APPENDIX
Holistic concepts integrate those of advanced physics with traditions of the shaman/ witchdoctor/ priest-priestess healer of many ancient cultures. They involve a belief that everything in creation is linked in a universal, if intangible, energy field (E = mc2); that each cell of the body has an electromagnetic field which reflects the state of the cell; that the healthy organism is a bioelectric entity, with a balanced, integrated set of fields; that a very wide range of stimuli (external, internal and genetic) can modulate (beneficially or adversely) the bioelectric fields in the organism; that focused thought can interact with the universal and personal energy field; that there is no past and no future, merely a continuous present; that field effects interact with cellular metabolism etc.
In the definition of the dictionary, many aspects of Holistic Concepts of Health and Disease are arcane or occult (something which is restricted to the fraternity/sorority; secret, hidden). Holistic (transcendent) medicine recognises many more causes and therapies of dis-ease than does mechanistic (scientific) medicine.
Many scientifically-trained professionals have a religious belief, in which the healing arts (medical or veterinary) are human expressions of a divine vocation, similar to priesthood or humanitarian service. In human frailty, they attempt to realise the "will of God" (as revealed by the Christ, the founders of other great religions and the mystics) "to love one another" and "to heal the sick". They believe that the mind/soul is often involved in dis-ease and that healing of the disturbed mind/soul can often be more important than mechanical correction of physical lesions. They believe that the mind of the patient (and of those who know the patient) can influence the outcome of psycho-somatic disease.
An inherent part of holistic medicine is the desire to understand when, where, how and why the patient is ill (diagnosis) and what to do about it i.e. what methods of therapy may help the patient most.
When diagnosing, many holistic practitioners positively seek the help of our Creator. They also seek the patient's help by an internal (mental) dialogue: if I am to help you most effectively, you must please show me where and what is your main problem! When treating, they will/visualise/ project healing to the patient as a routine part of what they do: I open myself to the healing energy of the Creator, who heals all pain and suffering. I transmit to you the healing energies with my love and with the love of our Creator.
Many holistic practitioners believe that a drug administered with love and compassion is of more benefit to a patient that the same drug administered mechanically or dispassionately. Great healers (believing that they act as channels for a benevolent Creator/Universal Life Force) can dispense with the drug altogether.
Fragments of my unpublished prose and verse follow. They may give some slants on this student's impressions of some of these concepts.
PATRICK KAVANAGH'S WORLDS: MINE AND NOT MINE
(Extracts from an unpublished work by P.A.M. Rogers).
Patrick Kavanagh (K) was a great poet, one of the greatest in the English language since W.B. Yeats. You may wonder what on earth a dead Irish poet has to do with Holistic Concepts of Health and Disease! I choose to discuss K's life and work, as they illustrate the paradoxical (Yin-Yang, positive and negative) nature of humanity, the power of mind to be creative or destructive, the struggle between rationalism and blind belief. Most of all, they allow discussion of materialistic-atheistic versus mystical-transcendent values. For poets and many holistic practitioners mysticism is the foundation of their work and their search for "why".
K was born on a small farm in Inniskeen, on the borders of Monaghan, Armagh and Louth (Ireland) on October 21, 1904. He died in a Dublin Nursing Home on November 30, 1967 after suffering years of cancer and alcoholism.
Though his body, bones and brain are long since dead and decomposed, K's warrior-spirit is alive and thriving! In his poetry, he is a warrior, a Christ-like champion of the poor and oppressed. His verses scream out human dis-ease (loneliness, pain, injustice, poverty and ignorance). They also sing out one recipe for optimal human health, the desire of the human soul to transcend the weakness and imperfection of this life. They acknowledge the joy and beauty of life (the only life that we really know) and the fearful wondering if there can be anything waiting on the other side of the Veil.
My comments on Kavanagh and his worlds are my impressions of his work. References and page numbers are shown as (CP5), where 5 is the page number in his COMPLETE POEMS. References from his novel the GREEN FOOL are coded (GF). LAPPED FURROWS and SACRED KEEPER (by his brother, Peter) are coded (LF) and (SK) respectively.
He was aware of the human condition: frailty, loneliness, frustration, the isolation of the artist and the need for love, the false friendship of the bottle, the transience of life and the battle to survive.
K was a paradox, an Irish version of a Zen riddle:... some said a great artist, others, ambiguously, a fiddle... (CP300). He was:... the representative of those/ clay-faced sucklers of spade handles,/ bleak peasants for whom Apollo blows... (CP30).
KAVANAGH THE POET : K wanted to find his own truths. Mysticism, Man's dialogue with God, Man-in-the-world-and-why was the foundation stone of his work: At the foot of a Cross is the Utterness/ of humanity/ every atom of clay,/ every worn stone/ becomes your wish for beauty/ the world cannot own... (SK8).
K had held fast to reason as the guiding principles for most of his life. But human actions and their expression are a mixture of reason and instinct (unreason). Alcoholism is "unreasonable", as is faith. In the end of his life, he wrote: The day I walked out on reason- that old plodder/ (but you didn't)/ was the best day of my life... (CP351)
K was a beggar but rich in spirituality, a dour loner and a black comedian. He was said to have been a plagiarist but he was also a creative genius. He meditated constantly on the place of humanity in nature and on the conflict and similarities between the pagan and Christian ways. He was a visionary/mystic, a Catholic/pagan.
The paradoxical riddles in K's life and work, his dualism (love/hate, joy/despair) and his undoubted consciousness of these suggest leanings towards the spirit of Zen Buddhism. He throws out a mighty challenge and no challenge: "my purpose in life is to have no purpose". Again, he said: Philosophy's graveyard- only dead men analyse/ the reason for existence./... The world began this morning, God-dreamt and full of birds.../ O come all ye youthful poets and try to be more human (CP225)
Humanity is a mixture of good and evil, gentleness and brutality. The conflict and tension between opposites has always been part of poetry and of life.
K was a very astute observer of nature- light, wind, landscape, animal- and human- behaviour. His readers, especially those from rural backgrounds, can feel the textures, see the pictures, hear the sounds of his ideas: A dog lying on a torn jacket under a heeled-up cart,/ a horse nosing along the posied headland, trailing/ a rusty plough..../ October playing a symphony on a slack wire paling (CP80)
SELF-EXAMINATION: I go from you as a snail/ into my twisted habitation./... I know the shallow ways/ of self (CP63).
If it is to be of universal import, poetry must contain a high degree of self-examination. It must examine and question accepted conventions and all the so-called basic dogmas and truths: birth/death, growth/senility, immaturity/maturity. It must also address human reaction to more abstract values and emotions- love/hate, God/Devil, good/evil, subjective/objective realities randomness/meaning of existence, etc.
Am I merely an amalgamation of things, bits and pieces strung together? Am I my profession, an ethical reality? Am I my feet, my penis, hands, one hand clapping in a Zen temple, the other severed in the surgeon's bin? Am I the sin of my ancestors, the mind-creation of my children, wife? Shall I pay the price for them? (Rogers).
FIERCE HONESTY AND LOVE OF TRUTH: K knew that nothing can be known fully and that people who assume that it can commit a crime against wonder: ...The poet wrote it down as best he knew/ as integral and completed as the emotion/ of men and women cloaking a burning emotion/ in the rags of the commonplace, will permit him (CP124)
Science, psychology and literary assessment rely on analysis, the breaking down and tearing apart of complex things and ideas into their components in an attempt to understand how they all fit together in the complete picture. This attempt, unless done with sensitivity and wonder, is of itself an act of destruction, a desecration:... we shall not ask for reason's payment/... nor analyse God's breath in common statement (CP125)
The dissected flower, butterfly, mind (or writer's work!) is a sad sight. K's comic vision sensed the vulgarity of such analysis. He was also sceptical of "objective" science. K was convinced that rational thought and scientific exploration are but one aspect of human search for subjective truth: Now I have to sit down and think/ a world into existence; you cannot borrow/ anyone else's... (CP296)
Objective truth depends on at least one observer. The more observers who agree, the more objective the truth is for them, in other words objective truth is arrived at by a consensus of subjective truth and ... Truth's insanity/ is a spell that all men must hold to; when they wake/ not even dust is left for all their striving (CP182)
TRUTH VERSUS FANTASY: ... If truth is certainty and our world uncertain, our world is fantasy. The main certainty for us is death, the main uncertainty what then?
My truth/reality may be your fantasy/nightmare. Our interpretation of the world is imperfect and subjective. It depends on our senses, our training and, to some extent, on instinct/intuition to fill in missing pieces of the image. Reason can be defective, a fact well known to those who work with psychiatric patients.
Dream-trance/hypnosis: In occult traditions thought (dream, conception, will) precedes action (foundation, construction, reality). The Spirit(s) breathe(s) the dream/idea, which may strike a number of people at the same time. Nothing is more powerful than an idea which has reached its time. If enough people want something to be (to happen), it will, at least for them. The dream precedes the blueprint, which precedes the Taj Mahal. Directed or controlled visualisation (daydream) is a powerful tool.
Truth/reality is primarily opposite in trend to dream/fantasy but the seeds of one lie in the other and the opposites of each lie in each. One can lead to the other. Dreams or fantasy can have a basis in truth/reality and can develop into it, as in precognitive dreams or medical diagnosis/healing using the inner (sixth) sense. Truth/reality can have a basis in dream/ fantasy and can develop into it, as in human endeavour in the First World to solve the problems of the Third World. One fingerless hand claps, as in most aspects of nature.
TRAGI-COMEDY: "tragedy is underdeveloped comedy" (SK106) and "some crucial/ documents of sad evil... may yet/... fuel the fires of comedy" (CP296)
PAGANISM, NATURE WORSHIP AND ATHEISM: New life, new day./ A half-pilgrim saw it as a rabbiter/ poaching in wood sees/ primeval magic among the trees (CP113). Prayer, worship and meditation were directed towards the spirits, or towards the material manifestation of their power- hence sun and moon worship; sacrifices to the sea and the forest; festivals of spring, summer, harvest etc: And you who have not prayed/ the blackbird's evening prayer/ will kneel all night dismayed/ upon a frozen stair (CP64)
Many of the places of Christian pilgrimage were originally sacred, or "places of power", in earlier pagan cultures. Many Irish "Holy Wells" flowed healing water long before the Christian era.
As is the case with all thinkers, K often questioned if life had any meaning which can be discerned by human mind: Mind is a poor scholar/ O blind mind/ when is spun your chilly firmament/ souls nothing find (CP12)
The occult is based on dualism (white- black, good- evil). Adepts choose the left or right path, both of which are powerful. They pray/meditate in the belief that concentrated thought is concentra-ted energy and can cause the desired effect to happen, if only by bolster-ing their own self-confidence and resolve. Benevolent or malign human thought can be potentiated by calling in the heavies- benevolent or malign entities.
Apart from powers vested in the spirit world, occult traditions recognised special powers in certain natural phenomena. These forces could be harnessed by people for good or evil. One could draw healing power from a tree, an underground stream, the wind etc: It is there! Earth force! Life force!... Feel it flow: pins and needles tingling, Kundalini spreading. Scalp, neck, back, arms, trunk, loins, legs electric. Feel the Power and hold it within! (Rogers)
"They who live by the sword shall die by the sword". "As you sow, so shall you reap". Occult traditions teach, as does the Judaeo-Christian:... Thought and Word are straining hounds./ Once unleashed, they track and course/ the distance of the universe./ They nurture life or inflict savage wounds./ By day they turn their master's chosen game./ At night fall, they return/ (often matted in dried mud, torn,/ bloody, thorned, panting, lame)/ home to their lair. They paw and gnaw/ on parboiled heads and other gory chow./ They gorge as hungry hounds know how,/ then circle down to rest in the tangled straw/ synapses of their slipper's demon mind/ or wag their tails and nose his godly hand (Rogers)
Positive thoughts produce positive effects, as in healing prayer/Lourdes, telepathic healing. Negative thoughts produce negative effects, hence the use of curses, spells, voodoo etc in occult, pagan and satanic rituals. But the thoughts, or their clones, return to the sender.
ORIENTAL CONCEPTS AND ZEN:
Oriental philosophy is based on duality, the interplay of opposite forces. It holds that all created things depend on interplay of Yin-Yang energies or Qi- the vital or life force: Chained by a leathery navel cord to sweet-and-sour earth and pulled towards the celestial by fierce magnetic force, must our soft centres rip apart on that cosmic rack? Between the foolish and the wise, man lies. Between the glowing stars and groaning ice, man lies. Between laughter and tears, man lies. God-Satan fights in him. Hope-despair lurches his heart. Love-hatred savages his mind. Nun-Harlots turn his head and in a vital world many living souls are dead (Rogers).
The symbol of Yin-Yang Qi is the Monad, a circle divided in halves by a wavy line, so that it resembles two fish, head to tail. How many city-dwellers have seen the sharp line of demarcation between the north- and south- faces of a Toblerone of milled peat on a frosty January morning? The north face (Yin) is white with frost and the south face (Yang) is brown and the dividing line between the two runs along the top of the Toblerone. It is an amazing sight when seen for the first time but is shrugged at, as something absolutely natural, by those who know the bogs. It is one of the best examples of the oriental concept of Yin-Yang for visual display.
K was aware of nature's laws. In describing the North-facing side of hills, he wrote: My hills hoard the bright shillings of March/ while the sun searches in every pocket (CP13)
Yin (material, solid) and Yang (immaterial, ethereal) are merely different forms or states of energy. These realities, depend for their definition on each other. Yin (passive) and Yang (active) can not exist without each other. Yin and Yang transform (change) into each other and return to the original state (Yin to Yin, passivity to activity to passivity). Good and evil, antagonistic yet complementary fundamental energies must find expression.
Night and day, winter and summer, ice and fire, death and birth are common realities. In Zen they are neither evil nor good. They just are. Good and evil are only words. It is the personal choice and direction of action or inaction which matters to the Zen Master.
The concept of natural rhythms and change is central to Yin-Yang theory: See Master Sun, sail in at dawn, dip away at dusk. See Mistress Moon, slip in at dusk, pale away at dawn. But in the night the sun is there and in the day the moon, there and not there at the same time, like Santa Claus and God (Rogers)
Conception, birth, puberty, parenthood, menopause, death (reincarnation?) are all part of the seasons of life. There is a time for activity and a time for rest. All action/interaction involves input or output of energy, creation and destruction, and transformation, i.e. involves dynamic, inevitable change. Yet, the whole system stays in balance, with nothing added and nothing taken away. All of nature consists of change and no change. Yin-Yang theory predated Einstein's relativity theory by over 5000 years: The Newgrange sign is clear and penetrates the soul.... The whorls and spirals,... deeply etched in granite cry aloud: "The reality of life and death is change! The reality of change is death and life! Listen and act if you dare!". The eagle understood. He saw his death and rebirth, found great inner peace (Rogers)
Zen Buddhism is rooted in concepts of Tao (the Way), the paradox, the way of change and no change, the way of Yin to Yin and Yang to Yang. It is the way of reason and unreason (intuition).
An exercise of Zen meditation is to wrestle with a riddle to which there can be no reasonable answer- the paradoxical KOAN. A typical piece of Zen verse depicts a crag (Yang), valley (Yin), each merging into the other (change).
K was a great, if unwitting, poet of the oriental Zen Yin-Yang tradition:
... the boortree that has a curse but also a blessing (CP155). "Suddenly I remember something that makes me sad and, curiously enough, I am happy then" (SK122). "... people are hated because they are loved" (SK320). But now I will hate till my hate/ comes out the other side of the world as love,/ love in Australia (CP218). K's statements that "to be willing to be nothing is one of the best ways of being something" (SK222), that "his purpose was to have no purpose", that "tragedy is underdeveloped comedy" in the most profound sense (SK106) and that "the right way is wrong" (CP347) are characteristic of the Zen KOAN.
The comic poet and the Zen Master have a lot in common. Evil does not faze the Zen Master. He/she accepts evil with the same serene detachment as good. Both are equally valid realities:... praise, praise praise/ the way it happened and the way it is (CP322). Evil does not subdue or even arrest the comic poet because his/hers is the superb sanity of knowing what really matters (Kennelly).
In typical Zen riddles, K confounds thinkers and poets who take themselves too seriously in seeking to explore the unexplorable:... There are no answers/ to any real question (CP237, 238)/... no answer, no message from experience won,/ advice forever explores the banal/ so let us walk along the banks of the canal... (CP279)
or to those writers who try to explain the unexplainable: The only true teaching/ subsists in watching/ things moving or just colour/ without comment from the scholar (CP287)
CHRISTIAN FAITH: The way I see it, all that went before is gone, work, rest, good, sin, but sparrows still find grain. Today is incarnation, birth, death and resurrection, wheel, spoke and axle, hub and rim of universe (Rogers). Child there is light somewhere/ under a star,/ sometime it will be for you/ a window that looks inward to God (CP7). I saw Christ today/ at a street corner stand,/ in the rags of a beggar he stood/ he held ballads in his hand (CP27)
For faith to have value, believers must wrestle constantly with unbelief. K had many doubts. Talking to himself, he said: you... take up religion bitterly/ which you laughed at in your youth,/ well not actually laughed/ but it wasn't your kind of truth (CP223) but he wanted to accept the idea of a personal God: Only God thinks of the dying sparrow/ in the middle of a war (CP115). But the concept posed problems for him in later life, as it does to many who want to say (and believe) "Amen!". If the personal Ear of God listens to the millions who pray for specific, selfish, intentions, poor God must be weary, if not downright confused. K touches on this: A secret lover/ is saying Three Hail Marys.../ that... will bring/ Cathleen O'Hara... home to him./... Cathleen herself is saying/ (three more)... to bring/ somebody else home to her.../ What is the Virgin Mary now to do? (CP176)
K's idea of prayer was one of worship, praise and wonder at the beauty of creation (nature), a sense of oneness with the Creator and all things created, rather than a plea to supernatural beings for special treatment of the self: ... You plough, you sow, you reap, you buy and sell/ and sing and eat and sleep. All is well/ done/ in the name of the Holy One (CP181).
For him, the search for truth and its expression in poetry was real prayer, the praise and worship of the Spirit in mortal flesh, the childlike affirmation of the utter dependence of humanity on the benevolence of the Energy behind nature.
The Circle is the Father/ Diameter His Son/ Spirit the mathematical centre/ thus truth is known/ in all turning wheels/ in all tumbling clowns/ as in the firmament deep/ where the Prophet drowns (CP67)
But, as in other things, K was paradoxical: The poet's task is not to solve the riddle/ of Man and God but buckleap on a door/ and grab his screeching female by the middle/ to the music of a melodeon (preferably), roar/... up lads and thrash the beetles (CP248)
HUMANISM, ATHEISM, SCIENCE: (Knowledge said... ): This is the only way/ of truth ./ And the fool in me/ buried God's lantern in dark clay/ that an angel might not see (CP41)
K had difficulty in resolving the conflict between intelligence/rationality and blind or reluctant obedience to religious dogma and practice. The self-reliance and pride of atheistic humanism is exemplified in the "scientific" search for truth.
Many scienti-sts and thinkers believe that natural phenomena can be reduced ultimately to physical/chemical reactions governed by a complex set of equations. By reducing nature to equations, they remove all the wonder and mystery. Analysis may quantify the elements in the beetle's iridescent wing but can it reconstruct the beetle's ash to fly again? Can Science weigh the human soul or take the pulse of God? Atheistic scientists would not be:... afraid when the sun opened a flower,/... never astonished/ at a stick carried down a stream/ or at the undying difference in the corner of a field (CP180)
No scientist has seen a quark but the reality of quarks is inferred from effects which can be explained by their existence. No scientist has yet seen God through his/her telescope. Ergo, God does not exist- God is not given the status of the quark: Way out among the distant stars, or hidden in a quark,/ or in the pure song of the lark, or in the deeds of dark,/ or in the thunder and the rain, or in the desert dry,/ or in the fission of the bomb, or in the human cry,/ or in the slowly rotting leaf that births a giant tree,/ or in the plastic micro-chip, or in the depths of me,/ mc squared equals E! I kneel and adore THE E:/ at one with the Universe! (Rogers)
Einstein's Law of Relativity states that energy is neither created nor destroyed; it merely changes form. Mass and energy are interchangeable. Yet, the whole system stays in balance, with nothing added and nothing taken away. All of nature consists of change and no change. Ancient Yin/Yang and Zen theory predated these concepts by over 5000 years.
K saw science as a game for creatures of limited consciousness. FOR EMINENT PHYSICISTS is one of his best religious poems, in which he implies that faith in God wins him rather than reliance on science. The poem is so good that it said it all in less words that this commentary: God must be glad to see them play/ like kittens in the sun/ delighted with the wisps of hay/ blown from His haggard on a breezy day.../ Time's kittens, have your fun (CP147)
REPENTANCE: We have sinned.../ Let us lie down again/ deep in anonymous humility and God/ may find us worthy material for His hand (CP256)
Sin, guilt and repentance mean different things to different people. The human reality is that we are human. To be human is to err. Some belief systems call this sin and demand a personal and social expression of guilt (confession) and sorrow for it (repentance). Where possible, recompense is expected.
Honest people admit to having made some serious mistakes, or having failed to hit the desired ethical target. This recognition of human frailty, with a sense of praise, worship and total dependence on God/Nature is the basis for all healing of mind and body.
O divine Baby in the cradle/ all that is joy in me/ is that I have saved from the ruin/ of my soul your Infancy (CP71)
K admitted failure in the end and threw himself in God's hands, even though doubts about the existence of life after death had recurred again (1965): ... heaven if there is such/ a place which I doubt very much (CP344). One wonders if those lines flashed through his mind at his last conscious moment, or if he died composing some new and violently beautiful poem to the Creator or a poem simply praising human ability to defy poverty, pain, darkness and silence.
CONCLUSIONS: We are all conditioned in our beliefs, morality and behaviour by family, school and immediate society. Most parents try to pass on their sense of values to their children. Parents would resent the charge that they try to "condition the children to the same taboos and fears which make a mess of their own emotional, mental, spiritual and sexual lives" but, in many cases, this is what the system (home + school + church + society) really does: She held the strings of her children's Punch and Judy,/ and when a mouth opened/ it was her truth that the dolls would have spoken/ if they hadn't been made of wood and tin (CP99)
Professionals are conditioned by teachers, drug companies, peer-pressure and our own clinical experience. While much of our conditioning is very useful, much is unhelpful- it does not solve our clinical problems. It is possible to delete obsolete or faulty software/ideas from our brains' storage area/memory and to reprogramme with worthwhile or experimental software/ideas by interfacing with holistic practitioners, artists, mystics and poets. I urge you to try it. If the new software is unhelpful, that can be scrubbed also!
Life is for loving and living, for growth and decay, for experimentation and failure. It is not for futile talk or unfelt prayer: He saw the sunlight and begrudged no man/ his share of what the miserly soil and soul/ gives in season to the ploughman (CP96)
Teaching depends on the knowledge, instinct and communication skills of the teacher and on the ability and willingness of the student to learn. The great teacher may have many students or only one. But one is enough because that one may teach many.
K believed that the great poets... never teach us anything... they... provide us with an orgy of sensation and nothing else or more (SK220). I believe that K was wrong. He undervalued the priesthood of the great poets and the sermons on love, hate, hope and despair in his own life and work. In 1957 he said that malice is only another name for mediocrity. People need not be mediocrities if they accept themselves as God made them. God only makes geniuses (SK326). What a teaching if there are students to listen!
REFERENCES TO KAVANAGH'S LIFE AND WORK