinking about health does not mean being one with it. On the contrary, thinking means interposing a schema between the self and the reality we must be in contact with. Watching every move in us as if we were frail and extremely easily assaulted, also denies the reality of being healthy; that of our resilience. If watching is required it is of the same kind as the one we have used as embryos and young children, which establishes the hierarchy of moving through integration and subordination from the egg to

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the total human being, as one behaves humanly on the spectrum of one’s time in this life. Through this dual movement we remain in control of all our past and free to enter the future as it demands.

Health is therefore the climate of harmonious living in contact with freedom within watchfulness. As beings of the four realms we can be healthy even if we have accidentally given ourselves a soma that looks handicapped. Health is perfect functioning within the constraints of our history, not perfection in the abstract. We may lose all our teeth and be totally healthy. We may suffer a fall that paralyzes one of our limbs or part of our body. We may genetically come into the world blind or deaf or unable to stop progressive arthritis. None of these so-called “calamities” concerns the self totally. Enough of the self is left to generate the joy of living within one’s condition. There are a number of these examples in my life and I suspect there may be several in every one of my readers’ lives. Because we are of the fourth realm, we have access to awareness of the self and therefore to the recognition that our circumstances do not absolutely condition us.

We can live without any burden or mortgage from our history, and yet enter willingly into activities that take a toll on us. The classical ones are smoking, drinking and the use of other drugs which begin by being the intake of chemicals that have general effects, but soon become also mental habits which substitute themselves for the spontaneous meeting of what is asked of us in the here and now. Our will can stop this reduction of itself in some cases and in some circumstances. When this occurs we

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find that our will is a guardian of our health and that we must use it more often.

But there are other areas where we relinquish the integrating and subordinating functions of the self through life. I gave a list of them in the chapter headings of On Being Freer, and in the content of that book I gave some attention to each of them.

Being free is not allowed to us in our condition; but being freer is compatible with being of the four realms, and especially of the fourth: that of our intelligence, our enlightened affectivity and our will. Evolving towards a greater awareness of who we are, what our place is in the various layers and spots in life, is the sign of mental health. For this, each of us alone has the responsibility, exactly as we found that we could, in early childhood, look after our somatic energy by being watchful and remaining close to the triggers in our soma. A watchful self makes us freer and therefore healthier. Indeed its function of watchfulness consists in seeing to it that the limited energy each of us commands is not wasted in dysfunctions, in their perpetuation, in activities that take away more than is needed for its renewal. Watchfulness does not mean stinginess or marking time. It permits, on the contrary, that we know at each moment that there is free energy available and that we can use it purposefully and perhaps lavishly for a vital end. For example, watchfulness can diminish the worry that comes from not being alone and of being surrounded by others who, we may think, might be watching us and condemn our actions. Watchfulness will show us that these people have other things to do, things which are more important to them than ourselves which absorb their energy, so that they do not have any to spare for looking at us. This observation both frees us from worry, and makes more 203

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of our energy available so that we may be more watchful of the real dangers following our actions (crazy or otherwise).

Because the maintenance of our health in a social and cosmic environment requires watchfulness, we can see where our responsibility lies. If there were in us mechanisms that could cope with the unknown, with the future, adequately (as animals have), we would not need watchfulness, nor our will to actuate its findings, and our health would be the responsibility of the environment alone. But since it is not the case, since we are of the fourth realm, we have to compensate for this lack of complete conditioning by other functionings which are human and can even be called spiritual.

Of course, we can be poisoned by a bite or at a dinner party; we can be victims of fires and natural disasters or other accidents and have to cope with their consequences which may be a permanent loss of our health; but, barring such events, we can consider that in so far as there is a role for ourselves in maintaining our health and that of others, we must try to know what it is and act in agreement with it.

The model offered in Chapter 8 serves me as my guide, and I have known that I not only feel when I am in good shape but that I keep the conditions I brought from a remote past in check, so that they do not interfere with the expressions of my self.

Clearly the first and most important guardian of my health is my ability to live at what I call “my peak�. That is, concentrated, relaxed, alert and vulnerable to what comes, so as to meet it

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adequately; always seeing to it that in the waking state I do what is possible then, and leaving to my sleep what my self does best then.

In the waking state, I know I shall be with others, involved in events and happenings. To be prepared for this, my watchfulness keeps me observing what I am doing, what I let people do to me, how I can act to keep my freedom and the energy I need to cope with what comes. This takes many different forms in various circumstances, but means one and the same thing for me: an attitude of suspended judgment in the areas where I do not know, and an integration of myself into things, and things into myself where I know. In particular it calls for a reduction of “reacting” as one of my behaviors in as many circumstances as is possible, for reacting means that I give back the likes of what I receive, when it is possible to receive what is imposed on me by the outside world, to transform it by integration and/or subordination, and give it its proper dimensions within my life.

The maintenance of our health demands that we not be a system which is moved by responding to stimuli in the manner of the stimuli. This is a correct manner of being for animals, who, cutting into reality through their specific instincts, allow only some stimuli to affect them. As humans we have no instinct to speak of, and we cannot be properly acting within the fourth realm which transforms environments, by “reacting” to its impacts. Our awareness of our responsibility in the maintenance of our health shows itself in the amount of patience, of tolerance, of forgiveness, we manage to display in various circumstances. All these attributes of human living deny 205

Who Cares About Health ?

reaction as a correct human way of receiving what comes.

Whenever we can educate ourselves not to react, we display a correct intuition of what we know to be our health.

Similar in functioning to the holding in check of our reactions, is our control of the bent to yield to attractions, to greed, to possession, etc. Greed clearly leads to overloading certain functions and requires more energy to restore balances than when we do not yield to it.

Slowly we see that our responsibility for maintaining our health leads us to the perennial popular wisdom which warned against excesses and exalted moderation in all walks of life.

Clearly it is a component of our responsibility that we can deliberately ruin our health and lead a life of excesses which are not to be assimilated to the effects of accidents, of germs, of ignorance, when they produce conditions that look like diseases but are predictable consequences of our actions.

As humans, we have a choice at every moment, even when we do not experience each moment as such. Because of that, we cannot, in the ordinary circumstances of our life, fail to consider that we constantly participate in what we allow to happen to us.

Our diseases and our health both bear some strong mark of what we selected to do with ourselves and therefore are the result of our actions and our thoughts, whatever our personal philosophy, our beliefs, and however much we may yield to outside pressures.

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10 A Conclusion: Our Health, Our Responsibility

If we were to embark upon an education for health, today we would have greater chances of doing some things right because we are aware that man is of the fourth realm and therefore responsible for himself. It is our sense of responsibility in that field that can be translated into educational action beyond the teaching of hygiene, clean living and proper eating.

Living all the time at one’s peak may seem a tall order until one finds that one has been doing this for some time, first in utero and then in early childhood. When we know how to do it in later years, we demonstrate the content of an education for health.

This can then be spelled out and given to all to look at and to translate into social actions which will bring about the growth of a healthy community.

Today, this means a world community.

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Further Reading

1

The Universe of Babies, 1973

2 Of Boys and Girls, 1974 3 The Adolescent and His Will, 1971 4 Conscience de la Conscience, 1954/1967 5 Un Nouveau Phenomene Psychosomatique, 1952 6 The Mind Teaches the Brain, 1974 7 Evolution and Memory, 1977 8 On Being Freer, 1975 9 On Death, 1978 Obtainable from Educational Solutions

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Acknowledgements I owe a debt of gratitude to three friends who worked on the manuscript of this book: to Caroline Chinlund and Charlotte Balfour, who took time to improve the English on almost every page; and to Patricia King, who took it upon herself to prepare the text for the printers and to catch some of the errors left over by previous proofreaders. Without their help this text would never have seen the light of day, since it would have been too obscure for most readers.

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