The universal human impulse towards wholeness, completion and self-realization has as one of its most important worldly expressions the noble and timeless dream of healing. East and west have continuously sought in their own unique ways to heal human suffering, aid the recovery of health, and in their largest aspiration reach towards the highest potential available to humankind. And to that end the great healers of the past, through their outer and inner explorations, have sought with great passion to unlock the elusive mystery of healing and to discover its ways. They arrived at their understandings with great attention, study, and care, and have left us a legacy in the language of symbols and text through which we can harvest the essence of their most profound and deeply cherished discoveries.

In the west the mystery of healing is fully expressed in the symbol of the Caduceus. It is said that upon seeing two snakes fighting on the ground the Greek god Hermes thrust a staff between them. The snakes curled around the staff remaining forever in the dynamic movement of opposition and union. These two snakes represented the two great healing forces, the outer force of external therapies and remedies and the inner force of a fully developed consciousness and its healing capacities. And the Caduceus has as its crowning symbol the wings of a dove symbolizing the fully conscious healer within each of us who can properly weave these outer and inner aspects of healing into the richness of a comprehensive and fully integrated uncommon health.

In the east the mystery of healing has been expressed in the symbol of the medicine Buddha. In his right hand he holds the Arura plant which represents the power of external healing remedies, in his left he holds a bowl, traditionally a skull cap signifying the defeat of death, that contains the healing elixir of inner wisdom. Similar to the figure of the Cadeuceus, the Buddha symbolizes the enlightened being lying dormant within each of us who can comprehend, integrate, and apply these internal and external ways of healing. What we discover from these inherited symbols is that the traditional dream of healing, west and east, has been precisely the same: an ever changing alchemical mixture of outer remedies and inner wisdom administered with masterly precision by no other than the fully developed healer within each of us.

The outer and inner aspects of healing are each distinctive aspects of the double nature of healing. When combined in a manner especially tailored to each individual, these two powerful ingredients become a singular all-encompassing healing elixir. Outer remedies, are acquired through the use of our usual senses and their extensions — microscopes, x-ray machines, and so on — which provide us with a knowledge of the physical world which can then be applied in the form of therapies heal the body. Inner remedies are acquired through the sixth sense, consciousness, which provides us with a different type of knowledge, a special wisdom which can be utilized to heal the most subtle causes of distress and disease that afflict our body, mind, and spirit. The outer remedies address the gross physical and psychological aspect of healing. The inner remedies address at their source the subtler emotional and spiritual disturbances. Properly combined and applied they provide a comprehensive whole healing.

Although the ancient dream of healing was comprehensive in its scope, over time both the east and west abandoned the fullness of this vision. The people of the east chose to emphasize and develop the inner remedies while those in the west chose to develop the outer ones. As a result, each tradition evolved an extraordinary understanding of healing. In each case their understanding was one-sided and partial, invariably limiting the reach of its respective remedies. Due to its focus on the physical, the western approach while serving to alleviate physical suffering has left largely untouched the subtler and more unyielding inner causes of disease and distress. In contrast, the wisdom of the east has served to alleviate emotional and spiritual suffering at their source, while their outer efforts at healing have remained underdeveloped. Each, because of its one-sidedness, has failed to realize the more comprehensive and universal dream of healing, the alleviation of all suffering and the recovery of our natural state of wholeness, completion, and self-realization.

The great healers believed that when the causes of suffering were eliminated our natural condition would be revealed to us —a natural state of human flourishing and perfection. As a result they turned all their efforts towards understanding and alleviating suffering in its entirety. Aware of its dual nature, its gross and subtle aspects, they developed and practiced a carefully interwoven outer and inner healing, a double natured healing to remedy a double natured suffering. Their approaches recognized and addressed the three interrelated types of suffering —physical, emotional and spiritual that taken together spans the full range of human distress.

The first, physical suffering, associated with aging, disease and death, the physical aspect of life, is the most apparent to us. The second, emotional suffering is caused by negative emotions such as unrestrained desire, attachment, anger, hatred, jealousy, pride and all of their secondary afflictions such as stress, depression, anxiety, and so on. This aspect of suffering is apparent to us in its most gross forms but can also be quite hidden from view even when it continues to create havoc in our lives. The third, spiritual suffering, arises when we mechanically live our lives disconnected and alienated from our deeper self, from others and from life itself. This aspect of suffering is the least apparent to us, causes the most damage, and calls for a very subtle and sophisticated approach to healing.

Consider a stomach ulcer. If we think the physical pain of a stomach ulcer is our only source of suffering we merely use pain medicines and are satisfied with an outer and very temporary remedy. If we become aware that the physical ulcer is merely an outer reflection of an ulcerated emotional life then we have recognized a deeper level of suffering and are amenable to psychological healing. If we become further aware that what most deeply underlies our stomach ulcer is an unseen spiritual suffering that disturbs both our emotions and our physiology we can then open the possibility for a comprehensive healing of all levels of distress and disease. A stomach ulcer, as with any other disease or distress, when completely understood, becomes the doorway to a vastly larger life and health.

To see through the veil of physical disease and distress into its subtle causes is not easy for us in the west. It has taken centuries of an exclusively outer medicine to slowly move us towards developing and implementing the varied methods of psychological healing. To some extent these approaches have been successful in explaining, managing and diminishing the grossest of these inner disturbances. There is much to be thankful for, but also much to be wary of, as we have attributed more to our psychological approaches than they can deliver. Like weeds ripped from a garden, our disturbing emotions will always re-emerge in our lives at the most unwanted times until we remove them at their roots. To remove them at their roots requires more than psychological management, it requires an understanding of their subtler causes, which can only be done through the development of a larger consciousness. To move deeper into the ways of inner healing we must invariably turn to the genius of the east.

As the west has occupied itself with exploring one strand of the double nature of healing, outer healing, the east has explored the second strand, inner healing. Their greatness has been in the discovery of the principles and practices of the most subtle aspects of healing, the inner aspects. Although well known and available in the east these systematic and methodical step-by-step approaches to inner healing are largely unknown or distorted in the west.

The healers of the East have told us that for an inner healing we must turn towards our mind and spirit. We are further told that our mind, this “black box” that seems so untouchable and unknowable, will itself, with the proper methods, reveal its mysteries to us. Through these methods we can gain a personal and direct understanding of its workings and learn how to heal at the source. These understandings and practices will take us directly to the subtle and tenacious roots that underlie our emotional and spiritual sufferings, providing us with many methods to heal at the source. The combined genius of both east and west when fully understood is a sound and basis for a comprehensive healing of suffering, and the final fulfillment of life’s greatest possibilities.

We now finally have sight of the necessary elements of an uncommon healing, the inner and the outer. Even more so we have the required maps by which to reach them and the teachers themselves. So what is holding us back? This is a central question, and the answer begins with the third element expressed in the figures of the Medicine Buddha and the dove wings of the Caduceus we spoke of earlier. Both figures represent the matured inner healer whose expanded consciousness and corresponding capacities can properly apply the knowledge of the inner and outer ways of healing. What is holding us back is our inability to leap to the next level of consciousness.

In the west we have mostly relied upon professionals to provide us with the great achievements of biomedicine. This is as it should be. We don’t need to know the intricacies of biomedicine or alternative therapies in order to effectively use them. But to attain the full dream of healing we must engage the inner way and for this we need far more of ourselves. For this is not merely a case of following professional knowledge. Inner healing, the foundation of an uncommon health, is something we can only do by our self for our self. Individually tailored and precisely applied by the highly developed mind and open heart, it alone can bring all suffering to an end and reveal the deepest treasures of life. The challenge is to sustain and grow the achievements of an outer healing, master the knowledge and methods of an inner healing and then unite them alchemically into a seamless, comprehensive and whole healing that is more than the sum of its parts.

The symbols of the Caduceus and the Medicine Buddha remind us of the noble and timeless dream of healing, west and east, in which we have always been the central players. These ancient cultures have taken the universal human impulse for wholeness and embodied it in the worldly form of healing. Their message to us is a large one. Our vision and capacities can become broad enough to hold the profound knowledge of both ways of healing, to know how and when to use all our healing tools, from technique to compassion, from machines to wisdom, allowing us to fulfill in the time given to us the unique human impulse towards wholeness and completion —a human flourishing that is an uncommon health.

The secret hidden by the ancients in their symbols is the realization that it is man himself who has a double nature, a nature belonging to the material world and a second nature belonging to the spiritual world. Humankind’s full healing, final perfection, and re-discovery of wholeness and completion is to be no more or less than the complete healing of both these natures.