Both health and ill health are strange enigma's. I have been studying this phenomena most of my working life and often run through a range of different emotions, feelings and thinking in trying to find some deeper sense of understanding here. The problem lies not just in the complexity of it all but exactly who and what are we referring to. There is the body which is apparently healthy or ill and even here in this very seemingly simple model the more we know the more complex it becomes. The matter body is not just anatomy with its gross muscles, organs, nerves ect but also very complex physiological processes constantly in flow and not just a simple flow like a river running downhill but very defined spiraling, vortexing, expanding and contracting, adding and subtracting, passing into the cells and subcutaneous spaces, carrying information and nutrients everywhere in a most astonishing order and seeming intelligence.
There is also a background of energy and information coordinating all this activity. Many symptoms come and go within minutes or days without any intervention and even without any symptoms there could still be serious underlying disturbances in the energy-information systems long before physical symptoms appear. By the time symptoms or signs appear there is already quite serious malfunction within the system. I say this because homeostasis is the very nature of healthy function and the system will always be doing its very best to maintain this astonishing balance.
My interest is how this is maintain and a great deal of my writing is about the way the matter-energy-information system co-ordinates itself and allows healing to manifest. This is my work and even mission to open up this remarkable space
Why do experts disagree? Part One
On the nature of reality, medicine and the maps we live by.
I am frequently dismayed to read that an expert that I have trusted for a long time suddenly makes a statement about some aspect of medicine that is totally apposed to what I had already accepted as true. This particular expert who runs a longevity clinic and understands I thought what it means to support health rather than treat disease was supporting quite strongly and using good science he said for the use of statins in the bringing down cholesterol. This was saying two very clear statement, firstly that it was okay to use statins and secondly that cholesterol was somehow involved in atherosclerosis the underlying cause of heart disease. Both these viewpoints I appose. So who is right? I clearly believed that I was right and he was wrong or at least was only seeing part of the picture. My previous trust in him was decidedly shifted but it did bring up the question around my own view which I thought was also based on good science and there were many experts who shared this view.
Over the last few years I have had to deal with this issue over and over again, not just for statins but so many other issues that keep coming up. Here are just a few more such issues:
- The vaccine dilemma and confusion in general
- The covid-19 vaccine
- Hypertension and what is normal
- Weight reduction drugs
- Synthetic hormones vs bio-identical hormones
- The abortion issue
- Contraception
- Routine investigations like mammograms, biopsies, colonoscopies, PSA testing.
- Cholesterol controversy
There are lots more serious disagreements in medicine.
I find it quite unsettling that even 'experts' can disagree so fervently around issues that can often seem so obvious and clear. If reality is in fact not obvious and clear then how do we simple human beings deal with our life and make decisions that are appropriate when even highly trained experts hold positions that vary significantly.
My sense is that in medicine anyway the problem arises because the conventional medical model is driven by a science that has evolved out of an understanding that living systems are similar to machines just much more sophisticated. This machine driven science was able to very quickly change the way humans lived. Think how quickly we had motor cars and how this has developed over a mere 150 years where we now talk about driverless cars. How our household inventories have made major shifts, clothes, food items, agriculture, buildings, airplanes have all been added to our reality. The very powerfulness and apparent effectiveness of all this has given the impression that science can do anything.
In living systems however we seem to have possibly reached a boundary that has not been easy to cross. In a way this is not surprising. Living systems are not machines. Machines come out of the mind of man and life emerges out of the mind of God. I use the word 'God' here to refer to the great unknown that keeps shifting the goalposts so that every time we think we know or have the answer a whole new vista opens up and we have to step back in astonishment. Reality keeps showing its depth and that depth appears to be infinite. Machines don't have depth but function in a linear time based way.
So what is really going on and perhaps we need to re-look at our assumptions. In particular the idea that living systems and human beings in particular are just very complex machines. We may also need to come to terms with the idea that there may not be one objective truth 'out there' and that disagreement simply reflects a lack of knowledge, bias, or error but in particular may be pointing to the impossibility of any one point of view containing the whole. I have often pointing to the idea that 'the more viewpoints the better the view' for the simple reason that everyone's viewpoint is valid from that person 'narrow' viewpoint and our particular viewpoint will always be narrow and limited even when it is the combined truth of many scientists. All the facilities we have such as our sense organs are all filters but even our thinking and feeling self also filter reality. The nature of any filter is to filter according to the limits of that filter.
Even science today is not straight forward. The Newtonian model which is so effective for machines is not working so well for human beings as can be seen in the 'war on cancer' which was initiated by President Nixon in 1971 with the establishing of the National Cancer Institute in its modern form. This initiative has managed to transform cancer from a perceived death sentence into a manageable chronic disease for many, nevertheless cancer is still one of the top caused of dying today.
Machine model science is great for sending astronauts to the moon but the astronauts themselves remain a great mystery. Machines can be mapped clearly and the workings of the machine can be easily described and reproduced to make thousands of copies. Even very simple living systems such as bacteria remain an enigma to scientists and controversies around their functions among biologists are obvious.
So we need to seriously consider that perhaps Newtonian science which worked so well to change our lives does not do so well in understanding the very person that has made this possible.... The human being.
Luckily even science itself has found a new window or doorway to study reality and that is quantum science. In trying to find the basic building blocks of living system by breaking the whole further and further into its parts, science discovered that the basic building blocks was not 'matter' as such but closer to energy and information. Energy/information is not matter and only becomes 'matter-like' when the energy slows down enough to become visible as matter, much like steam becomes water and then ice as the molecules slow down. Matter is then the visible (and touchable) and measurable part of energy/information.
Clearly then trying to understand human beings from the matter body only is going to be very limited if one leaves out the energy/information field underlying the matter body. It is here that we enter into the complexity and begin to see why for example the war on cancer has not found the answers. Physiology which is part of the matter body moves at centimeter's/second while light moves at 300,000km/second. Clearly the controls running the system cannot be in physiology but must be closer to the energy/information.
Two words have come up in the above paragraph i.e. system and field. Living systems function as fields of activity. Each system is complex and functions on many levels of energetic frequencies and as a field they are effected by and influence other fields close by but also even at a distance. This is unlike machines, not that machines don't have systems buried within their own complex operating mechanism and may even have field effects as radiation spreads out from them but this is child's play compared to the multidimensional and complex systems of living organism especially humans.
Quantum science has introduce some new and novel ways that systems operate and particularly how consciousness has an important part to play in the way systems function. This is a total reversal of the old science which has always postulated the idea that matter came first and with increasing complexity consciousness or mind eventually was the evolutionary development. In quantum understanding the opposite has been not only postulated but shown to be true i.e. the ground of reality is consciousness and matter is the more recent evolutionary emergence of consciousness and here is the clue to how different experts come up with different views around reality.
This conversation will continue in the next newsletter
Late night musing
A person was having a surgical procedure. During the procedure there was a moment when the physical body went into a shock state and the person had an 'out of body' experience (NDE). During the NDE the person was able to see the surgeons and assistants standing around the body and trying to revive it. The person did recover. What was interesting to me was that the person had been blind since birth and yet could clearly see the people in full colour. When she recovered she remained blind but clearly the experience changed her life in many ways. This is not so unusual. In dreams we see people in colour and even hear them talk. This does suggest to me that our sensory organs while limited to certain frequencies may not be the only way we meet the world. My ex wife had a very traumatic first birth in which she left her body and watched the difficult birth from the ceiling of the operating theatre. Perhaps if we can 'loosen' the hold our physical senses have over reality we may be able to meet the world differently. Just saying...
