the collective psyche orients to the body, its very animal nature, not so much as a backseat driver or third world cabbie, but as incarcerated cargo in the trunk.

deconstructing ayn rand

objectivism and enlightened self-interest seem, on face, valid proposals, save they hinge on a proposed human facility, admittedly needful of disciplined development, for reasoned interpretation and focused (ie. delimited) action... the notion that we could possibly escape relativism to see things plain and unfettered by either personal context, mysticism or, worse, primitive imaginal mind. yet here lies the root of twenty-first-century insanity, to grow a human crop at the whip of dry, commercial logic, irrigated not by the chaotic (yet highly organized) infrastructure of bios, spiritus, and the drawl of infinity's backdrop.

rand and her muscular insistence on logic and reductio-materialism emerge as a reactive flowering in the wake of the industrial era, the first to harness the herd to commonly-held aspirations, comforting political demagoguery and line production ambitions. an era that was on the one hand, prudish and god-fearing, on the other, in awe of the coming technological age and its gloss poetry of convenience, fancy, and quasi-eugenic-perfection schemes.

but it was principally the need to collectively organize an uneducated workforce that proved most stifling to what would become the post-war western cult of individuality that latterly led to the me-generation of the sixties, the pursuit of happiness and all its virtues and excesses.

ironically, rand paid the price for her command of mind and certainty of philosophy with an unconscious enslavement to the collective archetypes, fascinated as she was with the inner ideal man of her intense capito-erotic fantasies.

'atlas shrugged' premised group action even while it dared not regard it as 'collective' behaviour given it was effected by a leading elite, the rogue mid-century new intellectual above the common and its ties-that-bind. yet, the acerbic wit and rapier cerebrality was fed and took nourished root in gatsby-esque new-age architecture and design, infantilizing "tiddlywink" (her term for the chaplinesque music of the thirties so adored) not to mention the hubris of the last century's skyscrapers and rhinestone skylines that now lie vulnerable to the very disowned mysticism she feared, that now thrives in modern-age religious intolerance and fundamentalist madness.

rand derided the irrational function because her only model for it was the brute ruskie peasant who took to god or committee like the freaks took to LSD and knock-n-roll. had she been more fortunate, she might have been able to synthesize the nuance and sukha of the immortal human chain of ancestors with her valid protectionism of the right to happiness and free expression... so well (and logically one would add) developed by the zen, the buddhist, the shaman. but in the end she spoke exclusively and deridingly to those inner rivers of numen, idealizing the trite, dry and predictable exercise of practical reason and the autocracy of cash interest.

when she exhorted immortality, quoting a now forgotten greek who said, we don't die, its the world that comes to an end, she was evoking a next-stage thinking that eluded her in life but surely baked her to core first with the loss of her husband and then in her own death.

rand was a necessary atheist, a philosophic wunderkind of her age and i like her very much, but her limit and her sorrow came in not being able to next-stage it and synthesize the two functions that must be married for true laterality and depth to be achieved. such is the task of our era and our players.

vortices

i've become enamoured of late with the idea that our connective tissue system, with its 3D highway lines of myofascial continuity that run longitudinally and spiralize round the body, responds _vortically_ to stress, injury, and strain. the farther the originating point of injury is from its force-expression of impact, the more liable the body is to torque little black holes into these highways, the way we ties knots into fabric.

leading edge of a kite

reflecting on the lateral edge of the hands, the leading edge under the fifth, little finger. its like the fleshy brain compartment of the two kites, the arms and hands, our extensible and endlessly specializing motor tool of choice. but perhaps more importantly, the extensible and endlessly fluid remnant of our adaptation to air (wings) and space (gravitational manipulators). the hub for the fluid tensional branches of the arms is the rib basket, the spine, an interlocutor between the upper body and the pelvic root bulb and its levers, the legs, knees, ankles to feet that give purchase in gravity to ground.

injuries to nerves, nerve-rich areas, hypericum is often indicated. i say often since some injuries can be rather textbook, in which case hypericum brings great relief. but if there are other symptoms, their character, atypicality and degree of impact may indicate other similimum.

HYPERICUM: injuries of any kind, contusions, lacerations, punctures, surgeries, to parts rich in nerve, and injuries to the spine and coccyx. pain is sharp and shooting. this remedy picture is worse for movement, not better.

holistic embryology: van der Wal

"Your whole life long it’s a matter of ’taking off coats’. That is the gesture of development. To be born will turn out to be a gesture of ’dying out of…’. The philosopher Mansukh Patel says: 'When we die, we just take off a coat.' Actually we don’t do anything else right through our lives. We shed the body of the baby to step into that of a toddler. Next we put on the body of a child, adolescent, adult and so on. The embryo can teach you a great deal about the real dynamics of growth and development, about dying and being born." [Jaap van der Wal, "Embryo in Motion"]

tenderhearted is tenderized

transversus thoracis
MYO-EMO profile: need and lack fulfillment.

the transversus thoracis armours the heart and important thoracic organs. in contraction it pulls the bony basket of our ribs toward core. emotions easily translate into holding patterns with this muscle, especially when emotional traffic in the body has lots of build but no release.

this is the muscle we need to relate to if we really want to become tenderhearted in the world.

problem with reason is the same problem called god

i find it endlessly fascinating that the times posit such extremes in unreconciled couplets. on the one hand, the fervor of religious fundamentalism which insists on the existence of a dumbed-down dimension, retro precepts, and almighty parochial wardens. on the other, the elitist faith of rational dogmatists who insist that only those models of truth which can be factually constrained by current evidentiary laws are worth the human bother. both points of view must by rights denounce and refute each other, ignoring content and experience which defies both the reductionist maw of thought divorced from spirit and the mandelbrot perpetuity of faith divorced from muscular sense. for human progress to occur, integration of these functions require new models, new explications.

to bring next-level stability to complex systems we must find ways to withdraw unconscious human affect from the theatre of its primitive roleplay needs, and use its conscious-retention-for-the sake-of-integration as the impetus for another flowering in human evolution, both personal and interpersonal. this is the challenge. and should we fail in our task to meet it, we have long records of old results to gird us for the catastrophic losses.

celebrity and economics

in the examination of world trends, both economic and gubernatorial, historian niall ferguson has suggested that racial/ethnic distinctions, rather than hierarchies of class, are the principal engine of discord, taken together as they need must with market instabilities, hegemonies in collapse, and the old east-west polarity play.

well, even within racial and ethnic groupings, we still find hierarchies that posit some underling class and some favoured elite. the question is why and the answer to this is rarely couched in humanistic terms. this seems in keeping with the surficial analysis (ie. description of surface appearances) so trendy in academe. the notion that objective, quasi-scientific assessments of fact are somehow more telling than holistic surveys which seek to provide as much depth as latitudinal coverage. science likes the flatland of two-dimensional assessment, free of the human stain carried via psyche and soul. this accounts for the denigration of psychological inquiry and its devolution into mere behaviorist dogma, and the quarantine of the spiritual life in the mere rule/role tautologies of religion.

what appeals more to my inquiring mind is the quest to understand what is evidently a constant in human affairs since earliest times, this need for hierarchical experience. the need to segregate an elite from the common in what i would term a displaced spiritual neurosis which plays out in a dramaturgy we have self-created but long since disowned so as to experience it as something imposed on us from without, and beyond our control, and therefore, quasi-divine.

even today, in the manufactured world of celebrity, we are gifted the service, scarcely recognized for truth, to see this function at its most base and obvious. it's one of the last outposts of our considerable unconsciousness, this need we have to imagine ourselves in the midst of an elite, a royal, appointed-for-distinction class which possesses qualities more akin the gods than mere mortals. thusly we can project the processes once satisfied by integrated spiritual experience known to the shamanic ancestors into an artificial hierarchy play that satisfies our need for the numinous on earth about as well as a shit chocolate bar satisfies our need for gastronomic heavenliness.

as usual, i'm short on time and can only offer this quick precis, but if and when time permits i'd like to write more on the subject. for only by understanding the needs which inform the behaviour of our species can we really begin to unravel why we create the structures and divisions and turmoils we do, and how to better harness our god-like creativity, inherent-but-little-used trans-temporal faculties, not to mention the irrational technologies of instinct and intuitiveness, and our inbred need of worship and wonder.

more soon. i hope.

empiricism

Somewhat of an understatement to say it was interesting to hear Paul Stamets riff on the world of fungi courtesy the folks at Longevity Now. But I was surprised to hear the oft repeated suggestion that our ancestors lived out an empirical worldview, that this kind of trial and error approach is what accounts for the evolution of understanding we now profit from in terms of both materia medicum and prosaic usage schemes for the variegated bounty of this earth. Its a frequently repeated idea but I can't get behind it.

It seems more plausible to me that our ancestors enjoyed an unbroken continuum with archetypal consciousness. The human mind was not compartmentalized and fractured as it was to become in the service of all that led to modernity and its exploitation of the rational axis for construct and progress. Instead mind was a part of the numen of matter, the vent of the jungle. It had not yet sought to see itself as distinct for the purposes of abstraction and mastery. It was still in the garden of eden, conversant with the powers of time and place and the mother earth forces. We see vestiges of this in the plant theologies of the Amazon basin, the technology of animal totems employed by shamans thru the ages.

There was no need for a concept such as synchrony for the world was experienced as a defacto interlocutor of both spiritual and practical mysteries, the as yet undivided heaven and hell of pitiless exposure and tender harbour. Our ancestors walked in ever-present communion within the living, ribald world. Ecstatic states and extreme adjuncts on consciousness via deprivation or feats of endurance made the veil between worlds even thinner, permitting knowledge to reveal itself in aristotelean alacrity. The forest taught the man what he already knew, not thru chance observation or cunning experiment, but by silting itself into the deep stream of the unformed mind where everything is at once already understood, already discovered, already known, already cultivated, already employed, already defiled, already destroyed, already returned to the ash of ages and born of light again and again and again...
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For further reading I recommend The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes and anything by Jeremy Narby and Joseph Campbell.

full research texts available for viewing

HELENE M. LANGEVIN

Research Associate Professor
Department of Neurology
M.D., McGill University, 1978

Residency: Internal Medicine, Johns Hopkins Hospital, 1985; Certified: American Board of Internal Medicine, 1986

Fellowship: Johns Hopkins Hospital (Endocrinology & Metabolism), 1986; Certified: Endocrinology and Metabolism, 1987

RESEARCH
The research interests of my laboratory are the mechanism of action of acupuncture, and the interaction between connective tissue and sensory nervous system. Acupuncture has been practiced for over 2000 years, but its mechanism of action remains unknown. An important aspect of acupuncture treatments is that needles are manipulated after being inserted into the tissue. Manipulation typically consists of rapid rotation and/or pistoning of the needle. In humans, we have found that acupuncture needle rotation causes a marked increase in the force necessary to pull the needle out of the skin (pullout force). In animals, (both in vivo and tissue explants), we have shown that this increase in pullout force is due to subcutaneous tissue winding around the needle, creating a tight mechanical coupling between needle and tissue. The importance of this phenomenon is that, once this needle/tissue coupling has been established, further movements of the needle can transmit a mechanical signal into the tissue. We are currently investigating the hypothesis that transduction of this mechanical signal to a cellular response underlies some of the therapeutic effects of acupuncture.

Our long-term goal is to understand how the effect of mechanical forces on connective tissue matrix composition may influence sensory afferent input originating from that connective tissue. Understanding these interactions may give important insights into the pathogenesis of musculoskeletal pain.

visit Dr. Langevin's site and download the articles here...

Helen Langevin

Helene Langevin a research professor of neurology from University of Vermont found that most of the Qi points are located in the areas of inter-muscular or intramuscular connective tissue planes. In other words the Qi points are located in areas where fascia planes or network converges. They showed that acupuncture points mostly lie along the fascia planes between muscles or between a muscle and bone or tendon. When a needle is inserted along the fascia plane, it will first penetrate through skin's dermis & subcutaneous tissue, then through deeper interstitial connective tissue. They hypothesized that the Qi meridians are the representation of a network of fascia. A blockage of Qi can be viewed as an alteration in fascia composition. Acupuncture points correspond to the sites where fascia network converges. Thus needling or pressure at the acupuncture or trigger points will have more prominent effect because a point represents convergence of several fascia plane or lines. Thus manipulation produces changes in the cellular level that can propagate along the fascia network (Langevin & Yandow, 2002).

http://www.terrarosa.com.au/fascia.htm

spatial medicine isn't just about myofasciae

its also about the quality of vascular and lymphatic irrigation of the tissue soils that be we. here, a link to an exciting report detailing the discovery of an Italian physician that links improper iron uptake and vascular insufficiencies to MS. it appears (and makes sense) that a simple operation to stent any obstructed veins that drain blood from the brain bag in turn assists plasmic traffic in its ability to remove excess iron from the barrier portal.

As the vessels rupture, they allow both the iron itself, and immune cells from the bloodstream, to cross the blood-brain barrier into the cerebro-spinal fluid. Once the immune cells have direct access to the immune system, they begin to attack the myelin sheathing of the cerebral nerves - Multiple Sclerosis develops.

read the article here... and the original globe and mail article here...

why some shapes are better than others

The BBC has reported that hip fat, unlike abdominal fat, "mops up harmful fatty acids and contains an anti-inflammatory agent that stops arteries clogging."

What's more, the article continues, "Fat around the thighs and backside is harder to shift than fat around the waist. Although this may sound undesirable, it is actually beneficial because when fat is broken down quickly it releases a lot of cytokines which trigger inflammation in the body, say experts. These cytokines have been linked to cardiovascular disease, insulin resistance and diabetes. The slower burning hip fat also makes more of the hormone adiponectin that protects the arteries and promotes better blood sugar control and fat burning."

The scientists go on to conjecture that the calling of medicine might be to learn how to induce a shape limiter as a means to health through prescription of some kind, one that would "redistribute body fat to the hips."

I would say that hip fat performs its virtues by dint of its proximity to major lymphatic activity in the general area where the legs meet the trunk. Clean and well-exercised interstitial fluid, optimum communication of informational substances and nutrition to cells, these are the things that make for higher tissue function and improved system integrity, as when your body like your circumstance, works for you rather than against you.

So the issue isn't to induce body fat, thru chemical contrivance, to lay itself down at the hip and not the belly, it's to improve the body's food supply, it's quality of activity and hydration. It's to expand the posture of mind that it might overcome its own nature, and most important, eliminate the need to hold on to toxic matter.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8451674.stm

FROM THE CLASSIC ARCHIVES, DOSSEY'S SPACE, TIME AND MEDICINE: The relationship of scientific observation and world-view was the subject of an interchange between two of this century's eminent scientists, Albert Einstein and Werner Heisenberg. Heisenberg relates how he as a young scientist initially met Einstein. While discussing how the scientific endeavour proceeds and how scientists go about their work, Einstein discounted Heisenberg's view, which expressed the traditional belief that scientists observe, measure, and then form conclusions dispassionately from the data thus collected. Einstein contended that the reverse is true, that the scientist begins with a belief or a model, and that this preconceived view determines to a major extent what is observed.

- Werner Heisenberg, "Quantum Mechanics and a Talk with Einstein (1925-1926)," in Physics and Beyond (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), pp. 59-69.

the hangover of matriarchy-chique ...

... and its implications for integrative phenomenology and somatics

The life pulse is a wholeness-seeking force. It effects its experiential progress via nesting hierarchies that chow down in a constant flux of evolution and involution; a fundament wave pattern that vents chthonic complexity into a next-level simplicity and back again. The marches of time, changes of space, embroideries of logos and metamorphoses of all raw substance are in continuous crest, carrying forth new awarenesses into old paradigms in a constant recycling of view and content. Consciousness itself changes posture and platform in the guise of epochal characteristics and DNA conditionings. The ever-changing recipe of elemental components (chemical/alchemical) in our native environ has as much of a determining role to play in delimiting possibilities of mind and body know-how as the ritual dialogues and refracted scholarship of the ages. Similarly, the archetype of duality as represented by the mythopoesis of gender difference has been fuel and staging for necessary roleplay and evolution, but like a shark, it must ever move or die.

The pendulum swing that has brought us to a return of goddess worship and proto-feminimism is an evident endgame forestalling a new synthetic age that masters at last the harmonic convergence of yin and yang into neither. In this present day hangover of matriarchy-chique, with its stranglehold of mother-knows-best dogmatism, myopic vision, political correctness and an inherent dislike of the unowned person, a very real impasse has emerged in our orientation to healing and humanistic progress. Yet just as grit begets the pearl, dissatisfaction with these retro rule/role assignments and regressive world-views will give rise to new approaches to both the life-experiment of individuality and collective guiding concepts. Only through the negotiation of new roles and even further paradigmatic shifting can the sukha of integrative healing be achieved, both for self and planet.
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Matriarchy-chique is a regressive identification and over-valuing of the feminine aspects of the human person at the expense of a whole-person-centered view and to the exclusion of a synthetic protocol that provides for healthful interplay between feminine and masculine in an honouring and celebration of both. Where we once heard exhortations to a father god in heaven, we now hear invocations of the multi-form goddess and the all powerful She of Mother Earth. Understandable that we should rediscover the generative and fabulous womb and its cunt of black soil from which all life emerges in this shift out from the androlatric ages, but those ages were themselves a pendulum response to the gynolatric eras of distant history. The point is not to return to either/or valuations, ping-ponging from woman-worship to man-worship to woman-worship again, but to take up the task of the era and integrate the two polar values.

One of the consequences of this for the new age clinic is the need to critically evaluate the orientation of a pseudo-anamnesis that belies a behavioural bias for all its spiritual pretense and hollow gestures of compassion and acceptance, not to mention a frankly noxious presentation of self-other dynamics that accords more with the mindframe of gossiping housewives and armchair psychologists than the immoveable spot. For when the feminine point of view is selected for and valued in _exclusion_, it bloats the technology of relational interpretation, for the yin attitude of mind ever compares to the self, asking the question, "what does this mean to me?" Under such a lens, clients are never seen for truth and the successful outcome of therapeutic intervention owes more to chance than skill. In fact, any empirical evaluation of success-rates in professions as diverse as analytical psychology to radionics belies this. Successful outcomes only happen when the client vibrates in accord with the therapist's basic resonance and can easily play a part in his/her inner dramatis personae. Such interventions become by definition clannish and clique-driven. If the imperative of our time is to alter the inevitable implosion of materialist medicine, commerce, and politics, such exclusionary and unconscious tactics we can but fail. Worse, the holistic, integrative paradigm will ever remain a recourse of (some would say) an elite, and limited in its circumference by a selection process that rivals the ruthless social behaviour of high-schoolers.

The masculine consciousness was rightfully vetted for its superficial diagnostics and compartmentalization of the human. Yet feminine consciousness is in many ways far more judgemental, for it evaluates at the level of personal worth and goodness. A synthetic mindframe would understand that all encounters are actually staged and enabled by the inside of one's own head. There is no objective reality of the other that we experience, save the contours of our own perceptions and biases. The feminine ever wishes to cast the other as an external and not-me, otherwise the narcotic of relationship is impossible. But the tertiary option is the soberness of vetting the drama of relationship and all its fleeting pleasures and pain for the soberness of true perception. You cannot gaze into the eyes of another without encountering alone the bits of self that are reflected back. Separateness is an illusion most vile, the currency of the unintegrated psyche. In this series, I'll examine the deficits of the current dark age and sketch the features of a new integrative posture of mind.

"There will always be an inner obstruction to knowledge that will make your task of helping others incomplete." [Dalai Lama]

the art of war and other therapeutic encounters

Life is a tactical engagement, a game violently played and for keeps. It serves to recall this, for even as the modern age tries to take the edge off this pathos of human nature, we remain _the_ avaricious manipulator. And while history peals glory-refrains of awesome achievement, its been alongside the loathsome durge of our persistently odious treatment of one another. Still, as esotericum instructs, it's not the task of the human to renounce its particular stain, but to work syncretically with even the most unpopular of facts. So woe be the clinician or naif sportif who enters the fray, the arena of our discontent, without some wry understandings or the aptitude for constructive action. Such is the on-going art of neutralizing....

The concept of the "adversary" or "opponent" is therefore a valuable one, for if the body teaches anything, it teaches we better bite that without contraries there is no progression [Blake]. For purchase, we need a fixed spot to anchor against. For spatial functioning, we need vectors that oppose and play in mutually exclusive direction in order to deliver opportunity to stasis or loss. To express any kind of power, we need a sweet-spot balance between adding/subtracting, digesting/voiding, tensing/compressing. For system responsiveness, the ability to not only steadystate but integrate and adapt, we need both sanctuary and utter destruction, parasympathetic restoration and total sympathetic annihilation (as in of a particle and its antiparticle : to vanish or cease to exist by coming together and changing into other forms of energy).... [Websters]

Each of us at various times has to play the part of adversary to someone else's wish-fulfilment. The therapist does it while holding space for transference resolution. The parent does it when refraining the freedom of a still unformed child. The friend does it when remaining optimistic in the face of misunderstanding. A colleague does it when they listen to the rhetoric of protestation but drag you kicking and screaming out of your sand box anyway. Adversarial dynamics are a fact of nature. They only drag us beneath the threshold of their constructive applications into mere conflict when we take them at face value and with the ego leading.

When the adversarial miasma _does_ take the lead between people its often hard to resist being drawn into the plotline of subjective experience. But its the very thing we gotta develop the smarts to resist if peace on any scale is to be achieved. For the clinician, conflict patterns shouldn't be a disappointment or an invitation to judge but an incitement to travel more deeply into the mystery of the client 'not-me' seeking its own truth and beauty.............. and therefore an invitation to inquiry the very source of healing itself, both the clinician's and the client's. For its the clinician who's there to relieve their own shame and effect transformational growth, it's the client who comes to enable it and work on _them_, never the other way around. [for more on this, check out Hawaiian Ho’oponopono]

The weapons and tactical assaults the adversary reaches for _first_ mark the only fire power the complex actually has, and further, the adversary unwittingly teases itself out onto a limb because it secretly wants the inconvenient exposure and loss of face, it wants to be found out. This is where heart is good to have and is best deftly used.

A case cannot start to unravel until we meet and make peace with the adversary to healing. Its the clinician's responsibility to bear the burden of such polarizations while cultivating the inner space needed to draw the other or the self toward the laying down of arms. Even when it means taking a few darts. Even when it means bleeding a little.

Reminds me how much I love it when people complain about the weather, rail against cloud, the cold or the rain like its all an odium and somehow _personal_. "There's no such thing as bad weather, just the wrong clothes." [Billy Connolly]

Ihaleakala: Manipulation happens when I (as a therapist) come from the idea that you are ill and I am going to work on you. On the other hand, it's not manipulation if I realize that you are coming to me to give me a chance to look at what's going on in me. There's a big difference.

If therapy is about your belief that you're there to save the other person, heal the other person, or direct the other person, then the information you bring will come out of the intellect, the conscious mind. But the intellect has no real understanding of problems and how to approach them. The intellect is so picayunish in its way of solving problems! It doesn't realize when a problem is solved by transmutation — by using Ho'oponopono or related processes — then the problem and everything related to it is solved, even at microscopic levels and back to the beginning of time.

>>Ho'oponopono<<

Psyche and Substance [Edward C. Whitmont]

[emphasis mine]

We deal with everyday reality as if image and psychic dynamics were irrelevant and separate from "material" events, which are still considered to be largely determined by chance.

There is by way of compensation the opposite tendency of confusing holism with psychologism, of viewing all pathology as secondary to psychological attitudes. The old Cartesian dichotomy is still prevalent in such an approach but with reversed denominators. The body is here treated as an epiphenomenon of the mind rather than vice versa. Now a "right" attitude of mind is held to be the exclusive determinant in curing or preventing illness by avoiding stress and tension.

While it is certainly true that a hopeless or pessimistic outlook on life, repressed psychological conflicts and tensions do result in organic pathology, and that positive imaging helps in restoring as well as maintaining health, it is equally true that no one alive can wholly avoid tension, stress, conflict, repressions, depression and disappointment. Indeed, psychological complexes and crises are the building stones of personality. Frustration and repression are the unavoidable conditions of ego-building no less than approval, success, satisfaction and joy. The capacity to become ill seems to be built into the ground plan of human nature regardless of mental efforts to the contrary.

Morever, we are not merely free-floating minds but minds embodied. A genuinely holistic viewpoint cannot but see the body as the visibility of the mind and the mind as the expression of the particular individual self's way of embodiment. Just as our psyches are open to and indeed participate in the energy patterns that surround us, so our bodies interact with substance and are parts of earth processes and nature. And nature is not only kind and life-supporting; it is also destructive and terrible. Natural living does not guarantee health. Indeed, a perfectly natural way of living would amount to a return to savagery. Primitive man also knew illness. Civilization undoubtedly produces its own pathology but natural primitivism does also. Whichever way we turn we cannot avoid crisis, pain and disease. The tendency to illness appears to be an aspect of the earth dynamic, as is healing. They are the two sides of the same coin.

"That which wounded shall heal" is the oldest known formulation of the similia similibus curentur wisdom of the unconscious or of the gods, and is ascribed to the Delphic oracle in reply to the injury of Telephos. (Telephos means the far shining light.)