There is no doubt in my mind that a major shift in the way many people are starting to look at the way reality is unfolding is slowly happening. Are we moving to more and more chaos, leading to a third world war breaking out, an apocalyptic eruption? Along with that is the possibility of a nuclear endpoint, with really serious destruction and death, and untold damage to the environment. Or will there be enough of us standing up to stop this devastation of the world as we know it, allowing a far more creative edge of peace and harmony to prevail?
It is not at all clear to me which way it will go. The arrogant shadow male energy is dominating the narrative, trying to force all of us to toe the line and play their game.
Please don't allow too much anger to arise because this just feeds into the deep well of anger everywhere. Love and peace and a sense of the sacred is not a passive narrative to bypass responsibility. But it can do this if one is not prepared to step up and listen to the calling of one's heart and respond to the need of the moment to the best of one's personal ability.
To me this means to ask of yourself what you can do and then do it, even if it is just asking the question. Don't bypass the question because you are afraid of the answer. Most times in my experience the answer will really meet what can be done by you. It's only the thinking mind which creates the fear of the question. The answer will be coherent with your life as it is right now, so don't be afraid of asking.
The three waves of medicine
In very broad terms, medicine has gone through three waves or cycles. The first wave was Indigenous medicine or what I call the medicine of experience, or direct knowing.
The second wave was the conventional model and what I call medicine of experiment. This is based on Newtonian science with a clear distinction made between the objective world and the subjective world. This is the medicine of measurement, causality, experiment and control. It is enormously powerful in the way it has dominated the narrative around health and ill-health and the way it has managed to exclude the subjective and keep it at a distance.
The third wave is now relatively well established in science but is still fringe when it comes to medicine. This third wave, surprisingly for many, is being driven by quantum science and its discoveries, which place serious limitations on the Newtonian model. I want to explore this third wave more fully, because without understanding this wave the medicine of the second wave can shut down the growing insights of quantum science, and lead to a solidification of a very narrow perspective around the nature of living systems. What we will end up with is a medicine driven by Artificial Intelligence doctoring and diagnosis, with protocols developed for this machine model of human beings. Just as it is already difficult to find a real person to talk to when connecting to your bank or other large institutes, direct contact with a doctor will become difficult.
So how is quantum science involved in the third wave? What happened when scientists went deeper and deeper into matter was that they discovered that the building blocks of matter were not just smaller matter pieces, but energy and information. That was quite a shock. Matter was suddenly not nearly as solid as scientists had thought. Matter was energy-information slowed down to the point that matter appeared. Imagine the shock to scientists but even consider it for yourself. Matter is hiding its underlying nature, which is not solid at all, but flowing energy appearing and disappearing into something even more bizarre and difficult for scientists to fully comprehend. That deepest space is called the quantum potential.
Quantum scientists have introduced words like complexity, coherence, non-local and 'the observer effect', among many other terms, to try to explain what they have discovered. By showing as fact that the very act of observation changes what is observed, they have brought the observing individual back into the equation. This is major, and points to the human being's participation in reality.
This is the third wave of medicine. It is participatory medicine, a medicine where the ill- person and the practitioner understand that their presence in the moment of interaction is critical and can make all the difference to outcomes. In Indigenous medicine the client was in a submissive state, consulting the shaman who knew much more and was held in great reverence. In this wave the client was not participating but submitting to the healer.
In the third wave there is a deep participation, a dance, a deep respect for each other. This is different, and a new kind of medicine is needed to meet this understanding. Techniques may not change, drugs and surgery may still be used, and Integrative practitioners will still use their supplements and a range of other tools. But the space between the healer and client will shift, in the recognition that healing is not about treating a disease or even about healing the person that has come for healing. There will be a growing recognition that the space is sacred and deep and real healing can only happen when this depth is recognised.
You see, quantum scientists have already gone there. They give it scientific names such as coherence, consciousness, energy, information etc, but what they are also referring to is the great mystery, the divine complexity. Many quantum scientists use the word sacred when talking about their amazement that there should be 'something' rather than 'nothing' and that there should be order in the way evolution has unfolded.
Third wave medicine will bring in the sacred when health practitioners reach into this depth and discover their own participation in this amazing unfolding health drama.
Even Iain McGilchrist, one of my favourite science-based authors, a medical doctor, researcher and expert on Right and Left-Brain function in his two volumes, has a chapter that is over 100 pages long called 'The sense of the sacred'. I love the way he tries so hard not to be mystical about the word sacred and yet can hardly avoid pointing out how this amazing world could possibly arise from an unintelligent cosmos.
I know that most people may just say that it is all about evolution ... the movement from simple things to more complex things. What McGilchrist points out is that chaos did not happen in this so-called evolutionary process. with trillions upon trillions of things happening all at the same time across the universe and our planet. Many scientists are now objecting to this over-simplified narrative. There had to be, they say, some underlying intelligence there from the beginning. How about God, you say? Well maybe, but then we have to be clear what we mean. I prefer the term Great Mystery because it certainly is a great mystery. The human body, for example, consists of 10¹⁴ (100 000 000 000 000) cells, and each cell produces 10 000 bio-electrochemical reactions every second. All this has to be almost instantaneously and dependably correlated. Few scientists believe that this could have evolved in the time span of the universe, or in a way without some divine intelligence behind it.
I have made the word 'sacred' as part of the vocabulary of the third wave for a very good reason. The word itself carries something important. It also points to humility. This is the nature of the third wave. There is suddenly the recognition that the very act of 'being' itself is not haphazard but driven by an underlying intelligence that we are all seeking to be coherent with.
Imagine what it means if every moment of your awakened day you are really participating in reality. If you don't like what you see, then perhaps it's time to check out the way you are choosing to observe the world. This is not the same as the mind-body narrative that many people like to consider, that is that you can use thinking to change your outcome.
The thinking mind is not this intelligence. It is itself just a thinking apparatus. This intelligence I am pointing to is deeper, and quantum scientists are suggesting that it may be what is referred to as consciousness. They are pointing to the possibility that the quantum potential is also just another name for consciousness or even God, (quantum scientists would definitely not use the word God though). Keep in mind that the quantum potential is empty but full of potential. It therefore has infinite potential to create. It is present everywhere and pretty much all-powerful. Out of this 'space' appears the Chi or energy that drives creation. So, from no-thing (empty) appears the multi-universe (something) driven by an energy which maintains order (lovingly). Sounds like God doesn't it -- all powerful, all knowing and all loving.
Late night musings
Flowers are truly amazing. Perhaps more than any other natural thing, the flower does more for me than almost any other experience. High experiences are great, but they come and go and generally don't leave much perfume behind. But flowers are always there... their silence a fragrance reaching deep into my heart.
