HEALING -- A NEW-OLD GOAL FOR LIVING

PAUSE A MOMENT

HEALING

Good morning, and welcome to Pause a Moment. I'm Barrie Barkla. Tonight I want to share some thoughts and “got-its” with you about something we all long for – Healing.....

[Open Your Eyes – Snow Patrol – 5:38]

Sinclair Lewis – said something in “Arrowsmith” that lit the blue touch paper under my rocket. He wrote - “God give me unclouded eyes and freedom from haste. God give me quiet and relentless anger against all pretense and all pretentious work and all work left slack and unfinished. God give me a restlessness whereby I may neither sleep nor accept praise till my observed results equal my calculated results or in pious glee I discover and assault my error. God give me strength not to trust to God!”

These words thrill me still. I am grateful that my parents taught me the principles of hard work, dedication and impeccability, at least by precept, from the day I was first aware. These words contain what I need. The hero of Arrowsmith was a doctor and the doctor was a hero. At moments he was almost a god, bringing healing to skeptical mortals. Arrowsmith spoke words that were were sparks hammered hot from the anvil of his dedication. I embraced his dedication to his life, and I determined to go forth like him – somehow.

[Soft Heartbeat]

While I was going through this, I didn’t mention the book to my father. As far as Daddy was concerned, if it wasn't on the school syllabus it was a frivolous waste of time. He told me sternly and often about the burdens and responsibilities of work. He didn't think to mention it might be enjoyable, but then my father didn't pack a lot of joy into the open gladstone bag he carried to work every day with the yellow metal Thermos poking out of the top, nor did he bring any more home at night. And when he retired, he died. Hmmm! 

Gotta be more to it than that, surely.

One way and another, I've spent a lot of my life in hospital Emergency Rooms. And I confess to a weird liking for ER documentaries on TV. But it seems to me, especially after 12 hours waiting to be seen for a heart attack, on an ambulance stretcher in an Adelaide private hospital, // that medicine is turning out to have too little to do with healing and making people whole and happy. It has to do instead with doing the paperwork and tests and treatments, with little or no probing into our lives, pronouncing a few of us, the presumably unlucky ones who don't make it, as “expirations”. 

Having nothing else to do while just lying there, I vividly remember the girl in desperate agony from her botched self- abortion; she's probably emotionally no better off now, even if she isn’t bleeding anymore. The drunk from the parklands across the way, reeling around the ER, out of his senses, oblivious to the streaming gash across his forehead. I'd seen him, or many like him, before when I was driving ambulances in Broome. He probably still comes in every fortnight, not long after he's collected his pension and spent it in the bottle shop on West Terrace. Then there was the grey-faced lawyer clutching at his chest, certain that at that very moment he was dying. Truth is, he had been dying for years but hadn't taken any notice – this was his wake-up call. I wonder if he paid much notice? Then there was the angry young woman with the barbiturate overdose— she was a respectable addict who was probably trying to get someone to notice she'd lost her footing in a turbulent set of rapids and was going under. 

I didn’t get to know any of their names. They were being referred to, and treated, as “the abortion”, “the overdose”, “the laceration”, and “the heart attack”. They were the sum total of my Australia that day.

In a way, it's beginning to seem normal. Certainly the pollies and senior public servants don't see anything wrong with it as they do their daily rounds of spinning their way out of the indefensible. Never mind, their turn will come one day. The veterans of ER have grown used to it long since. And you've allowed yourself to get used to it, too.

Well, I refuse to get used to it. The boy in me still burns to do better, and to require “betterness” of others. I've been to hospital in Thailand, a so-called "third-world country", and I'd far rather be ill there than here. We don't require enough of the people we elect and charge to look after those who cannot fend for themselves. It's too easy for us to mix with the nurses at their station, sloughing off our anger and fatigue with jokes and coffee in between ambulances. When an ambulance does drive up, the scene changes in an instant, almost to hysteria. Then we move! We live our lives in fits and starts of emergency in between bouts of collective torpor and amnesia. It's not the system's fault; it's ours - yours and mine.

Oh look, I can fire up on emergency action, too, and thanks to Lifeline I know I'm good at it. But at the same time I'm also a stranger to people. Who were these suffering souls I spoke with anonymously for an hour or more every night? Was my life connected with theirs by pure chance, or is there some point to it? Do I really make a difference, or am I alone in the cubicle just playing with myself? Does it matter that I really care?  Or do I get only the same brownie points as those just pretending to?

CURE OR HEALING? I'm not about mere cures. If a cure happens -- good! But it seems to be that humanity at large is determined to suffer, and woe betide anyone who gets in the way. Besides, there are so many charlatans out there peddling cures to everything from cancer to chillblains. I am deeply suspicious of all of them.

I am about healing people and making them whole. The ones who've had enough; the ones who finally realise there is no payoff any more in suffering. I have had a great deal more time to think about that, and I have some skill in doing something about it. But I'm not going to chase you down. My Dad used to call “Come and get it” at tea time. You have to come if you want to get it. Got it?

Medicine, for example, began as more than either science or art; it was spiritual wisdom. Hippocrates, who still walks with every physician, really was an angelic doctor. He claimed descent directly from Aesculapius, the Greek god of healing. In his own lifetime he was revered. He did not just sew up wounds; he stitched up his patient’s immortality. We do not know much about the methods of Hippocrates, but we have some of his words. Fragments remaining of his teaching included such statements as this: 

“Even though a patient may be aware that his condition is perilous, he may yet recover because he has faith in the goodness of his physician.” 

In taking the Hippocratic Oath itself, every doctor swears to this: “I will keep pure and holy both my life and my art.” Hmmm.

Since we know very little about the practice of the art Hippocrates was master of, his noble words do not appear to have much connection to reality anymore. The medicine appears to have been stripped of ideals, in favour of a practical zeal for zapping the diseases and repairing the bodies, and tranquillising the troubled minds of sick people. The best doctors I have met in every field are scientists of great integrity and skill. Their goal in life is to track down the cause of disease with precise objectivity and then, they hope, to wipe it out. I can state without even pausing to think about it that no doctor of my acquaintance has ever alluded to his “pure and holy art.” After graduation day, I wonder if they forget it in the rush to reduce the crowd in the waiting room and meet their quota of billings for the day....

The ancients, for their part, appeared to have little in the way of a scientific foundation for their medicine, but , by God, they got a good grasp on the nature of Man. Their first principle was that health requires a balance within the body. As a piece of received truth, this easily rolls off the tongue, but its implications have been carried far from the ancient world. Today we speak of the body’s “homeostatic mechanisms”, and we pursue biochemical research to discover such things as “how the autonomic nervous system mediates the secretions of the endocrine glands”. And we spend the budget equivalents of small countries on synthetic drugs that ape what our bodies used to do naturally. But we are still talking about balance within the body, and we still find it absolutely vital to preserve it. And what about balance in the mind and spirit? In those realms we seem embroiled in a state of war between un-balanced Good and Bad.

The ancients also believed that man’s inner nature mirrors nature as we observe it around us. Cosmos, or the universe, comprised two fundamental and related realms, the Inner and Outer. Balancing their forces made it possible for life to continue in harmony. Inner and Outer ran on parallel tracks, so to speak, and throwing either one into imbalance spelled disaster for both. I've seen nothing since to disprove that.

The ancient healers thought they understood the universal basis of life, and they desired to live from its source. Their precepts for health may sound simple-minded to us now because they are not based on reliable information about the body. The Greeks had either bad data about physiology, or no data at all. It is therefore hard to credit their view of medicine. Accurate information seems, after all, so much more real and credible than wisdom.

Hippocrates knew nothing about so elementary a fact as the circulation of the blood. He thought of blood as a pure vehicle for the elements of creation—earth, air, fire, and water—and he held that the purest blood must reside nearest the heart, the seat of the purest affections. He and his contemporaries argued whether consciousness could be located in the brain or the bloodstream. Choosing one or the other put you into entirely different camps of Greek medicine. 

 

This seems now like a ridiculously primitive disagreement, but the ancient physicians collectively held on to some invaluable assumptions that no one's debating. They assumed that man and the entire world were endowed with life, intelligence, and a soul. Since they believed that every bit of the living world contributed to human well-being for better or worse, the ancients built their centres of medicine at sites of great beauty and sanctity. A hospital was very much like a temple. Patients came for inner, as well as outer restoration, and their physicians found the fresh air and sunlight to be highly beneficial for both. In his counsel to doctors, Hippocrates wrote one great dictum: “Nature is the curer of sickness.” His famed center of medicine on the island of Kos was reputed to contain six thousand medicinal plants, but he knew stronger remedies than any of them: “Leave your drugs in the pot at the pharmacy if you cannot cure the patient with food.”

Nowdays our hospitals are being removed from garden settings into glossy, glassy factory complexes, built on poisoned railway yards next the busiest of traffic intersections in the whole CBD. And hospital food ranks down there with airline food as standard fare for comedy!! Our sports fans get a better deal than the sick!! And the wealthy get to live in garden-apartment piles where the hospitals once stood. Unless, of course, you're both sick and really rich, in which case you can afford to go to private clinics which are often located in really beautiful and specially endowed places, and they look like – you guessed it – temples.

Hippocrates' complete trust in Nature is dismissed as quaintly radical now. But if he turned out to be right, wouldn’t we all feel nothing less than immense embarrassment? The ancients proposed that nature, meaning our own inner nature, had sufficient means to keep us completely healthy. Their ideal was a state of health that harboured no thoughts of sickness at all. (I am reminded of the old custom in India whereby a physician was paid only if everyone in his village was well.) In other words, health was like freedom. A free life did not confine itself to boundaries, theories, turf wars and precautions. A free life is lived spontaneously, taking its nourishment from air, sun, food, and philosophy, and the more spontaneous it is, the stronger it stands.

Nothing in our medical system yet comes close to this sort of inspiration. In exchange for ideal health, we accept a view that is more practical and (so we say) more rational. Our science attempts to understand the body one piece at a time, in terms of cells, tissues, and organs. It protects our health the same way, one disease at a time.

But the rational system has wandered so far from its source that it is turning in on itself. If we believe the marketers, we can't even be a responsible parent unless we buy and shovel down our throats half the local pharmacy every week. We are losing the family GP in favour of battery “super clinics”. Confidence in doctors is becoming rare; we're even suing them when we get to hang on to our favourite illness. The incredible expense and complexity of the present system is testament to a technological blowout. Our growing resistance to formerly life-saving drugs indicates we might just have missed something along the way from Kos to here.

What is less well known, because doctors do not discuss it very openly, is the futility of practicing medicine without a basic healing ideal. What kind of holistic rubbish would my present GP find in these two lines:

Rejoice at your inner powers, for they are your connection to wholeness and holiness in you,

Rejoice at seeing the light of day, for seeing makes truth and beauty possible.

They happen to come from Hippocrates, and as long as they still have some meaning to a practitioner somewhere, medicine can be saved from becoming totally soulless.

But it would seem that both economic rationalism and dis-ease are getting the upper hand. Economics and technology have not delivered on their promises. Economics has too much to do with fiscal showcasing. The rational methods, the machines, the controls and concepts of treatment seem to have too little to do with life and too much to do with postponing death in the name of “saving life”. 

Practicing medicine as we do now makes a doctor’s life as nerve-racking as a soldier’s. It consists of an endless struggle to conquer disease, and to keep at this, a doctor must deny to himself that disease ultimately wins. The essence of healing life begins when we get that there ain't no cure for death. But these are not the kinds of thoughts you permit yourself, are they? But doctors do face up to them from time to time, and wonder what their work is for.

Success in any system, however, depends on everyone believing in the system. I used to be much more into believing than I am now. My beliefs have been changing and waning very fast, and now I am part of what my GP might call “the holistic menace”. When someone says someone I know has cancer, I now ask “What's eating her?” I am amazed at how long it took me to discover something that is almost absurdly simple: a healer must trust in Nature and be happy and whole in himself. From there, he can change the world.

[We Can Change the World – Anne Kirkpatrick & Slim Dusty (A) – 4:30]

 I can change the world. And if I can, so can you. Every thought you buy into, every feeling you nurture, every move you make, every action you take – matters. I've spoken of it before; it's called the Butterfly Effect --

In 1963, Edward Lorenz presented a hypothesis to the New York Academy of Science. His theory, stated simply, was that:

A butterfly could flap its wings and set molecules of air in wave motion, which would move other molecules of air, in turn moving more molecules of air—eventually capable of starting a hurricane on the other side of the planet.

Lorenz and his ideas were literally laughed out of the conference. What he had proposed was ridiculous. It was preposterous. But it was fascinating! Therefore, because of the idea’s charm and intrigue, the so-called “butterfly effect” became a staple of science fiction, remaining for decades a combination of myth and legend spread mainly by comic books and bad movies.

So imagine the scientific community’s shock and surprise when, more than thirty years after the possibility was introduced, quantum physics professors working from colleges and universities worldwide came to the conclusion that the butterfly effect was authentic, accurate, and viable.

Soon after, it was accorded the status of a “law.” Now known as The Law of Sensitive Dependence Upon Initial Conditions. In Baz-speak, that means “If you spit in the wind, expect a tidal wave of booger back.”

Now I'm no butterfly – more like a daggy old moth. But the stories I tell have the power to provide hope and direction for your lives, and sometimes also help in leading others to their own life of permanent purpose! Imagine what could happen in your life, your relationships, or your businesses if we were able to put away our self doubts and fears, and MAKE JUST ONE MOVE that could dramatically affect how we, and others, live today.

I don't care how retarded, how slow, or how handicapped you think you are, you can make one move. I just made another one, and I'm watching the waves ripple around the world.

Come on. What have you got to lose? Make a wave. Make a difference.

[Wave – Slava Grigoryan, Jane Rutter, David Jones]