Our unceasing and innate longing for self-realization, wholeness and completion is embodied in our continuing efforts to improve and expand our health. Blessed with the therapies and remedies of modern science, informed by cross-cultural approaches to healing and endowed with a unique and expansive human consciousness we stand on the threshold of a new medicine, one that transcends our previous preoccupation with survival and longevity and calls us to live into the potential for human flourishing and perfection. This is a great demand and a great challenge, one that we have been well prepared for and that is well suited to the possibilities of our time.

In western culture the basic rituals of healing at first become quite automatic to us. The first steps come early. Our parents carry us to our first visit with the doctor, and from there we slowly learn to follow the customs and practices of an outer healing. If as adults we move beyond this level of healing and continue to grow towards a larger health we will explore health promotion strategies, develop new psychological understandings and practice mind/body skills. With these steps we extend our health and become more personally involved in the healing process. To go this far is itself a major achievement in human development. Yet there are a rare few who will have the curiosity, courage and capacity to explore the farther reaches of health by exploring the more subtle and profound aspects of an inner healing, the natural and traditional complement to an outer healing of the body.

The problem for most of us is that unlike these unusual individuals we stop too soon. We stop developing before we have reached our full potential. As individuals and as a culture we become accustomed to having others take charge of our health, habituated to outer remedies - conventional and alternative, content with a very limited notion of health and paralyzed by an intellectual laziness. Our ordinary and popular medicine appears to be the summit of achievement. We may re-arrange it, add to it and expand it but we do not grow beyond it. Satisfied with what is given to us, we step out of the great movement towards wholeness and completion, settling for the best our culture can offer. Our fate becomes one of an ordinary life, an ordinary health, and a sedated soul.

Only when we profoundly and directly realize that it is the expansion of consciousness that drives a larger health can we finally and irreversibly free ourselves from the limitations of all lesser levels of healing. From this perspective it becomes apparent that all past and current approaches to healing were merely steeping stones towards a final, complete comprehensive healing. Through the continued development of consciousness we have moved from the primitive mind’s rudimentary efforts at survival, to the magical, mythical, philosophical, theological, and finally scientific approaches to healing. Each advancement in consciousness has been accompanied by a corresponding expansion of our healing capacities, freeing us from the limitations of the approach that preceded it and propelling us into the future. The past was not abandoned. It was embraced, improved upon and ultimately transcended as we progressively grew towards a more developed and matured approach to healing. What at any one time appeared to be our highest level of achievement when seen from a broader perspective is recognized as merely another step in our movement towards a larger consciousness, life and health. And this includes scientific medicine.

The more primitive mind, in which thought, observation and analysis as we currently know them were non-existent, shaped an empirical healing, a healing of trial and error largely relying on plants and other available natural remedies. This process of trial and error, of using what works and relying on nature, has and continues to be incorporated into all more complex forms of the outer aspect of healing. As consciousness further developed into what has been called “magical thinking” amulets, incantations and other methods were added to healing. This development reflected an early use of the power of the mind that is found in a more matured form in our mind/body medicine of today

Humankind’s further mental development subsequently gave rise to the philosophic mind and its diverse philosophies. Whether they were those of Hippocratic, Ayurvedic, or Tibetan medicine these philosophies contributed the idea of a dynamic self-balancing physiology, a balance of the humors or the physical elements. The idea of physiologic balance and its therapeutic implications embraced both the trial and error empiricism of earlier healing and magical mind/body healing and went beyond them to create a more developed mixture of inner and outer approaches.

The development of the religious mind further contributed the dimension of a religious/spiritual healing, a healing resulting from love, compassion, and faith. This was a major milestone in our advancement towards a systematic process of inner healing. And finally, in the 500 years of the modern era, the west has extensively developed the intellectual aspect of the human mind with its scientific medicine and methodology.

With each leap in our mental capacities our approach to healing has shapeshifted. It has become larger in scope and more capable of living its earliest dream. With each leap in consciousness there has been growth in our understanding and capacity that has both integrated and gone beyond all previous approaches, creating a new mixture of inner and outer healing that was more effective and complete than what preceded it. In each instance shape shifting took place, fundamental change occurred. A larger mind, a larger consciousness, a larger life, and a larger healing.

Another way to look at this is to look at its equivalent in our own life. The early mind of the infant slowly develops step-by-step into the sophisticated intellectual mind of the adult. In rare cases it can evolve even further through successive stages of development into the fully developed spiritual mind. Each leap in mental development embraces and goes beyond that which preceded it, allowing for a larger understanding of our world and life, new capacities, new relationships and a larger life and health. The problem is that we unknowingly stop the growth of our consciousness far before we have reached its full development. What we get in life and in health is largely dependent on the level at which we stop unfolding the richness of our consciousness.

The last great leap in consciousness occurred when the philosopher Rene Descartes in the 17th century gave us the philosophic gift of “splitting” the mind into its spiritual and intellectual aspects, giving the former to the church and the later to mankind. By unlinking the exploration of the physical universe from the domination of the spiritual perspectives of the church he provided an acceptable social compromise that enabled the great scientists to fully develop the intellectual capacities of the mind in their quest to understand the workings of nature. From this evolved our current approach to healing, a modern, scientific, outer medicine. A larger consciousness, a larger medicine, albeit one that was limited by the reach of the physical senses.

Because evolution can be a bit of a messy business the past 500 years has been dominated by the gifts of this leap in consciousness as well as the tragedies that have resulted from its suppression of the inner ways of healing. We now find ourselves at a time when this over dominance of the intellectual mind is giving rise to a renewed interest in spiritual understandings, an effort to recover the inner aspects of healing. Our mind is by nature self-balancing. It balances itself by growing larger. It takes more consciousness rather than less to embrace the accomplishments of the past and ascend to the next level of development.

In the past several decades we have begun to explore new ways to “correct” this denial of the inner aspects of healing and advance a larger healing. These have come in waves. The central ones have been efforts at health promotion, wellness, mind/body healing, holism and most recently the exploration of alternative therapies and healing systems. It is important to consider these one at a time so that we can understand the contributions of these efforts and also understand why they have each failed to further advance the great dream of healing. Only then can we change course and direct ourselves towards the real issue, a fundamental growth in consciousness.

Health promotion and wellness can be taken together as they both refer to proactive personal efforts to improve ones health and well being rather than the custom of waiting until the onset of the signs and symptoms of physical or emotional disturbances. The wellness movement had its origins in the work of John Travis in the 1970’s. He envisioned a physical/psycho/spiritual process through which individuals would proactively engage in activities that would promote health rather than merely waiting until the onset of disease. Health and well being were seen not as the opposite of disease but rather as a positive state in themselves. In its original intent and form wellness included a large scope of activities spanning the body, mind, and spirit. Its intention and vision were correct for the time.

As the wellness movement was popularized and taken up by the traditional medical community and the corporate world it was largely reduced to its most physical outer components: fitness, nutrition, and smoking cessation. What was previously a broad based vision became a narrow one made to fit into the outer view of modern science and medicine. The psychological and spiritual aspects of the wellness movement, its most significant inner contributions, were quickly jettisoned. When wellness hit the mainstream of modern medicine it was changed. It became one more outer approach to healing and as thus shape to conform to contemporary medicine. It contributed to an expansion of outer healing, but did not fundamentally change it or advance us towards the next level of healing.

The mind/body movement resulted from the merging of several streams that came together at more or less the same time. In the 1950’s Elmer Green, the founder of biofeedback, journeyed to India to study the great Yogis and their capacity to reach profound levels of consciousness that were accompanied by a mastery over physiology previously unknown in the west. He sought to record the brain waves of these masters to see if westerners could be trained to emulate these mental states and the physiologic mastery that accompanied them.

In the same line of thought Herbert Benson, a researcher at the Thorndike Laboratories at Harvard, pioneered research on the physiologic states attained by experienced meditators and developed the concept of the relaxation response, a technique to calm the mind. He also journeyed to the east to study the Tibetan practice of tumo in which Tibetan monks were able to take sheets dipped in frozen water, wrap them around their unclothed bodies, and then dry them by mentally raising their body temperature. Each monk, situated in a freezing environment, dried one sheet after another at times reaching twenty sheets at a single session. The physiology of this mastery of mind was accurately measured and recorded.

The next major contribution to mind/body medicine came from the developing scientific field of psychoneuroimmunology in which researchers such as Robert Ader and Candace Pert began the effort of isolating the chemicals in the body, called neuropeptides, that were the interface between mental states and physiologic states, the mind/body connection. And more currently new and exciting research in the neurosciences is using sophisticated brain wave measurements and flow MRIs to correlate states of consciousness with brain function.

From these efforts arose the fields of biofeedback, relaxation therapy, visualization practices, and the popularization of other mind/body techniques such as yoga, aikido, and tai chi. Much the same happened with these techniques as had occurred with the wellness movement. In the east the purpose of training the mind is to grow towards greater knowledge and understanding, to develop the inner dimensions of healing. These practices were brought to the west and drastically reduced from their original intent of inner development to that of “fix it” therapies, outer treatments for headaches, stress, anxiety, and coping strategies for a variety of physical ailments. They became management tools rather than vehicles that prepared each of us for a larger double natured inner and outer healing, a question of managing chemical interactions rather than inner development. Again the movement towards a matured balance of the inner and outer dimensions of healing was lost. As with wellness, when these mind/body approaches hit the mainstream their intent and direction were changed. They failed to further develop the profound inner aspect of healing that are discovered and activated through a personal leap in consciousness. They failed to emphasize and provide the methodology for individuals to further develop their consciousness. These mind/body approaches were and still are important contributions to expanding the scope of healing, but because they have not grown our consciousness they have not fundamentally shifted healing to its next stage of evolution.

Holism as expressed in the philosophies of the east refers to the inner experience of the oneness and unity of life that is directly and uninterruptedly experienced at higher levels of consciousness. Some of us have at times touched into a less developed form of this as a “peak - peek” experience. In his book Holism and Evolution written in the 1920s Jan Smuts, a South African prime minister and self-made biologist, reduced and applied the larger spiritual experience of oneness into an idea about biology. He proposed that evolution occurs by the emergence in nature of increasingly larger and more complex wholes, each of which is a part of the next larger whole. For example, a cell is a whole that embraces and transcends its molecules in structure, function and capacity, and similarly it itself is a part of a larger whole, organs and organ systems.

George Engel, a noted physician, attempted to bring this vision into medicine in a way that highlighted the interdependence of all of life from atom to consciousness to environment suggesting that medicine consider all aspects of the human condition in its view of health and disease. Holism, as expressed by Smuts and Engel, was a theory about biology, as well as life. It can be said that the perspectives of Smuts and Engel were reduced and materialized understandings of the larger vision of holism held in the east. Nevertheless these were all broad and expansive perspectives of the human condition.
When taken over by the medical and corporate community holism as a philosophy was reduced to a marketing tool. We rearranged things a bit and created a “new” type of medical center or promoted a “new” type of healing practitioner whose singular innovation was gathering multiple physical outer-based healing techniques under one umbrella. Each of these efforts were merely marketing tools that suggested something new when the truth was otherwise, a collection of techniques rather than a fundamental innovation. The transcendent vision of the east, the grand biological theory of Smuts, and its clinical expression in the writings of Engel were reconfigured to conform to the intractable view of an outer medicine. The principle of holism expanded our notion of healing, but it did not fundamentally change it or lead to the further development of our inner healing capacities.

Finally there is the effort to explore and use alternative therapies such as Ayurveda, Chinese medicine, herbalism, and homeopathy. Not all of these approaches are the same. Some are accompanied by broad based psycho/spiritual perspectives that touch into the inner dimensions of healing, others are not. Some have been shown to have clinical effectiveness while others ride on the label of “alternative”. In either case the result is the same. In general when the practitioners or advocates of these approaches seek social and cultural validation, licensure and recognition from the medical insurance industry and medical establishment they, much as physicians have in the past, sacrificed their rich inner traditions with the result of reducing their approaches to mere outer therapies, another set of tools done by a practitioner to a patient. No one can argue with the expanding approaches available to treat headaches, back pains and chronic disease provided by “alternative” therapies, but once again the expanding scope of outer healing has done nothing to bring us to a larger synthesis of the outer and inner aspects of healing. Alternative medicine, in its urgency to be integrated, affirmed and recognized by health insurance plans, has been itself reshaped, abandoning the opportunity to move us towards the larger dream of healing.

Each of these efforts has been a well intentioned attempt to deal with the limitations of an exclusively outer-focused healing that has continued to deny all of the interior aspects of healing. But they have failed to create fundamental change, and we have deceived ourselves. We have become entwined in a pervasive outer view that will defend itself in all ways and sabotage any of our efforts to leap towards a larger health. Our approach to healing has neither shifted shape or form, nor evolved to a higher level. At best it has expanded the scope, the activities and the number and type of therapies.

Ken Wilber defines this type of change, change that expands the scope and activities of outer healing, as horizontal change in contrast to vertical change. Understanding the difference between these two types of change is essential if we are to grow towards a more comprehensive healing and gather the treasures of a far larger health. It is not for lack of right intention, but rather a result of our inability to grasp the difference between these two types of change that has kept us stuck where we are.

All our efforts to expand healing have been horizontal changes. They have to an extent increased and expanded the scope of outer healing and provided better opportunities to therapeutically manage physical and gross psychological disturbances, adding more comfort, ease, and at times additional years to our lives. For this we must be grateful. But in the process of expanding the scope of outer healing these efforts have also inadvertently served to lock it more in place, strengthen its dominance, and weaken efforts to change it. They do so because they provide the false hope that fundamental change is really occurring, thus occupying some of our best minds and all of our hopes for a larger healing in efforts that in the end will not lead to the change in consciousness now called for.

We, who must ultimately be the agents of change, remain with the same perspectives and the same level of consciousness irrespective of our insistence that our selves and our healing are changing. Horizontal change does not transform our sense of self. It does not change our consciousness, radically change our vision or capacities, affect the character of our healing or take us towards a matured and comprehensive inner and outer healing. It only changes or expands the tools that the old self and its consciousness use. If we look very closely at our medicine most if not all of what we do is horizontal change, re-arranging furniture in the same room and thinking that something has actually changed. Nothing can be more paralyzing than this delusion.

Vertical change is a shift or leap in our consciousness to a new level of development and capacity, one that is deeper, broader, and more whole than what preceded it. We gain a new set of eyes with which to see the possibility of a larger life and health. The shift from archaic, to magical, to mythical, to philosophical, to theological, to intellectual levels of mental development are examples of vertical shifts in consciousness that in each case went beyond what preceded it by radically enlarging our understanding of the inner and outer aspects of healing, making available to each of us far more of the human experience. These shifts did not expand “what is” they transformed it, shifting the shape of “what is” rather than merely expanding its activities. These were momentous movements, individually and culturally, shifting the center of gravity from one level of consciousness and its outer forms to another. When our “self” has undergone change through a leap in consciousness our understandings and worldly endeavors take on new and larger proportions.

Descriptions of vertical change can be found throughout the ages and across cultures, and these descriptions are quite similar. In his Republic Plato describes them in his Parable of the Cave and Simile of the Line. In the east they are expressed as the movements through the seven Chakras, or the ten levels of bodhisattva training. More recently Aurobindo details these vertical shifts in great detail in his Integral Yoga and Life Divine. And to this can be added Abraham Maslow, Eric Erickson, and the modern developmental psychologists. More recently Ken Wilber reviewed many such descriptions of vertical change in A Brief Theory of Everything and Sex, Spirit, and Ecology. In each instance these authors describe vertical change in a remarkably similar way. They describe it as a progression of consciousness, understanding, and capacity from the most primitive and instinctual levels to the broadest spiritual perspectives.

It’s only through the eyes and capacities of a larger consciousness that we can know and hold both ways of healing, inner and outer, uniting them in the creation of a more expansive approach to healing that results in an uncommonly profound health marked by a human flourishing. To do so we must attempt the great leap now awaiting us, the next great journey in our life, the shift towards a larger understanding that alone can prepare our mind and heart for the complete inner and outer healing. Because the intellect is limited by the capacities of our senses, the intellectual mind can provide us with the blueprint of a larger consciousness and health, but it can never take us there. To explore the inner dimensions of healing we require a different method, one that can access the subtler reaches of human consciousness.

The essential discovery is that the full development of our consciousness is the key to a radical shapeshifting of healing. It is the doorway into the traditional dream of healing and its abundance of treasures. It is the root, sap, and essence of a larger life and health. It is this vertical shift, this change in who and what we are and how and what we know that is the only path to an uncommon health and human flourishing and perfection.

Our capacity for a comprehensive healing relies on our own inner development. We can begin at any time, irrespective of the culture we are currently embedded in. It is only through this personal effort that we can collectively foster the development of an uncommon health and an elaboration of the cultural values and institutions that will support this new and more profound approach to healing. The changes begin when we begin, when we understand where we need to go and nurture it with determination, study, practice, and an ever-present remembrance of the preciousness of our human life and its possibilities.