Understanding
Understanding, inclusive of apprehension (recognition), comprehension, and reasoning, is here represented by ice crystals that are accreting on an abstract plane. Like Platonic solids, these are idealized visions of our imaginings that are useful insofar as they pattern successful problem-solving.
Understanding is the ability to apprehend the new and to comprehend the familiar. It allows you to form a framework through which to view inner and outer phenomena, supports the formation of constructs such as ideas and methods, and forms habits of understanding that become part of your perceptions. It is a human creation that has been handed down and modified as needed over countless generations since before recorded history. Understanding situates you in time, community, and habitat, and so allows you to create and cohere processes of being and becoming that you can extend into the world through your interbeing and interbecoming. Understanding is far more sophisticated than modern data processing and algorithm design in that it draws on other aspects of the body so as to enable pattern recognition, identification of the important and elimination of the extraneous, causal analysis and reasoning, formation of heuristics and spatial-hierarchical arrays, priority setting, and time management—often all at once.
Your embodied understanding may include new views, frames, and constructs, but it is more likely that you have rediscovered what others have discovered and rediscovered before you, or that you learned from others through interaction or education. This is especially true of human inventions such as language and perennial tools such as hearthfires and bowls.
From archaeology, we learn that tangible goods found in burials may be easy to recognize and understand, but the intangible meaning may be simple to speculate on yet remain forever impossible to recover. Within recorded history, the basis of human understanding has come apart of its own weight at the end of every era. This time it is our taking for granted the life on which all life depends—i.e. the biome—that is accelerating deconstruction of modernism and emergence of the new. As with the bubonic plagues that heralded modernity, it is chronic ambient poisoning that is heralding emergence.
As formal schooling disseminates the mental expectations and skills that belong to study, more and more people are able to apprehend the new, to revise their comprehension of the old, and to participate in the exchange and development of views, ideas, and methods that have the capacity to support emergence. With a strong understanding, you can use symbols and languages to form trains of thought and to devise courses of action. When you sharpen your understanding and sustain the ability to evaluate three to seven factors in the moment, you become able to adjust your views and constructs in real time in response to your experiences. Because these abilities cannot be reduced to formulae, some use the word intuition to refer to a strong, resilient, and adaptable understanding.
If you have had formal schooling, you will have learned some habits that have always been useless or maladaptive, or that have since become obsolete. Modern education was designed to suit the needs of industrial employers who valued uniformity and conformity over creativity and adaptability. You will therefore likely find good reason to pursue self-guided lifetime learning from life in addition to formulaic learning that enables you to determine the utility of and to make the most of centralized databases.
Absent understanding, cure is impossible and care is likely to yield only fleeting relief and ephemeral wellbeing. While modern methods of clinical science and medical detection made it possible to delineate the causation of many ailments, moderns have generally wanted to live as they please and to find a doctor or surgeon to patch them up and put them back in place rather than collaborating to remove the causes of illness. In the emerging model, individuals or their guardians resume authority and responsibility for their bodies, establish and sustain basic habits of care and cure, and consult carers in times of need.
Emerging views, frames, and constructs that structure our largely three-dimensional thinking aim to have traction on the human scale and above, for the continuation of the evolved living context, with integration of all existing human wisdom, in biological time, free of human exceptionalism and other errors destructive to the body of life. The fundamental view is biocentrism—that is, valuing and protecting and restoring the body of life by resacralizing it in a panentheistic manner and recognizing it as having greater value than anything created by the human species.
In the emerging paradigm, you thus consult an allopath who can draw on global information as shared in the literature and on local information shared by other patients and colleagues who are facing similar ailments. At the same time, you draw on your particular observations of cause and consequence. You and your allopath can then consider the available information, pursue processes of medical detection, and, with luck and ingenuity and effort, elucidate and interrupt your causal web and so mitigate your ailment. If the causes of your illness are simple or obvious, this process may be quick; if they are not, it may take years, but may still allow you to preserve your existing abilities, to stave off exacerbations or recurrences, or to prevent other ailments.
Even if your illness has done irreparable damage, or has led to a final common pathway disease that cannot be reversed, your elucidation of its causal web may yet enable your cure or facilitate general prevention or care. For example, if you have a fixed cause such as a genetic trait, you may be able to avoid or remove cofactors such as poisons and so render the trait harmless. If you have sustained damage, your body may be more sensitive to environmental hazards and render you able to help others by detecting hazards to which they remain oblivious. You can also take note of the Jungian idea of the wounded healer and aid in the care and cure of others who suffer with ailments like yours.
If the causes of your ailment elude detection or are ambiguous and uncertain—as is most often the case—you may be obliged to “think outside the box.” That is, you may have to look for causes of illness in places and things and qualities that you have deemed irrelevant or rationalized as innocuous. In modern times, as artificial hazards and environmental degradation spread at speeds that far outstrip the detection of their most dire consequences, it is reasonable to consider the possibility that any new and mysterious illness may result from poisoning of the body of the individual or the bodies of species, habitats, and life. Your ability to learn from life may enable you to cure far more than your body.
Self-guided lifetime learning can free you from excessive reliance on your computer, timetables, and received ideas. It will enable you to make good use of your free time and to structure, interpret, and respond to your unplanned experiences. If you lack common sense, creativity, or the adaptability to respond in real time to living systems—and thus to form basic skills for self-guided care and collaborative cure—you can take your illness, your body, and this book as your teachers. If you have done so already, your understanding is probably strong enough for emergence.
Awareness
Awareness is here represented by an image of wings that reminds us of the human fascination with flight, from Icarus to angels to Da Vinci and air and space flight. These wings allow your body to encounter the unknown mysteries of ailments and to make sense of them.
Awareness—also called consciousness—is the least tangible, most expansive, and most elusive aspect of the body. Awareness is the aspect of the sevenfold body that is capable of flight from the beginning of time to the distant future, and from the depths of the ocean and the core of the planet to the stars in the firmament. Awareness is expansive and boundless, and contains your greatest gifts: the ability to pay attention to a chosen object and the capability of concentrating on it. Though awareness, your body can touch the minute and vast and move to any near or distant point in time or space. A relaxed, spacious, and unobstructed awareness supports you in bringing all aspects of the body to bear on your self-care.
Awareness is the locus of the attention and concentration that use your energy and vitality to constitute your focus, which can join your bodily understanding, perceptions, and sensations with flesh or interbeing, states of being or interbeing, and processes of becoming or interbecoming. Without awareness, we live in a world of matter without abstractions necessary for grasping the illness experience or discovering actionable causes.
When your awareness is strong and expansive, it is like a lens that can focus on and influence any point or process in your body. When it is even, unobstructed, and boundless, your focus is free to zoom in on the tiniest particle, take in the face of a beloved friend, or zoom out to encompass the galaxy of stars that brightens the night sky. Awareness is thus a mediator of your self-guided care and of your examination of cause and consequence for the sake of cure.
When your focus is intense and your body is otherwise relaxed, grounded, alert, and receptive, you can give energy and vitality to your focus without leaving your heavenly healing state of being and interbeing or taking away from your becoming and interbecoming. Then you can make optimal use of your focus for self-guided care and cure, and for any other task of any aspect of the body, and so facilitate the processes by which you are coming into closer sync with life in time and creating a new and better life that fulfills your ultimate purpose as a lifework and enduring legacy.