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 | "And So It Went" | |
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to follow whatever pattern of behaviour we design for our selves. |
| During the greater part of European history it was generally accepted that humans came in two basic parts. Behaviour & Body. Or to put it another way; the part that you had to put up with, and the part that you could hit with a stick; a practice that was frequently carried out with religious fervour. Any aberrant behaviour (deviation from the conditioned pattern desired) was considered to be the work of malevolent spirits invading the body. The cure being to torture the body so as to make it untenable. The fact that the subject (read, victim) often died from the cure was just one of those things. Even today, the medical profession expects us to contend with unpleasant side-effects. And so it went. |
| For 3,000 years the ancient Egyptians embalmed their dead in the belief that they would be restored in their equivalent of heaven. They also believed that the mind lived in the heart. So, seeing no purpose to the brain, they threw it away during the embalming process. If they were correct in their belief, it follows that, somewhere, there is an ancient Egyptian heaven filled to the brim with 3,000 years worth of no-brainers. And so it went. |  |
| Progress to the rescue. Here comes the voice of reason as personified by the purveyors of "a better way to do things". The 'medical men' had a sure-fire recipe for advancement (read: self-aggrandisement). Suck up to the established religion, denigrate midwives as witches, banish all knowledge of folklore, and generally get rid of anyone who looked like being an undermining factor. Meanwhile, keep applying the leeches (nepotism if ever there was), slap on the arsenic and newt's eye poultices, and drain off a few pints of blood. If nothing else, it sure left the patients too weak to argue. And so it went. |
Then, clever monkeys that we are, we hit upon the Scientific Method! Enter the White Coats. The new priesthood discarded superstitions left right and centre, replacing them all with absolute, undeniable, immutable truths.
This table represents the way that we have been perceived by the vast majority of the scientific community right up until the last few decades of the 20th. century. There had been sweeping gains in knowledge of the intricate workings of both the brain and of the rest of the body; but there was still a tremendous reluctance on the part of the establishment to accept the depth and reach of the correspondence between the two. Psychologists were still enmeshed in the previous century's obsession with deterministic mechanisms. We were seen as being sharply divided by the Limen. A literal translation being: "threshold, the starting point of a new state or experience, a region marking a boundary, a doorway. To many, this doorway was seen to be firmly sealed, impervious to any requests for communication to and from consciousness. Just about everyone absolutely knew that: 1. Consciousness resided in the functions of the Central Nervous System which controlled all voluntary actions. It was largely concerned with the outside world and our relationship with the common reality. 2. The Autonomic System concerned itself with our internal environment. Comprised of two parts, the Parasympathetic Nervous System and the Sympathetic System, it was a self-governing system that was closed to us. 3. The Immune System was only just beginning to be examined, but it was patently obvious that it was even further away from our conscious manipulations. 4. Finally, there were the blueprints for life contained in our genetic make-up. Those blueprints were written at the time of our conception and were fixed. No post partum rewriting was conceivable. And so it went. |
| Then came a renaissance. Although in a minority, a lot of people from a wide range of fields began to communicate with each other, merging their disciplines into areas of study for which they had to invent new titles. Biopsychology, PalaeoPsychoNeuroImmunology, OsteoPaleantology, etc. Folk myths abound with stories of the 'strange-but-true' genre, but now the results were being duplicated in laboratories. Coupled with modern research methods they gave incredible insights into what is possible for anybody to achieve. Although thinly scattered, and often recorded only in obscure writings or written in high-tech languages, the knowledge is there for anyone interested enough to take the trouble to first look for it, then adopt the methods as part of their life. So now it comes! |
| "If the body is presumed to live its life mostly apart from the mind, no one bothers to explore the mechanics of their possible connections. But once it appears that the mind is in contact with the body, the mechanics become important ... Suddenly, pathways in the body that were thought to be as empty and uninteresting as a dark alley are as alive as a disco floor after midnight." 'Where the Mind Meets the Body', Harris Dienstfrey. |
