The ABC of Awareness, Being and Consciousness

How do you know you exist? How do you know of any self or ‘I’? Only through an awareness of it. So how then, can this awareness be identified with that self, or reduced to a property of it?  

How do you know that anything is or exists? Only through an awareness of it. So how then, can awareness be identified with any thing (for example the human brain) or reduced to a mere product of it?  

The Awareness Principle (1) 

Awareness as such cannot, in principle, be reduced to the private property or product of anything that there is a prior awareness of - any subject or object, self or world, ego or ‘I’, being, brain or body, experience or phenomenon - since we only know of any of these things through the prior or ‘a priori’  awareness of them.

Awareness as such is both inseparable and distinct from anything experienced within it - anything there is an awareness of. 

The Awareness Principle (2) 

1. Awareness alone is.

2. Awareness is everything - all that is. 

3. Conversely, everything is an awareness - an individualised consciousness in its own right, distinct but inseparable from all others. 

There is no such thing as a conscious or sentient ‘being’ - only ‘consciousnesses’ or ‘consciousness beings’, being constituted by their qualities of consciousness or sentience. 

What can be called ‘God’ is not one being among others that merely happens to have or possess consciousness as its private property. Instead God is consciousness - not a consciousness that is yours or mine, his or hers, the private property of any being, but that universal consciousness field that is the essence of the Divine. 

What I term ‘awareness’ is consciousness in its spacious non-local or field character - ‘field consciousness’. In contrast, ‘consciousness’ is awareness in its focal character - focal or focussed consciousness.

What I call The Awareness Principle has yet to be acknowledged as the new foundational metaphysical principle for life, science and religion rests on the false metaphysical belief that ‘subjectivity’, ‘awareness’, ‘sentience’, ‘consciousness’ or ‘experiencing’ necessarily implies or requires the pre-existence of an aware, sentient, conscious or experiencing ‘being’, ‘subject’, ‘ego’ or ‘self’ – or else can arise from a purely ‘objective’ and insentient universe of unaware things.

The Basic Flaw of Advaita and neo-Advaita

The idea of awareness as some sort of mirror, or its modern equivalent, some sort of pixelated screen on whose surface appear those constantly changing images we perceive as the world, both tend to go together with a fundamentally false and flawed idea: that there is nothing ‘behind the screen’. Spiritual teachers who talk about consciousness being everything, and yet nevertheless preach this sort of idea to their students, are essentially telling them that they and other people don’t exist, i.e. that there is no consciousness ‘behind’ the mirror or screen-like perception of them, and of all perceptible things that appear on the mirror or screen of awareness.   

Self-experiencing and the ‘Ego’

All we know of ourselves is an experienced self or selves. Awareness per se or as such is the sole experiencing self. 

Every experienced self is both an experience of self and an experience of something or someone other-than-self. 

What is called ‘ego’ is the attempt to separate our experience of self from our experience of others or otherness - and to prevent that sense of self being transformed by our experience of others. In reality however, they are interwoven. 

We are all parts of one another. Other people, indeed all things, are reflections, more or less distorted, of aspects of ourselves that we can either embrace and embody or negate and deny. 

What is called ‘projection’ is simply a false separation between the parts of ourselves we normally identify with and those that are reflected or embodied by others, and that we identify solely with those others.  It is this separation that hinders an expansion of identity - preventing us from embracing all those aspects of ourselves we identify with others.  

Personal ‘growth’ is not some form of self-development. It is the inward and outward expansion of identity, our very sense of self. 

God and Gods 

We are each uniquely individualised portions, personifications, expressions and embodiments of the divine-universal awareness field that is ‘God’. In this sense we are each absolutely distinct ‘gods’. But being also inseparable from the divine-universal awareness field as a whole we also are that field - we are also ‘God’. 

What if “God is a verb”  (Jenkinson) and not a noun? What if God is not some sort or source of ultimate answers to all questions about ‘creation’ and the universe but is an aware, living, pulsing question? What if creation itself is a continuous questing - a never-ending manifesting of that question, and one which the very process of constant change and becoming that constitutes the universe?   

The Science Delusion

The delusions of ‘science’ 1. far from being in any way ‘empirical’ - rooted in direct experience - modern science regards its own abstract mental and mathematical constructs as more ‘real’ than the actually experienced phenomena they are used to ‘explain’. 2. Far from being able to explain any qualitative features of experiences, science regards them as an expression of abstract quantities and their relation. 

What we do have direct ‘evidence’ of from experience are such qualities as sounds, light and colours. We do not experience and have no evidence from experience of such things as ‘frequencies’ of vibration of air molecules or wavelengths of an ‘electro-magnetic  energy’ spectrum’. 

The most basic scientific fact is not the ‘objective’ existence of a space-time universe but a subjective experience of that universe. 

We live in a subjective universe and not an objective one, for all apparent ‘objects’ are but the manifestation and experience of other consciousnesses. 

To regard time itself as having ‘begun’ at some dateable time with a ‘Big Bang’ is a self-evident philosophical absurdity - but one which seems to have passed most physicists by. 

Philosophy and metaphysics are not some primitive form of modern science. Instead modern science, including physics, is a primitive form of philosophy and metaphysics. 

On the  fundamental  illiteracy of ‘science’. Trying to convince a scientist that behind and within what appears to be a multiplicity of objects in space-time lies a physically, imperceptible and immeasurable but multidimensional universe of consciousness is like trying to persuade an illiterate - someone who has never learned to read - that a book or text is no mere three dimensional object made up of chemical ink marks on paper (or electronic pixels on a two dimensional screen) but the manifestation and revelation of a physically immeasurable and imperceptible but multidimensional world of meaning. 

No matter how sophisticated the technology or theories used to research the inner secrets of  the ‘book of nature’ nothing can be learned or understood without first of all learning to enter into its true inwardness as one does when reading any book. It is by learning to read a book that its true inwardness is then found - an inwardness of meaning and consciousness and not of matter or energy. 

There is indeed an inner ‘order’ and structure to events and phenomena that used to go by the Greek name logos. But this is more comparable to the inner order and structures of meaning and perception constituted by speech and  language themselves (légō - to speak)  than those of mathematics - or the obscurantist languages and jargons of the sciences. 

We can only truly enter into and explore the inner world of nature as we enter the inner world of a book - with our consciousness and not with technical instruments.  

Nature understood (as it used to be) as the living word or ‘speech’ of God. No deeper ‘scientific’ understanding exists, despite all the ‘advances’ of modern science and technology, quantum physics included.    

Knowing and Being 

Knowing precedes Being. 

Intimate inner knowing or gnosis is not ‘knowledge’ in the ordinary sense - knowing ‘of’ or ‘about’ anything.

Knowledge assumes the prior being or existence of something knowable or actually existent. 

Knowing in the deeper sense, on the other hand - gnosis - is logically prior to or ‘precedes’ Being. It is a primordial awareness of infinite potentialities of being or existence, and not knowledge of or about any actual thing or being. 

The Principle of ‘Simference’

If any two or more things or people were absolutely different in any or all respects there could be absolutely no relation between them in those respects. If they were absolutely the same in one or all respects they would be one thing, experience or person in those respects, and not two or more.

What Wittgenstein called ‘family resemblances’ are in essence ‘simferences’ - ‘similarities in difference’. Wittgenstein’s term, however was a very well-chosen one to express the nature of simference. Thus while no two members of the same family have identical eyes, noses or features of any sort, they may indeed resemble one another. Yet when we say something like  ‘John has his father’s nose’ what we really  mean is that they are ‘simferent’ - for in reality they are also different in the very ways they appear to be similar or resemble each other.

Field Patterns of Awareness

What essentially is a species of life or organism? For example that which, as human beings, we perceive of as a fly, spider, dog or shark? We know that the senses of different species differ so much from each other and from our own that there is no way in which they could perceive their surrounding world - and other species of life - in the same way that we, as human beings, do. 

As human beings, we not only perceive but understand other non-human species of life from our own highly anthropocentric perspective - identifying and naming what we call ‘a shark’, for example, purely according to our own, specifically human and  highly species-specific way of perceiving its shape, form, behaviour and organs - including its sense organs themselves.    

If the essence of a species of organism or form of life cannot be identified with the highly  species-specific way in which we as human beings perceive and conceive it, think of and name it, what essentially is it? 

Is ‘a shark’ something made of biological tissues and organs (even sense organs) and possessing a specific shape or form as we perceive it, or is it essentially nothing but an organising field pattern of awareness - one which shapes that patterned field of awareness which it experiences as its surrounding world - just as it also shapes its perception of other species within that world? 

If all organisms are essentially nothing but organising field patterns of awareness, and not their expression in biological shapes and form as we perceive them, then they are essentially species of consciousness, which may or may not have any biological or  ‘physical’ form at all, and which survive independently of their manifestation as biological life forms. 

What if the field patterns of awareness that characterise the essence of human beings are so limited that we fail to even perceive in any way, shape or form the countless ‘trans-physical’ species of consciousness that inhabit our world to the same extent and with a similar or even greater degree of diversity as those biological organisms which we do perceive and recognise?

Feeling tones and the music of the soul

A field pattern of awareness can be compared to a pattern of musical tones - or a tonal pattern. For we know that even a single tone can produce a ‘cymatic’ pattern, for example by vibrating or stroking a bow string on a metal plate sprinkled with powder (so called Chladni patterns). 

Tones not only have potential shapes or forms but also have felt qualities.  A mood can best be described as a silent tone of feeling or feeling tone with tonal qualities comparable to tones of voice - such as sharpness or flatness, clarity or dullness, brightness or darkness, lightness or heaviness, softness or hardness, warmth or coldness etc. 

It is because musical compositions or expression springs from such silent tones of feeling and their qualities that it ‘affects’ our feelings and mood - not through any causal mechanism but through resonance with its tones and chords of feeling. 

Awareness itself has its own innately sensual qualities of mood or feeling tone. It is these sensual qualities or ‘soul qualities’, themselves the expression of feelings tones or ‘soul tones’,  that find expression, not just in musical tones or tones of voice, but in all the sensory qualities of shape and form, light and darkness, lightness or heaviness, softness and hardness etc. that we experience around us.

The world of sensory qualities we inhabit is the expression of a world of moods, emotional feeling tones or ‘soul tones’, each of which in turn has its own qualities of feeling tone or ‘soul qualities’. 

What is the difference between a soul quality and a sensory quality? Like the difference between warmth of feeling towards someone and a feeling of warmth from our body temperature.  

There is nothing ‘suprasensous’ or ‘sense free’ about the soul world. On the contrary, it is a world of rich and heightened sensual awareness - not a suprasensuous world,  but a richly super-sensuous world made up of sensuous tonal qualities of awareness.  

Feeling tones are wavelengths of attunement to others, and the carrier waves on which thoughts ride and communicate telepathically, even if only in a wordless way.  

Listening as Therapy 

Listening is no mere part of therapy, a technical skill employed 'in' therapy - or just a necessary prelude to some form of therapeutic response. Instead listening, deep inward listening, is the very essence of therapy. Deep listening is listening understood as therapy.                                                

Even 'just listening' - just giving people time to speak - can be more therapeutic than any therapeutic insights or responses from the listener.   

How absurd that the therapeutic nature of listening and the nature of therapeutic listening does not even figure on the syllabus of most forms of professional training, not just for doctors, but even for counsellors or psychotherapists, i.e. precisely those for whom listening is the most fundamental therapeutic and human capacity they need to exercise.                  

Inward listening takes us to the source of all thoughtful or therapeutic 'insight'.  Language offers its outer clothing - more or less well fitting.                                

If we are only listening in some type of professional role we are not listening at all - and so neither can we fully fulfil that role. 

The listener as midwife - listening as a way of being with and ‘bearing with’ others in pregnant silence - thus not only bearing and relieving them of part of the weight of their burden, but also helping them to undergo the labour pains necessary to give birth to a new inner comportment or ‘bearing’ towards life - to once again ‘find their bearings’.

To listen with our whole being means also to listen with our body as a whole - which is both a sensory embodiment of and a sense organ of feeling awareness - of the soul.   

What a person confides with us and the way they confide it may already be a response to the way  we are listening to them or not listening to them - not fully hearing or heeding their words.   

It is above all through the felt tone of a person’s voice, speech and language - the way that they are speaking - that we can truly attune and adjust our listening to their ‘wavelength’. Just listening to what they say, on the other hand, does not in any way guarantee such an attunement, no matter how much we may think we ‘resonate’ with their words.   

Listening is already a form of silent questioning: a wordless inner quest for the appropriate wavelength of attunement to the speaker, one in resonance with the basic feeling tone of their speech and of their words.  

Feelings (plural) are something we ‘have’. Feeling (verb) is something we do. 

The attentive listener extends a tendril of feeling awareness  to the speaker, one which not only acts as an antenna attuned to their tone of feeling - but also touches them inwardly. 

To be truly with another person and and at the same time hold them in the field of our feeling awareness without saying anything, this ‘with-holding’ is more than just silent reticence, reserve or defensive wariness - though like the word ‘awareness’ even this is a word which, in its root sense means to guard, shelter and quietly ‘watch over’.  

Every great poet and thinker is, first and foremost, not a writer but a listener. For it is from inward listening that they first draw their words and thoughts from depths of feeling awareness.  

The soul of the good listener is like rich and fertile soil, and the listener like a gardener who patiently plants, tends, fertilises and brings to ripe fruition the seeds blown over to them as words on the breath of the speaker. 

Feeling tones are the both the silent telepathic carrier waves of thought and the wavelengths of listening attunement.  

The way we are hearing or not hearing another person’s words communicates back to them, and does directly, wordlessly and ‘telepathically’. 

In listening, we are already speaking and responding - ‘bearing back a message’. This ‘bearing back’ of a message is also the root meaning of ‘re-lating’.  

All sickness and all healing is fundamentally relational. 

Healing (therapeuein) begins with being truly heard.  

Telepathy 

There is no scientific or ‘parapsychological’ mystery to ‘telepathy’, which simply means ‘feeling’ (pathein) at a distance (tele).  

We can feel close to someone and feel them even at a distance, just as we can feel them as distant from us even in their closest proximity. 

 

Telepathy is only a ‘parapyschological’ or ‘supernatural’ phenomenon in need of proof or explanation for those who presuppose that we are not just distinct but also separate beings, or that thoughts are the creation or private property of an individual thinker - rather than arising from a common field of feeling awareness - one that is a natural vehicle of ‘telepathic’ communication between beings because it is the common source of their being. 

Telepathy arises from our basic Intra- and Interrelatedness as beings - from our Interbeing. 

The Law of ‘Morphic Resonance’

The law of morphic resonance: by giving fitting form (Greek morphe) to a mood or tone of feeling - for example through our body language, words, vocal tones, music or any type of artistic or creative activity - we automatically amplify that tone through resonance with its formed expression. 

Brain Science as Nonsense

On the one hand neuroscientists freely admit that our entire perception of the world and all the objects in it are a fictive sensory hallucination or phantasm created by the brain. On the other hand they declare our sense of sight, for example to be a result of light reflected off these fictive or hallucinated objects striking the retina, and sending nerve signals to the brain. How hallucinated objects can produce or reflect light or sounds remains a question unthought, unasked and unexplained - not least since our very perception of the brain itself, as well as of eyes and other sense organs is itself, according to ‘brain science’, a fictive perception or hallucination produced by the brain. Talk about nonsensical or ‘brainless’ thinking!

The Laws of  ‘Field Phenomenology’

1. No field of awareness (for example that of a dream) can be reduced to or explained by any of the phenomena or events emerging from or present within it.

2. No single phenomenon, emerging from and present within a field of awareness can be said to cause or produce that field of awareness. To believe it can is like believing that the field of our dream consciousness is a product of some object or event we dream of. 

3. No two phenomena emerging from and following one another within a field of awareness can be said to ‘cause’ each other. To believe so is like believing that one dream event or phenomenon - or one word we utter in a sentence -  ‘causes’ the next one. 

Body and Self 

What essentially is a ‘body’, any body, in terms of field phenomenology? Simply a field boundary or membrane of awareness, one which, like a circle drawn on a piece of paper, both distinguishes and unites the inner space or field it surrounds from that which surrounds it outwardly. 

The very same field boundary of awareness that constitutes the body is also what constitutes the ‘self’, although most people identify their self or identity, like the boundary of a circle or their own skin, only with what it bounds and and surrounds - and not with the space and field of awareness around and surrounding it. In other words, people identify their self or identity only with what they experience ‘inside’ or ‘within’ themselves - within their own heads, bodies or skins, and not with all they experience in the space and field of experiencing around them. 

   

In traditional Christian and also pre-Christian thought, the inner field bounded by our bodyhood was associated, in Greek terms, with the psykhe and the outer with the pneuma - later translated into Latin as spiritus. Hence also the distinction drawn in the Pauline epistles between the soma-psykhikos and the soma-pneumatikos. 

Edmund Husserl was the first thinker to recognise that what we experience as an ‘outer’ or ‘physical’ world is just as much a field of consciousness in which phenomena appear to us, as anything we experience or phenomena occurring in our inner ‘psychic’ world. 

Psyche, Psychology, Psychotherapy

Three contemporary, hollow words or ‘unwords’ as I call them - ‘psyche’, ‘psychology’, ‘psychotherapy’.

‘Psychology’ - a term for a supposed ‘science’ that is less than 200 years old and was first used in a proto-modern scientific treatise. Now defined as the study of ‘mind’ and ‘behaviour’. 

‘Psyche’ - now defined variously as ‘mind’, ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ - as if these words were interchangeable or even synonymous.  A complete bastardisation of the original meaning of the Greek word psykhe - which was ‘breath’ or ‘life breath’.  

Only the Latin term spiritus (meaning ‘breathing’) had this meaning too  - hence also the Latinate words inspiration, expiration and respiration.

‘Psychotherapy’ - would it really be so outlandish to redefine this term in theory and practice according to its literal Greek meaning, i.e. as attention and care (therapeuin) given to the breath and to breathing (psykhe)?  

Only later did the Greek word for tending and attending - therapuein - come to mean ‘medically curing the sick’. In which case, however, all diseases could, in essence, be regarded as  respiratory ones, since there is not a single thought or emotion, event or occurrence in our lives that does not immediately affect our bodies and selves through our breathing, both in an overall manner and on a cellular level.

And what essentially are both the ‘body’ and ‘self’ if not a more or less porous and breathing boundary or membrane, one that, like a circle drawn on a piece of paper, both distinguishes and unites an inner space it surrounds and an outer space surrounding it’, i.e. an inner and outer space of air, breath and wind (psykhe and pneuma) and with ‘soul’ being akash (Sanskrit) or space itself, understood the  ‘higher air’ or aether of awareness itself.  

Where the breath flows freely, awareness flows too - and vice versa.

Where breathing is confined or stifled, so is awareness and so is spiritus - as the life breath of psykhe and of the living, breathing human body and self, soul and spirit.   

Wearing masks that inhibit or stifle breathing, quarantining that confines us to a social vacuum that draws out and empties us of breath, like an astronaut without a helmet. The intubation or mechanical ventilation of Covid patients which damages their lungs. And all this on top of the breathless busyness of wage labour enforced by capitalism over centuries. 

What are all these phenomena except a growing assault on the living, breathing spirit of humankind - an assault on spiritus?

‘Panpsychism’

‘Panpsychism’. A misnomer, since it regards consciousness as a mere feature or property of all things, in which case they are all no less composed of something ‘non-psychic’ or other-than-consciousness. 

The Metaphorical Nature of Perception 

‘The knife pierced his heart.’

‘The loss of his wife broke his heart’.

We take the first statement as ‘literal’, the second as ‘metaphorical’ - even though medical research has shown that loss of a spouse of loved one can have a no less detrimental or even fatal effect on the heart than a knife. 

It was Nietzsche who first declared that all language is metaphor - and he had a point. The unasked question is what essentially is ‘metaphor’ itself and is it merely a feature of language?

What we call ‘metaphor’ is not just a figurative or imaginative way of describing things in language but also a way of perceiving them. 

Metaphor is ‘perception as ...’ Thus we do not  merely see some such thing as ‘a rose’ or ‘a car’. We see something as ‘a rose’ or as ‘a car’. No infant lacking speech or language (the meaning of ‘in-fans’) can see or smell ‘a rose’ or see or hear ‘a car passing by’ - for they have no word for ‘a rose’ or concept of ‘a car’. It is only through words and verbal concepts that we are able to perceive something as ‘a rose’ or as ‘a car’. 

This understanding has profound implications. For it means that what we take as the simplest type of ‘factual’ or ‘empirical’ proposition is in reality the expression of a perceptual metaphor - a perception of something ‘as’ this or that. 

Simply to say that ‘the rose is’ is already such a perceptual metaphor, since its essential meaning is that we are perceiving something as a rose. Conversely, we can begin to understand the essence of ‘metaphor’ itself in a new way, i.e. as ‘perception as …’. We might even suggest a sort of linguistic equation here. The equation is: ‘is’ = ‘as’, meaning that what we conceive or perceive as something that ‘is’ is itself always a type of conception and perception of it ‘as’ this or that.  

Matter as Metaphor

When we look around us  we see things that we know can also be potentially experienced in a tactile way - touched, felt, handled or picked up. Yet just because we actually or potentially experience something as hard or soft, solid or fluid, etc. does not mean that these qualities are the ‘property’ of some sort of ‘objective’ but invisible ‘substance’ called ‘matter’. Instead they belong simply to the tactile dimension of our subjective, sensory experiencing. 

To perceive something as ‘material’, therefore, is therefore no direct sensory perception at all, but a sensory experience that has already been borne over into and overlaid by a sensory conception of what is perceived or experienced ‘as’ matter. 

Matter ‘is’, only in so far as we conceive of what we perceive in a tactile way as ‘material’.

The equation: ‘is’ = ‘as’. 

Body and Soul

Bodily shape and form are not properties of matter but are inwardly felt or outwardly perceived shapes and forms of awareness or ‘soul’ itself.  

Does the soul survive the death of the body?  A wholly false question, since soul or awareness is precisely that which bodies. 

There is no dimension of soul or awareness that is not embodied in one form or another - even if only as a body of pure light or sound. 

The soul, therefore, always has some innate and intrinsic bodily shape or form of its own, and can take countless forms in different planes or dimensions of awareness - as we already know it to do in our dreams. 

It is not some disembodied soul therefore that survives death, but the soul in all its unlimited potentials for embodiment in different forms to those which it takes in human life.

Which body is it with which we feel ourselves – our self? Which body is it through which we can feel ourselves as inwardly ‘closer’ or more ‘distant’ to others, however near or far they are in measurable space, inwardly ‘warmer’ or ‘cooler’ towards other people, irrespective of our temperature,  with which we can feel ourselves ‘expanding’ or ‘shrinking’, ‘uplifted’ or ‘carried away’, ‘sucked in’ or ‘trapped’, ‘open’ or ‘closed off’, ‘full’ or ‘empty’, ‘shapeless’ or ‘spineless’, ‘exploding’ or ‘imploding’, ‘space out’ or imprisoned in our own skin  – yet without our fleshly body and its organs changing shape in any way? 

Which body is it whose ‘heart’ can be inwardly felt as ‘open’ or ‘closed’,  ‘big’ or ‘small’, ‘warm’ or ‘cold’, with which we can feel ‘heartened’ or ‘disheartened’, ‘lose heart’ or suffer ‘heartache’, seem ‘heartless’ or ‘big hearted’ – independently of ‘the heart’ as a biological organ?  Which body is it Which body is it whose ‘skin’ we feel more or less inwardly ‘at home’ in, which can make someone seem ‘thick- or thin-skinned’, that without any physical skin irritations can make us feel ‘prickly’, ‘edgy’ or ‘irritable’, ‘stretched’ or ‘frayed’, that can feel tight and constricting like a diving suit or straightjacket – or like an airy, comfortable and loose-fitting garment?  Which body is it whose overall mood or ‘feeling tone’ – like a tone of voice – can be felt as ‘bright or dark’, ‘light or heavy’, ‘lively’ or ‘dull’ and ‘flat’, ‘resonant’ and ‘full’ or ‘hollow’ and ‘empty’? The answer to all these questions and more is not our fleshly body and its organs. It is not any body we can measure, weigh or apply any form of medical tests to. Nor, however, is it some form of ‘astral’ or pseudo-physical ‘energy body’ of the sort that esotericists, New Agers and practitioners of alternative medicine speak of. Instead it is simply the subjectively ‘felt body‘ or ‘lived body ’, our body of lived experiencing. To be more exact, it is not just a body we feel or are aware of. Instead it is our body of awareness – of feeling awareness or ‘soul’. Our soul body. 

Health and Medicine

All disease is a type of bodily metaphor, embodying an inwardly felt dis-ease. To be ill is to be ‘ill at ease’ with our lives in a way which we express symbolically through bodily symptoms of one sort or another. 

Illnesses have life meanings and not just bodily or biological ‘causes’ or ‘cures’. 

Medically ‘diagnosing’, ‘explaining’ or ‘treating’ an illness is one thing, but coming to an understanding of its life meaning is another.

The biology of the human body is an embodiment of the biography of the human being.

The life of the human body cannot be separated from the life of the human being in all its aspects?

Bodily symptoms are like dream symbols – there to tell us something about ourselves and our lives.

Purely biomedical diagnoses can result in damage to our health, prescription drugs can worsen the very symptoms they are designed to remedy.

Conventional medical treatments have been shown to be a leading cause of death, resulting in more fatalities than cancer and heart disease - in the US annually a conservative estimate of the annual number of ‘deaths by medicine’ is 800,000. 

So-called ‘scientific’ medicine is really money-driven medicine – making illness a source of huge corporate profits for the Big Pharma and the Medical-Industrial Compl

The most important questions that doctors don’t ask: what was going on in our lives in the hours, days, weeks, months or years preceding the onset of an illness? What do our symptoms stop us from doing and what do they force us to do? All these questions offer clues to their meaning and the meaning of our illness itself.  

 

Illness always begins with an uncomfortable sense of not ‘feeling ourselves’, bodily, in the way we are used to. But from this state of not feeling ourselves can come the birth of another self. 

Pregnancy is not an illness. But illness is a type of pregnancy - one that can lead to the birth of a new sense of self. The pain and suffering associated with illness can be compared to the labour pains of this birth. 

To ‘cure’ an illness is not necessarily to ‘heal’ it in any meaningful way at all - but more  like aborting or terminating a pregnancy. 

The focus of biological medicine is purely on seeking supposed bodily  ‘causes’ and ‘cures’ for illness, whilst denying that it has any significant life meaning. 

Illness and its symptoms emerge in the same way as dreams and their symbols do.                                     lllnesses can be understood as ‘body dreams’ – or ‘body nightmares’. 

It makes no more sense to regard sickness as an ‘unnatural’ deviation from a ‘normal’ state of health than it does to regard dreaming as an unnatural or abnormal disruption of sleep - or to regard nightmares in particular as an ‘unhealthy’ type of dream.                                                 

The biomedical model, based as it is on the premise that illness is a meaningless deviation from health, is as outdated as pre- and post-Freudian ‘scientific’ views that dreams are merely some form of meaningless but necessary discharges of neurological energy.

The body does not merely ‘have’ a language. It is a language, in the same way that our dreams are a language - indeed all that we experience is.

Subjective Biology

 

Few people recognise just how subjective our biology is, not just because we can only experience our bodies subjectively, but because our cells and organs themselves have a subjective life of their own, indeed are essentially nothing but biological forms of subjective life itself - of consciousness.

 

The ‘biomedical’ approach to illness treats the body and its biology as a mere clinical object, wholly denying them any subjective life of their own - and thus almost totally ignoring the relation between illness and  our lived, subjective experience both of our bodies and of our lives as a whole. 

 

What has been called 'the lived body' is the body as we subjectively experience it, subjectively, from within - our subjective body.

 

The subjective body has two distinct sides to it - the body of our consciousness or subjective experience of life as a whole, our 'consciousness body', and the innate consciousness or subjectivity of our fleshly cells and organs themselves, our 'body consciousness'.

 

Not only does our consciousness body survive the 'death' of our fleshly bodies, but so also, in its own way, does our body consciousness itself, the consciousness of our cells and organs, which merely disintegrate into atoms or molecules of consciousness after death - thus losing their previous organismic unity and bodily form.  

 

We all need a way of dying. So we die through diseases or organ failures - and not simply 'of' or 'from' them.

 

‘Biology’. A ‘science’ of bodily 'life' (bios) or life's own speech - its logos?

 

There is nothing, not the slightest subjective feeling or most minor event in our lives that does not affect our breathing, our hearts, our circulation, digestion and metabolism etc.  How then, can the scope of medical ‘science’ be so limited as to search for a single ‘objective’ cause for illness?

‘Biology’ as such. The ‘science’ of bodily life (bios) or its logos - its own speech (logos)?  

There is nothing, not the slightest subjective feeling or most minor event in our lives that does not affect our breathing, our hearts, our circulation, digestion and metabolism etc.  How then, can the scope of medical ‘science’ be so limited as to search for a single ‘objective’ cause or cure for illness?