Notes From a Fellow Traveller

Our conception of health is not something to be fixed and frozen in time. To do so would be to fix and freeze our human potential, needlessly limiting ourselves and denying our precious opportunity to gain a vast, profound, and enduring health, happiness, and wholeness. Fortunately, the actuality is that the character of human health evolves over the long journey of human existence and then again in each of our individual lifetimes. In broad terms we can say this evolution is from body to mind to spirit - an evolution which gives to each of us a progressively larger capacity for life and health.

The earliest and most basic form of health is an instinctual physical/physiological health. Internally, this is the automated process by which our body balances itself. Our blood pressure, pulse, temperature, hormonal secretions, immune function and most other body systems keep us alive as they adjust and readjust in an automatic fashion according to the moment-to-moment needs of the body. Similarly, on the outside, we instinctually seek warmth when cold, water when thirsty, safety when threatened, daily food and rest. There is little consciousness or intention required. These basic survival mechanisms are built-in. For much of humanity this has been and still is the most basic form of health and healing.

Several thousand years ago humankind made the extraordinary leap from an instinctual life to a mental life. The former capacities were of course retained, but the center of our experience shifted towards the rational mind. The words we use here are "embrace and transcend." That is how evolution works. We never give up a capacity we just integrate it into a higher level of development. With reason, logic, and intellect we are able to move beyond survival to highly sophisticated understandings and technologies. As a result our vision of health expands, new priorites are asserted, and previously unknown capacities are gained. Accurate diagnosis, safe surgery, effective treatments, preventive strategies, health promotion and mind-body approaches are a few of the fruits of this evolution in health.

This is where we are today. There are two directions that are now open to us. The first is to expand the scope of a rational or mental based health. Of course this is ongoing. We see it in the continuing development of conventional medical science as well as in the introduction of other rational systems of medicine that we have termed alternative and conventional. Each of these share their common source in the development of the human mind and its resources.

However, expansion is not transformation - expanding the medical tool kit, however valuable, is more like bringing new furniture into the same room. It is easy, as we have, to mistake this for fundamental evolutionary change. But it is not. Complementary, alternative and integrative medicine are not the transformative leap in vision and capacity that shifts our center of experience and releases a wellspring of new understandings and possibilities. That evolutionary leap still awaits us.

The transformative leap from a health defined by physical survival to a health defined by the analytical and methodological resources of our intellect is the necessary foundation for the next great leap to a health centered in and defined by our spiritual capacities. As before, such a leap discards nothing. It embraces our instincts for survival and our brilliant rational medicine. However, by re-orienting the center of our experience from rational/mental to spiritual we again gain a more expansive vision, reorder our priorites, and extend our capacities.

The development of our spiritual life offers us a precious quality of health that cannot be achieved by lesser levels of development. We have already gained the basic material requirements for survival and the capacity to attend to our biology, but our spirit adds a further dimension. Only through spiritual development gain we attain the intuitive knowledge - the pure wisdom - that can lead us to the alleviation of all suffering and the promotion of human flourishing.

This level of health is characterized by a vast, profound, and sustained health, happiness, and wholeness. This final movement towards a perfected health and healing is simply not available through the capacities of our instinctual or mental levels of development. To complete our long journey towards a perfected health we must move into the unknown terrrain of our subtle inner life. We must turn inward for the next great evolutionary leap.

What is there about the development of our spiritual center that offers these new possibilities? Instinctual life is limited by the dominance of automaticity and the lack of consciousness and intention as we know it. Our mental life is conceptual and dualistic. It invariably and tyranically imposes upon us the painful separation of subject and object. This requirement of our mental life separates us from our heart, our inner wisdom, other beings, andall of creation. We are thus we are separated from the oneness and wholeness of life. And oneness and wholeness is the truth of life. As a result we live and cannot heal the diseases of an exclusively mental life. These can only be healed by leaping to our next level of development.

Instinctual life and health is unconscious, mental life and health is disconnecting, spiritual life and health is unifying. To know the truth of our oneness with self and all else naturally brings us to a profound wisdom, connectedness, loving-kindness, and compassion. And it's these qualities, found only in spiritual development, that allow for an end to suffering and the potential for human flourishing.

Fortunately, when we follow our destiny to the next level of health we will find that the teachers and teachings that are needed to assist us are well developed and awaiting our call.

As the poet Mary Olvier said "What do you want to do with this one precious and wild life of yours." The choice is yours!

It's been a month since returning from retreat and teachings in the East. Anticipation of the return home has always given rise to concerns about retaining and growing the understandings and practices gained in retreat. How can I sustain the momentum when reimmersed in my day-to-day environment? How can I maintain the same level of mental stability and its accompanying well being? How can I hold and expand the truths and realizations discovered on retreat that seem so essential to a sustained life of health, happiness, and wholeness?

It seems a bit more steady and sustained this time. I sense this is related to the growth of faith. We are told that there are three aspects of faith: a faith arising from intellectual certainty, a faith arising from an intuitive clarity, and a longing faith that arises from the meeting of the first two aspects of faith. The first, an intellectual certainty, comes from life experience, study, and teachings. It is a certainty that a sustained and profound well being can only be found through the still mind and open heart, and that this pursuit is the most meaningful activity of human life. From this certainty arises a non-intellectual intuitive faith that knows this same truth from a deeper non-conceptual source. And from the meeting of this conceptual and intuitive clarity arises the third aspect of faith, a yearning faith which motivates us from within to work with diligence to attain the full promise of our human possibility.

The motivation based on a growing faith encourages us to abandon unwholesome behaviors that create both mental and physiological havoc, to abandon our lifelong pursuit of mundane, momentary and self-betraying pleasures, and to stop automatically chasing every thought, emotion, and image that moves through our mind. We choose to cultivate healthy behaviors, a still, mindful and clear mind, and an open heart. And we choose a mentor, a set of teachings, and a supportive community to help us on our path.

This movement from outside to inside, from a conventional health to a vast and profound well being is a progressive shift, a transformative change that begins inside. Although limiting, old ways of thinking about and seeking health and healing are quite tenacious. It's taken time to overcome these conditioned thought pattterns and convince this habituated mind that there is more to health than I have imagined, more to health than biological balance, and further, that it is possible to gain this more expansive health in this lifetime through my own efforts. It has also taken time to find the right teachers and teachings. But slowly I'm getting it and that is why this return has been far more seamless than previous ones.

There is not much time between the years others are caring for our early development and then again the years when others are caring for us towards the end of our life. There is only a brief time to make our life precious and meaningful by pursuing the most meaningtful possibility of human life - the floruishing of health, happiness, and wholeness. I've been fortunate to have the time to dilgently pursue a larger health. I know that this is not so for everyone. Yet, as I have grown in faith, study, and practice I have also found far more time to devote to this pursuit as I've happily given up a host of trivial and meaningless activities, entertainments, and surface social conversations which in the end amount to nothing.

More than ever before, even as a beginner, I can begin to feel the changes within. I can feel the early intimations of a sustained and hardy health, happiness, and wholeness. No practitioners or outer remedies here - just study and practice.