Time, Suicide, and Creativity

[Guest guest]

Dear Ken and others,

 

 

this said,

 

What is/was the concept of body in Chinese medicine?

 

Not only was the Descartes mind body dichotomy not too formulated, at least not a dominating trend through out China (history) and its medical paradigm(s) up till late Qing?

 

but presumably the structure leading to function dichotomy, was also of a lesser preoccupation? (till late Qing?)

 

My current "understanding" of the body in "terms" of Chinese medicine is that the body is assembly of constellations-functions subjected to the same "laws" as Earth Heaven - Yin Yang interactions (these "three" components being and making qi) i.e. at times qi can be consider "interactions"?

 

Since things are always changing (as the saying goes).

 

Chinese medical history surly "must" be more then a history of ideas, and as such ought to be a more pronounced part in any curriculum of learning Chinese medicine. This I am saying with out knowing how the situation is today but where I was studying forget it, thus, making it more difficult in learning to:

 

thinking-knowing Chinese medical practices.

 

Presumably the classics would serve the fundamental purpose in learning to thinking Chinese medicine? (when commentaries take the temporal and spatial factors in question) i.e.. contextualise interpretations...

 

 

Any comment on Chinese medicine and the body most welcome...

 

Marco

 

 

-

dragon90405 <yulong

Friday, January 03, 2003 8:58 PM

Re: Time, Suicide, and Creativity

Sonya, Z'ev, Marco and others...The interpretation of time (much like interpretations of anything) reflectsas much or more on the individual(s)doing the intrepretation than on timeitself. I think we can develop moreuseful insights by phrasing the questionas, Who were these traditional Chinesewho have forumlated traditional Chinesemedicine over the millennia? And, Whatvalues were they using in order toestablish and propagate their interpretationsof time?Clearly they were agricultural folks,at least by the time that the culturalidentity we now call Chinese began toemerge and coalesce. The problem withanswering the question as I've statedit above is that these people are alldead and gone. But they have left traces,and in fact they were somewhat obsessedwith the leaving of traces.They also left a living tradition thatis a rich, complicated aggregate ofmany schools of thought and practice.This is part of the rationale for the importanceof the study of language, literature,and history in the understanding ofthe most basic terms and concepts ofChinese medicine, by the by. We can now conveniently refer to Descartes error, i.e., that the body and the mind are two distinctly different things rather than two names for varying interactively related aspects of one whole thing. And we can raisethe question of how people who were notlaboring under this misconception may haveexperienced and felt the movementsin the natural world that appear to thedichotomized mind as a never ending seriesof 90 and 180 degree choices and obligations.We can even consider the dynamics ofthe neural architecture and the way thatdifferent mental habits and patternsreplicate themselves in the brain'smatter and therefore the way this neurological-mental matter develops and evolves withoutthe sense of itself as having beensplit in two.By such means, I suggest that we canprogress towards an experiential understandingof traditional Chinese medicine that can be enormously useful in the clinic,as Z'ev points out.By experiential understanding I mean comprehending and feelingthe feeling of what was happening whensomeone was thinking or saying or usingcertain concepts, say yin1 and yang2 orqi4. There's just one way to get it.To once again cite Musashi, The way isin training.But to neglect or avoid the study ofthe traces that have been left behinddenies access to part of the morphic,if we can use this term to describefields that have generated in China for such along...What draws so many people to Chinese medicine,as Z'ev points out clearly, is that it representssome movement or change in their understandingand appreciation of time. It is old. It isbuilt upon the speculations and considerationsof people who were very concerned about longevityand survival, and we only know of it today becauseto a very great extent these concerns have beentranslated into workable approaches to the challengesthat face all human beings who seek to survive.These very basic considerations ought notbe minimized in terms of their importancein the clinic, especially if one looks atthe clinic through the eyes of the patientrather than the eyes of the doctor.It's time for a patient centered medicinethat gives people the capacity to treatpatients before they get ill. The mass ofhumanity has grown to a size at whichthe sustainability of a human-conduivebiosphere is being challenged by thenumber of humans vying for survivalon earth.Who is going to take care of all thesepeople? I agree with you, Sonya, when you pointout that time, suicide and creativityare inter-related. It might be fruitful to envision the current suicide epidemic in the Chinese countryside as the collision of two enormous waves of time. The forces generated in this collisionare beyond the capacity of a growingnumber of people to sustain...to continueto create their own lives.Of course it might all be reduced insome people's minds to a matter ofeconomics. But map the largescale movements of human beings thatare being generated by China's headlongrush into the future after centuriesof reliance upon its traditional sensesand values of time, culture, and human action in general.Some fairly daunting trends emerge,and when these are extrapolated intothe future...even the very near future,the importance of effective medicineis greatly increased.KenChinese Herbal Medicine, a voluntary organization of licensed healthcare practitioners, matriculated students and postgraduate academics specializing in Chinese Herbal Medicine, provides a variety of professional services, including board approved online continuing education.