New Year’s Reflection

Recently, the U.S. Secretary of Health stated that at present 76% of Americans suffer from a chronic disease; around 1960, during the presidency of his uncle, it was 11%, and in the early 1950s 3%.

This is the reverse side of the development of our technological civilization—and treatment. Questions arise: What is it like in Europe? Is it not very similar? Where is all this heading? Is it not the result of something? What about the general sense of life and the overall joy of life of the majority of the population, in America as well as in Europe? We ask, but we do not find answers in newspapers or on television, nor in other competent places.

There will certainly be more causes of the decline in the health of individuals and society. I will, however, focus on one that seems important to me as a healer: the neglect of the subtle organizational (or informational) component of the human being in treatment and in maintaining health. In European and North American tradition it is called life force, in Indian tradition prana, and in Chinese qi, though there are other names as well. Its fundamental influence on health or illness used to be acknowledged by physicians and healers in a line from Aristotle, Hippocrates, Avicenna, Descartes, Paracelsus, Hahnemann, and other scholars, up to today’s homeopathy and, of course, autopathy. What we do is a continuation of a long therapeutic and philosophical tradition. However, under the influence of powerful interests and materialist ideology, its boundaries are continually narrowing and the space is shrinking, especially in so-called “developed” countries, to which, at least in this respect, we also belong.

At the same time, this era brings significant positives for our lives in the form of continuing democracy, which at the personal level allows one’s own choice of how and by what means to support and maintain health, including methods of stimulating prana, a spiritual component of people not recognized by institutions. Thus, in the final instance, it always depends on the personal decision (karma) of each of us. And since we live in a time of paradigm change and the expansion of human consciousness—so far more at the level of individuals, but of many of them—let us remain sober optimists under all circumstances. It depends on us.