 Many years ago in China, when I was a student in my father's acupuncture school, my father told me and all his other students that integral medicine is not an external discipline. It grew out of two million, seven hundred thousand years of human life growth and is based on internal recognition of the problems of life. In this way, it provides effective internal and external solutions. What this means is that integral medicine is a spiritual awareness of life, slowly attained throughout hundreds of thousands of years of real life experience. As internal awareness grows, solutions become self-evident.
So my father told us, "To learn integral medicine, you cannot simply take what has been written in books and study that. You must develop yourself spiritually before you can become a true healer."
He repeated this many times, and I am repeating it to all of you. Reading books is only one step to truly healing. Going to classes is only one step; you need your own spiritual cultivation and awareness so that you can link yourself with the accumulated experience of human development.
What constitutes a spiritual awareness of human life? My father told us something very easy to remember and very easy to apply: a healer firsts needs to affirm positive life energy by learning about the positive energy of the universe and his or her own positive energy. Each person is active and does things right, because of positive life energy. Occasionally, this positive life energy becomes blocked or obstructed. Someone who has developed a spiritual awareness and capability can help restore the normal flow of positive life energy. Basically, the development of integral healing is the result of the experience and understanding of spiritually developed men and women. It is the accumulation of their external discoveries and the self-discoveries and the solutions they applied to different problems.
People lived in China for centuries without any means of communication such as we have today. For a long time, they had to survive physically, mentally, and spiritually, without external help. The people who lived in that enclosed environment became spiritually aware, however, by learning to recognize and develop universal positive life energy. That became, in a sense, their religion. They worshipped the respect, protection and love of the nature-giving positive life energy in themselves, thus what eventually came to be called Taoism was never an external religion.
God is just a name for the universal positive life energy in each of us. By manifesting that energy in our lives, we bring out the beauty of life and also some great achievements. Without that energy, nothing can be accomplished in the world.
There was a popular philosophy in China that divided the universe into four stages: Birth, growth, decline, and emptiness or death. These philosophers stopped at the stage of emptiness, however, without realizing the subtle power of regeneration is the powerful force that we call Tao. It is positive life energy. When a person supports that energy, that is called virtue or morality or holiness. If someone does something that harms it, their actions are wrong and can be called sinful.
Although war and other human disasters are created by spiritually ignorant and immature leaders, the regenerative energy always brings forth life again. Although spiritual tend to not become involved in politics, we approve of any political, healing, social, or educational system that supports positive life energy. As future healers, set a simple standard for yourself: do only those things that support the growth of positive life energy in yourself and others. If something is harmful, do not do it. There is no higher discipline than this. Although it applies to any individual and any society, it is not an external doctrine or belief. It does not matter what anyone calls it; what matters is that we apply it.
The second principle my father taught us was kindness. Protecting and developing positive life energy is kind. Cruelty, violence, or brutality is harmful to positive life energy. No evil violent force can last for long. No extreme can bring true progress. Only gentle, kind progress can bring true maturity.
So you need to be objective about what you are doing and being, about the company you keep, about the schools you go to, about the church you attend: do they support your life energy or do they feed your swollen emotions? This is important to consider.
My father always liked to compare Taoist or integral medicine to a pot of boiling water: you do not stop water from boiling by blowing on it, you have to take the pot off the fire or take away the fuel that makes the fire. This fundamentally describes the basic principle of all treatment. Once you discover the trouble, you treat the cause of it, not just the symptoms. Treating the toothache or headache alone is not enough. You need to discover the source of the problem. Once the real problem is solved, the symptom will not come back again. Otherwise, a person needs to sit in the dental chair all over again. That is not healing, it is punishment.
Talk given to new students during the opening of Yo San University of Traditional Chinese Medicine on April 22, 1989.
|
