Balance Part I: Pre-ramble & "equilibrio ergo sum"
Preamble (more of a rambling than an ambling—over-perch it, if you will...)
Conventional Western healthcare is fragmentary; it is not whole. Rather, it suffers from innumerable holes wrought with the selfsame reductionism & mechanistic philosophy that permeates all avenues of our policy & thought—only such a tradition could claim with a straight face that Love is merely a sequence of chemical reactions in the brain involving dopamine & oxytocin & evolved for the sole purpose of furthering the species. Any time someone says "merely," watch out...they're trying to pull some reductionistic piece of wool over your eyes & eviscerate human experience. In stereotype, we conceive of a black-and-white Manichean universe—a Salisbury Plain whereupon the forces of good & evil meet in epic and endless eschatological battle. In this caricature of cosmology, we hold faith in final victory for the forces of righteousness. This is the first delusion; all categorical statements are false.
Let us, therefore, relinquish this binary vision & accept the doom of destiny: order falls to entropy, Chaos slays Truth, and Dionysus dines & sips red wine upon Apollo's muddy breastplate. Such a conceptual Ragnarök is a catharsis. To let go of the strain of sustaining such a myth is like a welcomed breeze a-waft through the fusty dungeon of our binary thought. Hindus venerate Shiva the Destroyer. Of the tripartite Godhead, Shiva is its annihilative expression. Why worship such a sinister figure? Because his destruction is deliverance, liberation from the bondage of our conceit. To disabuse us of the latter is to emancipate us from the fetters of errant understanding into the bliss of freedom.
Part I
Having thus dispensed with the erstwhile reigning delusion, let us now consider with clarity one peculiar aspect one the human condition that is all too-easily lost in the illusion of Manichean conceit: BALANCE. The latter is a marvelous aspiration that is rather conspicuously missing in modern Western medicine. And (in the way we usually objectify of it), balance itself is also a myth. One is never balanced. Instead, we are continually balancing. The peculiarities of our language allow us to dessicate the fundamentally fluid nature of what is fundamentally process. In practice, it is an errant notion to talk of balance as a thing. Instead, it is an activity.To speak of balance, then, is to speak of a continual activity of relating to the environment—attending to the feedback-loops of our divers systems of perception and engaging in perpetual response & readjustment according to this interminable influx of information. When the process falters, we topple over. In such a fault, the precariousness of our bipedalism achieves its full catastrophe & we find ourselves face-down in the dirt, literally, or worse: life itself depends on balance of bodily processes—if homeostasis is forfeit, our existence is not far to follow. Let us therefore amend the notorious Cartesian claim & in proud enunciation declare the truth:
“Equilibrio ergo sum”—“I balance therefore I am.”
Image of a statue of the Hindu god, Shiva.
Nataraja: Shiva as "Lord of the Dance," executes his performance of sublime destruction upon the vanquished dwarf Tamil, the master of illusion diminutively personified in the Hindu mythos.
