Quantum Activism and Integrative Medicine
By Amit Goswami, Ph.D.
Quantum activism in the field of health and healing begins with an appreciation of what health is. What is health? In integrative medicine, we are able to define health in an inclusive manner. Health is when not only the physical organs function properly but also when all our other bodies function properly. In particular, even physical health is defined not only by the proper functioning of the physical organs but also by the proper functioning of their correlated morphogenetic fields and the correlated mental body that gives meaning to the physical and vital experiences, all in synchrony.
A quantum activist must realize that disease occurs not only because of genetic (genetic defects) and environmental factors (climate change, bacteria and viruses) but also due to internal experiences and the internal environment that the memory of these experiences creates. Memory of past experiences also creates patterns of conditioning (Mitchell and Goswami, 1992) through which we tend to lose our freedom to choose healthy possibilities. In this way, disease may occur at the vital body level (vital body disease), at the level of the mind (mind-body disease), even at the level of the supra mental and bliss bodies.
Consequently, there are five levels of disease corresponding to the five bodies in consciousness. Disease at a higher level percolates down to lower levels. In this way, a wrong mental meaning may cause vital energy blocks that may then affect physical body functioning. It makes sense then that the true healing of a disease must involve the level at which the disease starts. That is, there are five levels of healing corresponding to each of the five levels of disease.
The quantum activist recognizes from the get-go that integrative medicine based on quantum physics is fundamentally optimistic. If the world consists of possibilities, not determined events, then we can hope to choose health over disease. Neither disease nor healing need be entirely objective. Subjective experiences and our attitudes toward them have a role to play. By using creativity, the quantum activist learns to change his or her attitude that takes one from illness to health and from ordinary health to positive health.
One shortcoming of materialist biology and allopathic medicine is that they are unable to properly incorporate an important aspect of biological organisms: heterogeneity. In conventional biology based on genetic determinism, all individual differences are of genetic origin. In vital body and mind-body medicine, individual differences also arise from the differences in the individualization of the vital body.
I mentioned before that our physical organs are representations of vital morphogenetic field blueprints of biological functions. How we use the morphogenetic fields in the formative developmental years give us our body types.
In Traditional Chinese medicine, two body types are recognized. The yin type occurs when conditioning is the operating principle for the use of the morphogenetic fields. The yang type occurs when the morphogenetic fields are used creatively to meet the challenges of the environmental changes during development.
In Ayurveda, two types of creativity are distinguished: situational in which creativity is used but only as a combination and permutation of already known archetypal contexts; and fundamental in which creativity is used with a discontinuous quantum leap to explore meaning in a brand new way in a new archetypal context.
Ayurveda recognizes a three-fold body type called doshas. The first is kapha which corresponds to the conditioning mode; the second, vata, corresponds to situational creativity; and finally, the third, pitta, corresponds to fundamental creativity. This kind of typology also characterizes how mental meaning is mapped into the brain in our formative years; in other words, we have a three-fold mind-brain doshas (Goswami, 2004). Excess conditioning results in the brain dosha of mental slowness. Excess situational creativity results in the brain dosha of hyperactivity (as in Attention Deficit Disorder). And finally, excess fundamental creativity leads to the brain dosha of intellectualism.
In truth, we usually have a mixture of all the vital/physical doshas and mind/brain doshas. The mixture for a particular person is called this person’s “prokriti” in Ayurveda—his or her Ayurvedic nature.
Health maintenance at the personal level for a quantum activist begins with the knowledge of one’s body type prokriti. This may require the help of trained physicians. The details of how to use this knowledge for maintaining one’s health can be found in books on Ayurveda and Traditional Chinese Medicine and in Goswami, 2004.