The Explorer Hub
philosophy & the unknown
Where the enquiry begins
What if illness is not simply a malfunction, but a message?
The voice of health asking for help to maintain homeostasis and good functioning.
Health is not a destination but an ongoing interaction with life itself from moment to moment. It is a relationship that involves self, other and the Great Mystery in which we are embedded. A creative process that demands our attention. A living conversation between body, mind, environment, and meaning.
Health is coherence all the way to source.
Origins
The journey that became
Creating Health
When I was twelve, my parents gave me a microscope — it came in a wooden box I can still picture exactly. I caught a fly, put it under the lens, and was astonished: no one had told me a fly really looked like that. From that day I put everything I could find under the glass, because I knew, even then, that people were keeping a secret from me — that there was a whole world just beneath the one we can see. Finding it has taken the rest of my life.
I qualified as a doctor in 1965, and by twenty-nine I had everything I thought I wanted — and was still unhappy. So I walked out of medicine and travelled for six years.
In India, my teacher prohibited me from visiting the Taj Mahal, only half an hour away, until I gave him a good enough reason for going. The day before I left, I sat under a tree for two hours, and finally understood.
I only saw that beautiful monument to lost love 40 years later.
I came home and returned to medicine — in a different way, seeking non-drug ways to treat people, working with the body’s intelligence.
Have I finally arrived at uncovering the mystery of healing? Have I found the Taj Mahal inside? All I can answer is that I’ve entered the doorway, and that is what home feels like.
People ask why I’m still working so hard in my eighties. I don’t call it work anymore — I call it art. Something in me wants people to see the flowering in everything, the magic in life.
The Taj Mahal I was looking for wasn’t out there — it was a place deep within me.
The timeline
More on the journey
1970 — I became disenchanted with medicine and was unhappy with my life.
1971 — Left South Africa to travel and paint — Europe, Sri Lanka, India, the United States, Canada. Six years as a travelling artist, carrying the long question: what is health, really?
2000s — Through the Society of Integrative Medicine, taught doctors across the country.
The third wave
Medicine has seemingly moved in three waves
The first — indigenous medicine, the science of experience.
The second — conventional medicine, the science of experiment.
The third, and the most exciting of all — driven by quantum science, where the objective and the subjective come back together again.
I was trained in scientific medicine. Over time I began to trust and explore my personal experience, and even distrust science. Later, I honoured the incredible work of good scientists and allowed my experience to also soak into that space. This became my teaching of Integrative Medicine which I later began to call Regenerative Medicine. More recently I have added the word ‘sacred’ and this has become Sacred Regenerative Medicine.
Regenerative Sacred Medicine
A different way of seeing
Regenerative Sacred Medicine is a fundamentally different way of approaching ill-health. The conventional medical model measures fragments — bits and pieces of the matter body. This new medicine recognises that life flows through the spaces between the fragments.
This is where energy-information flows and co-ordinates function — maintaining homeostasis throughout the living system. Physiology moves at centimetres per second; light moves at 300,000 kilometres per second. Clearly the controls must be much closer to energy and information. Chemistry is riding on the back of energy.
This does not mean that energy-information is where the final controls are. It is most likely that energy-information is secondary to a deeper intelligence, in the same way that the picture on the TV screen is the result of information passing along the electrical cable carried by the electrical current. The source of the picture, and where the controls lie, are in the broadcasting station. Quantum science is beginning to recognise that this may be consciousness itself and that consciousness is the ground of being.
Where matter dissolves
I have been examining matter all my working life and can tell you one thing about matter… There is no such thing as matter, only energy, information — and beyond this is some intelligence we don’t understand.
This is a major shift in our understanding. Physiology and anatomy are the tip of the iceberg. Beneath them is energy-information and behind that is consciousness. That is what constitutes a human being.
Our understanding needs to shift from the machine model to the systems model where physiology, energy and information play a dynamic and creative role in functions, and this is why consciousness feeding into the mind can no longer be excluded.
We approach a deeper understanding of health and healing when healing shifts from ‘treating symptoms’ to understanding patterns and getting to the root of what is asking to be healed.
The Enquiry
The Known & the Unknowable
Beyond the door is the unknown
Are you willing to go there?
To enter the territory one needs to let go of the power of the maps and the concepts generated.
‘Science measures fragments.
Life flows beyond what can be measured.’
We have been misled by the conventional scientific model, which insists that only the objective world of measurement is real, and the subjective merely secondary. But scientists cannot produce their science without inspiration, contemplation, imagination, and thinking itself — all of which are subjective.
The unknown and unknowable I keep pointing to is, in fact, known — to those parts of ourselves that we use to navigate that space. We call these inner tools knowing, feeling, imagination, intuition. They reach into a vast world that conventional measuring instruments cannot penetrate.
The distinction
Maps vs Territory
Watch the map give way to the land it only ever stood for.
Science is extraordinary at making maps, and maps are genuinely useful — you need one to find your way into a city you’ve never visited. But once you’re there, put the map in your pocket and get in touch with the city itself.
The map is not the territory. And the territory — the actual experience of being alive — can only be entered by a human being. Not even the cleverest machine can go there and report back.
Or drag it yourself
Maps we live by
The territory
- CitiesJoy
- TimelinesPresence
- Relationship expectationsMystery
- The construct of ‘I-ness’Being
Brom’s Rules
Three rules I keep returning to
Choose a life story that works — be as loving, compassionate, gentle and kind as you can be in that moment.
Words are powerful, they can be poison arrows or healing agents. And the tone you use makes a difference.
The territory remains a mystery always. Be humble in meeting the NOW moment.
About Bernard
Bernard Brom qualified in medicine in 1965. He gave it up, travelled for six years, and came back to spend the next sixty asking one question: how does health actually work? He founded the South African Society of Integrative Medicine, chaired it, started its first journal, wrote two books — and still sees a few patients every week, ‘to stay in touch with the territory.’
Elsewhere: his articles at Natural Medicine World, the South African Society of Integrative Medicine, and the Healthy Medicine course for practising doctors at Nutrition Network.
