Krysan Blog: Healing Words 6 - Nothing - Archives
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- Written by Marian Moore
KRYSAN
THE WELLBEING CONSULTANCY
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H E A L I N G W O R D S
(A 3-minute chat with Marian @ Krysan)
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed. ALBERT EINSTEIN
You are invited to log on to the KRYSAN BLOG each Friday or Saturday during the months of July and August for this latest series of Krysan Master Classes. The intention is to continue to explore the use of writing as a form of therapy and hopefully the caption HEALING WORDS and the Einstein quotation will prove rich in possibilities. MARIAN @ KRYSAN
Turn up the sound and click on the link below
Blog No. 6 : Friday, 14 August 2009
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Shipyard fortnight.
In days gone by when there were still shipyards (and coal mines) around this neck of the woods, most families took off for the annual sea-side holiday during the last week in July and the first week in August. My family, together with people from all over the North East and Scotland, congregated in guest houses, chalets and caravans in South Shields, Redcar, Seaton Carew, and - best of all - in Blackpool. Usually it rained. There's now little physical evidence that great industries existed hereabouts, but their legacy lives on in hearts and minds and everything still closes down for a fortnight at this time of the year. The point I'm really trying to make is that the 'shipyard fortnight' was when we did 'nothing' - at least on the face of it.The expert.
Whether on holiday or not, I've always been considered to be a real expert at doing nothing. This dates right back to my childhood when 'Nothing' was my favoured response to my long-gone mother's anguished and frequent cry, 'Marian, what are you doing?' This would be followed by, 'Put that book down! If this dinner was good enough to make, it's good enough to eat.' I can hear her now. She never did quite 'get' the difficulties I and other members of my family experienced in dragging ourselves back to reality (and thence to the meal on the table) when engrossed in a good book. Reading, to my mother's mind, was an indulgence and a family failing. My capacity for day-dreaming was even more difficult for her to understand. But, despite my mother's frequent protestations, she was also wise and largely thanks to her I remain (and in my seventh decade of life) both an unapologetic reader and an unapologetic day-dreamer.
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A paradox.On reflection, these frequent encounters with my mother's wrath were my first exposure to the notion of paradox, that is, nothing was actually something. According to my reading of Dr. Larry Dossey's book to which I will refer constantly, the dictionary defines nothing as that which is non-existent, insignificant, unimportant, trivial, useless, or empty. All of these words reflect, in his view (and in mine), our culture's blindness to the value and power of nothing. Indeed, if we achieve nothing in life we are thought to fail. Furthermore, we tend to equate nothing with sin itself. Remember what they say about 'idle hands'? Moreover, my hippy friends will testify that when someone actually celebrates nothing and not-doing as a way of life, they are generally considered at best 'odd' and at worst 'subversive'.
Not-doing.
Not-doing (doing nothing) has undoubtedly fallen on hard times, and this is particularly so in modern medicine. I wonder how many of the young trainee doctors I talk to each year will heed the words of Hippocrates, the father of Western medicine. He said, and you may have heard this before, that the first goal of a physician was to do no harm. Hippocrates was implying that doing nothing might sometimes be the wisest course of action. It is Dr. Dossey's experience (and he should know) that present-day physicians have largely abandoned Hippocrates' endorsement of a minimalist approach to healing and tend to consider nature as failure-prone, or one big accident just waiting to happen. He says,
Spontaneous remission."Believing we can invariably improve on nature, we physicians have become incorrigible doers and meddlers." Dossey, p. 186The most dramatic example of the ability of the body to heal when little or nothing is done is when dreaded diseases such as cancer simply go away. This is called spontaneous remission. The most comprehensive look at this "epidemiology of nothing" is to be found in Spontaneous Remission: An Annotated Bibliography by Brendan O'Regan and Caryle Hirshberg. These authors summarize 1,385 published case reports in which cancer and other serious illnesses disappeared without any treatment, or with treatment believed insufficient to produce a cure. One prominent physician who saw the value of 'do-nothing spontaneous remission' was Lewis Thomas who describes this phenomenon as a fascinating mystery, and as providing a solid basis for the discovery of a cure for cancer (and maybe other ills) in the future.
But, bear in mind doing nothing is relative."If several hundred patients have succeeded in doing this sort of thing, eliminating vast numbers of malignant cells on their own, the possibility that medicine can learn to accomplish the same thing at will is surely within the reach of imagining."What appears to be nothing to a physician may not be nothing to a patient. If interventions are not physical but of the patient's own mind, they are usually not investigated, discussed or reported in scholarly write-ups (or anywhere else for that matter). And, why ... ? I leave you to ponder this somewhat perplexing and worrying question as I must move on. But, decidedly not before mentioning the famous psychologist C. G. Jung who also saw the value of not-doing and non-interference. Some problems, Jung believed, have a way of solving themselves and he reported that he had often seen individuals who simply outgrew a problem which had destroyed others. His actual words of explanation are, "Some higher or wider interest arose on the person's horizon, and through the widening of his view, the insoluble problem lost its urgency." At last, some common sense, some honesty, some wisdom and, above all, some hope and a way forward for those who do not wish their mental suffering to be 'medicated out of existence with a blizzard of tranquilizers and antidepressants'. (Dossey p. 190) Maybe we all should study philosophy. And, for a life time! But, of course, that's just a personal opinion.
Pure consciousness.I will now touch on another subject dear to my heart, the subject of mind or pure consciousness. An increasing number of individuals around the world hunger for spiritual experiences that have a mystical flavour and many believe the only place they can find them is in the traditions of the Orient. This may (or may not) be true. But, interestingly, in his landmark work The Religions of Man, philosopher Huston Smith relates the experience of a Zen meditator whose awareness of self expanded into a sense of unity with all there is:
Mysticism."Ztt! I entered. I lost the boundary of my physical body. I had my skin, of course, but I felt I was standing in the centre of the cosmos. ... I saw people coming toward me, but all were the same man. All were myself. I had never known this world before. I had believed that I was created, but now I must change my opinion: I was never created: I was the cosmos; no individual ... existed."Critics (doctors among them) often dismiss such experiences as described above as 'dreamy mysticism' and warn that they will lead to a withdrawal from the practical side of life. But, as Dossey points out, the opposite is generally true. He and others believe that the experience of pure consciousness fills the individual with compassion and love, which are a springboard for a fuller, more active participation in the world. He convincingly points to the Western tradition of the 'practical mystic', represented by individuals such as St. Francis, Mother Theresa, and Florence Nightingale, who dedicated their entire lives to serving those in need. The evidence is that the views of mystics are consistent across cultures, which is why it is said that all mystics come from the same country and speak the same language. This is the language of joy.
The Universe.I would like to conclude with a few words about the widely-held belief that the universe originated from nothing around 15 million years ago in the Big Bang, or 'the explosion of a very hot dot.' Theories around the origin (and the ultimate destiny) of the universe are legion but the greatest unknown in all of science - the role of consciousness - is usually left out. An exception is the eminent physicist John Archibald Wheeler whose work suggests, "We are a part of a universe that is a work in progress; we are tiny patches of the universe looking at itself - and building itself ... a clue that the mystery of creation may lie not in the distant past but in the living present." Dr Dossey advises that we dwell on what he describes as 'the non-local, infinite nature of consciousness'. By way of a brief explanation, he says that 'a plethora of evidence suggests that consciousness is genuinely nonlocal or infinite, lying beyond the space and time in which our bodies are embedded'. Dossey makes a final statement of some great significance, saying,
Day-dreamers."The implication of the nonlocal mind is immortality; in which nothing [and nobody] are revealed as everything, everywhere, and forever." (Dossey, p. 208)It's no afterthought that I pose the question, 'Where would humanity be without the day-dreamers, those who can and do transcend the ego and experience the magic of a new dimension?' This is the world in which one's soul is in touch with the souls of all creatures. The seduction of such enlightenment is great. Consider the poet William Blake's words as he takes enlightenment into infinity and into eternity:
Beautiful words.
But, there I must end with much (as always) left unsaid. Join me next week when I'll be looking at Dr. Larry Dossey's refreshing and carefully considered take on 'one of the most low-tech health methodologies in human history: hearing voices'. Here's the quotation from whence we will begin,
'Out of the air a voice without a face ...'
W. H. AUDEN,The Shield of Achilles____________________________________________________________A BEAUTIFUL GIFT
REFERENCES
DOSSEY, L., (2006), The Extraordinary Healing Power of Ordinary Things: Fourteen Natural Steps to Health and Happiness, pub. New York, Three Rivers Press
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