The Matrix of Healing and Medicine

This article is not so much about our children as it is for them, on their behalf. Healing and Medicine touch each one of us throughout our lives in some way, and we are all children at one time or another. I’m hopeful that we all retain the child within, and never forget how to access many of the important aspects of being a child: playfulness, sensitivity, endless optimism, and truthfulness. Children have a remarkable eye, they know when they see and feel something wrong, or out of place.

During our lives, we all share in the process of figuring out how the world works and how to navigate our way through it. With that in mind, I’ll preface the next few pages by using the movie “The Matrix” as a metaphor. What is the Matrix? The movie’s basic premise is that our lives are programmed for us, we’re not as free as we think, and a critical mass of people have figured that out. The movie is an artistic representation of our current culture, a reflection of what’s going on at many levels, and parallels our healthcare predicament. Although this conversation may be old news for some, the subject matter can be somewhat challenging or revealing for others, and often inspires some resistance. I quote Morpheous, “I didn’t say it would be easy – I only said it would be the truth.”

Perhaps there is a Neo in all of us, and we’re seeing how deep the rabbit hole goes.

What is healing and what is medicine? How did we learn how to take care of our own health? What are we teaching our children about how we take care of their health, and how should they take care of themselves in the future? What is the context of the medical paradigm that we are currently living in? What’s been given to us about medicine and science, literally inherited, and how does that effect us? Has this way of approaching health actually been pushed upon us, not only as individuals, but also as a collective culture? Is the medical industry forthcoming with us about everything we need to know, historically as well as currently?

Following this line of questioning, I present you with a view of our current medical scenario in the western world, a complicated and confusing conspiracy that we all first experience as children. After enough years go by, our concept of healthcare is so tainted by our carefully designed and programmed environment, that we forget where it came from. Eventually the dynamic becomes more unconscious and automatic, we don’t even make our own authentic choices. We grow up, become adults, and are literally trained by the business and marketing branches of the influential and powerful medical industry, slowly but surely getting the wool pulled over our eyes. It comes in many forms, mostly in the form of advertising that’s carefully designed as clinical, medical, serious, and concerned, like a corrupt government simultaneously selling a false message while they cover something up.

Essentially we are living in an industrial and technologically based dream worldabout healing and medicine, that has created the illusion of safety, control, and power, mostly with drugs. We’re in the presence of an advertising driven greedy power complex, that aggressively pushes and fosters the use of drugs, while wearing a mask of the great doctor and healer. We’ve been sold healing and medicine and yet in reality it’s a marketing and fear based illusion. Like any paradox, it has contradictions and the tension of opposites. It’s so obvious, and yet so illusive. Could this be real? Is it really so hard to believe?

Our current medical paradigm is indeed centered around what’s called pharmacology, and as a result we participate in the illusion of having control of the symptoms in our bodies, and in our psyche, with a pill. Controlling symptoms, although valuable in it’s context, is temporary, incomplete medicine. In many cases not healing or medicine at all. From the time we are born we are bombarded with the message that medical science has our answer in the form of a pill. The very idea that we can control our pain, sickness, depression, feelings, health, our lives really, with drugs, is an illusion of power, an illusion of control, a lie.

The idea that drugs can take away our pain or heal us is a psychological over-investment in the thinking and analytical aspect of our mind, an arrogance, an inflation. This inflation is still somewhat unconscious, and fosters a blind conscious belief in the omnipotence of modern medical science, allowing western culture to participate in a fantasy. What is the fantasy? The fantasy is that technology and science actually separate us from the laws of nature, when in reality we are nature. We actually go against nature with the immediate application of many of the drug therapies. Metaphorically and literally, this separates us from our bodies, our very origins, as if we we’re above nature and can control it. To think, that if we have a physical symptom or a psychological symptom, we can just fix it with chemistry by taking a pill, without careful review and reflection of what’s going on not only in the physical body, but also in the mental, emotional, and spiritual body, is not of sound mind. It is not a healthy thought process, but a sickness itself.

This inflation co-occurs with the medical industry generating billions and billions of dollars annually, selling the quick temporary fix for a tremendous profit. There is a certain kind of power manifest here, the kind of power that has to do with money. The greed of big business and government are major players behind these dynamics, hiding in the shadows. “Welcome to the desert of the Real.”

And I’m not saying all western medicine is bad, or that all drugs are bad, I’m saying the context is very distorted. What’s being done with a lot of western medicine is bad, and corrupt. The medicine is powerful, but has limitations, like anything else. We can all be proud of the advances we’ve made in technology and medicine, there are countless brilliant examples of the wonders of western medical science, really a testament to the development of the western psyche over the millennia. In these cases the velocity and development of western medicine has been not only life saving, but necessary, and required. We actually have a responsibility to continue the research and development of medical science.

Therefore, I’m not talking about when there’s a 6 year old boy with rare kidney cancer, and because of the marvels of chemotherapy his cancer is forced into remission and he becomes a healthy boy and lives a normal life. I’m not talking about the amazing diagnostic studies and machinery that scientific medicine has figured out to detect and prevent all kinds of disease. I’m not talking about the cases where a particular drug or surgery actually saves the persons life, or thousands of lives. I’m not talking about when a patient’s condition has reached the point of no return, and they have to have the medication or surgery.

I’m talking about the automatic, unconscious, common practice of totally bypassing and ignoring the tremendous healing capacity of the human being. The common practice of popping pills to get fixed, or having quick surgeries to temporarily fix the mechanical structure of the body or internal organs, and then thinking that’s the end of it. This common practice is shared not only by doctors but by patients as well, and forgoes the exploration of the possibility of stimulating the body to heal itself through organic means. Neglects the integration of the mental, emotional, and spiritual aspects of the human condition and how they co-occur in time and space with the physical aspect, and how this more complete view of a human being plays a role in healing. Forgoes the possibility of letting nature take it’s course, allowing the divine design to do it’s divine thing: heal. There’s way too much intervention way too early with way to many drugs.

Indeed, a critical mass of people are developing a consciousness about these very powerful dynamics in our culture, essentially seeing through the denial, seeing their participation in it. Why then is so much of western culture still stuck in the energy of the quick and temporary fix? Stuck in the search for the answer to the problem, “What’s wrong with me? What pill can I pop to fix or control it? What external thing can fix me?

Why isn’t what I’m taking working?” Why do so many westerners pump their kids full of drugs with the first sign of symptoms? And what about the countless doctors offices with overflowing waiting rooms of people all gathered around, a bit agitated, a bit afraid, waiting on their diagnostics to come back and their next appointment to get their meds saying, “Take my pain away.” If the context of organic medicine has always been known, and is available, why are we still so obsessed with physical medicine?

Are you going to take the red pill or the blue pill?