precious because we can, through our own efforts, create a life of goodness, wisdom, meaning and sustained happiness — an integral life and health that is unique to the human condition. We have all the requirements: a fine mind, a sound body, personal freedom, sufficient material resources and the knowledge and wisdom of those who have traveled this road and attained the heights of human perfection and health. Yet even though the extraordinary is available to us we too often settle for the seeming comfort of the ordinary — filling our lives with distractions, trivialities and entertainment — forgetting that our lives are short and that there is little time to waste.

The great healers of the past have left us a road map to an integral life and health encoded in the traditional symbols of medicine. 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 integration of these two fundamental forces of healing through the intermediary of the fully developed healer — our largest self.

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 and 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 wings of the dove, 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.

But in modern times we have forgotten the inner way, the full development of consciousness and its extraordinary healing capacities. And that is the great limitation of our medicine, conventional and alternative, whose brilliance cannot alone heal the modern epidemic of stress, anxiety, depression and other mental afflictions that lead to endless mental suffering and premature disease and death. Only the full development of our inner healing capacities can directly address and heal mental distress and its reflection in our body, optimize our recuperative capacities, bring a richness and wisdom to aging and death and most importantly propel us towards human flourishing and perfection.

Like the butter hidden in milk, the flower lying dormant in the seed, or the gold encased in stone, the possibility of an integral life and health of wholeness, happiness and profound love and oneness remains an invisible and unknown potential lying undeveloped within each of us. We cannot see it, touch it or feel it with our five senses. Although its potential is given to us at birth it is hidden from ordinary view. An integral health cannot be measured, analyzed, developed or acquired in the usual ways associated with ordinary health. Our intellect alone cannot take us to it. It is not a process of adding another technique or therapy, alternative or conventional and no else can do it for us.

The great teachers and masters have, through their poetry, example, presence, teachings and practices, reminded us of this second force of healing, this hidden possibility within each of us. As we emerge from the darkness of an age that denies the inner life we are rediscovering that these midwives of a subtle consciousness have actually left us a precise blueprint for a larger life and health. They have developed a science of the inner force of healing no less brilliant than our science of the outer way. As we in the west have discovered a rich collection of remedies and therapies to assist the body they have learned how to bring humankind to the depths of life and the summit of health. Together, east and west, inner and outer, we have in the palm off our hand the great medicine that heals all suffering and brings forth human flourishing and perfection.

To be a hero in our time is to journey towards the only territory that remains unexplored, the deeper more subtle realms of the human experience, the potential for an integral life and health. There is no other ground to discover, nothing that will serve us more. Henry David Thoreau said, “… if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unimagined in common hours. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put foundations under them.” Let our castles be an integral life and health, a human flourishing and perfection, whose unshakable foundation will emerge from the seamless interweaving of our outer and inner healing capacities by the master healer that resides within each of us and has for so long patiently awaited our awakening. This is the timeless and traditional dream of medicine — east and west. This is how we make our precious lives precious.