Heroes Not Zombies

Look carefully at these raindrops and see what you can see within them.

There are all kinds of theories about reality and how we experience it, but in this Age of Modernity, the object, what’s “outside”, what can be measured, what is “physical” has gained almost a monopoly over what is accepted as “real”.

What a patient’s tests or scans show are believed to represent what’s really wrong or right. What a patient reports, relates or describes of their experience – their symptoms, their personal narrative, is often dismissed by researchers as anecdote, or by clinicians as unimportant – “I’m happy to tell you your results are all normal” (“now go away and stop bothering me with your complaints!”). Somehow the lived experience of reality has become less relevant than the measurement of reality. The object trumps the subject.

Yet that objective, physical reality can only be experienced by, can only be measured by, the human subject.

So, in this dialectic, is there some way to grasp reality, to know what is REAL?

I’m not about to solve this one here, but one way of approaching this which appeals to me a lot, is to ask the question “what are these the two poles of?” “Inside and outside of what?” Or to put it another way……If the subject and the object are two sides of the coin, what’s the coin?

Is it the continuous process of becoming which we see everywhere in the universe? Is it the vital force, the Life force, the universal spirit from which all form emerges?

Can we take a perspective on reality which sees BOTH the inside and the outside as valid and important?

That’s why I don’t accept the proposed duality of mind and body, and any understanding of a patient is incomplete without exploring both.