Riddles

Again, after delving more deeply into the work at the College of Mythic Cartography, I am seeing some parallels with the projects underway there, and those in my own life and work. I am very grateful again to David from Health Beyond Civilization for introducing me to the whole rewilding milieu. In all sincerity, I see Willem Larsen as a philosopher, and hopefully his wish will be realized and that moniker will change to Village Philosopher. I hope to meet this man, God Willing, and learn some of the more practical skills he teaches, as well as the incredibly beautiful and vital invisible technologies he describes, and embodies.

What prompted this gushing post is a short piece called The Reason for Riddles. It follows, also from the recent post comparing Tracking with Pulse Diagnosis. The component Larsen identifies, that links these activities is associative reasoning. And the term has come to be applied to Tong Shen Ming, or divine penetrating illumination, or even simply an historical emphasis on sudden insight that has informed the learning styles and goals of some of my predecessors, including Fei Boxiong and Cheng Menxue (both of whom I have learned about recently in Currents of Tradition in Chinese Medicine).

In conversation with my first teacher of pulse, a mentor and friend named Brian LaForgia, we discussed a comment he made regarding our shared mentor Dr. Leon Hammer. This was in reference to Dr. Hammer's unusual capacity for lateral and associative thinking. It is one of the keys to his enormous insight into the individuals whose lives intersect with his, whether as patients, students, or friends. And being able to reason thus is a boon for one who would practice Chinese Medicine as an art of increasing refinement and skill. Sadly, it is this capacity which seems to be radically attenuated in so many students and physicians these days.

It is ironic that the pulse diagnosis we practice is at once extremely thorough, linear, and objective in many ways. But it also acts as a vessel for one to tease out the significance of the messages that the body is capable of communicating (and which are often conventionally called, symptoms). And it is therefore a vehicle for associative reasoning as much as any hypothesis or riddle. We model this activity in our pedagogy, by interpreting pulses without examining the history. In practice of course this would be unwise, and not useful. But as a learning tool, it enhances the capacity to explore one's findings from multivalent perspectives. Via the many, we approach the one, and from the piece, the whole.

One of the comments that Willem made in a recent podcast was that the green tracker had better not track alone, because he will find himself too readily convinced of his own interpretation. So I find, too, that one of the principle values of keeping company with other advanced students of Dr. Hammer and even more so with my own students, is that it maintains my awareness of my limitations, and how to move beyond their confines.

Invisible School

This interview with Jon Young discusses one manner of deepening awareness.

YSL v2.0: Return to the Source

Yesterday I had a conversation with Eric Grey that touched on my post about the Year of Sagely Living.

"Does this imply that you are done with the whole project," he asked.

So, in case other readers, have the same question, the answer is a resounding, "No!"

I feel, in fact, more keen to delve into the essence of the inner work than before. The Year of Sagely Living is alive. Alive means mutable. So forth we go.

My plan is not to forego any of the goals I had in mind. It is to jettison the time frame, and to use Chinese medical concepts to strengthen me, to Nourish Life, in the journey. One thing I was alluding to before was that I know, and really want to demonstrate to myself, the deep consonance between a life of piety and faith, inner work and growth as a Muslim, with the practical (that is energetic, spiritual, and physical) aspects of striving to become a Superior Physician.

The goal is to enter the NOW of Sagely Living.

Shang Han Lun Dream

Last night I had this incredible dream, in which I was starting to memorize the Shang Han Lun and in beginning to do so, I opened Itunes to discover a number of tracks devoted to this purpose. The first of these was a rendition of the lines with a break beat behind it. And, the memorizing was instantaneous.

Oral Transmission, Invisible Technology

I have become an avid reader of the College of Mythic Cartography, and it was there that I discovered the work of Benjamin Bagby and his rendition of Beowulf in Old English. It demonstrates the sheer power of language that was once so much a part of our experience.

Of all this rewilding reading that I have been doing, the writing of Willem Larsen has the most force. He is intent on reviving what he has termed the invisible technologies of story-telling, memory, and community building. I cannot, of course, endorse the animism that figures so prominently in the writing of this whole movement. But there are insights to be gleaned there.

In fact, as removed as such a thing would seem to both Muslims and Rewilding enthusiasts, there are a number of parallels between Islam and the dismantling of modern civilization espoused by Rewilders. The first of these is exemplified by the epic oral poetry linked above. The concept of oral transmission is one of the main invisible technologies that interests Larsen. What community has preserved its oral history more successfully than the Muslim ummah? Well of course we cannot forget the indigenous cultures who have preserved their knowledge thus for millennia. Recent examples I have encountered include these stories told by natives of the Southwest. But my point is simply that while it is prey to the same deleterious modernizing effects of books, sound-bytes, and video, oral transmission is still the primary means of gaining traditional Islamic knowledge. Even more importantly, the preservation of the Quran and hadith corpus through memorization and recitation is an oral transmission. Has ever a community of memorizers eclipsed the Muslim polity? Especially in the preservation of its tradition into the modern age?

There are many more areas I hope to explore in the future regarding these issues. I am still a little unclear about some of them, and I want to articulate it without error.

Reflections on the Year of Sagely Living

I am very grateful for the discussions I have shared with Eric Grey of Deepest Health. It is true that when I proposed the Year of Sagely Living, I was very keen to recruit him in both the planning and staging of the project. His mapping of the year was masterfully executed.

So, what went wrong?

For one, even with our emphasis on remaining true to to cycles of the year, we failed to account for the inherently organic development of sageliness. We identified with our tendencies to isolate habits as a means to self-mastery. Actually, I feel that what I've learned in the months of the trial has been that what I do away with matters as much as what I do. So a focus on developing certain practices began to feel like spinning my wheels. Of course, the garden vegetables were nice.

I also lost sight of some of the original intentions of the idea. In this medicine, one cannot deny the role of the healer in the success of the work. We are at once, so close to the essence of another, that we are drawn inexorably closer to the essence of ourselves. So the question then becomes, how does the purification of my heart affect my work? And fortunately for me, my work does increase the purification of my heart. Thus, we are concerned more with self-cultivation than simply development.

An exercise that has been fruitful to me is to simply step back, in effect removing myself from an equation, and just write things out in a third person form. Sometimes this gives me a different perspective. So for example, if I pose the the basic question: how would a Sufi practice Chinese Medicine, I clearly cannot relate this to my present experience very well. But I can imagine it as an ideal and by anthropomorphizing it give it a life of its own. Then I can ask this Sufi healer questions. It is similar to active imagination.

So, in short, the idea for the YSL is to envision what a Sage is like, in action, in the practice of Chinese Medicine. And after envisioning it, to become that. The method is to use the hand to teach the heart, or to just "do the work", and to realize that it might mean leaving more than adding more.

When Women Scholars Graced the Ummah

A link follows to a book review penned by Sheikh Gibril Haddad.

Here is an excerpt:

ADAPTED from the Indian-born Oxford-based Dr Mohammad Akram Nadwi's introductory volume to his forthcoming 40-tome dictionary of women scholars in Arabic, al-Muhaddithat: The Women Scholars in Islam is the first in-depth study of Muslim women's scholarship in English, covering hundreds of shaykhas selected out of a total of 8,000 biographical accounts the author says he has compiled in his Arabic dictionary, with a single entry running up to 20 pages.

Organised around ten chapters crammed with historical and anecdotal information, al-Muhaddithat's leitmotiv is the sheer physical prevalence of women active on the scholarly scene. This presence is undoubtedly the most obvious, though not the most important indicator of their huge role in the transmission of knowledge in Islam. This is true, Akram notes, even if the later generations, paradoxically because of their greater numbers, were socially more withdrawn than the earlier ones: "By contrast, the scholars from the generation of the Companions and their Successors were far more present in the social space." Hence, the importance of documenting the vital link of women's scholarship in the chain of the transmission of "the Knowledge" can hardly be over-praised in light of the jurists' truism that "the default state of women is cover-up (satr)". The feat of those active, yet mostly invisible women sheds its spark on such a book, which is itself no small feat.

Read the whole thing here.

Mind-Body Debate

Thanks to the Helfgott Blog for linking to this article from the New York Times. It describes the potential establishment of parity for coverage of mental illness.