Just as late modern urbanist views cut humans away from the body of life, so they divide the flesh from the being that it generates. When the tangible and intangible aspects of bodies are addressed separately, as is almost always the case, care and cure may be divided between physicians and clerics who view the world so differently that they cannot work together. Like the blind men with the elephant, each perceives one aspect of the body and rejects all others, and thus it falls to the patient to test their advice against experience and to devise ways to integrate the irreconcilable.
As long as you live, the protean matter and energy of your body sustains a multitude of exquisitely complex, miraculously joined, seemingly automatic processes that are dynamic and resilient: they tend to remain in and to return to their usual states. Your ability to wisely alter these processes is necessarily and fortunately limited, but when you care for your body wisely and lovingly, it will work wonders for you. Doing so will join you with the body of life and its unceasing and abundant resources for refreshment, restoration, and transformation.
While many ancients viewed diseases as demons and feared and loathed the body as their haunt, moderns recognized in the body the beauty of nature. We see this in Renaissance art, romantic poetry, and the life sciences that uncovered the minute miracles hidden within the tissues and organs of the body. We also see and hear it in the words of Shakespeare, Byron, Thoreau, Muir, and all others who loved and gloried in nature, the union with nature, and the struggle of bringing humanity into alignment with nature. As we face the errors and limits of late modernity and recognize the cost of caring for and curing once-fatal illnesses and injuries in the modern way, we can once again embrace the struggle of coming into alignment with nature; we can free ourselves from perennial follies such as the impulses toward fear, greed, and apathy that misalign us with life.
We can begin aligning our lives with the body of life by puncturing the illusions of power that lead us to do more harm than good. Clinging to these illusions risks the future of the body of life and all of its component creatures, which are to the body of all as organelles are to the flesh of a human. To cast these illusions aside, we must first see the errors and limitations of modernity. For inspiration in this regard, we can look to the stories of the ancients as well as of those late moderns who have already begun to form the emerging working model. For example, we can look to scriptures, myths, and ancient rites of passage for cautionary tales that reveal that we must pass through a valley of shadows on our way to greater, more compelling light and life.
To move beyond modern allopathy, you can make use of a new construct of the body such as the one described below. When we view the body in context, we gain perspective from which to assess the gains and losses of modernity and to recover wisdom lost recently or long ago. We can recognize with Hippocrates that our bodies are more similar than not to the flora and fauna that surround us. We can recognize with Vesalius that the matter of our body makes us; and we can see with Maimonides that our energy is the raw material of our character. This perspective allows you to make use of the best of the past as you preserve, mend, and transform your life and all those lives most closely connected to yours; you become capable of accessing and integrating all available forms of care and cure. You can gather a team that includes an allopath, counselor, bodyworker, and habitat restorer and engage them in using the same construct. If you are fortunate, you may be able to access a support network of communicators, public health workers, veterinarians, agronomists, plant pathologists, herbalists, and experts in wise resource use via media or public institutions.
To fail to recognize the necessity of the tangible or the intangible is to neglect a limb in the way that a stroke victim neglects a side of the body; to imagine that you can rely on either matter or energy alone is to shy away from real challenges as a student of physics shies away from complex subjects like biology. To see your being and your ailments in terms of atoms or molecules is to miss the glory of the world–glory that is the most compelling reason to survive and thrive, glory that is the means by which to secure the future on which life depends. Only when you engage the body of life in which you are immersed can you recognize in your being the keys to the care of life, the cure of your ills, and the cure of all the rest besides.
If doctors are to enable grassroots self-care and cure, a new construct of the body is required that allows patients to hone subjective perceptions and to access their beings for the care of their bodies, as adepts did in ancient times. The initial Evolve Medicine construct of the body uses the modern view of flesh as comprised of organ systems and divides being into six aspects or levels that are useful for self-care and -cure. These aspects are derived from the “five heaps” or aggregates attributed to the Buddha, the energy body of classical Asian civilizations, and interbeing, a fusion of ecological constructs with the theological concept developed by Thich Nhat Hanh. For additional information, you can consult The Three Levels of Spiritual Perception by Deshung Rinpoche; Joyful Path of Good Fortune by Geshe Kelsang Gyatso; Introduction to Tantra: A Vision of Totality by Lama Yeshe and Johnathan Landlaw; Tantra in Tibet, Deity Yoga, and Yoga Tantra: Paths to Magical Feats by the Dalai Lama, Tsong-ka-pa, and Jeffrey Hopkins; Healing Light of the Tao by Mantak Chia; and The Energy of Prayer and Interbeing by Thich Nhat Hanh.
Flesh with its Being
The body is represented by an image that evokes the sacred as an angel and that appropriates modern stained glass images of angels as well as late modern images of the body that depict its intangible aspects. The image is comprised of seven layers that will be considered individually below.
In ancient times, humans thought of the body as composed of four to five elements such as earth, air, fire, water, and metal. This view is useful today when the thirsty drink and the chilled warm themselves. Over two and a half millennia ago, Hippocrates, a Greek physician, noticed that the body contained its own fluids, which he called humors. In medieval times, Maimonides considered the activities of organ systems to be the vegetative soul, which embodied ethics. A syncretic thinker, he combined medicine with ideas and practices from around the globe. In the Renaissance, European physicians broke the centuries-old prohibition against autopsy, and began once again to study the flesh and its diseases objectively. During the Scottish Enlightenment, doctors who were too far from Rome to be suppressed by the papacy decided to try and cure disease and save lives. Their discoveries of anesthesia, antisepsis, and other breakthroughs gave birth to late modern interventionist medicine that was centralized after World War II. It has since proliferated interventions, some highly advanced technologically.
In the heady days after the discovery of penicillin, the development of polio vaccines, and the eradication of smallpox, the power of objectivity eclipsed the subjective felt experience and the ideas and methods of self-care by which the sick could help themselves. These began in the Himalayas in the time of the Buddha, who viewed the body as comprised of five heaps (skandhas): form, feeling, perceptions, impulses, and consciousness. Later, during the classical period of Indian civilization, the energy body was discovered, mapped in great detail, and used to catalyze inner meditative work. While these methods are the most detailed and require mastery by the patient, every living religious and spiritual tradition has kept practices of self-care and personal healing transformation. You may have practiced some already.
The emerging method of self-care presented by Evolve Medicine uses ideas and practices from around the globe to support self-care as well as the development of skills that support care-seeking all types of practitioners. Key abilities that you can choose to master include:
- enhancing well-being by entering into care states and by shifting your baseline state toward care
- owning your own placebo for relief of pain
- strengthening your energy body to bypass fleshly obstacles
- countering the toxicity and negative placebos of mainstream care (and modern life)
- countering social isolation through grounding in life and time
- release of deep tension and energy wastage by embodied trauma and past distress
This is facilitated by a seven-fold model of the body that allows you to care for up to seven aspects of the body at one time. Two of these, flesh and interbeing, are comprised of matter—at least in part. The other five (energy, sensations, perceptions, understanding, and awareness) represent aspects of being generated by those two.