It is more apparent
than ever that we have been only able to catch sight of some elements
and patterns and that all of us in clinical medicine have tried to treat
living systems without knowing enough about short, medium, and long
term risks of our therapies.
Plants are our lifeblood,
not only as energy catchers, oxygen givers and nutrient suppliers, but
also as sources of myriads of medicinal substances.
Harvard biologist,
Edward O Wilson says in his book "The Future of Life", "About
1/4 of all prescriptions are substances of plant origin" and another
13% are from micro-organisms."
Whatever these
numbers, we can be certain that we have much to learn about how to carry
out our life, enhancing or altering processes in the more elegant ways.
There was a special
issue (September 2005) of Scientific American entitled “Crossroads
for Planet Earth”
I recommend that
readers read this issue as crucial perspectives are very well covered.
Professor Stephen
Leeder, Dean of Medicine at the University of Sydney, writes, "Ecosystem
plunder is a road to ruin".
Destruction of forest,
especially rain forests, for short-term economic gain is occurring before
we really know what is in them.
Fungi provide 85%
0f antimicrobial agents, but 97% of these species are as yet unassayed
for anti microbial and anticancer substances.
I am extremely interested
in the ecology within each of us, in our relationships and in our ways
of living.
It is appropriate
as suggested by Gregory Bateson, to consider that there are "ecologies
of mind"
Ecology within us
includes evaluation of adequate nutrition, consideration of what happens
when we are exposed to medication and environmental chemicals, and the
life of the microbiological flora in our intestines and within our cells.
When we apply the
same criteria to the environment (the biosphere with all of it's ecosystems)
we can begin to see that we have been poisoning and polluting these
systems in an ignorant, wanton and short term "economic rationalist
"manner.
Australia has not
been good in regulating toxic substances and has allowed some extremely
dangerous substances to be used in agriculture. For example, some batches
of 2,4.5-T, containing levels of dioxin and its related derivatives
at 260x then recommended concentrations were made from contaminated
ingredients of Agent Orange illegally imported into Queensland and Western
Australia during the Vietnam War.
Some workers developed
ongoing symptoms overlapping those of chronic fatigue syndrome.
This kind of common
weedkiller was used until the early 1990s.
Now at least one
Australian state government is finally confronting the effects.
The next generations
will increasingly come to realize what we have done and it will be costly
to repair the damage. Colborn and colleagues spell out details in their
book "Our Stolen Futures"
Carl Sagan in his
major book and television series" Cosmos", has a chapter and
programme entitled " Who speaks for earth?"
I invite each of
you to speak for earth.
David Suzuki has
also been never ceasing in his writings and programs which bring to
people the messages that we all can make a difference.
I invite you to
play your part in this life-saving quest.
COMBINING THE ELEMENTS
(SMALL PIECES) WITH BIG PERSPECTIVES
A reductionist approach
has proved to be crucial in discovering how we focus upon small elements.
Now cybernetic approaches
can help us to grasp the interplay including "feedback and feed
forward mechanisms", "up-regulation and down regulation"
"Cybernetics"
is the description given to regulation in systems (it comes from the
Latin word "gubernator" meaning "governor")
Although the systems
approach in principle considers all types of systems, it in practices
focuses on the more complex, adaptive, self-regulating systems which
we might call "cybernetic".
We can read on Pangaro
website
“Early cybernetic
researchers quickly realized that their "science of observed
systems" cannot be divorced from "a science of observing
systems" — because it is we who observe [von Foerster 1974].
The cybernetic approach is centrally concerned with this unavoidable
limitation of what we can know: our own subjectivity. In this way
cybernetics is aptly called "applied epistemology",
and
“Cybernetics
in contrast has evolved from a "constructivist" view of
the world [von Glasersfeld 1987] where objectivity derives from shared
agreement about meaning, and where information (or intelligence for
that matter) is an attribute of an interaction rather than a commodity
stored in a computer [Winograd & Flores 1986]. These differences
are not merely semantic in character, but rather determine fundamentally
the source and direction of research performed from a cybernetic,
versus an AI, stance.” ?
We can also conceive
of a big picture, where an observer can step back and try to discover
how the pieces fit together.
It makes sense to
step in then out repeatedly.
These are the patterns
of life, and can be described as richer and more diverse than we might
have imagined.
ENCOMPASSING
ALL DOMAINS AND ALL LEVELS.
I will also introduce
some of the ideas of Ken Wilber, with the intention of touching all
dimensions of what it is to be human and what our potential can include.
Wilber has looked
at all of the phenomena around our search for knowing ourselves and
the domains and contexts that we inhabit.
This includes a
history of our development, the recorded history of human groups and
their beliefs, ranging from what we can call premodern, modern and post
modern, and looking at what is now emerging that avoids epistemological
errors.
What descriptive
categories are needed as we create a sufficient series of paradigms
to allow ultimate integration?
THE FOUR QUADRANTS
It is my belief
that we are being challenged by Ken Wilber and others to become conscious
of the four quadrants, which he describes in order to locate all of
the phenomena of human operational thinking.
This enables any
of us to know the context or domain appropriate for the ideas being
considered. It offers a resolution to those who have wanted to understand
science, value the emergent consciousness of each person, have available
a basis for ethics and culture, and deal with the concepts of "modernism"
and "postmodernism".
After many years
of trying to get clarity in placing meanings in appropriate domains
of human operations, he came up with the following schema.
A representation
of the territories or domains that we can use to place everything that
we know is THE FOUR QUADRANTS.
He is describing
what he had to cover in order to encompass all the fields that he has
ever encountered.
The right side refers
to "IT", with the upper right placing holons each in it's
singularity, and the lower right the collections and their organization.
(Everything on the right side has readily discovered location)
A holon is something
that is whole in itself.
These right side
descriptions are typified by the chemistry that I have described above.
The left side represents
the "I" and the "WE". (These are much harder to
locate)
The diagram (Figure
1) which follows give the reader a chance to glimpse what Wilber means
Figure 1
If we reduce this
to three, we have the I, the We (the left side) and It. (the entire
right side)
THE BIG THREE.
I (interiors)
Consciousness,
subjectivity, self (this is me) lived awareness
Life from the
inside, self expression, art and aesthetics,
Truthfulness,
sincerity, integrity
WE (collective
interiors)
Ethics, morals,
appropriateness and justice,
Common context,
culture and tradition, religion
Intersubjective
meaning, mutual understanding
Knowledge communities,
the law.
Aboriginal dreamtime
Vedic chakras
IT (exteriors)
Science (physics,
chemistry, mathematics), technology,
Measurement,
"objective" findings (reproducibility) empirical forms,
Propositional
truths, pure reason,
What things look
like, arrangements and organization,
(E.g. demography,
epidemiology, ecology, sociology)
Social sciences,
systems theory
LET US WONDER AT
OUR WORLD AND OURSELVES!
LET US REFLECT ON
OUR CONSCIOUSNESS AND VISIT THESE QUADRANTS OFTEN!
Being able to successively
and simultaneously acknowledge these quadrants as having their own validity,
is a kind of integration.
Wilber would call
this INTEGRAL VISION.
Integration is a
key word here.
It is my hope that
the reader will feel willing to actively participate in a healing approach
to herself/himself and the biosphere, as well as joining in conversations
where we will all treat each other well. .
As my colleague
and friend Alan Stewart would say
"WE ARE ALL
IN THIS TOGETHER", and
"WHENEVER WE
TREAT EACH OTHER WELL, GOOD THINGS HAPPEN"
Let us reach for
this intention.
I like the notion
that human beings have too long been occupied with their own rightness,
and the time has come to seek to be each other's friends.
"WE ARE ALL
SUITED TO FRIENDSHIP "
LET US DANCE TO
RECOGNITION AND FRIENDSHIP.
There is a dance
of the eyes where as we move around inner and outer circles, we engage
and look into each person's eyes and think, "I have known you of
old "
This is recognition
of the humanity of everyone.
Let us do it!
medicine