2. An Application to health and healing

a. The present scenario

b. The alternative approach

c. How does the notion of ‘healing’ differ from the notion of ‘cure’?

d. The issue of treating symptoms

e. The difference between the holistic and the specialised approaches in healing

f. What is holistic about healing?

1. Fundamentals of traditional sciences

a. The difference in working with wholes and working with parts

The traditional sciences looked upon the cosmos and human beings as living systems. Here the whole is always regarded as being greater than the sum of its parts.The parts are there, but they are ‘interconnected’,arranged in a ‘certain order’, and there is an ‘overall principle’ that functions through all of them. This overall principle ‘animates’ the whole and guides the parts, which makes the individual parts function in the whole. However, if you ignore this overall principle and consider the whole as merely the sum of its parts, you miss the connections and the overall intelligence.

The whole = ∑ parts + connections + something overall.

Sri Aurobindo (in an answer dated 29th January, 1937 to a question by Kishor Gandhi, the author of Social Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo) said, “A cell in the body if conscious might also think that the human being and its action are only the resultant of the relation and action of a number of cells like itself — not the action of a unified self (1).” When we think down-up, we miss the overall or unifying principle like the soul or the spirit. Now we attempt to show the dimension that is lost when you try to understand the functioning of the whole by reducing it to parts.

What happens when you cut a living person in two parts? You don’t get two persons, but only two parts of a dead person. This is precisely what happens when you try to understand a living whole (or non-mechanical systems) by dividing it into parts and then study the parts in detail. You cannot know the whole by studying all the parts in detail — for the spirit, among several other factors, would be the factor that is always missing. And without the spirit the whole does not function as a whole. It simply breaks down into a heap — like a stack of things.

The method of analytical science is to separate the parts from the whole; to then analyse each part in great detail; and then put this knowledge together to develop an understanding of the whole. While this method is useful for studying mechanical systems it is useless for studying living systems — since the interaction of the parts and the overall intelligence will always be missing.

When something works as a whole, something new emerges in it. We can call them ‘emergent properties’ since they are properties of the whole and none of the parts has these properties. However, these properties arise only when the system is working as a whole. Thus, the ‘whole system properties’ cannot be known by dividing the system into pieces and then analysing the pieces. To have an idea of the emergent pr

Holistic healing and alternative therapies