Health, Society and You
Dada Jyotirupananda
As I write this, one of my friends – a top reviewer for
New Renaissance – is on his deathbed.
Ian Gottstein has lived a fine, busy life, beloved by
everyone he’s known. So in one sense his imminent passing does not bother me.
He will go peacefully, the doctors assure us, and he will leave a lot of love
and cheer, and a fine example of how to live, behind him.
But Ian is only 40, and this bothers me. The doctors are
not sure how he contracted his brain tumor. Certainly it’s unrelated to his
lifestyle: daily yoga and meditation and a well rounded vegetarian diet for many
years.
Another friend of mine has just passed away, from cancer.
Phil, only 34, also lived a healthy life style, with few if any complexes or
inner demons to eat away at him; and as well loved and respected in his
community, as was Ian.
Their conventional doctors could not place their illnesses
in any context outside of their own bodies. So while their bodies were the final
resting places for their cancers, it would seem that we are learning little or
nothing about the root causes of a very dangerous disease.
I tend to
think that both were suffering not so much from how they lived, but from where
they lived: in a world where strange chemicals, traumas, stresses and peculiar
poisons pervade our lives.
Our modern world seems to bombard us with health threats
beyond our control. Thus the media suggests that we leave health care to the
‘Powers that Be’ who may be able to, at some blissful, unknown point in the
future, cure these terrible diseases.
But of course these health threats are not really beyond
our control.
In this issue Zia Sardar, using the British National Health
Service as his foil, reminds us that medicine has been practiced quite
effectively long before the present allopathic, ‘Western’ system was born.
In his words, “It is the emphasis on the whole person and the power of the
patient to heal her/himself that has made non-Western medical systems so popular
in Britain.”
Andy Douglas agrees. Stalked by chronic fatigue for a
decade he finally gave up on the techno-medical system that couldn’t define or
treat his illness. He found relief, though a bit of pain along the way, with a
Mexican natural healer who doubles as a social activist.
Perhaps only 50 years ago only a few sci-fi writers and
overly-imaginative scientists could imagine the dozen or more ways humans can be
conceived today or in the near future. Rosaleen Love asks if future generations
will praise or damn us for tinkering with mother nature’s ways.
Richard Eckersley and Sohail Inayatullah both look at
health in relation to our social and economic development. A significant number
of nations are reaching a point where more riches don’t make a better life.
Perhaps, suggests Eckersley, we need to redefine health and happiness.
Inayatullah follows on this by examining health and work
and sees that the modern worker (at least in the more developed countries) is
not as much in crisis over money, as s/he is over finding meaning in life and
work.
Other writers here, such as P.R. Sarkar, Jan Lundberg and
Ivana Milojevic, challenge our easily held assumptions about how we can move
human society forward toward inner and outer prosperity, which, it appears, must
go hand in hand..
This article was printed in New Renaissance, Vol. 11, No. 2, issue 37,
Summer, 2002
Copyright © 2002 by Renaissance Universal, all rights reserved.
Posted on the web on August 1, 2002.
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