This article was first published in our sister blogspot dedicated to
natural forms of healing and maintained by Healthy Healing Center, in Goa. We
are reposting it here today because it contains much food for thought (for
those who still the leisure and time to think, rather than being compelled to
mechanically and without interruption act and react to the stimuli of the
moment).
Healing and 'enlightenment' are indeed deeply interconnected. The
Buddha himself was called 'King of Physicians' by his contemporaries because
what he shared with the world was a view of reality that had the potential to
heal from all suffering by 'seeing through' limited concepts or ideas about the
world, or life in general. And that's why we're trying to weave it all
together, 'healing' and meditation', the 'old science' and the 'new science',
'eastern experience' and 'western insight'.
The title of the posting, of course, sounds like a big mouthful of a
headline!
And I have to admit, formulating it, gave the writer a satisfying,
wicked kind of pleasure. As cumbersome as the title may at first
sound, it points very much right to the heart of the matter of what healing,
including through conventional medicine can achieve, when unfettered by
limiting concepts – but rather enabled by empowering ones. Empowering
concepts are those that support the capacity for self-organization in all of life
- including the awesome selfhealing capacity inherent in the bodymind.
That’s what healing involves: all of life. Healing should
not be administered only by following the inflexible rather limited laws of
physics as laid down by the long-gone forefathers of modern science, like
Descartes and Newton. It should actually include the input from the
more recent, modern theoretical physics, too. Unfortunately, most
often it doesn’t. As Larry Dossey so aptly puts it, “We
[physicians] have built a model of health and illness, birth and death, around
an outmoded conceptual model of how the universe behaves, which was
fundamentally flawed from the beginning. While the physicists have
been painfully eliminating the flaws from their own models, we have in medicine
ignored those revisions totally. We find ourselves, thus, with a set
of guiding beliefs that are as antiquated as are body humors, leeching and
bleeding.”
Yes, physicians are practical people, usually not much given to
philosophical meandering. But now, the time has indeed come to pay
attention to our view of reality, as any physician will treat his or
her patients according his or her basic view of life or the world. What
we see and take for real is what we are going to apply. What we fail
to notice, because it remains outside the frame of reference of our view, we
will dismiss. In short, the broader and more precise our view, the
better healers and physicians we will be. And that is our mission,
isn’t it? Not just filling up prescription pad after prescription
pad! And that’s why we are going to investigate, what entropy means
for healing, as well as the impact of ‘dissipative structures’.
Healing is not limited to merely restoring and nursing back to health
out of order physical bodies, supposedly only made out of inert matter. Although
all healing will, to a large degree, always be working with this very body made
of physical substance, when ignoring the realms of possibilities beyond
substance, however, the healing will have less of an effect; it will remain
incomplete. We cannot be good physicians when we stay in the Newtonian
universe. We have to step into the vaster world of modern,
post-Newtonian science – and may be even into the timelessly vast universe of
meditation that defies the conceptual world as much as it informs it with a new
kind of ‘energy’ or ‘information’.
This ‘energy’ and ‘information’, in turn, defies entropy and enables
surprising steps of evolution – and healing.
The
centerpiece of the posting, therefore, is a long quote from the book Magic
Dance by Thinley Norbu, a Tibetan scholar, artist and mature master of
the crystal clear Buddhism that he taught. When he spoke, Thinley
Norbu spoke from experience. Likewise, his motivation for writing
was not in becoming famous or selling books but in sharing his experience
beyond concepts for the purpose of empowering us, so that we, too, may
experience the fullness of our own humanity – and its as yet uncharted
limitless possibilities.
Engineer, social scientist, academic, futurist, writer, and visionary
Willis Harman once wrote, “…Since we have come to the understanding
that science is NOT a description of ‘reality’, but a metaphorical ordering of
experience, the ‘new science’ does not impugn the ‘old’. It is not a
question of which view is ‘true’ in some ultimate sense. Rather, it
is a matter of which picture is more useful in guiding human affairs.” Likewise
we can state that the view beyond substance taken by Thinley Norbu, based on
meditative experience, does not deny or ‘impugn’ substance but rather puts it
in the place it needs to fill and deserves in the overall picture of a larger
reality.
To begin with, we need to remember that the human body is more than an
assembly of its parts. And the origins of sickness involve more
layers of reality than the rather restricted playground of the molecules… This
is why Thinley Norbu, in his rather poetic manner of phrasing it, states,
“Essence lineage is the unbreakable natural connection with continuous
pure and natural energy. If we separate natural energy from its
secret source, it becomes obscured and impure… When our subtle
elements become gross… the pure essence of the elements seems diminished or
lost, but really it has only become hidden. Everything visible has
invisible essence. Even cement, which seems to be completely gross
and inert, has invisible natural essence…”
“The fresher something is, the closer it is to its natural source… The
older food gets, the more stale and inert it is, and the less accessible its
secret essence is to us when we eat it. Our phenomena are constantly
in the process of becoming stale and inert unless, through practice, we can
return them to freshness… Our body is constantly in the process of becoming
inert unless, through practice, we can return it to the Youthful Vase Body…”
“Youth is symbolic of pure balance in Dharma because the secret
essence of the elements manifests visibly in things when they are young and
their subtle and gross elements are in balance. When a tree is
young, its leaves display pure light and fresh colors because its branches,
roots and leaves absorb and use earth, water, fire, air and space in balance
with each other. When sentient beings are young, their bodies are
light and their complexion is fresh because they sustain their body from the
earth’s food, blood from water, warmth from the sun’s fire, breath from air,
and consciousness from mind’s space, in balance with each other.”
“As living things grow older, an imbalanced relationship develops
between the subtle and gross elements, which are dependent on each other. Some
of the elements become more dominant and conspicuous while others become weaker
and dormant. Trees produce heavy inert bark, and the human body
produces inert fingernails, hair, pus and mucus. The leaves of the
trees become brittle and colorless, people’s complexions become dry and pale,
until finally the connection between the gross and the subtle elements becomes
so imbalanced that it completely breaks, leaving a dead tree or a corpse as an
inert remainder…”
“For those who are able to go beyond the obstructed gross and subtle
elements to their unobstructed secret essence, there is no imbalance, and so no
inert gross elements are left behind…”
These are beautiful words, true poetry. But they are not
meant to remain mere poetry. They are meant to be translated into
action – and thus made real.
Readers who are a little better educated in science will be able to
draw parallels: The eroding balance over time is easily recognizable
as congruent with the Second Law of Thermodynamics, or Increased Entropy. According
to it, while the quantity remains the same, the quality of matter/energy
deteriorates gradually over time. This has to happen because usable
energy is inevitably converted into unusable energy, as it has been spent for
productivity, growth and repair. Thus, useable energy is
irretrievably lost in the form of unusable energy. ‘Entropy’ then,
is defined as a measure of unusable energy within a closed or isolated system
(for example the human body).
As usable energy decreases and unusable energy increases, entropy
must increase, in proportion. Entropy is also a gauge of randomness
or chaos within a closed system. As usable energy is irretrievably
lost, disorganization, randomness and chaos increase. This means
with regard to the human body that, as the Buddha said, it has to age, fall
increasingly prone to more and more illness – and finally die.
This is the rule.
But there are a few exceptions to the rule. In science we
call these exceptions ‘dissipative structures’. What does the word infer?
Ilya Prigogine, a Belgian chemist, first discovered these dissipative
structures, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry, in 1977. Larry
Dossey explains, “The entire concern for the biological sciences, for
example, is the study of exceptions to this irreversible trend [towards
entropy]. Biologists study life; and living processes embody a trend
away from the static equilibrium of entropy. In a universe that is
gradually running downhill, life processes are continually running uphill in
defiance of the thermodynamicists’ second law…”
“Prigogine has described, through a series of complex mathematical
equations how the second law can remain valid for the universe as a whole, yet
fail in certain local parts. Chance fluctuations do occur, and at a
distance far enough from equilibrium [entropy] their effects can be magnified
enormously. In local defiance of the universal tendency towards
disorganization, the fluctuations can give rise to forms of a new complexity…
The more complex the structure, the greater is the energy flow required for its
survival, and the greater the internal perturbation is likely to be if it
occurs. In other words, increasing complexity generates a need for
increasing energy consumption from the environment, which in turn gives rise to
increasing fragility. But ironically, it is this feature of the
dissipative structure that is the key to its further evolution toward greater
complexity. For if the internal perturbation is great enough the
system may undergo a sudden reorganization, a kind of shuffling, and ‘escape to
a higher order’”…
This ‘escape to a higher order’ is what Thinley Norbu, in his piece,
calls the ‘Youthful Vase Body’ – a body, inconceivable for the concepts of
ordinary mind, because informed by the limitless energy reservoir of the ground
of being, and thus not limited by either time, or death. Of course,
for those subject to the inevitability of death, it is difficult to understand
the deathless.
Yet, this so-called Youthful Vase Body has been realized or
experienced by some who dared to follow a certain path of practice, to the end. For
them, ‘the end’ suddenly turned into the equilibrium of self-renewing energy,
forever leaving behind the ordinary equilibrium of entropy, or total exhaustion
of all energy. This is actually not as far-fetched as it may sound. It
is just one of the possibilities offered by existence that we tend to ignore,
due to our identification with death, or entropy.
However, even from an ordinary physician’s point of view the
transcending and reorganizing qualities of dissipative structures are very
revealing as they reaffirm, proven through mathematics and science, the body’s
innate capacity for meeting the challenge of disease of its own accord – and
dealing with it successfully. Because the body has this innate
capacity to fight off disease, we need to strengthen it. Rather than
staying focused on disease, we need to focus on health.
Therefore Larry Dossey writes, “Our health strategy needs to
incorporate flexibility as a primary goal – the adaptability and capacity to
react to the periodic challenges to our body/mind integrity. What we
do in the interval between illnesses also becomes crucial. I can, by
conscious [or unconscious] effort, sabotage my body’s wisdom to resist
perturbation. If I subject myself to negative health habits –
smoking, obesity, unrelieved exposure to stress, chronic fatigue, failure to
exercise, uninterrupted anxiety or depression – I limit my body’s homeostatic
capacity to react to external perturbations. I ask it to do what the
bamboo in its wisdom never attempts: to remain rigid in the face of stressful
and perturbing events.”
“Seen from this perspective, the real medicine is what we do between
illness-events. All of the techniques of health care, which we
relegate to the second-class status of preventive medicine, are of critical
importance for they help determine the body’s capacity to successfully reorder
itself to a higher degree of complexity when actually challenged by disease
processes.”
“Conversely, the traditional approach of medicine and surgery should
be viewed as a second line of defense. These methods should be used
as a last resort, as a supplement to the body’s wisdom…”
The bottom line is: because of the self-organizing capacities inherent
in the human body old age, disease and suffering are surmountable, even though
this is difficult to achieve.
Due to the same: disease prevention is far superior to fighting
disease. It should be the primary form of health care.
All of this is what the hard sciences have to teach the science of
medicine, in accordance with the experience of meditators.
Meditation supports and calls forth the ultimate dissipative
structures. It is a viable strategy for better health – and
eventually may lead much further than physical fitness.
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