*Robert Wolff* # Progressive Summary # Definitions # Chapter Notes ## Chapter 2 - Draw Something, Anything > Because our world has become a world of chaotic overabundance we feel stressed. The stresses we feel are in large part the result of the overwhelming number of alternatives we must choose from, but also the result of the fact that we have had no time to develop an ethic to help us choose. The headlong rush into new technologies and new ideas, without the time to consider consequences, makes it almost impossible for us to choose. How can we have an opinion about something that did not exist yesterday? This is an important counter-point to [[Reference Notes/Books/Third Millennium Thinking|Third Millennium Thinking]]. > We are learning to be leery of expert advice. All too often we find, twenty years later, that the experts were no more expert than we were, that they too were ignorant of the long-term effects of a new drug, a new chemical to control pests, a new way to generate energy. We are beginning to disbelieve experts, distrust authorities and those who claim to know what is best for us. We call this mad dance freedom. Anticipated the current post-truth moment. > We are proud to be a society of free people, by which we mean people who are free to choose, people who, in fact, must choose—endlessly, all day—often making choices from alternatives that are so new that we have not had time even to imagine their consequences. We are choosing in a fog. > Stress is the price we pay for affluence—an affluence that in the end is little more than a glut of increasingly meaningless choices. ## Chapter 6 - Dimensions of Healing > The more I learned of the Western medical establishment (as a patient and as a student of medical systems), the more I realized that our system of medicine is not designed for healing. Doctors and patients alike are so overawed by the miracles of modern chemistry that we forget who healers were and what they did before penicillin. Both doctors and patients believe that healing comes from drugs, from outside intervention, forgetting that until recently healing was always what the body did, perhaps aided or stimulated by a healer. > In order to organize society, we create institutions, we build buildings, we train millions of people to perform very specialized activities. We make endless forms to record and report what we are doing. We create armies of people to supervise other people, and of course the supervisors themselves have to be supervised as well. > > These systems acquire a life of their own. We seem to forget that they were created around an idea. All systems (health systems, economic systems, or political systems) are creations of our unique way of looking at the world, our reality. Systems are expressions of our beliefs. > Each culture has its own thoughts about disease. In some cultures sickness or disease is thought to be punishment from the gods. In others being sick is something like permission to take a break—a legitimate reason to take a day off. Some cultures believe that sickness is a disturbance of energies. Chinese medicine, probably the oldest surviving system of healing in the world, is based on the observation that our bodies are interrelating energy fields that canand often need to be—adjusted or stimulated in order that we may be whole again. Herbs, diets, and acupuncture (and exercises like tai chi), in the Chinese way of thinking, all help to balance, adjust, or stimulate the many energies in and around our bodies. > In the West we believe that illness is the result of an assault, an attack from outside the body, usually by microorganisms. That means patients are victims, and medical scientists are forced to think in terms of which organism causes which disease. The question, of course, determines the answer; sooner or later we always find new organisms that “cause” a new disease. > Malays believe that the cause of any sickness is disharmony. The particular form the disease takes may be the result of an invasion of some microorganism, but why this person becomes ill while the next person does not is a consequence of the kind and degree of disharmony in the patient’s internal and external environment. Malays and others have known about the immune system all along, although they do not call it that. > The aborigines in Malaysia, I learned, think of illness in yet another way. To them sickness is a signal, a warning: Hey, you are doing something wrong! Stop and change! Healing for them means first finding out what is wrong so that it can be changed or righted. The wrong may not be a behavior; it may be a thought, a feeling, or even a word. It is easier to change a behavior than it is to take back a thought, but it must be done to get well. > Aboriginal people of the world will be as extinct as tigers will someday be. Tiger tissue may be frozen in the hope that future generations can re-create these animals. A few tigers may be kept alive in zoos. But only a Westerner could think that a tiger could exist apart from his own unique environment and still be tiger. The belief that we can save tigers by freezing some cells is the very belief that is destroying the tigers’ habitat: the belief that we are separate. A habitat is more than an environment, something to be exploited. In fact, the tiger and the jungle are one; each cannot exist without the other. # Quotes # References