• Symptoms are a message from the body about its condition and its function. The same condition may give rise to symptoms of different kinds: conversely, different conditions may cause similar symptoms.
• Cures of major diseases may occur because the immune system is sufficiently strong, perhaps supported by a change in diet or by psychological or spiritual renewal.
• Food is a direct cause of the proper or improper functioning of the organism.
• Quality, quantity, stored energy, taste, color, aroma, and texture of food all have physiological and psychological effects on the organism.
• The organism reacts to and interacts with its natural environment; climate, season, altitude, and weather all affect it. There are of course many more details in both these models; they will vary with each individual patient, doctor, healer, or diagnostician. As we consider how that interrelationship of systems that is our body functions, we must remember also that nobody exists in a vacuum. We are part of our environment, the earth, the whole universe, as is any other natural being. There are certain laws of nature that apply to us as much as they do to stones, trees, lions, and stars. I’ m referring here to something other than the basic laws of gravity and motion: to philosophical laws, encompassing all natural phenomena, that were discovered and formulated thousands of years ago and incorporated into the world’ s major philosophical and religious systems, including Buddhism, the Cabala, and Hermetic philosophy. These laws are so basic that they are currently considered self-evident, and thereby dismissible. However, since they organize our perceptions of reality in a coherent and holistic manner, they are definitely worth retrieving. Although these laws do not refer directly to our concerns regarding health and the body, they do apply indirectly, for they will help us understand our inner workings. Here, then, are seven universal laws of how things work; I have culled them from Eastern and Western philosophy, and modernized them for our practical understanding:
• Everything is one: Everything is connected, directly or indirectly; there are no isolated phenomena, only systems that connect into larger and smaller systems. Body and mind, then, are closely interrelated.
• Everything changes: Nothing remains static. Energy moves constantly, within and among systems. Thus, the diet that heals us must change as we change.
•“ As above, so below; as below, so above.” There is a basic correspondence between the phenomena of life that allows us to extrapolate what we learn in one area to the mysteries of another. For example, simple geometry helps us measure distant stars; polling a few we learn the thoughts of many.
• Everything has an opposite: Also, everything has a front and a back. Opposites are complementary, connected like two ends of a stick or two sides of a coin, and separated by degrees. Opposites may change into one another, and often do, either gradually or suddenly.
• Energy moves in a pendulum swing, between opposites: All motion is the result of expansion and contraction, to and fro, in rhythmic alternation. When the swing arrives at its extreme position, it reverses direction and heads the opposite way. Day turns to night, winter into summer, the in-breath into the out-breath. The pendulum doesn’ t swing back to its exact departure point, but slightly off, as spirals do.
• There are no accidents: Every event or phenomenon has a cause, a reason for its existence. Labeling anything as a“ chance happening,” resulting from either randomness, coincidence, or luck, merely exposes our ignorance of the interrelationships that brought it about.
• Magnetism manifests itself on all levels: Opposites attract, likes repel everywhere. But also,“ like attracts like” insofar as they belong to the same category, yet are of different degree. Consider hierarchies with chief and underlings, such as a flock of birds, a pack of wolves, a business corporation. 7 Keep this set of universal laws in the back of your mind. I will refer to them regularly throughout the book, to clarify or emphasize certain points. It is not necessary to believe that these concepts are literally true. Since we’ re working on the construction of a mental model, we include as relevant those concepts that appear plausible, that make sense, that are“ possibly true.” As we test them against reality, we’ ll use them as if they were true, and every instance in which they hold up will be a small step toward confirmation. Testing concepts in this manner will keep us from losing face if they turn out to be erroneous; believing something to be absolutely true is the mark of the“ true believer” and the fanatic, who remains inflexible and unable to adapt to error, change, and new possibilities. These laws are helpful in seeing the interconnectedness and continuity in all things— a notion central to the systems approach to health and healing. ENERGY FIELDS We’ ve talked about systems, about interconnectedness, about“ wholes”— but what about that mysterious“ more” that differentiates a whole from the sum of its parts? Many theorists have attempted to answer that question. I would like to present those ideas that I personally have found most intriguing and helpful. Sometime in the late 1920s, Harold Saxton Burr, Ph. D., professor of anatomy at Yale University School of Medicine, began to study the electric properties of living organisms. In 1932 he published his first paper on the