next chapter GICLEE PRINT GALLERY                 ARTICLES on medicine and current thought, including CFS by John Graham Beginnings,metaphors, holons Imaging fullfilment and healing Chronic fatigue

PREFACE  HOW DO WE KNOW?              Adventures in human stuckness from biological and philosophical perspectives We are presently faced with frightening happenings in our world.  Our ecology is seemingly in crisis. Global warming and climate change may be close to a crucial point of runaway. Ideologies and belief systems seemingly command adherents into hostility and opposition.  We are potentially humane and generous, but corporate living is often seen as promoting greed and self-interest.  In every age there are times for us to reflect, but life is calling us into an awareness that could turn out to be both life-saving and planet-saving!  We are looking at solving problems as individuals, in relationships and in community.  If we are able to see big perspectives, we can cooperate in helping our planet and the generations that are to follow us.  Can we create ways of thinking that enable us to see many viewpoints?  We can be conscious that there are practical ways of living that will work in such helpful and saving ways.  We human beings are remarkable pattern detectors.  This enables us to discern patterns that are present in both inanimate and animate systems.  Living systems are full of amazing signalling mechanisms.  In the writing here, I will be addressing fundamental understandings of every known domain of human enquiry.  This entails describing objects, classifying them, noting relationships between those that are related, noticing and describing patterns as well as the codes that enable the complex emergence of life.  This will include the phenomena of advance into complexity. As we are an example of an astonishing advance into complexity, we can note our consciousness and note our observer status.  We can hope to distinguish between opinion, (Latin)”opinio” and science, (L)”scientia” (knowledge)  The opinion is a preferred explanation or way of thinking, while the science is an ever repeated search for verification and validation.  As people we have emotional qualities that arise in our subjective lives.  As we echo the words in “Les Miserables”, can we sing ”Who will be strong and join with me?” and can we become ” a people who will not be slaves again?”  Any of us could wonder what led Victor Hugo to write this remarkable story, and further what brilliance of use of these themes set to stirring and passionate music, could lead to the musical version?  This might give the reader an inkling of how I have come to feel for the sufferers of any unsolved illness.  Here I am beginning with ways of helping persons who have been afflicted with severe and incapacitating fatigue.  But the reader will notice that the writings dance between complexities of biology and the richness of lived experience.  If you wish, please feel free to skip such sections that require much biological learning  When is tiredness chronic fatigue?  In 1977, I was asked to join the Pain management unit at Flinders Medical Centre at Bedford Park in South Australia, principally to help achieve accurate and comprehensive diagnoses in patients who came to the unit with "difficult to manage" chronic pain. This would surely require relief and healing in the sufferer’s life.  I was impressed that this area of medical practice was neither popular with health professionals, nor was it achieving adequate relief for the sufferers.  None the less those professionals are to be admired for doing what they could within the prevailing medical and psychosocial models that were valued at that time.  In time I came to ponder, what would need to happen for people who feel" stuck", to somehow, break free of that which constrains them.  I slowly began to realize that it was not just the patients who were held back.  I remembered the words of Gregory Bateson,”In the world of the living, events take their course or courses because they are restrained from taking other courses.”  All of us fall into ways of living, thinking and acting as if we can accept and live with certain patterns and beliefs even when they are not successful.  These ways can constitute traps so that we can become prisoners of our own linguistic conditioning, and inadvertently we tend to be guardians of our old ways of thinking and of explaining things to others and ourselves.  The discovery that in South Australia we have some 8,000 sufferers with Chronic Fatigue Syndromes (in a population of about 1.2 million people in the year 2000) was one factor which influenced me to explore this and allied fields, look at the literature and revisit the basic sciences to understand the disorder as well as the huge morbidity which I saw in the sufferers.  The information which follows includes material, which was originally intended for a lay audience, but was then expanded rather stochastically, as I came across material that intrigued me.  This part became more technical, often with implications for therapy.  At the time of writing the results of treatment are far from satisfactory, but I believe that we are turning important corners.  Things are indeed changing!  Recovery in my patients is no longer a surprise!    We now realize that there are probably at least 5, perhaps 6, different sub categories of the fatigue syndromes, such that therapists will need to specify the abnormalities to get the therapy correct. (or rather “better tuned” to each person!)  Both health professionals and CFS sufferers find it difficult to evaluate the many claims made by people offering remedies for the condition.  I want to reach people, and I hope that they want to reach out to each other.  I strongly hope to be thoroughly honest about what published literature reveals.  Many explanations are offered, yet very often ideas stem from small pieces of work by only one author with conclusions not yet evaluated in a scientific way. The decision to explore these fields of learning and human exploration has been incredibly rewarding.  I feel I have been refreshed in my thinking and philosophies, and have a renewed commitment to the ever-continuing learning that is embodied in the scientific method.  I would like to convey this enthusiasm to readers.  You are entitled in your humanness, to open your mind to the two kinds of truth.  The truth of science is the reliability of that which stands up to test after test. We call this "objective", in that its validity is used to make it possible for your house appliances, motor vehicles or computer to work time after time.  The second kind of truth is to do with an integrity which does not hide behind dogma, but with courage faces the field of the intersubjective domain with compassion and recognition.  In this domain, it is critical to consider that what is in any human life, is the conservation of information that somehow endured in that person's belief system.  I have been inspired by the people who have suffered not only through their illnesses, but also through the unwillingness of health professionals and other people to believe and support them.  Often, all we need do is be fully present to them. It also helps to be present to our own experience and genuine in our feelings. Living our own truth helps create the space for the other person to live theirs.  "The first duty of love is to listen."  -- Paul Tillich  "With the gift of listening comes the gift of healing."  -- Catherine de Hueck Doherty  One purpose of the material presented here is to invite skeptics to re-evaluate the rich information that is now available.  The document also presents some material that is basic textbook type information, so that those who have a small acquaintance with science and biology have a chance to have this information without having to find such a textbook.  Why will I present the reader with so many mechanisms?  Principally because the group of symptoms that we now call ” chronic fatigue syndromes,” will have many mechanisms, some of which are particular to specific participating and causative factors.  Indeed there will necessarily be common mechanisms applicable to all fields of medicine.  This is indeed an exploration,” to leave no stone unturned!”  Rather ambitiously I will include chapters on our human ways of knowing.  This also embodies a philosophy of approach that addresses epistemology appropriate to the full range of human endeavours.  These ideas have been inspired through my exploration of the ideas and work of Ken Wilber, an American philosopher and epistemologist who also has reached very widely in both Eastern and Western writings to create the best possible maps of all human knowing.  The potential is to move freely through all of our ways of knowing and to develop the most integrated ways of living and being that we can.  For those who want much more detail, the expanded information is being continually revisited and revised.  They will themselves seek information in all the ways they wish.  The reader is invited to respond in whichever ways seem most appropriate.  Somehow human beings have been on journeys of discovery and invention aroused by an intense curiosity about all unsolved matters that they encounter.  Unfortunately world gross expenditure on weapons and the systems that support them has gravely decreased the wealth available to solve health problems.  I find myself as a member of a peace seeking and curious band, and invite you, the reader, to be as active as you prefer in these learning adventures.  This is an invitation to increase your self-awareness.  Entering into conversation with other seekers has always been a means for our intelligence to emerge as wisdom.  Creativity matters and we all can have it.  By all means be thoughtful, and even sceptical, but beware of the scepticism which prevents advances being available.  In modern usage, “sceptical “seems to mean “doubting” or “needing lots of proof”, but I am reminded that the word sceptical comes from a Greek word “skeptikos” which means” thoughtful,” whereas the Latin word “scepticus” may be closer to  “inquiring, and reflective”.  Let us encompass all of these meanings, as we explore any mysterious problems.  “Come, let us think and reflect together !”  I invite you to consider your life journey as an incredible and wonderful experience, despite whatever difficulties saeem to have emerged.  There is an urgent need for consistent, coordinated and financially supported research here in Australia, but for those who are already doing this work, I offer my gratitude and support. Perhaps you can write to your Member of Parliament about this!                                                         ^