Health as Wholeness; Wholeness as perfection

Par le Dr Andrew Weil.

We know health well in its absence.

When we are sick or injured we have no trouble knowing how things should be. A pain should not be there. An arm should move freely. A rash should go away. “Freedom from disease” is a common dictionary definition of health. Since disease comes from an Old French word meaning “lack of ease,” we are left with a doubly negative sense: health is the absence of an absence of ease.

It ought to be possible to describe positively a concept so important to us. We talk about our health much of the time. (Some people talk about it most of the time.) We spend a great deal of money trying to restore or improve it. We join health clubs, visit health resorts, buy health foods. Yet in my years of formal medical education I never heard a good answer to the question, “What is health?” When I ask people to define health without using a negative construction, they often cannot.

The concept of health is at once simple and subtle. It is difficult to define only because we are no longer used to thinking about ourselves in the necessary philosophical terms. For example, medicine, religion, and magic are rooted in common ideas, and each sheds ii ht on the other , but the supremacy of scientific technology makes it fashionable to believe that medicine has nothing to do with such old-fashioned practices as religion and magic. Consequently, many modern doctors cannot grasp the true meaning of health and can only define it negatively as freedom from disease. What the word really signifies is much more interesting.

I intend to delve into the realm of philosophy and symbolism to clarify the concept of health. I will examine some deep and perhaps unfamiliar ideas and will ask the reader to bear with me. These ideas are fundamental to the practical discussions of treatment coming later. Whenever possible, I will give concrete examples in order to show their relevance.

The root meaning of health is “wholeness.” The word comes from the same Anglo-Saxon root that gives us whole, hale, and holy

Cure and care come from one and the same Latin root: to cure is to take care of. Treat has a similar root meaning in Old French: to deal with or manage toward some particular end. Medicine comes from Latin medicina, and that word derives from an ancient Indo-european root that has also given us remedy, mediate, and measure. The root seems to suggest "thoughtful action to establish order." Thus cure, treatment, and medicine all suggest action to restore some aspect of wholeness implied by the word health.

What are the special properties of wholes that unite and animate such powerful concepts as health and holiness? If the answer to that question were obvious, we would have no need of redundant phrases like “holistic health.”

Two properties of wholes command attention. By definition wholes are complete and perfect; they lack nothing. Moreover, in an ideal whole, the components are not only all there, they are there in an arrangement of harmonious integration and balance Perfection and balance are traditional attributes of holiness. They also underlie the concept of health.

All religions see the ultimate reality as utterly perfect, all-encompassing. Nothing can exist apart from it. As the Great Whole, it is the origin of holiness in the world. Hinduism calls that reality Brahman, pure Being, which includes the creative, preserving, and destructive aspects of existence. In Judaism it is That Which Was and Is and Shall Be, so holy that the Hebrew name for it cannot be written or pronounced, because language would limit it.

In practice, many religions have specified that persons wanting to approach the ultimate reality must reflect its perfection as much as possible. For example, the Old Testament gives a stark recitation of prohibitions about those who may lead worship (Leviticus 21:16—23):

And the Lord said to Moses, “Say to Aaron, None of your descendants throughout their generations who has a blemish shall draw near, a man blind or lame, or one who has a mutilated face or limb too long, or a man who has an injured foot or an injured hand, or a hunchback, or a dwarf, or a man with a defect in his sight or an itching disease, or a scab or crushed testicles; no man of the descendants of Aaron the priest who has a blemish, he shall not come near to offer the bread of his God, both of the most holy, and of the holy things.”

In other words, a priest of the holy God must be holy in his person. He must be intact, whole, healthy, reflecting the perfection of his Creator. This link between the holy and the healthy is the common ground of religion and medicine. In many cul-tures, the two have never been separate.

Native American medicine men are religious leaders as much as doctors, treating spiritual and physical ailments at one and the same time. They often speak of the Medicine Wheel as the basis of tribal health, drawing on the circle as a universal symbol of wholeness and perfection. One great medicine man who spoke very eloquently about this symbol was Black Elk, an Oglala Sioux, born in 1863. At the age of nine, during a severe illness, he had a vision that was to be the source of his healing ability in later life. In one sequence of it, he related, a “great Voice said: ‘Behold the circle of the nation’s hoop, for it is holy, being endless, and thus all power shall be one power in the people without end.’ “

At the end of his life, Black Elk told his story to a white historian, who recorded his words. Black Elk said:

You have noticed that everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round. In the old days when we were a strong and happy people, all our power came to us from the sacred hoop of the nation, and so long as the hoop was unbroken, the people flourished. The flowering tree was the living center of the hoop , and the circle of the four quarters nourished it... Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle. The sky is round, and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars. The wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours. The sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle. The moon does the same, and both are round. Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back to where they were. The life of man is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves. Our tepees were round like the nests of birds, and these were always set in a circle, the nation’s hoop, a nest of many nests, where the Great Spirit meant for us to hatch our children. 2

Black Elk poignantly lamented his people’s banishment to the square, U.S.-government-built houses of the reservations, a sym-bol to him of the breaking of the nation’s hoop. “It is a bad way to live, for there can be no power in a square.”3

The breaking of the sacred circle introduces imperfection and spiritual sickness, a loss of wholeness.

If the Creator and Creation are perfect wholes, how can imperfection exist? Or, in other words, why is there evil in the world? That is the supreme question for all religions and philosophies, and it must be understood that the question “Why is there sickness?” is just another form of it. Sickness is the manifestation of evil in the body just as health is the manifestation of holiness. Sickness and health are not simply physical states that the methods of science will eventually analyze completely and make understandable, They are rooted in the deepest and most mysterious strata of Being.

The most profound holy persons and philosophers tell us that evil is merely apparent or that it is the necessary other side that completes the whole of Creation. Buddhists say that good and evil in the relative world are both included in the perfect pattern of a higher Good. The God of the Old Testament declares, “I am the Lord and there is none else. I form the light and create darkness; I make peace and create evil; I am the Lord that do all these things.”4

The idea that wholeness and perfection result from accepting and including the dark aspects of existence, even sickness and death, is a powerful line of thought that runs through many systems of practical magic and esoteric philosophy. It is also represented by well-known symbols, like the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, which stands with the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden.

The yin-yang symbol of Taoism graphically expresses the truth of perfection attained by integration of complementary opposites. This symbol and the philosophy behind it gave rise to the theory and method of Chinese medicine.

The founder of Taoism, Lao-tzu, wrote:

“One who has a man’s wings
And a woman’s also
Is in himself a womb of the world.”
And, being a womb of the world,
Continuously, endlessly,
Gives birth;
One who, preferring light,
Prefers darkness also
Is in himself an image of the world
And, being an image of the world,
Is continuously, endlessly
The dwelling of creation. .

In the Western tradition, one of the best symbols of this same idea is the caduceus, or wand of Hermes, the familiar winged staff with its intertwined snakes.

Medical historians sometimes say that the caduceus should not be the doctor’s emblem, that it became so by confusion with another symbol, the staff of Asklepios, a plain staff with a single snake coiled round it. Asklepios (or Aesculapius in Latin) was the patron god of physicians in ancient Greece. Both doctors and patients offered sacrifices to him, and the final recourse of the very sick was to go to his temple, called the Asklepieion. Snakes were sacred to Askiepios and so were allowed to roam his temples freely. The ritual of the Asklepieion was simple: the sick would lie down in the great hail, listen to the hymns of the priests, and wait for night. Then they would stay until the god appeared to them in dreams and gave advice.

It may be that the staff of Asklepios is a logical badge for the doctor, and even that the wand of Hermes got mixed up with it somewhere along the way, but I consider the caduceus a far more appropriate symbol, because it embodies an esoteric truth that must be grasped to gain practical control over the shifting forces that determine health and illness.

Hermes is the messenger of the gods, the conductor of souls through the underworld, evolved, we are told, from the role of the herald in primitive Greek life; the caduceus as his emblem of power is a glorified herald’s wand, brandished aloft in ancient courts to gain the recognition of kings and the right to speak and relate news. Hermes is a most ambivalent figure in mythology. Outwardly male, he is really androgynous. He is the scintillating Quicksilver of winged feet and cap, who carries the word of the Olympian gods to earth below, but he is also the grave and mysterious hermit, muffled in a dark cloak, who presides over alchemy and secret knowledge: the guardian of “hermetic science.”6

The talents of Hermes — his speed, knowledge, effectiveness, and ability to protect from evil — all depend on his practical use of one chief secret: that power flows freely when the complementary opposites of existence are woven into the perfect pattern. That pattern appears in the caduceus. The two snakes spitting at each other at the top of the wand, are the light and the dark, good and evil, yang and yin. In the hand of Hermes their bodies form regular sine waves that fit together into the sign of infinity, of the continuous, endless creation of Lao-tzu. As the number “8” that same sign is another symbol of Hermes. A figure 8 is a twisted circle viewed on edge, with power surging around it in the form of a continuous sine wave. Eight is the number of rhythm and dynamism. The snakes that twine around the wand are not frozen. They are in dynamic motion.

The wand itself, crowned with wings, intersects the nodes of that serpentine infinity. It is the middle path, the midpoint between opposites, where all power resides an all change is possible Wednesday is day of Hermes (named for Woden, his Teutonic counterpart) because it is the midpoint of the week, yellow his color because it is the midpoint of the spectrum. Apollo may be the exoteric god of healing in Greek mythology, but Hermes is its esoteric patron, since he presides over the perfect union of forces that is health and holds the secret knowledge of restoring that union when it breaks apart.

Restoring that which is broken is the function of religion; the word means “to bind again." Religion is medicine of the soul: the same activity directed toward the same end but concerned with the spiritual realm rather than the physical body. Magic is also the same activity. In most societies throughout most of history, magic, religion, and medicine have been intertwined, practiced together, and seen as having a common on in. The shaman of tribal peoples in northern Asia an the Americas is the doctor of bodies, souls, and situations. He (or she) has learned to be a personal mediator between the everyday world and the “other world,” leaving his body to commune with spirits and learn the specific causes of illness, the whereabouts of missing objects, the reasons for failures of crops.

In our society, the commonality of religion, magic, and medicine is obscured. Our medical doctors have narrowed their view to pay attention only to the physical body and the material aspects of illness. As a result, they cannot practice the healing magic of Hermes because they do not see or integrate the nonphysical forces that animate and direct the physical body. For the same reason, many doctors cannot come up with a better definition of health than “absence of disease.” They do not grasp the concept of wholeness as perfection that is the root meaning of the word , nor realize that health and illness are particular manifestations of good and evil, requiring all the help of religion and philosophy to understand and all the techniques of magic to manipulate.

Science and intellect can show us mechanisms and details of physical reality — and that knowledge is surely of value — but they cannot unveil the deep mysteries. You cannot restore health in yourself or in others until you know in your heart what health is.

Référence: Andrew Weil, Health and healing, Cinquième Édition, Houghton Mifflin, USA, 2004, chapitre 4.

Texte reproduit uniquement à titre éducatif.