Redefining Health

We cannot talk about the health of an organism in isolation of its environment, and of its compatibility with that environment determining its fitness to perform its functions and fulfil its purpose. In this intelligent design of creation, every being has its purpose.

This adaptation inbuilt feature ensures that every species occupies their designed position in their ecosystem. From micro to macroscopic level, every being is endowed with the innate intelligence of knowing whether they occupy the right environment or not — what we call instinct. The land animal doesn't mistake the ocean for their habitat, nor the marine life for the land.

Our instinct informs us if the place, the activity and the people we are with is our right environment. If we are compatible, we feel in sync with our surroundings and can move to the next stages of coexistence and influence. If we are not, our instinct will keep sending us warning messages averting us of the incompatibility between our purpose and that environment.

The farmer will feel out of place in an operating theatre the same way a surgeon will feel out of place on the farm, or in an astrophysicist's laboratory. It starts with a sense of discomfort and a feeling of being out of place. If ignored, the warning signal ramps up into a feeling of anxiety, which people try to silence instead of listening to its message.

This adaptation instinctual intelligence is our survival and thriving security check. It is our compass, helping us orient on our inner and outer map, in our inner and outer environments.

When we are in sync with our environment — mentally, emotionally and physically — we enter a state of flow. That flow state is what we call wellbeing. That wellbeing is our inner compass, and will not let us be until we correct course and occupy our rightful position.

This is what illness is. A self-corrective inbuilt feature, averting us that we are off course.

That's why in the CWS model we don't treat the symptoms. We don't try to heal the condition. We listen to its message, correct course, and reorient on our inner and outer map until we've found the spot that puts us back in flow.

Once the organism has passed the adaptation test, the second feature of health is its ability to coexist with other organisms and forces in its environment. To coexist harmoniously, each being must contribute to the whole without encroaching on others' purpose.

Here we start seeing how the aberration from the natural order of a faction of rogue beings has deviated the human off its course and destroyed in the process the balance and health of the ecosystem. To put it in context, the aberration breaching the natural order would be for a farmer to encroach on the surgeon's purpose by opening a side business employing surgeons to practise medicine on his behalf. Or for the surgeon to take over farming as a side business, employing others to farm on his behalf. In this example we have a double aberration from the natural order: first by the farmer and surgeon encroaching on each other's vocation, taking over the other's purpose within their community, and second by taking over more resources than they could accumulate through their labour, breaking the balance of equity.

The river fish doesn't aspire to expand its reign to take over the fish in the ocean. The salmon doesn't aspire to become trout; the cow doesn't aspire to become elephant; the wolves don't take over the lions' resources; the ruby doesn't aspire to become diamond; silver doesn't aspire to become gold; the Moon doesn't aspire to take over the Sun's purpose.

An organism who takes over the purpose and resources of another is a parasite. In the natural order, the salmon stays salmon and does salmon things, serving its kind and the ecosystem.

Humans too are born with the aptitudes required for the good functioning and evolution of our kin, town, nation and environment. Only a small number have no natural talent of their own with which to contribute to the ecosystem, because they are parasitic entities born outside the natural order. You recognise a tree by its fruit. You recognise if one is part of the ecosystem or a parasite by their contribution to, or destruction of, their environment.

This abnormal desire to take over others' resources and dominate is the parasite's behaviour, not human nature. If you look at indigenous cultures, they live in harmony with their environment. They don't overpopulate and don't overconsume; they respect all life and don't kill, except to protect and eat. Whereas the parasite kills by pleasure and sport, destroys everything in its wake, and serves only itself. Its survival depends not on its contribution to the wellbeing of the ecosystem but on its ability to possess and syphon its resources.

The Inner and Outer Map

If in the adaptation phase the compass lies within the organism, in the coexistence phase it lies within the others. We serve as corrective guides for others, and they as ours. Through the feedback from our interactions, we inform each other if we are on track or if we have deviated from it.

That's what Self meant when they said that every vice carries an inherent virtue and vice versa, that every bad carries a hidden good. A physical illness is often the awareness trigger to heal a moral and spiritual one.

In this process of self-regulation, our tormentors and enemies act as customs agents, preventing us from getting further off the map. A narcissist husband making our life hell informs us that we deviated from our course.

Whether because we are in the wrong profession or because we have developed an unbecoming character, their intervention, like any illness, is a sword with two edges, meant to help us remember that we have a choice.

It is that moment of awareness of the duality of our world — the good and bad, positive and negative, health and illness, spirit and matter — that provides us with the awareness of our choice-making ability, and depending on which side we vote with, which side we choose — ease and superficiality, or hardship but transformation; comfortable lie, or painful truth — we either correct course towards our purpose, or we deviate further, delaying our arrival at our destination.

It is in taking these messages and making the hard choices that we prove whether we are ready or not to evolve to the next evolutionary level.

The longer we resist the message, the more painful it gets.

Life doesn't care how much it hurts. It put pain in place as a corrective measure on purpose. When we ignore the first warnings, we get anxiety disorders and psychosomatic conditions. If we persist in ignoring the warnings, we get depression and chronic illnesses. And these agents will not let us be until we either choose deviation until we become one with it, or correct course — internally, by revising our shortcomings, and externally, by embracing our purpose.

The third feature of health is having the ability to influence our environment through the aptitudes with which we have been programmed before birth.

From cellular level, each organism abides by a prebuilt program meant to sustain and enhance the life of the micro and macro cosmos. These aptitudes are our preinstalled manufacturer's software, helping us to do our job: support and stimulate each other's growth and evolution. Craftsmanship, arts, music, sciences, philosophy, literature, technology and spirituality helped humankind evolve from one era to the next thanks to the influence of individual talents on the collective.

When we are deprived of the opportunity to contribute with our inborn abilities and are forced to learn skills and perform tasks that are not part of our natural program, we are prevented from fulfilling our purpose. If we don't fulfil our purpose, we — and the world we came to serve with those wasted abilities — will not evolve.

The faculty of influencing our environment with our talents and experience gives us the sense of meaning and purpose, of being wanted and useful. It gives us the confirmation that we matter. It is the crown jewel on the human needs pyramid, and the threshold from the lower stage of individualism into the higher consciousness collectivism.

In CWS terms, it is the transition from Level 3 to Level 4 consciousness.

We cannot measure the health of a fish by its ability to adapt to land. Equally, if its environment is contaminated, the fish will get ill and slowly die. Resources will become scarce, and the behaviour of the species in that ecosystem will change to survive the contamination. Some will adapt to accommodate the pathogen by adopting its behaviour, becoming more aggressive and eating species with which they previously coexisted peacefully; others will migrate. This is when the survival of the fittest comes into play. At the arrival of the pathogen, not before it.

Replace the fish with humans. Psychology and medicine measure our health and normality by our ability to adapt to our toxic environment. Whether our world was contaminated by a pathogen such as greed, social injustice, poverty or inequality, leading to genetic mutations, behavioural change and health impairment, little matters to the health specialist. Instead of healing the cause, material science treats its symptoms. This is equal to trying to fill a lake by carrying water with a sieve.

We measure the health of a system by its effects on the organisms in that environment.

Nature doesn't make mistakes. Humans do. Each life form in the natural order is endowed with the functions allowing them to cohabit harmoniously with their environment. If that organism gets out of sync — gets ill — it is either because it has been tampered with, or its environment has been corrupted.

Illness doesn't happen per ipsum, by itself, the same way health is not its own cause.

A healthy human will develop erratic behaviour, get ill and die outside his natural habitat — under water, in space, underground. We can use protective equipment to survive a short period, but we are not built to live and thrive in those environments.

Equally, if our environment is corrupted by pollutants — from the food, air and water poisoning, to the infrasonic radiation of the negative thoughts and emotions broadcast by the eight billion and more humans, to subtler cosmic forces undetected by our current technology — our health and behaviour will suffer.

At personal level, our future depends on adopting the correct paradigm of health, seeing human life as it is: a thread in a bigger tapestry.

And at societal level, the future of our civilisation depends on the development of a new environmental medicine, diagnosing and treating the environment and corporate pathology causing environmental damage, before trying to fix the affected human.

In the CWS model we don't separate mental health from physical health, and health in general from our environment.

Our health and wellbeing are conditioned by environmental forces of which you must become aware, and with which you must learn to contend.

What is the purpose of the sun? A little closer or a little further, and life on earth would not exist. What's the purpose of the ozone layer? To protect life on earth from harmful cosmic radiation.

What's the purpose of the heart, or of the neuron cell? If you could see your body's activities in real time, you'd think you were watching a mind-bending science fiction film of a universe populated by gazillions of diverse beings coexisting peacefully in colonies, each knowing their place in their microsystem; systems within systems populated by the simplest to the more complex life forms, working like clockwork, all performing their role, their purpose, like an orchestra led by an invisible conductor, each playing their part to perfection. If you could only see the concerted activity of these incredible beings rushing to heal your minor scratch, you'd be awestruck.

Unlike the nineteenth-century Darwinian theory would have you believe, life is not a random process, and life on earth specifically did not happen randomly.

From the simplest organism to the complex human and beyond, there is a well-orchestrated design in which every organism has its purpose. Their purpose justifies the need for their existence.

A random organism serving no purpose other than its survival is a pathogen — the same way a programmed organism performing a different purpose would become an aberration that would disrupt the balance and functions of the entire ecosystem. If they don't serve their purpose, they become redundant; they will no longer have a seat at the table; they will no longer be part of the Conversations with Self. They will condemn their existence to a monologue, feel excluded and out of place, feel that their life has no meaning or purpose, and will eventually wither and die the absolute death of dissolving back into the building blocks of life, with no life of their own or memory of ever having one.

Fulfilling our purpose is not only the condition for our health and wellbeing. It is the ultimate condition for us existing at all.

Like the cells in our bodies, we all have different functions to perform for the greater good we were created to enjoy and serve. Within each of us there is a cellular Jesus — cells willingly taking the cross for the greater good. One such example is the immune cell neutrophil: the guardians raising awareness of danger, calling for the creation of T cells to fight viruses and infections. They are the first to arrive at the infected site, waiting for the T cells to then perform their last self-sacrificial act of apoptosis, a form of controlled death releasing large quantities of a molecule called epidermal growth factor, providing T cells with the extra boost in energy necessary to finish the job.

A human being permanently prevented from exercising their natural abilities is not healthy merely because they are sufficiently medicated, disciplined or socially adapted to keep functioning.

Where a person can neither adapt without damaging themselves, coexist with integrity, nor influence the environment towards greater health, the relationship between organism and environment has itself become pathological.

Purpose therefore contains agency.

At the earlier stages of development we are largely shaped by the world; as consciousness develops we become increasingly capable of shaping it. And eventually the question stops being what can I get from this life and becomes what has this life equipped me to contribute to it.