As a supplement to Beyond Western Medicine, we are going to begin an eight part series on spiritual medicine, or medicine dedicated to helping people complete their conscious evolution.

Usually when one begins a new leg of a journey, he or she has to specify both the starting and endpoints. Therefore, we will begin with a brief description of western medicine and eastern medicine.

Western medicine can be defined as the system of medicine which limits its field of study to energies arising and manifesting in the world of bodies. This finite world of human experience, acknowledged to exist by the physical scientist, is included in all world views. For example, it is called the alam-i-ajsam, the world of bodies, in Sufism, the material world of Assiah in the Kabala and the realm of human and animal existence in Buddhism. Consequently, the first major limitation we find imposed, by the materialistic practitioner, which is fundamental to western philosophy and science and contrary to most other known world views, both ancient and current, is that man exists within only a single world of experience, a world we can denote by the term existential, that is, it is a world existing as a composite of energy manifesting as a hierarchy of separate bodies and entities. This world is one of linear cause and effect. A world of material energies only. A world where the laws controlling the manifesting and functions of separate objects are assumed to be complete. A world where spirituality does not exist, miracles are excluded, the transformation of man is impossible. It is a world of macroscopic predetermination.

Originally, man lived in a world in which he saw himself as an integral part of nature, a world of both organic and inorganic life, a world of elemental forces, a world where the spirits of the living and dead met, the world of shamanistic belief. However, beginning with seed concepts introduced by the Seven Sages of Ancient Greece, subsequently fertilized by the late Renaissance figures of Brache and Galileo, nourished by contemporaries such as Leibniz and Newton and blooming within the writings of the French philosopher-scientist Rene Descartes, man lost touch with the more formless energies of the higher worlds and began focusing his attention solely on the data arising from objects within the physical world. And as his awareness slowly shifted so to focus more and more attention upon the impressions received from his sensory organs, his world of experience began spiraling so to encompass circles of ever-decreasing radii, circles no longer containing the spiritual experiences and truths of the shamanist; hence, affecting the ability of western man to consciously perceive non-material impressions. As western man’s world of impressions and experiences diminished, the nature of his awareness changed such that he soon forgot about the other worlds. Because his perceptions of the world changed, his world experience changed. Because experience shapes and molds the content of our thoughts, our reality changes and remolds our consciousness. We become trapped within a very limited world view, missing the totality of man’s potential interaction with Creation, seeing only what we allow ourselves to see. Goethe said it best when he wrote, “Wir sehen, nur was wir kennen–We see only what we know”.

In the West, the philosophy of science is founded upon the premise that the universe is composed of discrete objects composed of distinct energies which are separated from each other in the Minkowski space-time continuum. Man is seen as completely separate from nature, the environment and other animate life forms. The world and man, like other organic entities, is likened to a machine which can be disassembled and reduced into a finite number of constituent subsystems and parts. Man’s reality is limited to the tangible structure of matter, which can be measured, quantified and analyzed. Events occur according to unchanging and comprehensible laws. Everything is one big mechanism.

Continued . . .