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A New Model for Healing:Let me begin by relating a story, which will give us a point of hypotheses in terms of our inquiry. This story, often related in the Sufi tradition, tells of a man by the name of Mullah Nasruddin. He is a kind of proverbial itinerant wise man. He is, in a sense, representative of the mind of the average human being and how it thinks and operates. As the story goes, he was a self-employed businessman who traveled back and forth between the borders of Saudia Arabia and Egypt. During this time, there was a border guard whose job it was to inspect all traders as they entered or left Egypt to make sure they were not carrying any contraband or illegal goods. They did not want any illegal goods crossing the border then as they do today. Every single time that he crossed the border, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, for four years, he would be accompanied by a donkey who was carrying a saddle bag on his back. Every time he crossed the border he was stopped and inspected by the border officer. The border guard would inspect the saddlebags diligently and invariably, he would find nothing in them. Each time he passed through the border he was duly inspected and each time the guard found that he was carrying nothing, either on his person or in the bags. This continued for 4 years. Then, after 4 years, Mullah Nasruddin retires a wealthy man for those days. One day, after his early retirement, he is sitting in a coffee shop in downtown Cairo sipping his coffee by himself. The border guard, who had also retired, a few years after him, happens to see him sipping coffee in the coffee shop. He is astounded to see him there retired and his curiosity overwhelms him. He wants to know how Mullah Nasruddin had become so wealthy in such a short span of only four years. So he comes up to Mullah, introduces himself and says, "Mullah, I have retired myself and have no interest in persecuting you in any manner I just want to know how you became so wealthy in such a short period of time. What were you doing for those four years?" Mullah pauses for a moment while he surmises the situation and the intentions of his guest and then replies, "I was smuggling donkeys." There may be many levels of meaning associated with this story, however, one of the more clear ones is that sometimes the most obvious facts in our lives are often the very things we fail to see. These are often the facts that we might call fundamental truths or self-evident truths that we miss because they are too close to us. We have no objectivity in relationship to them. If we use this analogy, we see that there is something that we are missing in our Western understanding of healing. What is this missing ingredient? It is consciousness or awareness. It may also be called the life principle. It is this consciousness, or life principle, which we seek to introduce in a new view of healing. This very principle could be expanded and called theocentric medicine. By this, we infer the relationship between spirituality and the overall condition of our health. Since meditation and prayer are two of the most important methodologies by which we can develop our spirituality, their connection to our understanding of this new view of healing becomes critical. It is so obvious that at first we don't necessarily see it. Let us, for a moment, begin to explore this new understanding as a radical paradigm shift in the way we perceive ourselves and the way we understand healing. However, let us step back for a moment and look at the old paradigm from which we currently operate. Today most people in the healing professions will accept without much argument that the human being is composed of two aspects-- one entity called our body and another entity called our mind. We recognize that these two systems are connected and interrelated with each other, and that their proper functioning creates both psychological and physical health. We have a great deal of scientific research that has explored the impact of the mind on the body, and vice versa, which is significant and scientifically unquestionable. However, if we turn back the clock forty or so years, even this view would have been new territory for most people in the healing professions. Today most health practitioners assume this without question. Another 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-- 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 nothing new. However, from the perspective of the healing professions, or from our Western notion of the healing sciences, this is new and important. The old model of the human being stated and made famous by the 17th century philosopher Renee Descartes was summarized as follows, "I think therefore I am." The new paradigm suggests that this is radically wrong. We are more than thinking entities. The new model could be stated as follows, "I am conscious therefore I am." We can use different terminology here--but what we are saying is that we are conscious entities. Awareness is different than thinking. When we make this shift, we launch upon a new view of healing. A model facilitated and awakened by the practice of meditation. In this sense, meditation is an exploration into the realms of consciousness, and a process by which we increase and free consciousness itself. |
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