Global Mind Change, HEALING US, Life-centered Vision of Nature

Outline of a life-centered and healing vision of nature

No Comments 04 December 2011

 

Life-centered vision of nature

Outline

of a life-centered

and healing

vision of nature

Nathan Batalion, Global Health Activist, Healingtalks Editor

Introduction: Shifting from left to right brain dominance or what triggered my  personal shift toward a different vision of nature

(Healingtalks) As a child I was a math prodigy. This meant that by age 12 or as a young teenager I was able to master forms of advanced mathematics. Before entering high school I passed a proctored, comprehensive integral and differential calculus final at Fairleigh Dickenson University (accomplished within about 2 months after picking up my first Algebra I book) and later won a regional high school competition in mathematics, and by a wide margin. At age 17, however, I had a high fever and that triggered the equivalent of a stroke. It shut down my left-brain functions almost completely – both verbal and mathematical. I became aphasic, unable speak well in whole sentences. This took me to uncharted territories within. In fact I felt lost and like my world had fallen apart. I dropped out of attending New York University, unable to relate, and for about five years what kept me alive was  lived  in an intentional community located in upstate New York. It was founded upon  a spiritual philosophy left to us by the Russian philosopher Gurdjieff. The teachings of that community essentially taught me how to put my inner observing consciousness very high above – above the left/right brain divide – and to  help me fathom this most disrupting life experience I had gone through.

What I learned

This taught me something critically important. It even forced me to become, though I fought it for years, a worldview renegade, one that a)  stopped believing in the conventional vision of nature  – the math-based and atomic and b) actually formulated an alternative vision that was right-brain rather than left-brain dominant in its vista.

     

 Are YOU right or left brain dominant?

There are simple tests on the web, series of questions, that help determine whether you may be right or left brain dominant.  One of the questions on that link asks: do you prefer algebra over geometry or are you more analytical than visual?  Looking at the above pictures of the left/right brain divide itself, do you understand it better visually or via the pictures on the left or the verbally – the words on the right?    Are you more a  business person who loves to wear a suit and tie and feels comfortable in working in an office cubicle plus revels in making a million… or are you more a hippie who loves to be out in the garden, to   wear lose tie dyes with a flower in the hair  – and has a goal of being a spiritual master  meditating on love, peace and harmony?

                                                                left-brain business man and woman      right brain hippie couple

 

Which above way of dressing, living and thinking do you better relate to?

I once interviewed Viktoras Kulvinkas and asked him what scientific or lab protocol he used at the Hippocrates Health Institute in the early years when they tested different sprouting and living food approaches. I was more than stunned when this former physicist answered that he prayed every night and communed with the Source! One need only look at his book Life in the 21st century – a best-seller filled with the drawing of Peter Max, to sense that he is right-brain dominant person on a high level.

Determining our personally or culturally favorite worldview

Worldviews are supposed to be objective – past personal and cultural biases. Right?

They should nakedly describe the world as is really is – not as we internally might like it to or believe it to be – no doubt!

But what if a whole culture can be tested and found to be either left or right brain dominant?  Is it possible that its internal view of reality is eschewed toward that internal proclivity?  Might there then be a bias, a lack of worldview objectivity, and for the whole of its population and its educational system imbued that view to its young?

Modern lab science is just science. It is not something we challenge or question on a far deeper level.

              crowd of businessmen and womenrainbow tribe  gathering

Is our whole civilization – our collective consciousness – more right or left-brain dominant?

This is not very hard to determine.

It is obvious which side we veer towards dominantly in our culture as a whole. Wall Street rules politics

Thus do politicians, or those who control our culture, wear suits or tie dyes?

Furthermore you can just take a look at how the hippie movement of the 1960′s was co-opted, and  by commercial forces armed with the law and uniformed police. You no longer hear beatle-style folk music dominating the airwaves, and with spiritual overtones.  One of the major steps taken to make this happen, and later in the 1990′s, was a consolidated control of the media via the Telecommunications Act of 1996  – so that the cultural revolution of the 1960′s could never happened again. When I was at an anti-war rally recently, with over a hundred thousand people in Washington DC, it had hardly any corporate media coverage – CNN, ABC, CBS, etc.  Owning even marijuana to see reality in a different way, though this is a healing herb, soon became a felony.

The left-brain dominance of our culture has appeared virtually complete.
boustrophedronox plows a field back and forth

Historically larger and more subtle way of seeing this

The right-brain dominant approach always takes a larger overview to see things in a holistic way.

Keeping this in mind, the internal nature of our language is actually a more important indicator of brain dominance than how we dress on the surface.

Back in ancient Greek times, the Greeks began to add vowels to their written language.

Without vowels, words had multiple meanings and one had to look at the whole connected context to understand what was being conveyed by a writer – thus needing mostly right-brain or holistic skills. Reading the Greek language originally had eye movements from right- to- left, indicating a culture that was right-brain dominant.

But about a hundred years after the introduction of vowels, reading started to become boustrophedron – like an ox plows a field or back and forth (going from right-to-left and then left-to-right and again right-top-left, etc.) – because the mind was too confused as to the dominance to settle upon. About a 150 years after the introduction of vowels (to give each word a more separate and  distinct rather than whole context meaning, reading eye-movements transitioned to settle on being  left-t0-right or left-brain dominant.

This had a HUGE cultural impact.

This corresponded with the beginning of the “Golden Age of Greece” and which, through the worldviews of Aristotle, Plato, Phythagoras and the atomists set the foundations of western civilization.  It took almost two thousand more years, or until the seventeenth century, that we find the adoption of the mathematical vision of nature – and which can be shown to be the very highest of high left-brain dominant worldview views (because math symbols are the high abstract means to separate all elements of consciousness) – or the naturally arising central paradigm of that left-brain dominance and bias!

Lastly, it still another 400 years to develop this culture proclivity – and to see the stark and often dangerous consequences in our daily lives.

bicameral mind

Transcending the divide

The real significance of  going beyond the bicarmel mind – the split brain – understanding the common foundation of these two essential forms of consciousness is that we thereby – and only thereby – can begin to understand what is consciousness itself

Knowing both sides intimately

My experience as a developed left-brain dominant person (a gifted math prodigy and linguist) was instructive in this light. Then my being radically transported to the opposite perspective was ultimately enlightening.  At first I was lost and confused.  Then I was forced to evolve a transcending view of  this divide.  Ultimately I chose to use the right brain’s  – the more raw, deeper and in touch with the nature of consciousness,  to guide the left.

This meant creating a brand new language to teach the left side how to re-see reality in the right brain way (which normally has no language of expression) – the more naked, raw, word-stripped way. It meant evolving a non- math dominated vision of nature.

None of the ancient traditions sufficed for me.

right brain dominanceWhy chose a right-brain dominance and to arrive at a whole brain objectifying view?

Looking at the picture above, could it be possible that knowing exactly how the colors of rainbow separate and reconnect back to white light represents a metaphor for how consciousness functions – and is more significant that understanding atom in the mathematical, left-brain dominant view?

Right brain dominance means the two brains are brought together with the right being the master, the left being the subservie servant.

The left brain has an essentially separative way of seeing reality, the right brain, connective.

What implications does that have for evolving a worldview? Would you rather connect what is most separative (right brain dominance) or the opposite, take apart what is most whole (left-brain dominance)?

species extinction

What if what is most whole in nature is organic life, and which dies when taken apart – so that the most extremely evolved left-brain dominant view might threaten the existence and survival of life on earth – as manifesting with the invention of atomic weapons, the spread of chemical pollution, genetic manipulations, and the extinction of species?

 

Jill Bolte Taylor Stroke of Insight

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor holding a sample brain

Contrasted to Jill Bolte Taylor’s experience

Harvard researcher Jill Bolte Taylor had a stroke that took her into the equivalent of another universe.  A short youtube on her experience has been seen by millions. She also wrote a best-seller book on the subject entitled A Stroke of Insight. T

aylor describes therein her entrance into another  inner world with blissful terms.

My experience and summation thereof was very different.  I decided to look at this experience from above, transcending the right/left brain divide.  From this, as mentioned and the reason why, I became convinced we need a right-brain holistic view to dominate the left. clinical experience tells us the same. When a person has a car accident where the right brain is damaged they become schizophrenic. Their inner world falls apart. When another person has a car accident were the left brain is damaged, they have trouble speaking because they disintegrate or tear their inner consciousness apart – and words, concepts and symbols guide us to do! They are handicapped in the opposite way.

My inner stance, as I regained my verbal and mathematical skills, was to no longer allow these to dominate as they had earlier in my life. I took a trans right-left-brain view and decided on a favorite whole brain view that made far more sense. One cannot connect a vision to wholeness, or bring the two types of inner consciousness together through disintegrative (left-brain dominant) perspectives.  I am certain of this from an ice- cold, freezing impartiality look from above the right/left brain divide.

This gave to me the priceless gift of being able to not only see this but to outline how to exactly and precisely bring these two vistas back together as one. With that we can finally see the objective (non-brain biased) view of our universe!

It is not at all the mathematical view we are familiar with.

  Samuel Batalion

Samuel Batalion, my dear dad, and at the opening ceremony of the Betar School (1947)

Why a brain-detached overview is personally important

There are two ways in which this is vitally important.

The first is on a personal level.

I can explain this best with the example of my own dad’s life. Samuel Batalion was a intelligent and quite vocal person. As pictured above he was an orator and leader. He also had many practical skills in life.  He founded the Betar school after World War II to help teach young Jewish men who had luckily survived the Holocaust. The school taught them  skills for a trade – or to become  a plumber, carpenter, electrician and so on. This gave them hope for a new life.

My dad, however, died of severe Alzheimer’s disease!

Why point this out? Because while he had so many great skills in life, he lacked the one skill I consider most important of all – how best to navigate our inner consciousness not to get lost, not to  not to literally slip into inner darkness. Lose consciousness and you lose all other skill sets. So wouldn’t such a premier skill be important? In fact, might it be the most invaluable of all skills we can have. We can learn the hard way, latter in life, that material possessions are nothing, have no real value, if the life within us slips away to enjoy them.

Sir Isaac newton

Why a brain-detached overview is culturally important

Back in the 17th century, several philosophers introduced the idea that nature cosmically functions like a Grand Clock or is but a mathematical machine.

No one expressed this more cogently than Sir Isaac Newton how ideologically led the way for the transition from the medieval to the modern world – and to the Industrial Revolution. His vision became dominant because he offered to chart the course of stars – a seemingly super-human feat. As one contemporary wrote, “Newton knew more about the cosmos than all of humanity combined.” His knowledge was so mythologized and revered. It didn’t matter than almost no one read or could understand his Principia Natural Mathematica (The Mathematical Principles of Nature) – except other mathematicians and physicists. It still, in my opinion, became the second most influential book of all of western civilization (second only to the Bible) because of its end-game insight – to chart how the earth rotated around the sun. This contradicted the view of the Bible. Genesis tells us that the stars were created to “shine upon the earth” as if the earth was the center of the universe.

With the Bible no longer being the highest or last word, but rather the word of Newton, all of western culture’s foundations were upset, and thus a revolution, a global mind change ensued. This is how Morris Kline describes this unique development in his book, Mathematics, A Cultural Approach:

“Infused with the conviction that reason, personified by mathematics, would not only conquer the physical world but could solve all of man’s problems and should therefore be employed in every intellectual and artistic enterprise, the great minds of the age undertook a sweeping reorganization of philosophy, religion, ethics, literature, and aesthetics. The beginning of new sciences such as psychology, economics, and politics were made during these rational investigations. Our principal intellectual doctrines and outlook were fashioned then, and we still live in the shadow of the Age of Reason….to win victories over nature.”

So powerful was this vast global mind change, that with the dethroning of the Bible came a challenge of Papal authority in Rome to delegate power to Kings and Queens. In one night, the entire royal family of Russia was murdered. The French and American revolution had a similar genesis. All of life changed with the transition from the medieval to the modern world.

This teaches us that nothing can change a culture more powerfully, deeply and widely than a new universal wordview. Absolutely nothing compares.

And there was an exuberant excitement in the air during the 17th century that what had been discovered would unleash a new era of progress – for man to control nature and all of life.  Little did they predict what is really happening 400 years later – a world marked by a) the invention of atomic weapon which can destroy all of life instantaneously, b) ever growing chemical pollution, c) with uncontrolled epidemics of chronic ills, and c) widespread dying of species.

There was one strange thing that happened in that era which should have clued us in that something might go wrong with the vision. Newton died a as a schizophrenic, something akin to developing Alzheimer’s disease or where the inner world falls apart.

Charles Kuen Kao
Charles Kuen Kao (高錕 ), a Nobel Prize Winner in Physics who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease.

Something should have clued us in, four hundred years later, when several Nobel Prize-winning physicists. chemists, and physicians have succumbed to Alzheimer’s disease or dementia. Above is pictured Charles K. Kao because there is a Charles K. Kao Foundation for Alzheimer’s Disease Limited named after him.

Do we need  a new vision of nature – and for what purpose?

I know with 100% or absolute certainty that we do. For me this is the result of a distant,higher-objectifying and detached overviewing of how the two sides of our brain develop their two polar opposite forms of consciousness in a narrow bias – and what is the essential and best way to navigate both to bring their vistas together as one.

It happens that the left brain, developing separative consciousness, can guide us best toward a navigation of the surface view. The right brain, oppositely, can guide us to best navigate wider and more important depths. It is the former orientation by which we understand physics and chemistry – the mathematical way of seeing things. It is the latter by which we  avoid the inner dementia that my dear dad and some of the greatest scientists of our time have experienced.

In fact, we can truly raise, uplift and heal that inner consciousness rather than seeing it slip away as we age.

Wouldn’t that be a most invaluable skill to have, and more valuable even than an apparent external “control” of nature,” of material things, which can so easily slip away from within?

That’s not the only value of this knowledge.

What if it could veer us away from all the developments of modern life that have allowed chronic disease epidemics (cancer, diabetes, arthritis, and so on) that have exploded in our times – and once we understand that on a deep level these are actually inner consciousness or depth ills that manifest symptoms on the surface of our bodies.

The means by which to do all of this is what I call a right-brain dominant vision of nature, the life-and-consciousness centered .

It is a greater, deeper, and more integral fathoming of our cosmos than that of Newton who guided (or misguided) us to the modern world. It veers away from looking at that world as made up of just matter and energy defined mathematically. It also does not hinge on or anchor reality in the look at an atom – and derivatively not in the structure of the periodic table of elements.

William James

William James – Father of  American Psychology

Instead, it is, in my experience, we gain a commanding knowledge of our entire inner world, the ultimate purpose of the science of psychology. Wouldn’t that be something? William James,  father of American Psychology, once stated, essentially, that whoever discovers the nature of “consciousness” will make the greatest of discoveries of all  millenniums.

About the life-and-consciousness-centered worldview or vision of nature?

For brevity and better imagery taking on, I call it the life-centered vision of nature. But more essentially it really
a) defines what is the nature of consciousness and in a guru-like, expert or commanding way. It explains its role within, and how it forms much more – namely the inner essence of all of nature along with the essence of ourselves  that keeps us whole or illness-free and alive.

 foot of a diabetic

The dying foot of a diabetic

Not having this knowledge, we will never be able to consistently avoid consciousness diseases like Alzheimer’s or diabetes,  or where with the latter neuropathy is common in the extremities. Thus one can potentially not feel or be conscious of stepping on a nail or having the life in our feet cells and tissues die and fall apart or disintegrate.

Brian Clement, head of Hippocrates Health Institute, and which applies conscious healing principles, noted that in his nearly half a century of experience treating hundreds of thousands of patients he has never seen a single diabetes type-II patient who has not reversed their condition using his therapies. That is what you call a commanding knowledge and more significant than knowing the clock-like mechanical motion of the earth around the sun – what is only a surperficial knowledge.

What I want to thus impress thus upon the reader is that such knowledge is real. It is not about things that happen accidentally or appear as illusionary (wishful thinking induced). It is not empty philosophy but a knowledge to assuredly guide the navigation of our inner terrains – not to get lost, not to slip into inner darkness.

In order to communicate this to others, my main challenge has always been one of simplicity in expression. This is necessary because it is a whole brain and unifying view.

Essene Gospel of PeaceHistorical Perspectives

Many ancient cultures, on all global continents, had attained a life-centered view. This is perhaps because all of nature around them appeared alive. Also the living forces were sacred as they kept all alive in an interconnected and interdependent weave or family of life. Many of these ancient traditions were trampled upon or obliterated, especially by the Crusades. Coming into modern times, we have little knowledge that survives about them.  But most notably, we do have a record of the vision of the ancient Essenes, a Judea-Christian sect, a group of healers who counted among them Jesus Christ, and who had a distinctly and powerful life-and-consciousness centered view. This survives in the form of the dead sea scrolls and their writings are more often called The Essene Gospels.

The Outline

Here is my offering of a simple outline that helps to present this vision.

I – FIRST PRINCIPLES


Planet-Earth

Planet Earth – an awesome video showing countless and magnificent life forms which

universally share one miraculous gift – sentience, awareness or consciousness

 

Central concepts

  • LIFE ITSELF
    Imagine life lies at the core of nature
  • CONSCIOUSNESS WITHIN LIFE
    Imagine consciousness lies at the core of life making up its universal essence

(more pic’s to be added to the rest of the text later, please revisit)

WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS

  • Imagine consciousness is the universal relationship of connection in nature
  • the principle of connection itself
  •  what connects all things to each other.

 

2) HIGHEST PRINCIPLE
The absolute highest reigning principle in this worldview and never subordinate (similar to the posture of  the Biblical God in the medieval times or to mathematics as supposed  the “last word” or defining of reality schemata in our modern times. Sometimes we call this also the supreme reigning central paradigm of a given or chosen worldview. It defines how all the elements are connected to each other and to create a chosen one-ing perspective – what we call a resulting or thereby constructed inner “worldview.”

a) PLACED FULLY ABOVE
As a result, consciousness is here conceptually or ideologically and literally or consciously and intentionally placed above all other mental conceptions or to consciously observe in practice how  words or concepts and symbols are formed by our conceptualization faculty – which is usually the left brain (though it can switch sides in about 10-15% of the population). We observe how our inner consciousness forms separate concepts and symbols to supposedly best understand the world to thereby navigate awareness. Consciousness is placed then fully above this process, and for both all religion and secular ideas without exception. Nothing is left sacred, including math symbols whose highest placement and claimed supreme navigation role in the modern view then becomes naturally challenged and as we shall see, hugely demythologized.

b) TRANS-SECULAR & NON-MYSTICAL
Consciousness so fully placed above becomes a more pure means to arrive at a trans-secular and trans-religious/mystical stroke of deepest insight.

c) INTEGRAL
Consciousness can integrally function as above only due to it being a universal relationship of connection. If it universally (and with true and integral universality) connects us to all things and connects all things to each other or among themselves,  then we can impartially and fully move to a mountain-peak view of the Oneness of all things being connected everywhere or universally as One.

This is in contrast to any culturally or personally chosen view – a partial-view or biased view – one connecting. Only to  a favorite or favored view of reality – and that is often forced upon people to believe in because the view is unnatural.

d) SCIENCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Our consciousness-centered view can then form its own true and truer science of consciousness, and derivatively of nature. Later we can explore why the conventional study of consciousness, and derivatively nature – has been made subordinate to a mathematical view (as required by the mathematical worldview being dominant and supreme). This means that the study of consciousness is ever subject to lab measurement to supposedly fathom what is consciousness. But this cannot lead us toward this goal integrally if consciousness is the universal relationship of connection in nature. It then has no separate beginning and end points to measure. Again consciousness has to remain the one and only reigning principle, the literal the “master” to form its own proprietary worldview – and all other conceptualizations then become the “servant” to that view. No exceptions, no matter how supposedly “holy,” “sacred” or “unquestionable” those higher conceptualizations claim to be.

3) AN INTEGRAL “INDIVISIBILITY PRINCIPLE

If consciousness is the indivisibility principle in nature  then the atom is not. And the latter fact, that the atom is not indivisible but has parts, has long been proven by countless discoveries seen under an electron microscope. Yet that was postured as an unshakeable belief by Newton who claimed the ” indivisible atom was a divine creation of God.  It was a belief not grounded in our sense nor good logic. Still the mathematical vision’s atomic view is  held onto for dear life – for otherwise the vision might collapse – as it rightly should. Conventionally the atom remains central to the understanding of nature, as nature’s so-called building block.   Here the true indivisibility principle is consciousness, and  for very deep reasons that are also very simple. Only what universally and thus integrally and everywhere connects cannot be ever separated. This then holds true and has to hold true not only at every level of magnification (which the atomic view does not) but for the blended blur in between magnification levels artificially isolated or separated by our minds – or at every attempt to slice apart whatever we see under a microscope, and its tunneling of our vision brought into sharply cut and thus separate focus – or past the smallness of any perceptions within our consciousness.

_______________________________________________________________________

II – SECONDARY PRINCIPLES

Forming an integral worldview and piercing what is non-integral

    • INTEGRAL WORLDVIEW- Posturing a principle of universal connection to connect all things is an intellectually integral posture. It is not subject to internal contradiction – or the by-product of many contradictions….an essentially  illusionary view (one that due to its contradictions and illusion will disintegrate the integrity of consciousness)..
    • OPPOSITE OR WHAT IS MOST NON-INTEGRAL
      • A HUGE MISTAKE – Posturing a principle of universal separation to connect all things is obviously not intellectually integral and if believed in, a terrible and very foolish mistake.  I dare say it is stupid. This takes a long explanation because it is so vastly counter-cultural to what we have all been taught to be believe. And such deep beliefs struggle to survive within us, like toxic parasites holding on for deep life when we detoxify.
      • ULTIMATE INTERNAL REVERSAL ILLUSION – So imagine it is a starkest of all reversal illusions (and the greatest of all inner reversal illusions revealed or pierced through only by placing consciousness above) to believe that principles of universal separation should guide our connecting of all things to form a worldview. It’s like trying to use a chainsaw to glue all things together.  Imagine it is the ultimate right/left brain illusion to tackle, to see through – but it is not seen through either by a person or culture that is left-brain dominant. This is because the left brain essentially separates all elements of consciousness – so that process seems to be the natural, and to reflect the natural order of things.
      • AN ILLUSION THAT HAS CONSEQUENCES – Lastly imagine that there is such a view and that it has more powerful consequences than any vast external illusions – such as the cosmic reversing of helio-centricity with geo-centricity (the sun centered with the earth-centered view).  Unraveling this external illusion lead to the creation of our modern world, with vast consequences. Unraveling this yet greater illusion has predictably yet great consequences still.
      • WHAT IS WRONG WITH THE MATH-CENTERED VISION – So what is this all about? Shockingly,  the principle of universal separation is symbolized conceptually by the number “1″ – as found in pure mathematics and as a foundational concept in and of mathematics. One (1) this or one (1)that, applied universally we fins is a concept that invariably helps to separate an element of consciousness. Take three apples and blend them together and you can no longer count each as “1″ in the applesauce. The same is symbolized by a point in spacial mathematics …or what we call simply “geometry” or the measuring of space. The “point” is a conceptual means to actually “disintegrate thoroughly” or separate all of space universally into separate points. The two views – of pure mathematics and of geometry – are merged or married together and very brilliantly in Cartesian geometry. Cartesian geometry formed the basis for Fehmi’s formulas that created the atomic bomb – to indeed separate space – and as could have been predicted many centuries prior as a consequence of that worldview.
      • THE MATHEMATICAL WORLDVIEW AS A WORLDVIEW - But worldviews don’t see themselves as worldviews, as biases. Nevertheless, what we visualize we create. Just as the atom is supposedly…that is supposedly according to the mathematical view ….forms the building block of nature (“the atom, what God created on the first day of creation” according to Newton).. so the number “1,” the indivisible one or 1/1=1 – and all related symbols that are built up around the sacrosanct number “1″ (such as 2,3,4…and fractions) or concepts indirectly referring to the same set of symbols (like using the symbols “xyz” to replace missing numbers)… altogether forms the mathematical worldview intellectually. Then this worldview is applied to all of nature as not a worldview but the worldview. Newton’s “Principia Mathematica Naturalis” is not Natural Principles According to Mathematics but The Mathematical Principles of Nature. This forms the tenants of the mathematical worldview
        • KEY QUESTION – The key question arises, is that viewpoint really and truly -past cultural mythologizing – an objective, impartial and integrally wise inner stance?
          When consciousness is the arbiter of that very critical question (or is supremely placed above the pointing paths of math symbols) ….and to sacrilegious observe and judge their paths…what we find is that we can and even must demythologize that culturally assumed worldview.
        • UNEXPECTED ANSWERS CAN BE UPSETTING - Needless to say and believe this can be hugely upsetting to a physicist, chemist or geneticist (who holds the wisdom of a super-idolized icon like Einstein to be supreme – and will fight tooth and nail not to upset and pull the foundations out from under their worldview. They rather want to continue to follow faithfully from behind the pointing path again of these held-to-be sacrosanct symbols, and without further wise or challenging thoughts. On the other hand, their worldview is not just culturally chosen. It is the highest of left-brain integrating visions. But this is not enough to justify its overall dominance for we find, not  surprising, that several Nobel Prize winners have died of Altzheimer’s disease or essentially that the mathematical view did not safely or effectively navigate their depths our consciousness in a rescuing way. Imagine this is not accidental, or that patients in nursing homes fed chemical synthetics walk the halls like zombies, Imagiine the underlying math-based vision is essentially flawed  – very foundation of modernity – and very, very seriously flawed as a worldview vision.This means it needs to be overthrown or dethroned, exactly like the medieval view when contradictions and illusions were discovered. But why and more importantly how can we make this global mind change?  The worldview which we have inherited from the 17th century, and perhaps from ages prior as well, not only can be shown to be not integral – to harbor contradictions and illusions – but to be danger-filled due to its core contradictions being applied universally.
        • PLACING CONSCIOUSNESS ABOVE TO SEE SUCH CONSEQUENCES - Because Newton, Galileo and Descartes never really, in my view, placed their consciousness far above the use of math symbols,  to search for impeccable impartiality, trusting instead the unquestioned choice to follow the lead of mathematical guidance – and coming out of an age of faith – and following that to wherever this ideological posture might lead our consciousness – they collectively were pitch-blind to how dark a choice they had made and what the centuries-later implications would be – such as the future invention of atomic or nuclear weapons. To them chemical pollution was something unthinkable that wasn’t brought to our consciousness until the 1960′s (via works like Silent Spring). And Rachel Carson in the ending of that book refers to a primordial philosophy creating assaults on nature p but without pointing fingers.  We just trust that worldview implicitly, much as a modern physician prescribing chemical drugs trusts what he or she does.  Ultimately math symbols, naked seen, are simply universal symbols for how best to separate all elements of consciousness universally. And one cannot best connect a vision hereby. Its impossible.
        • TOWARD A CULTURE OF DEATH - For the past four hundred years what we have been guided or misguided to is
          • A CLEAR REVERSAL OF TRUTHS – and with consequences that are hugely global as well as non-sustainable.
          • DEATH AND UNCONSCIOUSNESS-CENTERED VISION - This is because we are everywhere materializing the very extreme opposite principles that brings out not life and consciousness ( nature’s essence to the surface) but rather and again the polar opposite -  death and unconsciousness in nature.  This creates a disintegrating culture of death and where inner life is disintegrating as well, or a zombie unconsciousness. It is not surprising in such a mislead world tat we increasingly see the wholesale death or extinction of species.

III – TERTIARY PRINCIPLES

    • RECAP – After  a) consciousness is postured as the singular supreme central paradigm, a road-map-constructing principle to re-navigate consciousness toward its own essence and toward the perception of Oneness, what is itself a life-centered vision of nature ; and b) that vision is seen as having integrity – we then can proceed to trust that view to move much further along – to move down the mountain peak to define the first duality of that vision on the road to the bottom or the diversities of all of consciousness experience. Obviously that first duality is not going to be matter and energy defined mathematically. But what then?
    • SEPARATION AND CONNECTION
      • PRINCIPLE OF SEPARATION – think of it as any element of consciousness (a surface appearance because consciousness is  indivisible) as the essential movement away from consciousness’ essence and the experience of undivided Oneness. A physical metaphor for the nature of consciousness is any body of water which dissolves the separation of separate drops. The can appear separate on the surface, defined by separate surfaces, but lose the separativity inside the body of water.
      • PRINCIPLE OF CONNECTION – think of it as any element of consciousness (a non-surface appearance or one having depth integrity) as the essential movement toward consciousness’ essence, its Oneness.
      • FIRST DUALITY IS DEFINED IN RELATIONSHIP ONLY TO THE ONENESS - and nothing else (or arbitrarily chosen by a culture’s ideological bias and that a culture becomes attached to).
      • CONNECTIVE MOVEMENT OF CONSCIOUSNESS IS SINGULAR and thus simple in nature (being a movement toward oneness and dissolving complexities).
      • SEPARATIVE MOVEMENT OF CONSCIOUSNESS IS DUAL - creating the beginning of separate and clashing complexities.
        • SEPARATIVE CONSCIOUSNESS HAS ITS OWN FIRST DUALITYIt is connective separation vs pure separation. This involves a connected spectrum, like rainbow colors, and of moving from partial unconsciousness and partial death at one end to full unconsciousness and full death at the other. Again the duality is solely defined by the essential nature of our world, and nothing else as a personal or culturally chosen view.  These become the true tertiary or third-level principles of this life-centered view.If we define “healing” in a living organism to be the process of inwardly connecting and reconnection that which has become torn or asunder, then an truly integral (and universally connecting, not separating, including with contradictions) view of our world is critically important for all healing processes. In fact, it becomes a means for re-guiding and revolutionizing the whole of our healing arts – and even healing consciousness itself.

IV – WHERE SUCH PRINCIPLES LEAD US

  • AWAY FROM THE SOUL OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION – The exciting new natural science, the new proprietary vision of nature of the 17th century, was applied the most, and the most effectively, to the creation of machines.  The underlying vision was the  heart and soul of the Industrial Revolution – as well as our essentially commercial and materialistic (possessing separate things driven) society where human beings are guided to relate monetarily to each other and to nature in creating “progress.” That progress has some merit, as the mathematical view has some intrinsic merit in a servant, not master status and in reversal roles because it represents a reversal illusion.  Thus machines will objectively, if superficially, help us avoid what is not healing, mechanical chores, and this double negative that yields a superficial positive. But making our lives very deeply mechanical will destroy life itself. And we are in the process of doing just that, especially with genetic engineering. Also machines made of separate parts model the essential nature of the underlying vision that created them – rather than represent the deepest universal “Principia” or laws of nature.
  • TOWARD THE SOUL OF A NEW AGE OF HEALING – Similarly the life-and-consciousness centered vision materializes its own best modelling but in an exactly opposite direction to that of just creating artificial machines that never exist in pristine nature. It models itself via the greater and greatest healing of living organisms – or in the healing arts made integral, curative and brought to perfection  (which is the opposite of what is presently the case). In an Age of Healing, the perfection of healing, of being connected as one – and which happens through a development of higher consciousness, becomes the primary collective goal of life – not the accumulation of money and material things as the key to a progress that illusioary – and eventually falls apart because the foundation is but quicksand.

V – HEALING ARTS BECOME PRIMARY – RE-GUIDED & CONSTRUCTED

When the guiding principles of a worldview tend to connect us to the essence of nature, we are reconnected to our own essence and thereby heal. Under the guidance of a life-and-consciousness-centered vision, what kind of practices will heal us and which will not?

  • RE-UNDERSTANDING ILLNESS – If the foundation of nature is consciousness, separative and connective, and not matter and not matter and energy defined mathematically and charting its mechanical motions, what does this imply for the healing arts?
    • EARLY STAGES OF ILLNESS – The early stages of illness tend to be inflammatory or acid because what is fiery, created by friction, represents the byproduct of “connective separation” – oppositional relationships that generate and fuel fire.  It is the beginning of the burning out of life and consciousness. This parallels how the fiery colors of the rainbow are the first to come about as color separations come out of white light, the colorless Oneness of light.
    • LATER STAGES OF ILLNESS - The later stages of illness involve the movement toward pure separative consciousness or unconsciousness and death. We see this when a diabetic patient had neuropathy and no longer feels anything as a foot steps on a nail.
    • REVERSING CHRONIC/SYSTEMIC ILLNESS – CURING THE INCURABLE  – Only a vision that integrally understands the healing process, the re-movement within to Oneness, can guide the curing of chronic systemic ills.  There are several major and effective paths up this mountain. All of them involve the regaining of what is life and consciousness in the body. Overall this involves the practice of natural healing – rather than using drugs, surgery, radiation and genetic modifications – and based on giving the natural healing arts their own supportive worldview with integrity – rather than trying to justify natural therapies with the very worldview that undermines and leads to a supplanting and destroying of the natural healing arts.
      • FOUR MAJOR APPROACHES – Bring the best of living forces into the body (nutrition), take out the worst (detoxification), circulate both (exercise) and mind/body work to keep mind and consciousness on track.
        • NUTRITION – This worldview advocates for a living foods diet, full of sprouts, green juices, green blends and superfoods – and that help alkalize what is acidic in the body and tend to be anti-inflammatory. This includes a low-glycemic diet. The simplest of green plants, the grasses, tend to naturally be the most healing or reconnective – and in the form of their juices. These are oxygen rich and we need to bring  more oxygen into our bloodstream.
          • The concept of “oxygen,” while it belongs to the chemical/atom model of nature, is at the same time a bridge to the consciousness model. Having sufficient oxygen within, and in balance, is a means to reconnectively heal. When something oxygenates, it loses its life force unless there are anti-oxidants to ward that off. Thus freshly squeezed drinks should be drunk soon after making, and so the rest of the universe, which wants the same doesn’t get it and the force is released inside our bodies.
        • DETOXIFICATION – Here we want to make our overall lifestyle organic, avoiding synthetic chemicals (the products of the 17th century worldview) and work to remove these same chemicals (not ingest more in the form of drugs or IVs) and other life-toxins from our interiors. We want to remove what undermines our consciousness, or takes out the light from within. This can be done through fasting, exercising to a sweat, taking a sauna, doing some special liquid cleanses, hydrating with pure water, taking enemas and colonics, as well as via skin brushing and lympth stimulations – among many other means.
        • EXERCISE – This will improve circulation and, with aerobic exercises, will bring more oxygen into the body. Strength exercises will help build bone density, but the overall aim in healing is not to just develop separate muscles, as if the body was just a machine. It is to help heal and strongly carry the life force.
        • MIND/BODY – Meditations, visualizations, realigning our worldview, healing our emotions, reducing stress or conflicts in life – all are valuable mind/body approaches to support healing.

VI – TESTING OUR WORLDVIEWS IN NATURE & THE HEALING ARTS

Because different worldviews each claim to best connect a vision of nature to Oneness, we can test each in nature – as well as in the healing arts meant to reconnect us.

  • TESTING IN ISOLATED DOMAINS – In our modern world we measure (find beginning and end points of consciousness separation) and then test things in intentional isolation (as in a test tube) from the interaction of separate elements defined atomically/to fit the mathematical model of nature. We use fire (Bunsen burners) to effect this separation to greater heights in isolating chemicals.  This approach is especially applied to multi-million dollar drug testing – that is to the testing of patented drugs in isolation because patenting creates uniquely separate identity in the market place to focus monetary attention upon. We then look at the impact on isolate symptoms. But does that tell us what heals?
  • TESTING NON-SEPARATIVELY – If we take a random and large mix of chemicals in order to test not one or another chemical in isolation but the whole chemical/math-based view of nature – and through that mix into a living environment like a compost heap, what happens? The compost heap is here chosen because all plants decay therein to form the building elements for all other plants in an unbroken circle of unity. So what happens with the large random mix of chemicals thrown in. We create a supertoxic waste site were all life there in dies and nature’s defining circle of unity is broken. In short the vision flunks out test in a more natural, rather than artificial environment.  In short, the isolative testing deceives. And part of the deceiving terminology is saying that what harms and even kills us is just a “side-effect.” It is not what is focused upon in isolative, non-holistic, non-objective testing.

VII  GREENING & HEALING OUR WORLD TO DEPTHS

We cannot green out world to depths without first greening and healing our ill worldview.

  • ARCHITECTURAL METAPHORS – With a worldview that forms the dominant roadmap to our lives, you can see that dominance revealed in physically in soaring forms of architecture.Thus at the head of Wall Street is Trinity Church. Built in the 17th century to represent the ideology of the Church of England, the medieval view, with the steeple pointed to God, it was originally the highest reigning building in Manhattan. This has long been dwarfed by insurance, brokerage and the like office buildings – representing a different worldview.  George Washington knelt in Trinity Church, praying there to bring about a new world order.
  • GREENING & HEALING OUR WORLD TO ITS DEPTHS – If we want to transform the world to its depths, this means not just recycling or saving energy (doing external things) but inwardly to our depths transforming our entire consciousness of the world – of what will make us more depth-connected to nature rather than more separate. We might need to question the universal presence of asphalt and cement, in City environs, covering the living earth. Cities were the places where monetary forces attracted people to live, from rural environment, to engage in the Industrial Revolution. But what if that revolution was based on a false foundation. Now we then need to thus reconnect the guiding worldview or whatever inwardly has been tearing us apart from nature. Choosing the highest symbols for separating all elements of consciousness is about the absolute worst choice for a vision’s supreme central paradigm – and not only worst and simultaneously most dangerous for potentially destroying all of life on earth.
  • TWO OPPOSITE PATHS, TOWARD AND AWAY FROM HEALING – Such a worldview needs to be challenged, its dominance overturned and made subservient to a better view. If we connect what is most separative (right brain dominance) we heal what is most ill and threatened in our world. If we do the opposite, or separate what is most connected, we destroy conscious, organic life on earth. That has been our 400 year course, in essence, with superficial appearance of progress. One view creates a world of growing health pandemics and species extinctions and the other the opposite – toward an Age of Healing.
  • SUPPORTING LIFE AND CONSCIOUSNESS - We thus need to support, not undermine, the greatest healing and promoting of our  lives, of our life’s consciousness, its essence and that of all of nature – and in order to not only heal ourselves but sustain the sacred living world that surrounds us -  interconnected and interdependent as One.

DEDICATION

This blog post was written on the eve of a Memorial to Melinda Lichter Elliott, my partner of four years and who recently passed. It is an expression of gratefulness, for Melinda, among other things, helped first set up raw-wisdom.com and which introduced to the world the life-centered vision of nature as here outlined.

RELATED BOOKS

RELATED ARTICLES

VIDEOS

One man’s expression of the adoration of Life – part of his life-centered view, after having experienced war. The principal or highest adoration and reverence for life was common in the pre-modern cultures that were largely trampled upon, including that of the American Indians.

 

My early video that expresses the life-centered vision of nature

HEALING US, Life-centered Vision of Nature

Advocating a Life-Centered Vision of Nature

No Comments 19 October 2011

 Life-centered vision of nature

Advocating a

life-centered

vision of nature

Nathan Batalion, Global Health Activist, Healingtalks Editor


We are in the process of awakening from a culture of death.”

Dr. Gabriel Cousens

(Healingtalks) The following article by Harvey Sindima, a Presbyterian minister, is a very exciting find.

Here he advocates something I have been so immensely passionately about and for educating countless others for decades. This refers to the urgent need to shift deep within to a  “life-centered vision of nature” and from the mechanical (death-centered) as a ruinous and bankrupt view.

Sindima, as a professor of philosophy and religion at Colgate University, really hits the nail on the head. There is hardly anything more determinative of our overall self-destructive global path than the essential worldview we currently have in western civilization – and how  our cultural imperialism undermined wiser indigenous approaches.

From the Mechanical to the Life-centered Vision

In other blog post I have outlined the intellectual flaws of the whole notion that nature is essentially mechanical (why that vision is both illusionary and contradictory, and why it can’t guide us effectively toward real progress. It rather deceptively leads us to our collective demise) and how the life-centered view is the more  integral (non-contradictory) alternative understanding of the world we live in.

Great Article Discovery

With this understanding in mind, I was hugely thrilled to find the article posted below and to further share this with our many regular readers.

Community of Life

Note that the title and ending summary of the article spell out the link between a different life-centered cosmic understanding (from an African perspective) with the promotion also of alternative communities in contrast to our competitive, materialistic, exploiting commercial society.

This really does follows the logic of a wider life-centered view

This is also why we live what we teach or have started the Raw-Wisdom Community as a model for alternative living. So here is this exciting article:

Community of Life:

Ecological Theology

in African Perspective

By Harvey Sindima, Professor of Philosophy and Religion, Colgate University
Originally posted at Religion-online.org

(Healingtalks) That Christian theology throughout its history has been transformed by sources outside of Christianity is a well-known fact. That it should be open to transformation through the insights of the various traditions, that it should be open to the possibilities of creative transformation by contact with the wisdom and vision of other sources, is highly controversial. Many of the authors in this book, however, are committed to such openness as an essential part of their own Christianity. Moreover, most would argue that we must repent of some aspects of the Christian experience that have been exploitative or destructive to peoples and to nature. In this essay African theologian Harvey Sindima proposes a traditional African view of life and community, which opposes the mechanistic world view that has so dominated Christianity in the West since the Enlightenment. It is the mechanistic world view, imported to Africa, which has been largely responsible for many eco-crises faced by Africa and which has led us in many ways to the global crises we face today.

How we think about the world affects the way we live in it. In particular, our understanding of nature — our cosmology — affects the way we understand ourselves, the way we relate to other people, and, of course, the way we relate to the earth and other forms of life. For some time the people of Africa have been influenced by a cosmology inherited from the West: the mechanistic perspective that views all things as lifeless commodities to be understood scientifically and to be used for human ends. Yet these people have an alternative way of looking at the world, an alternative cosmology, which can better serve their needs for cultural development and social justice in an ecologically responsible context. This alternative way might be called a life-centered way, since it stresses the bondedness, the interconnectedness, of all living beings. In what follows I will (1) examine the sort of cosmology imposed on African thinking by the West and (2) explore the traditional African view of creation and life as a healthy alternative to this vision. The chapter is divided into two sections corresponding to these aims.

The Problem The Mechanistic World View

The problems that are arising from a misuse of science and technology — our loss of ecological balance, for example — demand that we look seriously at different ways of thinking and living in the world. The present ways of understanding the world and the models of living informed by these views are leading humanity to self-destruction. The African concept of the bondedness of life, to which I will return in the second part of this chapter, is a viable alternative that could provide a foundation for a doctrine of creation and for the transformation of society. If a vision of the bondedness of all life informed and regulated the structures and actions of government and church, it would transform the way socio-political, economic, and ecological decisions were made. The ministries of the church — preaching, pastoral care, and the church’s general involvement in the life of the people and nature — would be transformed.

What prevents the traditional vision of the bondedness of all things from influencing government policies and church ministries in Africa? The answer to this all-important question obliges us to analyze the last two centuries or so of Africa’s socio-political biography. During that period the West intensified its contacts with Africa because of the growing demand for African resources and labor overseas. The early titles of the African novelist Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease, capture what happened in the two centuries following this intensified contact. Achebe’s novels show the African attempt to fight against European domination of thought and values.

The West introduced a system of thought and a manner of living new to Africa. This system of thought manifested itself in various ways, particularly in a cultural imperialism, which was taught in schools and preached in the churches. Any system of domination uses three modes of control: coercion and reward; dependence; and thought control (Baker). The last mode is the most subtle of all forms and is a technique that seeks to uproot a people and impose on that people a value system different from their own, doing so until the people become obsessed with the values so imposed. The higher one’s education, the greater his or her disorientation. This disorientation process begins with corrupting thought and language, for people interpret and understand their experience or reality, that is, their cosmology, through these media. Consequently, people’s emotions and relationships become conditioned by a new “reality.” If a people’s thought system is corrupted, their value system is destroyed; the “world” or cosmology that informs their way of life has been ruined. This corruption continues as long as the people do not come to a realization of who they are. Without such self-consciousness a people cannot reject the disorienting language, that is, the process of alienation becomes total. This is what Western cultural imperialism sought to do to Africans.

With the imposition of Western cultural views, the African hermeneutical process — the process by which African people appropriated their own heritage — became so impaired that the Africans ceased to understand their world through their own cultural system or through the symbolic interpretation given by their cosmology. Today this impairment prevents the traditional concept of the bondedness of life from being an organized logic informing African life and practice.

In this chapter I use the word mechanistic to refer to that view of the world and its attendant manner of living that informed the thinking and behavior of the Westerners who brought this impairment. The mechanistic view takes the world to be like a machine with many parts, each working according to the laws of nature. To understand the world, one has only to know these laws. Society, as well, is conceived as a megamachine1 in which nature and people are objectified. The model of living in this megamachine is accordingly mechanical. People are seen as atomistic individuals whose interactions and interrelationships are valued according to function and utility alone. Feelings and emotional needs are not important. Hence, concern and care do not enter everyday living. Moral conduct in a mechanistic society is often guided by self-interest, and often there is no agreement on what is “moral.” Mechanistic society undermines the ties that bind persons and their communities to one another and to the cosmos.

The mechanistic perspective which has now shaped Africa itself has a history, originating in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with work in philosophy and science by thinkers such as Descartes, Bacon, Newton, and others. In this era, nature was reduced to mathematics or transformed into quantitative physical phenomena which could be grasped by rationality. Nature was purely other and merely material to be subjugated and manipulated. It had only instrumental value, determined by the extent to which people could use it. With this vision of nature in place, the stage was set for the rise of materialistic philosophy and its attendant manner of life. This way of life has captivated much of Western civilization ever since, and has been exported to all places this civilization has gone in its quest of material resources and to fulfill its expansionist philosophy.

Part of the mechanistic perspective involves adherence to the myth of progress. For Descartes, Bacon, and Newton, science implied unlimited growth. Technology became the application of the rules of nature established by science to specific needs for human ends. Through science and technology, human mastery over nature seemed complete and progress assured.

The notion of progress has been very compelling in Western civilization. Many believed progress was the way in which misery would be eliminated in the world. However, as the centuries have shown, the alliance of progress, science, and technology has not eliminated misery. On the contrary, destitution has emerged and the future of all creation hangs in the balance. Progress through (industrial) technology creates exploitation of resources and people and has often damaged the ecological balance and threatened the livelihood of those who depend upon that balance. This alliance of progress, science, and technology has led to social, ecological, and spiritual bankruptcy.

Exploitation

Let us consider some examples of this exploitation. First, the ivory trade. The demand for ivory abroad is the reason for the large decrease of elephants in Africa. But elephants play a very important role in the ecological balance. They contribute significantly to the welfare of other animals. Elephants are the only animals with an extra sense to locate water in the ground. With their tusks elephants make a hole in the ground to get at water as deep as three feet below the surface. Elephants drink about sixty-five gallons of water at a given time. They also like mud because they play and bathe in it. Furthermore, mud serves as moisturizer for their unusually dry skin. Because of this great need for water, elephants make a hole in the ground large enough for their massive bodies. In the process they make a pool from which other animals find water they need. This explains why many animals are found in areas where elephants are in large numbers. Kill elephants for their tusks to satisfy aesthetic beauty abroad, and many animals will die of thirst at home. The ecological balance to which elephants have contributed is destroyed.

Ecological balance is also destroyed when people want to take more from nature at one time than nature’s internal mechanism allows for the balance of the system. Science has the ability to promote life when rightly applied, but its potential to destroy ecological systems is great. Informed by marine biologists, an effort was made in the 1960s to increase tonnage of fish caught in Lake Victoria, Africa’s largest lake. To increase tonnage, marine biologists recommended introduction of Nile perch, some of which grow to be six feet long. The perch took to the lake with a vengeance and have destroyed scores of all fish. Once again, the ecological balance was changed. It does not take much thinking to know that the introduction of the perch into Victoria had a negative result for the people who depend on the lake for their livelihood and protein. The desired increased tonnage is still in the future!

Attempts for high productivity may be appropriate, but the price and who will pay the price must always be taken into account. Usually it is those already struggling to make ends meet who pay the price for national gambles. Science, or at least its technological application, has much to answer for in Africa in this respect. In the name of high productivity Africans were encouraged to use fertilizers. Most of these fertilizers were not tested for the particular soils in which they were being used. This resulted in the use of the wrong types of fertilizers. Consequently, soils were burnt with the wrong salts applied to them and made unable to produce as much as had been hoped.

Malawi

Malawi, my own country, provides a more specific example of some of the problems identified above. In Malawi the staple diet for a large population of the country is made from corn flour. In an attempt to increase production of corn, agriculture experts recommended introduction of a hybrid corn, Malawi Hybrid, commonly known as MH 12, 15, or 32. The numbers stand for specific hybrid categories. This corn grows two to three long cobs with big ears on one stock, and it grows faster than the traditional corn. Its big ears, however, are softer and therefore absorb water much more quickly than the traditional corn. Because of its softness and quick absorption of water, MH 15 and the others get rotten very fast. Insects quickly infest the ear. To preserve it for some time, even for a few months, insecticides have to be used. For reasons best known to agricultural “experts” in the country or because of economic considerations, the insecticide commonly used by farmers or stocked by local farmers’ clubs is dichlorodiphenyl-trichloroethane (DDT). How safe is DDT for human consumption? Furthermore, this breed of corn is unsuitable for the tropics because of the high rainfall these areas get. The corn begins to rot even before it is harvested. For Malawi, the problem is compounded by the fact that rain water permeating through the walls of traditional granaries gets to the corn. The walls of traditional granaries are made of bamboo or twigs and their roofs are thatched grass. A roof on top of the granary prevents the corn from direct exposure to rain but does very little to keep it from getting rotten. Thus a family that worked very hard for months may find it has less food to carry it through to the next harvest because all its corn is rotten. Worse still, the family will have no money, yet it has to pay back a loan from the local farmers’ club from which it got the MH 15 seed. All this, for high productivity!

The result of these and other examples has been suffering on the part of people and other creatures. Until people learn to be responsible in their relations with nature, until people realize that they are a part of nature and that nature is part of them, unnecessary suffering will abound. People need to learn to take care of nature.2

Responsibility of Experts and of Western Christianity

The examples I have given above indicate what happens when moral responsibility is replaced by greed, and when the mechanistic perspective prevails. Over the past two centuries the mechanistic concept of the world and its attendant manner of living, a manner of living inundated with greed, has destroyed the African system of thought and values; it has ruined our vision of and interaction with nature. Our ability to interpret the world as we understood it and live accordingly has been weakened; not only has our sense of basic values been affected but our very vision of life has been undermined. Our very identity has experienced a crisis.

Illustrative of this identity crisis has been an overreliance on mechanistically inclined “experts” at the expense of trusting in the intelligence of traditionally minded African people. For example, in the last few decades the crisis has been compounded by the recommendations that Africa has received from the “development experts.” Indeed, the very concept of development has its roots in the notion of progress and is essentially a materialist philosophy bent on unlimited growth of exploitation and accumulation. The African bureaucrats and political elite who operate within the Western vision of the world continue the philosophy of accumulation under the heading of development. This explains why politicians and the bureaucratic elite are unable to draw on our concept of the bondedness of life as they decide on national policies.

Even Christianity cannot be excused. Christianity, though a Middle-Eastern phenomenon, came to Africa in the last century as part and parcel of Western culture and civilization. That being the case, Christianity only compounded the problem of the crisis of values for Africans. Through preaching and education churches changed traditional value systems. As traditional values crumbled, the hermeneutic ability of our people became deeply affected. This is to say, Christianity weakened or impaired our ability to interpret and reconstruct systems of values and norms that give meaning to our lives. All the more important that Africans, particularly African Christians, rediscover traditional African values and rethink Christianity in a non-Western, African way. As we will see, this envisioning process may have relevance to people in other parts of the world as well.

African Concept of Creation

The African understanding of the world is life-centered. For the African, life is the primary category for self-understanding and provides the basic framework for any interpretation of the world, persons, nature, or divinity. For Malawians, life originates in the divine Moyo. Part of the very process of life involves a tendency toward self-transcendence, which itself aims toward umunthu, or the fullness of life. In the human sphere the process of life achieves fullness when humans are richly connected to other people, to other creatures, and to the earth itself. Humans realize their own fullness by realizing the bondedness of life.

To reclaim this notion of life, of life as characterized by a deep and thorough bondedness, is to find a correction to the mechanistic view which has been imposed upon African thinking, and which has led to the exploitation and suffering of humans and other creatures alike. In what follows, I briefly explore (1) Moyo as the foundation of life, (2) umunthu as the aim of life, and (3) notions of justice and community which are entailed by life itself.

Moyo as the Foundation of Life

In a Public Broadcasting Service documentary series titled The African (1986), Ali Mazrui, one of the leading African political scientists, finds an example of the African vision of interrelatedness and bondedness with nature in the way Africans think of the forest. Mazrui pointed out that the forest provides the African with all basic needs — food, materials for building a home, medicine, and rain; it also provides a sanctuary for religious practices as well and a home for the fugitive; in addition, it serves as a cemetery and the abode of ancestral spirits. In short, the forest is everything for the African.

In so many ways nature in general plays an important role in human life and in the process of human growth. It provides all that is necessary for a person to live and develop. This means that nature and persons are one, woven by creation into one texture or fabric of life, a fabric or web characterized by an interdependence between all creatures. This living fabric of nature — including people and other creatures — is sacred. Its sanctity does not mean that nature should be worshiped, but does mean that it ought to be treated with respect. John Mbiti comments on this vision of nature as follows:

It emerges clearly that for African peoples, this is a religious universe. Nature in the broadest sense of the word is not an empty impersonal object or phenomenon; it is filled with religious significance. . . . This is one of the most fundamental heritages of the African peoples. It is unfortunate that foreign writers, through great ignorance, have failed to understand this deep religious insight of our peoples; and have often ridiculed it or naively presented it as “nature worship” or animalism. . . . The physical and spiritual are but two dimensions of one and the same universe. These dimensions dove-tail into each other to the extent that at times and in places one is apparently more real than, but not exclusive of, the other. To African peoples this religious universe is not an academic proposition: it is an empirical experience, which reaches its height in acts of worship (Mbiti, 73-74).

For the Malawians the universe is full of sacred life, full of life that transcends itself through fecundity, that in its abundant creativity continues to cross frontiers and break forth into new dimensions, always recreating itself and presenting people with ever new possibilities.

Moyo is the Malawian word for such life. Moyo, written with a lower case m, is both physical and spiritual. In part, moyo is life as it is manifested in biological existence. As such it is shared by, and bonds together, all living things. But moyo is also spiritual and sacred: even moyo as it is manifested in biological existence is rooted in the Mystery. Divine life, signified by the capitalized Moyo, is the source and foundation of all moyo. All life — that of people, plants and animals, and the earth — originates from and therefore shares an intimate relationship of bondedness with divine life; all life is divine life. Mulago speaks of this vision of life as follows:

It is a whole of life, individual inasmuch as it is received by each being which exists, communal or collective in as much as each being draws from a common source of life. . . It is life as it has been derived from the source of “power,” as it turns towards power, is seized by it and seizes it (Mulago, 138).

Holding that human life is inseparably bound to nature, and that both human life and that of other creatures are one with the divine, the Malawians find it alien to objectify nature as the other or to see nature as having only instrumental value. The African notion of the bondedness of all beings in sacred moyo, in one texture of life, fosters a sense of care for all of creation. It entails a manner of living guided and enriched by respect, by a stance that allows the rhythms of life to flow.

Nature has rhythms and patterns through which moyo flows. It is our responsibility to keep ourselves from interrupting the flow of moyo; it is imperative that we avoid changing or reversing these rhythms and patterns. The future of a people depends upon how that people relates to nature and exercises its human responsibility.

Umunthu: The Aim of Life

For the African, human life is a fiber in the fabric of the totality of life The phrase “being-in-plenitude” best describes the African notion of persons because it emphasizes the unity or connectedness of persons to one another and to nature. We cannot understand persons, indeed we cannot have personal identity, without reference to other persons. Nor can we understand ourselves without reference to nature. People understand themselves and gain identity only in a total framework of life. They are defined as they engage in work, ritual practice, and symbolic activities. But they must also understand themselves as belonging to nature, as living the life of nature. It is through their relationships with nature that people discover their identities and approach the possibility of living life fully. As nature opens itself up to people, it presents possibilities for experiencing the fullness of life, possibilities for discovering how inseparably bonded people are to each other and to all of creation.

Furthermore, when traditional Africans think of creation they think of the relation between human life and nature; a world without people is unthinkable to them, for it is an incomplete world. Moyo continually breaks frontiers and reaches superabundance. It continuously transcends itself as it aims at greater and greater fullness of life. Human life completes the picture of this process of creation. Through their rich relationships with life, with nature, and with one another, individuals give themselves new meaning and achieve umunthu, fullness of life. Similarly, creation achieves new meaning through these persons. In many ways, moyo transcends itself as the possibilities for the realization of umunthu are created.

Community and Justice

In the African view of the world, the word community refers to more than a mere association of atomic individuals.3 The term itself suggests bondedness; it refers to the act of sharing and living in communion and communication with each other and with nature. Living in communication allows the stories or life experiences of others to become one’s own. The sharing of life’s experiences affirms people and prepares them for understanding each other. To understand is to be open to the life experience of others and to be influenced by the world of others. In community, we share and commune with selves who are other than ourselves and yet united to us by both moyo and Moyo. In being open to the other, we are given possibilities for transformation and for reaching umunthu.

Persons are not individual entities or strangers to one another. They are nature itself seeking fullness in the actuality of present life. Since people belong to the fabric of life, their life — like nature — must be respected. This call for respect is also a charge to the community to create possibilities for persons to realize full personhood. In a community of life where all are bonded together, everyone is responsible for everyone else:

What falls on one, falls on all. In such a relationship, the issue is the re-establishment of community, the re-establishment of the circulation of life, so that life can go on transcending itself, go on bursting the barriers, or the intervals, the nothingness, go on being superabundant (Boulaga, 81).

A community of life emphasizes being-together for the purpose of allowing life to flow and for the purpose of creating possibilities for achieving umunthu. The notion of being-together is intended to emphasize that life is the actuality of living in the present together with people, other creatures, and the earth. Justice in such a community must be based on a sense of the bondedness and oneness of life:

We must repair every breach of harmony, every wound and lesion. We must demand reparation for ourselves because we are not merely ourselves, and for others because they are also ourselves, the what-and-who of our pre-existence and survival, the what or who of some manner of our “presupposing” ourselves (Boulaga, 81).

Justice is how we live in the web of life in reciprocity with people, other creatures, and the earth, recognizing that they are part of us and we are part of them.

Conclusion

As we see, moyo, umunthu, community, justice, nature, and the power of life are inseparable. Together they represent the bondedness of life. This notion of the bondedness of life has informed some African Christian thinking where that thinking has attempted to transcend the mechanistic views imposed on Africa by the West, where that thinking has drawn upon the rich heritage of Africa itself. But such life-centeredness could also serve as a vital basis for all Christian thinking and action, as a guide and an empowering vision for the Christian movement to alleviate the suffering and exploitation of living creatures worldwide.

And there is urgent need to consider a model for the transformation of society, a model which will take bondedness and the relationship between people and other creatures seriously.4 Social structures and policies must find a basis in life itself, and in the notion of justice as it is entailed by the life we creatures share with each other and the divine. Community must be based in a consciousness that all creatures are part of all others, that humans share a common destiny with nature. Community, and the vision that puts forth that community, must be dedicated to the fullness of life for people, for other animals, for plants, for the Earth, indeed for all expressions of the divine Moyo.

Notes

1. This is a term Lewis Mumford has designated in describing the differences in visions and ways of life of Western and other societies.

2. There are a few examples where projects exhibiting care for nature have been embarked upon in Malawi. The restoration of the country, which begins every year In December with the tree planting day, December 21, is a good sign of care for nature. The project is done by all Malawians. The Ministry of Forestry through its nurseries throughout the country sells the seedlings at a cheap price, about three cents a seedling, cheap enough for most people to afford. Game parks are another sign of hope, especially when attention is given to animals that may soon be endangered species, such as the twenty-four hundred elephants now under special protection in the Game Parks. In an attempt to preserve nature, Malawi in 1982 became the first country in the world to create an underwater national park designed to protect fish. According to ichthyologists, Lake Malawi has nearly a thousand species of fish, many of which exist nowhere else in the world. But what will happen to this park if Malawi follows the UN. proposal to introduce fresh water sardines into Lake Malawi? According to UN. marine biologists, these sardines could produce as much as ten thousand tons of protein. At what price will that be in terms of the ecological balance of the lake? What will be the future of the sixteen thousand Malawians whose livelihood depends on the lake?

3. The differences between African and Western concepts of community are well-argued by Menkiti (Menkiti, 179).

4. I have described the question of transformation in another work, Community of Life: Foundations for Religious and Political Transformation.

Works Cited

Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. London: Heinemann, 1962.

_____.No Longer at Ease. London: Heinemann, 1963.

Baker, Donald. Politics of Race: Comparative Studies. Westmead and Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1975.

Boulaga, F. Eboussi. Christianity Without Fetishes: An African Critique and Recapture of Christianity. Trans. Robert R. Barr. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1984.

Mazrui, Ali. The Africans. A Public Broadcasting Service television series, 1986.

Mbiti, John S. African Religions and Philosophy. New York: Doubleday, 1970.

Menkiti, Ifeanyi A. “Person and Community in African Traditional Thought.” African Philosophy. Ed. Richard A. Wright. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984.

Mulago, Vincent. “Vital Participation: The Cohesive Principle of the Bantu Community.” Biblical Revelation and African Beliefs. Ed. Kwesi Dickson and Paul Elingworth. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1971.

Mumford, Lewis. The Myth of the Machine, Part Two: The Pentagon of Power. A Harvest Book. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970.

Sindima, Harvey. Community of Life: Foundations for Religious and Political Transformation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Forthcoming.

About the Author

Harvey Sindima

Harvey Sindima, a Presbyterian minister, was born and raised in Malawi. He graduated from the Church of Central Africa Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Blantyre, Malawi, and did postgraduate work at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and at the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta. His Ph.D. in religion and society is from Princeton Theological Seminary. He is author of Community of Life: Foundations for Religious and Political Transformation (forthcoming) and Drums of Freedom: African Theology (forthcoming). This essay originally appeared as chapter 10,pp. 137-147 in Charles Birch, William Eaken and Jay B. McDaniel (eds.) Liberating Life: Contemporary Approaches in Ecological Theology, published 1990 by Orbis Books, Maryknoll, New York 10545. This material was prepared for Religion Online by Ted and Winnie Brock.

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HEALING MIND, Life-centered Vision of Nature

Five Deepest Insights

No Comments 15 September 2010

deepest-insights

Five Deepest Insights

Nathan Batalion, Global Health Activist, Healingtalks Editor

(Healingtalks) The following is a an introduction to my life-and-consciousness centered worldview, a core philosophy that can be used to help transform all the healing arts, in fact all of modern life that has been using the mechanical vision of nature, and that has been leading us to our own global self-destruction.

It is a positive message that life need not to be lived that ill way.

1 -  How does consciousness
emerge out of nature?

A related question is how does consciousness emerge out of ourselves and to a higher level. In our culture it really doesn’t.

In fact statistically it tends to recede over a lifetime as is evidenced by the wildfire growing epidemic of Alzheimer’s – the fastest of all the major growing health epidemics of our time.

That disease now affects more than half of those over age 85 or older. Not far behind are two other major consciousness epidemics – diabetes where one suffers from neuropathy or conscious loss of feeling in the hands and feet….and the epidemic of cancer spreading silently, that is unconsciously. Modern medicine, through lack of wisdom, helps creates the multi-drugged, walking the halls like zombies residents of old-age nursing homes. It is a travesty, a practice of medicine rooted in criminal ignorance. But all of this is really the result of a faulty worldview, the mechanical.

While it is obviously true that our bodies house life – and this includes consciousness – is it also true that our brains appear to be the main storage house of that consciousness. Or is that really true?

It is one of the deepest insights of my life that life and consciousness do not come out of the physical world at all, and thus with the latter not arising out of our brains (an illusion derived from our left brain male-like function, projecting-images-outward-from itself like a penis)  but rather the reverse.

This means the physical world comes out of what makes up consciousness.

How is this possible? This begs the question, first and foremost, what is this consciousness?

2 -  What is consciousness ?

There is a growing movement in modern science  “towards a science consciousness.” But the movement is grounded again in the 17th century mechanical worldview that created classical physics, chemistry and modern medicine.

These three disciplines point to a math-defined physical world as the foundation of nature.

Mathematics designs machines. It is thus the mechanical, life-less view.

This overall physical world also includes our physical bodies with distinct brain hemispheres and brain cells that undergo chemical reactions. This all supposedly creates what we experience as consciousness in us. If those brain cells are damaged, the consciousness is no longer the same way – which seems to support this thesis.

My alternative view is that our experience of consciousness actually represents something deeper to the taproot foundation of nature.  This would require consciousness not to arise just out of our brain cells.

So let us first define consciousness in a novel way, namely imagine that consciousness is the principle of connection itself in nature.

What does that mean and imply?

A symbolic analogy and image is a body of water or an ocean that connects countless separate drops as one, and out of which those separate drops manifest.

In the ocean we also find fish.

Now it would be a stretch to believe that the ocean arises out of the fish! We instead are more convinced that fish are birthed, grow, and develop  out of the ocean, out of their source environment.

Imagine the same could apply to the relationship between a physical world made up of separate objects and an inner world composed of the connected “ocean” of consciousness. Forget what you learned in high school about physics and chemistry making up our world.

3 -  What is Life?

robot-hand-of-god

Imagine that life concentrates and models the presence of consciousness – just like machines model mechanicality and/or a mathematical order of nature.

In short, imagine that consciousness is at the core of life and creates life.

Secondly imagine it connects us to the world around us and within. It makes whole and healthy. So to be healthy you don’t need chemical balance through drugs, you need simply more consciousness.

An Alzheimer’s patient who has vastly receded consciousness cannot connect events or memories to each other. He or she cannot connect parts of a face to recognize the whole, even of a life-long loved one. He or she has so little or no sense of the whole that they may have trouble even knowing where they are in crossing a street. Their inner vision is totally disconnected.

This is why, if the essence of life is consciousness, it would make sense that life requires an organically whole or connected physical form to thrive in – like the radiant form of a flower or the iris of our eyes.

Life therefore would leave whenever that physical form is cut apart severed or dissected to death.

It would leave if transformed into a schemata of just machine parts, as in the mechanical hand shown above. Knowing this it suddenly makes sense that if our food is progressively cut apart, processed or made no longer whole, like milled flour products for example (cookies, breads, pasta) and that are subject to life-killing high-heat, it would make complete sense that eating such dead foods as a staple will eventually cause us to develop consciousness diseases.

And this is precisely what is happening in our modern industrialized and commercial world where dead foods have greater shelf life, greater commercial value, better mathematical-dollar-tagging qualities, better death values.

Life, when fully alive, also feels conscious pain when its organic form is disconnected.

Life also becomes polluted and has its consciousness recede when it is drugged into a stupor by synthetic chemicals.

Why?

Chemicals are organized mathematically. It is as simple as that. This is why the vision fails in a living terrains. Mathematics uniquely abstracts how to separate all elements of consciousness. Three separate apples can be counted as three until you make applesauce. When connected the apples cannot be counted.

This is why there is no chemical drug to cure Alzheimer’s and there never will be!

So if we compare something living (organically connected) with something dead or mechanical, unconscious or robotic (math-designed mechanical) and disassemble the latter back into its separate machine parts… we can always put those separate machine parts, such as of a car, back together as a whole… and the machine or car will not only continue to run it may even run better.

We cannot do the same with life or with a whole organism that is conscious.

Cut it apart systematically and it dies. Life leaves. Consciousness goes away.

Imagine this is because consciousness, at the core of life, is the root principle of connection itself in nature. 

The equal sign of a mathematical formula does not connect nature or replace that principle.

4 -  Are there laws of this consciousness, akin to the mechanical, math-defined?

fight-flight

Absolutely and they can be powerfully applied, especially in the healing arts.

They function, however, in an entirely different way than again the laws of physics and chemistry.

Let us first look at the mathematical view of nature.

Numbers beginning with the simple number “1″ represents the universal separate and indivisible whole  (1/1=1) or one divided by one equals one. Its the final building block.

We can call numbers the building blocks of mathematics as a resutl, like individual dots are the building blocks of lines and the rest of geometric space.

With this understanding, if nature is truly mathematical, then nature must also  be organized in this way. This arrogant presumption, and it is a left-brain-originating assumption, can be easily shown to be both illogical and non-empirical or unreal.

But this means putting our consciousness above the mathematizing process, which the 17th century, in its arrogance, never bothered to do. Galileo, Descartes, Newton and others  just applied the vision universally with blind self-assurance to lead us to our modern Industrialized age.

When through the invention of high-powered electric microscopes, atoms were found not to be indivisible,  how inconvenient was. Still this blind ideology was kept in tact because otherwise the whole system of this bankrupt understanding would collapse.

Returning to our core question, are there laws of consciousness?  Looking at the picture above, we can contrast how fight and flight, or fear and anger represent separative emotions while love represents a connective posture. If consciousness is the principle of connection itself in nature, having a loving posture becomes more conscious. It is as simple as that.

A universal principle of connection is what can integrally make our world one.

Something that moves toward oneness ends up being simple. Complex things are not at one.

The simple understand is, at the same time, a deep and profound understanding.

5-  Revolutionary understanding to re-guide daily life

sir isaac newton principia

In the modern western worldview, the most powerful applications of the math-bound view became Industrial Revolution – large-scale machine applications from simple sewing machines to computers that have helped build the modern world.

But the same vision fails to halt the more important modern receding of consciousness.

Newton especially helped guide the transition from the medieval (bible-centered) to the modern math-centered vision of nature.  This was his revolutionary thesis of his main text Principia Naturalis Mathematica (The Laws of Nature as Mathematics). The later was more often translated as The Mathematical Principles of Nature because it was an ideology assumed to be absolutely true.

The fact is that machines never once occur naturally in pristine nature didn’t bother them. How can what never occurs anywhere in  nature represent the universal order of nature?

Newton’s vision is essentially contradictory. Abstractions of separation cannot possible best connect the essence of our world. This is why the vision fails to support what is most connective in nature – life and consciousness.  This is why it destroys life globally on earth, and its consciousness. This is why the earth is becoming ever more polluted and species are become extinct – something Newton or Galileo never foresaw, being blinded by their own ideology!

Newton, the left brain genius (the left brain separates elements of consciousness)  went insane toward to the end of his life – symbolic of the fact that one cannot connect a vision of nature using the absolutely most separative  symbols in the whole of our human consciousness! Newton went crazy and schizophrenic.

atomic bomb

What those symbols can best help us do is to create atomic weapons that can destroy all of life on earth.

This is because that vision is the by-product of a root contradiction.

Yet it still dominates our times as our modern world is falling apart at multiple seams. It is not leading us toward higher consciousness.

 

healing-revolution

The most powerful applications of an alternative vision is not for building atomic weapons but rather for a deeper and greater support of  healing – reconnection of the life-and-consciousness.

We thus need a new…..bio principia naturalis.…..a virtual opposite vision to that of Newton’s.

The primary focus is no longer again toward creating machines made of separate parts but rather toward the discovery and creation of what connects us within (and all of organic life) to a higher level of consciousness and health and wholeness.  We gain the knowledge of a mending of the life together – of mind, emotions, sensations, body and consciousness as one.

It also is a model for mending of our social bonds with each other, and not through a dominantly commercial society.

Will the Newtonian view take us to the same place?

I am afraid not. The proof abounds as in the pictures below.

nursing_homes

Again no pharmaceutical (math-designed) drug will cure Alzheimer’s patients. This is because we hold on unconsciously to the Newtonian vision, and patients are fed not one but multiple chemical drugs to mislead them down the path of unconsciousness and death.

Multiple drugged patients then occupy nursing room halls like zombies.

Crudely said, they become cash-machines for Big Pharma rather than functional, living, conscious human beings.

Notable Physicists Who Became Alzheimer’s Sufferers

charles kuen kao raymond davis jr gerson goldhaber

Charles Kuen Kao                              Raymond Davis, Jr.                       Gerson Goldhaber
(2009 NOBEL/Physics)                  (2002 NOBEL/Physics)                 (1976 NOBEL/Physics)

Nowadays half of those 85+ again suffer from Alzheimer’s.

These terrible victims include Nobel-prize-winning laureates in physics (the above pictured Charles Kuen Kao, Raymond Davis, Jr., Gerson Goldhaber, etc.).

This is because, as I contend, their Newtonian vision fails to well guide them.

This is a hugely revolutionary statement.

It knocks on the door of overturing the core modern worldview that has ruined indigenous wisdom.

Newton’s vision overturned also the medieval God-centered view, forming the core spirit of our modern world. This means we need a second and vast global mind change to overturn the Newtonian view – otherwise we are headed down an ever darker path.

As noted by an organization of senior citizens(AARP). “you have brilliant physicists, physicians, and mathematicians getting Alzheimer’s as well as average people in familiar occupations.”

What this means is that the worldview they learned does not really enlighten us.

john-douglas-frenchNewton 1726
John Douglas French MD
Founder of the first Alzheimer’s treatment center in the US  who
himself became a sufferer! & Newton, portrayed at age 81

The great Sir Isaac Newton himself died with the  fate of severe schizophrenia.

That illness manifests when the right brain’s connective consciousness shuts down and the left-brain’s separative  (disintegrative, falling-apart consciousness) prevails.

Mathematics once again is the zenith left-brain dominant symbolism for the separation of all elements of consciousness.

Math squiggles on a blackboard are the very highest and most universal symbols for that separation.

They are the mental tools for therefore designing machines made of separate parts.

But these are immensely misguiding symbols in trying to optimally connect both a vision of nature’s essence and the healing arts that bring our life and consciousness back together as one.

Thus the failure of even Nobel-laureates, or greatest mathematicians or a preeminent  MD who formed the first exclusively Alzheimer’s treating center in the US, himself falling prey.

This is telling.

Briefly My Life Story as a Renegade and Global Health Activist

As a former child math prodigy, I had a high fever and apparent stroke at the age of 17 that caused my left-brain to shut down.I was escaped thereby the ideological confines of our modern vision. I broke through its deep illusions, to become a mathematical renegade, I left the fold and abandoned the Newtonian vision.

I made the leap rather to a life-and-consciousness centered view of nature

The Biocentric View

biocentrism

A life-centered vision has been called “biocentric.” This is ecoed by Robert Lanza, MD in a book called biocentrism – and where this knowledge builds not dazzling machines but helps us heal and reach our real and true highest potential of life.

Closing Statement

Our civilization appears rich in material things, but is not integrally rich. Out health statistics contradict the surface appearances of all things being well. This is why we need the deepest of new insights to liberate us from the declining environmental and health condition we have created.

This can only happen through a new and deep revolution of thought and toward a more authentic, healing vision.


Photos on flickr

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