Mystery and Excellence of the Human Body

What is Health?

Modern physics has presented entirely new theories about the world and how it behaves. These theories have been widely accepted, and yet conventional medicine has been reluctant to incorporate them into itself and continues to view the body as a clockwork mechanism in which illness is viewed as a breakdown of parts.

In his remarkable book Space, Time and Medicine, Dr. Larry Dossey shows how medicine can and must be updated. Drawing on his long experience in the practice of internal medicine and his knowledge of modern science, Dr. Dossey opens up startling questions. Could the brain be a hologram in which every part contains the whole? Why have ordinary people been able to raise and lower blood pressure at will, control heart rate, body temperature, even minute blood vessels, in a way no one can explain? What is the role of consciousness in health and illness? Larry Dossey argues that just as the clockwork picture of the universe was abandoned in the onslaught of new data, so will the mechanistic view of health and illness give way to new models which, too, will be more consistent with the true face of the universe.

Larry Dossey practises internal medicine in the United States, and is also actively engaged in clinical research. He is Chief of Staff of a large Dallas Hospital and an adjunct professor in the Department of Psychology, North Texas State University.

What is health? There is no generally accepted answer, and one of the embarrassments of modem medicine is its inability to define exactly what it is that it promotes. Most persons tend to visualize health in negative terms — I don't have high blood pres sure; I don't have an elevated blood cholesterol level; I don't have any

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obvious abnormalities on my physical examination. If my doctor can't find anything wrong, I must be healthy. This prevalent way of defining health does not, however, tell us what health is. And even the attempts to couch a definition of health in positive terms are flawed. The World Health Organization has defined health as the total physical, psycho logical, and spiritual well-being of an individual — yet these concepts are too vague to be very useful. They are not clear about what this well-being actually is, or what is meant by the proper function of the spiritual, physical, and psychological parts of ourselves....

Health, we ordinarily presume, somehow emanates from within us. This supposition reflects our reflexive way of attributing all characteristics such as health — and even life itself — to the behaviour of our constituent molecules. Yet it is not entirely clear that this is so. David Bohm, in speaking of the living world, uses the example of a seed. Almost all of the matter and energy that emerge as the seed grows comes from the environment. "Who is to say," says Bohm, "that life was not immanent, even before the seed was planted?" And if life was immanent prior to the unfolding of the seed in its growing form, then , the growing seed becomes more than the mere matter from which it; began, as it takes on life itself. The growing seed has become more ! than the behaviour of constituent molecules.

This life-energy, a term Bohm uses, belongs to the implicate order, — that unseen totality that, says Bohm, underlies the external world of; things and events (which belong to the explicate order), and in which '3 all things are grounded. Bohm has also proposed that health is the result of the harmonious interaction of all the analyzable parts which comprise the explicate order'— the cells, tissues, organ systems, and the entire physical body — with the external environment. For Bohm, health is harmony, a quality ultimately grounded, as are all things, in the totality of the implicate order, and not in the particulate things themselves....

The essence of the nonobstructed, indivisible, flowing movement of the implicate order is harmony — which for Bohm is the meaning of health when this harmony is transcribed into the explicate world. But since pure flow and movement are imperfect in living organisms (breakdowns do occur), harmony — and thus health — is imperfect. Things go wrong. The result is disease, a break in harmony. All living organisms change and die.

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Seen in this way, health has a kinetic quality. There is an essential dynamism to it.... Health is not static.

Yet how differently we ordinarily conceive health! For many of us our image of health is to be frozen at some stage of youth, whereafter things never change. We wish to capture this state in some crystallized, static form, and so remain healthy thereafter. But it cannot be so, for health is harmony, and harmony has no meaning without the fluid movement of interdependent parts. Like a stream that becomes stagnant when it ceases to flow, harmony and health turn into disease and death when stasis occurs. We return to the concept of the biodance, the endless streaming of the body-in-flux.

It is pathetic that we have lost touch with this kinetic quality of health. We view health as a frozen painting, a still collection of bits of information: electrocardiograms, blood pressure readings, laboratory values for liver enzymes, blood sugar, and kidney function. Even health facilities that overtly emphasize kinetic aspects of health care — the movement sports such as jogging frequently convert the distance a client has run into a computerized number that indicates how many "points" he has achieved, so that the kinetic experience becomes translated into the stillness of numbers. The experience of health, its moving principle, is diminished. It is translated into dead data that, ironically, seems to reassure us more than the experience of health itself....

There are moments in which all of us experience the harmony of the movement we call life. These are transcendent or "peak" experiences in which we may forget not only our self-as-object, but the world-as object, becoming one with the experience itself. Space and time are perceived at such moments in nonordinary ways. Spatially, we cease to distinguish ourselves as floating in a sea of space adrift with other objects; and temporally, time ceases to flow in a linear way. These are moments of implicate awareness.

These are also times of health, in the sense that they are experiences of perfect harmony. Yet these moments invariably change, and as they do our attention is drawn to the nonharmonious events that follow. To some of these ensuing events in life, if they are sufficiently disruptive, we attach the term "disease." We make these distinctions just as naturally as we analyze a flowing Bach fugue into its separate notes after losing ourselves in the initial hearing of it. And our repetitious fixation °n such nonharmonious events creates our belief that they have some

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primary status, forgetting that we have abstracted them from the whole ness of the experience. The flowing harmony of experience becomes rarer as we carve those genuine moments into bit-events.

Yet health is a flowing movement. There is no benchmark to which we can refer to tell us when health leaves off and disease begins. Health and disease are the "moving principles" of each other. As Bohm implies: perceived as they are by conscious thought, and grounded as thought is in the totality of the implicate order that enfolds all, health and illness — how can we avoid the conclusion? — are one.

The experience of health and illness are, of course, not one and the same. The experience of them occurs in Bohm's explicate order, the world of the everyday that we habitually dissect into discrete objects and events. And as a consequence of partitioning this world into separate objects, we find that we partition it into immiscible experiences such as health and illness.

Is there a way to experientially touch the implicate order such that our own morbid preoccupations with health and disease are transcend ed? Can health and illness be experienced as irrelevancies? Almost certainly this is the case. The mystical literature is alive with instances of this sort. The mystics are consistent in asserting that ordinary considerations of health and illness, even of death, can be transcended. Frequently these statements are misinterpreted — for example, the mystic has "renounced" the body. This view is, I think, wrong, for the mystic has achieved a state characterized not by a repudiation of the flesh, but one in which he experiences the implicate union of opposites: body and nonbody, spirit and matter, health and illness, birth and death.

If we begin to experience the domain in which the issues of health and disease cease to appear as absolutes, our ordinary health strategies can be seen in a different perspective. The grim urgency of health care imperatives changes. Not that health, if neglected, won't evolve into illness, but that this evolution describes events only on the explicate level.

This is no endorsement of self-abuse and neglect of health. On the contrary, my suspicion is that an experiential understanding of the relativity of health and disease will lead to an increasing respect for one's material body, and that a fuller flowering of health will ensue. To transcend health care, to experience health as irrelevant, is not to neglect it. It is rather to regard all matter, including one's physical body, as alive

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and beyond health, grounded with conscious thought in the implicate domain. Rather than engendering an abusive disregard for the flesh, this point of view is more likely to promote sound health care — but not out of a fear of dissolution and death, but from respect born of an awareness (as Bohm states) that death is a mere abstraction, and that all is alive.

If Bohm's proposals for an implicate and explicate order are correct, it is clear that the efforts of modem medicine are wide of the mark. They focus only on the reality of the explicate order, the realm of our habitation, where the world is one of separate objects and events. The implicate domain, where the very meaning of health, disease, and death radically changes, is currently of no concern to medicine. The totality that enfolds everything is ignored....

How could medicine redirect its course? Instead of "keeping the parts running" ("explicate therapy"), how would it implement an "implicate therapy"?

I do not believe the task is a hopeless one. Indeed, there are indications of an emerging paradigm in medicine that will foster an experiential awareness of the implicate order. These new methodologies have as their foundation this underlying understanding: mind and body are intrinsically united, and consciousness is the fulcrum of health.

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From Larry Dossey, Space, Time and Medicine,

Shambhala Publications, Boulder, Colorado 80302, U.S.A.

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David Bohm and his concepts of

the "implicate and explicate orders,"

and of the "holoverse"

David Bohm was an associate of Einstein and later Professor of Theoretical Physics at Birbeck College of the University of London. He is regarded as one of the pre-eminent theoretical physicists of the 20th century.

Bohm maintains that the information of the entire universe is contained in each of its parts. There is, he says, a stunning example of this principle in photography: the hologram (literally, "whole message"). A hologram is a specially constructed image which, when illuminated by a laser beam, seems eerily suspended in three dimensional space. The most incredible feature of holograms is that any piece of it, if illuminated with coherent light, provides an image of the entire hologram. The information of the whole is contained in each part. This principle, says Bohm, extends to the universe at large.

Since Bohm frequently resorts to the holographic analogy, a brief description of the process will be given. The mathematical theory underlying holograms was developed initially in the 1940s by Nobel physicist Dennis Gabor. When Gabor initially proposed the possibility, holograms could not actually be constructed — this had to await the invention of the laser twenty years later.

Holograms are made using a kind of lenseless photography. Coherent light — light whose waves are approximately of the same frequency — is required. This light, such as from a laser, is passed through a half-silvered mirror. The mirror allows the passage of some of it onto a photographic plate, but reflects part of it onto the object which is to be "photographed." The object also reflects the coherent light beam onto the photographic plate; at which point the reflected beam collides with the beam passing through the half-silvered mirror. When the two "wave fronts" of light meet, they "interfere" with each other, creating an "interference pattern." It is this pattern that is recorded on the photographic plate as a hologram.

Now the truly unique feature of holograms emerges. If a beam of coherent light is passed through the photographic plate, the observer on the far side of the plate sees a striking three-dimensional "picture" of the original object suspended in space. And what is also remarkable is that if any piece of the hologram is illuminated with coherent light, the same phenomenon occurs. To be sure, the smaller the piece the "fuzzier" the resulting image, and the larger the portion the more detailed the image becomes; but the entire representation of

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the original object is contained in each portion of the hologram.

Bohm proposes that the universe is constructed on the same principles as the hologram. His theory rests on concepts that flow from modern physics. In the modem physical view the world is not assembled from individual bits, but is seen as an indivisible whole. In modern physics the old classical view of "bit pieces and building blocks" has given way to the concept of pattern, process, and interrelatedness.

The aspect of the world that we ordinarily perceive (the explicate order) is that of isolated parts, however. To us, things do seem disconnected and unrelated. Yet this is an illusion and a distortion of the underlying behind-the-scene oneness and unity, which is an intrinsic quality of the world.

This unity, says Bohm, is "enfolded" into the universe. It is an expression of an implicit order — or, as Bohm says, an "implicate" order. How is this order enfolded into the world? In ways already described by physics: through electromagnetic waves, sound waves, electron beams, and in other numerous forms of movement. The behaviour of all of these forms of movement constitute the implicate order in nature, and in order to emphasize its unbroken wholeness, Bohm states that what "carries" the implicate order is the "holomovement" — which is itself an undivided totality.

For Bohm, order and unity are spread throughout the universe in a way which escapes our senses. They are part of an implicate order which, although hidden from us, constitutes a fundamental aspect of reality. In the same way that order and organization are spread throughout the hologram, each part of the universe contains enough information to reconstitute the whole. The form and structure of the entire world is enfolded within each part.

It is important not to underestimate the seriousness intended in Bohm's descriptions. For many working physicists these concepts are inescapable conclusions that flow from quantum mechanics and relativity. They are not mere poetic or metaphorical musings about how the world behaves.

It is crucial, too, to appreciate the scope of these implications. We frequently assume that quantum physics applies only to the diminutive realm of nature — electrons, protons, etc; and that relativity has only to do with massive objects of cosmic proportions — stars, galaxies, nebulae, etc. But Bohm's contention is that we are squarely in the middle of these phenomena. He says: Ultimately, the entire universe (with all its "particles", including those constituting human beings, their laboratories, observing instruments, etc.) has to be understood as a single undivided whole, in which analysis into separately and independently existent parts has no fundamental status."

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Extracts from Larry Dossey, Space, Time and Medicine

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Characteristics of a Healthy Body

One

A healthy person enjoys simple food and is contented because he gets a satisfaction before eating to full capacity which would give a feeling of fullness and discomfort.

Equally so, the process of digestion will be a quiet one and the per son will be unaware of it.

The healthy skin should not emit an unpleasant smell as does that of a carnivorous animal. The skin should be moist, but not wet, should feel warm, be smooth to touch and have an elasticity.

The lung function should be voluntary and without any difficulty.

Sleep of a healthy person is soft, quiet and uninterrupted. On waking one feels cheerful, bright and contented.

Deep mental emotions cannot long oppress a healthy person, he recuperates quickly.

The healthy body is one of fine proportions.

All natural movements are free, unhindered and need no exertion nor tension.

A healthy feeling is one in which the person does not feel the presence of his body, its weight and-any part of it.

Even warmth all over the body, lightness of feeling, keen hunger, sound and restful sleep, clarity of mind, ability of the body to work, freedom from laziness, and timely elimination of filth are the signs of good health.

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From K.L. Sharma, Practical Nature Cure,

Nature Cure Publishing House

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Manuscript page of Charaka Samhita, early Indian medical text

TWO

An individual is supposed to be healthy if he is free of any disease. He should not have any type of pain. His colour and texture of the skin should be muscular, the body-parts proportionate, and sturdy. He should have strength. His digestive power should be well developed. It is to be judged by the feeling of hunger, and the food which is taken in is to be digested so that at appropriate hours of the day he feels hungry and thirsty. He should have sound sleep and after sleep should feel buoyant and fresh. The excretion of urine and stool should be smooth and at appropriate hours. There should be unpolluted and pure semen in the body. Over and above he should experience perfect coordination of mind, intelligence and body organs. These are considered the important symptoms of the healthy individual.

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From S.H. Deshpande, Physical Education in Ancient India

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