Reconciling Holistic and Western Medicine
The development of material form, behaviour and organization has historically/culturally been seen/understood in two evolutionarily-opposite ways;
(a) inside-outward determined material dynamics as in Western biological sciences
(b) outside-inward – inside-outward energy transformation as in the new physics
In (a), ‘genie-like genes’ have the wherewithal to manage the genesis-by-construction of the material organism (e.g. human ‘being’). In (b), material forms are ripple-structures that gather and re-gather in the evolving energy-charged spatial plenum [‘field’]
While (b) is supported by relativity and quantum physics, (a) is a ‘guess’ that gives the black-box response ‘genes’ to the question; “from whence comes the development of material form, behaviour and organization?”
This ‘hocus pocus’ answer to ‘what is life?’, which assumes inside-outward directed genesis, continues to play a primary foundational role in our globally dominating Western social dynamic, although new biological research is rapidly enlarging the ranks of ‘post-Darwinist’ and ‘post-Genetics’ [‘hologenomic’] scientists.
Visually, we can watch the ‘growth’ of the human organism as a ‘thing-in-itself’, but such a view is entirely out of the context of the evolving universe, and thus out of the context of the quantum physics view of material forms as ‘ripple structures in the spatial-plenum’ [‘field-flow’].
The development of material forms within the finite and unbounded spherical space of the biosphere is subject to ‘reciprocal disposition’ or simultaneous mutual influence (as in ecosystem development), as given by Mach’s principle; “The dynamics of habitat are conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants at the same time as the dynamics of the inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat.”
That is, in the thin spherical space ‘film’ of the biosphere, the development of the ecosystemic web-of-material forms unfolds interdependently. As the following graphic reminds us, the space of our real-life experience, the space of the biosphere, is nothing like the absolute fixed and empty space we mentally impose to provide a convenient, synthetic reference frame for visualizing the development of the material form as if it were a ‘thing-in-itself’ whose development was inside-outward driven. This notion that the development of form and behaviour and organization is ‘inside-outward driven’ is what forces us to invent some kind of ‘black box’ genies residing inside the material form that we can hold responsible for determining the development of the material form.
Why ‘inside’? … because we have implicitly framed the developing material form (e.g. an infant) with a notional absolute fixed and empty [non-influencing] space-box [Euclidian space] and are thus ignoring the fact that the organism is included within the earth’s biosphere wherein space-matter relativity applies; i.e. space is the primary mover and shaker and material forms are secondary ‘ripple structures’. The real reference space for the development of the material forms we call ‘organisms’, the biosphere, is a relatively thin, spherical space [1/500th of the radius of the sphere of the earth] that is like the skin of an apple;
Ask yourself whether we can reasonably ignore the influence of this ‘special space’ we call ‘the earth’s biosphere’ when we seek to understand the development of material forms that we call ‘organisms’. Ignore it is what biological science actually does by postulating an inside-outward-driving source of development of material form, behaviour and organization, via the black-box notion of ‘genes’.
‘Wait a minute!’, you may say, ‘‘genes’ are not ‘black box’, we have determined their physical structure and the processes by which they direct the development of proteins which are the building blocks of the material form of the organism.’
Here we go again. ‘Physical structure’ is ‘material form’ and every time [at every level that] we observe ‘material form’, this question comes up as to the (a) or (b) source of the material form; i.e. are these material forms determined inside-outward from within, or does outside-inward influence predominate over inside-outward influence, as in the new physics?
When we examine the continual gathering and regathering of interdependent ecosystem assemblages of material forms in the biosphere, over thousands of generations, shall we go with the inside-outward material construction view of biology which presents men as machines, or with spatial transformation as with [candle-flame-like] ripple structures in an energy-charged spatial flow-plenum such as the biosphere?
Let’s be clear. This is not just about ‘genes’ and the genesis of ‘organisms’, this is about whole paradigms; ‘world views’ that shape thought and behaviour that separate Cultures.
1. The doer-deed world view: — In this view, openly mocked by Nietzsche, which includes genetics and Darwinism, everything is inside-outward driven; i.e. the genesis of the material form is inside-outward driven and the genesis of the community/habitat dynamic is inside-outward driven by the inhabitants. That is, at all level, the ‘inhabitants’ are the inside-outward drivers of the development of form, behaviour and organization. This is the view at the level of genes and cells and this is the view at the level of organisms and ecosystems.
2. The ‘living space’ world view. — In this view, material forms are ‘ripple structures in the spatial-plenum’ [Bohm, Mach, Schrödinger, Poincaré]. What is always first is the energy-charged spatial plenum. The world is only given once, as Schrödinger says, and within this one-world is a continual gathering and regathering of material forms, all in mutual interdependence with one another and the unfolding spatial-plenum. In Nietzsche’s terms and Lamarck’s “evolution is a process of diffusion [like a candle-flame] in which outside-inward in-flow-ence predominates over inside-outward out-flow-ence.”
These alternative views can be used anywhere, at any level, as a means of understanding material dynamics. If we want to understand a hurricane as an inside-outward generated material form within its own locally originating inside-outward driving behaviour, then this is a rather convenient way to infuse ‘understanding’ into our visual observations. But in this case, as in general, the true source of the dynamic, which is at the same time the source of the material form, is the invisible, nonlocal, flow of the spatial medium.
The biosphere is intrinsically ‘more important than’ [transcends] ‘the human organism’ and it is an energy-charged spatial medium that continues to spawn ecosystemic assemblages of material forms.
The energy-charged spatial medium transcends the visible, local, material forms, that continually gather and re-gather as ripple structures in the biospheric flow-plenum.
Genetics, with its inside-outward driving determinism, has never been able to explain how damaged organs can be regenerated, how stem-cells ‘know’ [without outside-inward direction] whether to develop into fat cells, bone cells or muscle cells. This is why cell biologists are ‘jumping ship’ and going with relativity and quantum physics, which allows them to acknowledge that the energy-charged spatial plenum transcends the material forms that gather within it; i.e. which allows them to accept the Nietzschean/Lamarckian world view in which “evolution is a [candle-flame-like] process of diffusion in which outside-inward influence predominates over inside-outward outfluence.”
As cell biologist Bruce Lipton observes;
“Advances from science’s frontier offer new insights that provide a bright light at the end of this dark tunnel. Firstly, in contrast to the emphasis on the Newtonian material realm, the newer science of quantum mechanics reveals that the Universe and all of its physical matter are actually made out of immaterial energy. Atoms are not physical particles; they are made of energy vortices resembling nano-tornadoes.
Quantum physics stresses that the invisible energy realm, collectively referred to as the field, is the primary governing force of the material realm. It is more than interesting that the term field is defined as “invisible moving forces that influence the physical realm,” for the same definition is used to describe spirit. The new physics provides a modern version of ancient spirituality. In a Universe made out of energy, everything is entangled, everything is one.” – Bruce Lipton
Biomedical research has recently toppled the widespread belief that organisms are genetically controlled robots and that evolution is driven by a random, survival-of-the-fittest mechanism. As genetically controlled “robots,” we are led to perceive of ourselves as “victims” of heredity. Genes control our lives yet we did not pick our genes, nor can we change them if we don’t like our traits. The perception of genetic victimization inevitably leads to irresponsibility, for we believe we have no power over our lives.
The exciting new science of epigenetics emphasizes that genes are controlled by the environment, and more importantly, by our perception of the environment. Epigenetics acknowledges that we are not victims, but masters, for we can change our environment or perceptions, and create up to 30,000 variations for each of our genes.
Quantum physics and epigenetics provide amazing insight into the mystery of the mind-body-spirit connection. While Newtonian physics and genetic theory dismiss the power of our minds, the new science recognizes that consciousness endows us with powerful creative abilities to shape our lives and the world in which we live. Our thoughts, attitudes and beliefs control behavior, regulate gene expression and provide for our life experiences.”
Western medicine continues to be anchored down by the materialist Newtonian world view of inside-outward driving materialist genesis/construction. While this is unfortunate, in the sense that it constrains understanding, it is not surprising, since the world-dominating Western culture has built the materialist view into the foundations of its thinking, practice and institutions (social, political and religious).
For example, the western view of the ‘genesis of production’ is that ‘men’ or ‘nations’ are the causal agents responsible for production of, for example, food crops. The device of ‘land ownership’ allows us to notionally extend the powers of man so that we say that ‘the farmer’ produces the food crops. If colonizers who seize land by force allocate ownership of a grove of data palms to a man, even though he has not ‘lifted a finger’ we will speak in terms of ‘his productivity’ and ‘the productivity of the colony or nation-state’. Shares in his date farm may be sold to others and the stock market will talk about the ‘growth in the farm’s productivity’ and if those warming sun baths and moistening rain baths which the farm owes its productivity to, should recede for a decade [as in the Oklahoma etc. dustbowl conditions of the 1920’s] the stock market will say that the ‘farm’s production’ has declined.
Is ‘production’ really the inside-outward farmer-driven result we claim it is?
Clearly it is not. The land does not belong to the farmer in a physical sense, only in an idealized ‘legal declaration’ sense. The farmer ‘belongs to the land’. If the outside-inward influence of sun-warmth-baths and rain-moistening-baths cease for some reason, the inside-outward driving influence of the farmer and his technologies are to no avail. In other words, Nietzsche and others are correct in their claim that outside-inward influence predominates over inside-outward outfluence.
In the following composite, the picture in the upper left encourages us to think of the farmer’s inside-outward shaping influence on the land. The upper middle shows the rainfall anomaly during the dustbowl conditions of 1925 – 1940 and the upper right shows the thin spherical space of the biosphere that is brewing up the conditions for crop growth, … or not. The lower duststorm photo reminds us that we [the farmer] is included in an outside-inward influencing spatial medium that predominates over his inside-outward influence on the land.
Holistic medicine, in its most general form, is about acknowledging the candle-flame-like nature of the material form and the natural imperative of sustaining outside-inward — inside-outward dynamic balance or spatial-relational harmony.
Western medicine rejects the candle-flame [spatial transformation] essence of the material form and imposes an absolute reference space-frame on its observations of the human body, of the same time that gives us the impression of the inside-outward driving power of the farmer in shaping the land; i.e. Western medical experts portray man the same way as western economists portray the farmer, as a ‘local material system with its own locally originating, internal process driven source of development of form, behaviour and organization. This gives us a view in which the dynamics we observe originate within the interior of material forms such as organisms and/or machines, as if these ‘inhabitant-dynamics’ were not secondary to the habitat-dynamic they are situationally included in.
In the previous composite picture, farmers in Oklahoma and California will have very different ‘production profiles’, which can derive from their respective skills and technologies as in our inside-outward-driving ‘machine view’ of their productivity. Meanwhile, they are included in the biosphere, an turbulent energy-charged spatial flow-plenum like an apple-skin that not only animates them, by giving them crops to play with, but engenders them. As Emerson says; “the genius of nature not only inhabits the organism but creates it.”
While ‘the people belong to the land’, once we describe people as machines and space as an absolute fixed and empty operating theory for organism-machines to move about and interact in, then we have mentally inverted the direction of genesis of the world dynamic, and are then in denial of our inherent conjugate habitat-inhabitant relation wherein “outside-inward influence predominates over inside-outward outfluence”.
Does the farmer’s behaviour really originate within him? If he didn’t have a garden to play in in the first place, he would have had to develop soil and that takes thousands of years. Thus, he is merely messing around with a dynamic greater than himself, that he is included in. The picture of the farmer shaping the land is an ‘inverted’ picture since a video-camera focused on earth from space for a few generations would show that man’s material form emerges within the turbulence of the biosphere, like spots of transformation that are more like convection cells [ripples in the spatial flow-plenum] than ‘local, independently-existing material systems with their own locally originating, internal process driven development of form, behaviour and organization.
What impresses us, … those of us who have been adopted by the Western materialist culture [as B.F. Skinner says; “Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless. It enslaves him almost before he has tasted freedom.”]… is this view of our ‘self’ as an inside-outward driving shaper of our surroundings. This is a view that ‘forgets about’ the fact that the development of material form, behaviour and organization, SUCH AS OUR OWN, derives from the energy-charged spatial flow-plenum in which we are Johnny-come-lately ripple structures.
If we look closely at the lowermost picture in the composite, at the thin film of the biosphere wherein organisms are continually generating and degenerating, and machines too, the choice of humans as ‘candle flames’ wherein spatial energy in transformation predominates over material form, as the new physics insists is the case, appears much more reasonable. As ship-jumpers from the biological sciences such as Bruce Lipton imply, the notion of ‘spirituality’ [‘field’] was not there for ‘no reason’.
So, do we associate our ‘selves’ more with the figure on the upper left or the one on the upper right? And if it is the one on the upper right, the science of caring for our health associated with the figure on the left would seem an overly simplistic and inherently possibility-constraining view.
Mach’s principle observes that ‘the dynamics of the biosphere are conditioning the dynamics of the biosphere-inhabitants at the same time as the dynamics of the biosphere-inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the biosphere’. The cultivating and sustaining of health would therefore have to start from cultivating and sustaining the health of the biosphere.
Western health-care which concerns itself with the health of notional local, independently-existing organisms, nations and corporations, notionally equipped with their own locally originating, internal process driven development of form, behaviour and organization, is an approach which is damaging to our health in the more comprehensive, conjugate habitat-inhabitant relational sense, where we acknowledge that we all share inclusion in a dynamic One-ness that transcends us and wherein ‘outside-inward orchestrating influence predominates over inside-outward determining outfluence.’
Definitions of a healthy community that are based on the health of the individual biological machines that ‘make up’ the community are impervious to unfolding realities wherein healthy warriors blast one another to bits and where mothers and children are slaughtered in the cross-fire, and/or, where the best health care that orients to the individual biological machines is fighting a losing battle against a pollution and carcinogen infused habitat, the product of our too-constrained [anthropocentric self-interest based] definition of ‘health’ coming from our perceiving of material forms as local, independently-existing biological machines with their own locally originating, internal process-driven development of form, behaviour and organization.
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