Towards a new Physiology and Anatomy.

It is beyond question that we once had a unified knowledge of the human body’s inherent structures and their functions including their energetic systems. Parts of the system still exist in Ayurveda, Tibetan and Traditional Chinese Medicine and traces are there in the Upanishads, the Bible, in Egyptian hieroglyphs and the works of the early Greeks including Pythagoras. Only 1500 years ago, we had schools and hospitals where learning and treatment of the sick using energetic medicine went hand in hand. The famous school at Jundishapur in India was established after the Emperor Zeno closed the school at Edessa in Mesopotamia in 489AD. "Jundishapur" brought together scholars from India, Greece and China and translations were made of important works in both medicine and astrology.

Why we don’t have a complete energy physiology and anatomy now is an interesting quirk of history. It may have been the fire that destroyed the library at Alexandria or the intervention of the early Christian Church, only one thing is certain, nothing approaching a unified system remains. We are left with something resembling a cryptic crossword puzzle.

To simplify matters even further, in the 16th century we gave God and other troublesome concepts like witches and miracle healings to the church, and opted for a Skinnerian world that was highly determined by the principle of wysiwyg or "what you see is what you get".

This split between the Christian church and science was a phenomenon that occurred in the west at the time of the renaissance and was probably indicative of the general attitudes of the Catholic church at that time. As Lawrence Blair succinctly put it "the religious leaders of the past (pre Christian era) were also the scientists and mathematicians, which suggests that there was a time when neither we, nor the gods we created, were so schizophrenic as to maintain that the world of matter and reason was distinct from the world of spirit and the awareness of God.’(p81 Blair, Lawrence; Rhythms of Vision. Paladin.St Albans Hert. 1976)

After the renaissance, anatomists went "scientific" and concepts like etheric fields, bio-magnetism, humours and astrology gradually lost their place in favour of a physical chemistry that attempted to explain life, the universe and every thing down to the last atom. Not that the "atomic theory" was really a product of so called "modern science". Democritis expounded it 3,000 years ago. By the 20th century, this secular chemistry had become incredibly sophisticated, but we were still faced with the ramifications of this separation of the powers of the church and state.

Scientists were and are mostly unwilling to even broach subjects that could relate to spiritual or energetic matters and expose themselves to ridicule from their peers. As Ken Wilbur notes, (Wilber, Ken. The Marriage of Sense and Soul. Broadway Books New York 1999) "…the relation of science and religion in the modern world – that is, in the last three or four centuries has changed very little since their introduction to each other in the trial of Galileo, where the scientist agreed to shut his mouth and the Church agreed not to burn him."

Things are starting to change as we are beginning to realise through quantum physics that things are not how they appear. Nonetheless, we are still suffering from a medicine that has tried to "scientise" itself by attempting to wrap itself around an incredibly incomplete understanding of the human being by virtue of the exclusion of everything that didn’t fit it’s own unique parameters.

Even in the 21st century, when some of us consider that western medicine has evolved past being dragged kicking and screaming into the benefits of acupuncture and reflexology, our physiology and anatomy texts by and large haven’t grasped the inescapable fact that for a technique like acupuncture to work, it must do so by affecting a system and therefore there must be a system which it directly affects.

Why aren’t meridians in the standard physiology and anatomy standard texts? This is perhaps our most blatant use of the "not made here" syndrome. 4,000 years of oriental medical research appears to mean little compared to the fact that it doesn’t fit in with the western approach.

The current western view of human physiology and anatomy describes the tangible complexity of energies and information which expresses itself on the physical plane in the form of our bodies and brain. It does not approach defining or even acknowledging the "tangible complexity of energies and information" that construct the physical body and are essentially responsible for its health and well being. In our approach to physiology and anatomy, we have put the cart before the horse.

However, if we are prepared to explore a "new" physiology and anatomy from an experiential perspective investigating both modern and ancient teachings through thought and feeling, coupled with an understanding of the relevancy of the western psychological and bio-chemical view, we will take a big step in the right direction.

Kevin Farrow