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Theocentric MedicineMany Sufi stories tell of the trickster Mullah Nasruddin. In one, Nasruddin is a self-employed businessman who travels between Saudi Arabia and Egypt each day. Nasruddin crossed the border 7 days a week, 365 days a year, year after year, along with a donkey carrying a saddle bag on his back. There was a border guard whose duty it was to search for contraband. He would diligently search Nasruddin every day. He would inspect the donkey and the saddle bag, and never find anything suspicious. After four years, Nasruddin retired, a wealthy man. One day, he was sitting in a coffee shop in Cairo when he was spotted by the border guard, who had also retired. The guard came over and said, "Nasruddin, I have no interest in persecuting you, but I simply must know what you were smuggling all those years." "Donkeys," replied Nasruddin. Sometimes we fail to see the most obvious facts of our lives. We miss fundamental truths because they are so obvious. And our Western understanding of healing is missing the donkey. The donkey is consciousness. The donkey is awareness. I call the relationship between spirituality and health "Theocentric Medicine." Its two most important disciplines are mediation and prayer. It represents a radical paradigm shift in the way we perceive ourselves, and the way we understand healing. We forget that forty years ago, the notion that mind could affect body was radical. Today it is taken for granted. That's a paradigm shift. The next shift is taking place before our very eyes. This view holds that there is a third component to the human being, which we call consciousness, which is distinct and separate from both the body and the mind. This, in effect, is who we are. To be more specific, it is consciousness (the life principle), which both animates and enlivens the previous two components and which is responsible for the functioning of the entire system. This new paradigm holds that human beings are made up of three components&emdash;a body, a mind, and consciousness, and their relative importance lies in this same ascending order. From the point of view of religions, whether Abrahamic (Judaism Christianity and Islam) or Vedic (Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism or Sikhism) the notion of consciousness, spirit, or soul is fundamental and age-old. However, from the perspective of the Western healing professions, it is new and important. Descartes summed up the old model in his famous aphorism: "I think, therefore I am." The new model is: "I am conscious, therefore I am." Awareness is more than thought. (AUTHOR: NEED BRIDGING SENTENCES HERE) Meditation both explores the realm of consciousness, and is the process by which consciousness frees and observes itself. |
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