A defence of health

I have repeatedly asserted that reality corrects towards health over time. This appears to flatly contradict how events and ‘things’ are subject to entropy, to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. So it seems at the very least wishful and naïve of me to argue that somehow, magically, health is in fact reality’s driving force. I’m going to address that wishful naïvety in this article, albeit briefly.

We start with a simple observation. In purely ‘physical’ terms, reality has managed to proceed from the chaos – maximum entropy – immediately following the Big Bang, across aeons of uncertainty, to human life on this planet of exquisite complexity. Were there only entropy, this could not have happened. Hence, we need to bear in mind that negative entropy is also at work.

The second observation is more slippery and controversial: Materialism cannot account for consciousness. (I argue that materialism cannot fully explain matter, energy, space and time either, but that would be too much for this article.) This is to say that there is considerable uncertainty in the realm of ontology, generally speaking. Indeed, if we are strict ontological materialists, there can be neither consciousness nor free will. This means, by extension, that there can also be no meaning. And yet here I am making some. And there you are making your own meanings from my made meanings. I take this fact of our being meaning makers as solid, even irrefutable evidence that materialism, in its stricter sense, is fallacious. 

Another way of expressing all this is that there is more to reality than the laws of physics; there’s plenty of wriggle room here.

As a man who believes (knows) there is only consciousness, that there is nothing but God, I make it my business to try to think organically; to use logic, intuition, instinct and reason together, rather than reason alone. I also see the mechanistic aspect of reality as a subset of the organic. I see things very differently to prevailing orthodoxies. 

So how do I understand health? In a nutshell: Health is why we incarnate. 

Sickness – departure from health and yet part of health’s broader vector – is a learning curve that makes our return to health more than a mere return to some immutable root state. Everything is always evolving. Indeed, falls from grace, slides into depravity, collapses into disease and malfunction all enrich evolution, are counterintuitively necessary essences of health as it serves evolution. “Health” is for me a word that poetically captures this dynamic, this fundamental truth.

Fundamental to our experience – to our duty – as human beings is how ego-fears generate the stresses and tensions that inexorably turn our attention toward understanding, toward actively pursuing, health. This mindful pursuit of health, this desire to learn about health at all levels as profoundly and humbly as we can, is what I think of as the Love Path. We could equally appropriately call it the Wisdom Path.

Hence: Health <=> Love <=> Wisdom

And yet sickness is easy to slip into. It is not immediately obvious to the ego that the self-mastery, humility and discipline required to nurture your own health, forever, is worth the effort. The payoff is not only in the (apparently) distant future, descriptions of such dedication initially lack allure. We want an easy life. We want to ‘fix’ problems once and for all. For example, junk food is far easier and more fun than a healthily balanced meal carefully prepared; the latter takes work, might seem less enjoyable, and its benefits are long term. Ergo, the former has more appeal, is more tempting.

So departure from health is the easy option, the likelier option. Wanting to stay mindfully true to all aspects of health, really wanting to pay our dues in hard work and perhaps, in decadent times, even gladly enduring ostracisation, seems first to require plenty of compounded error, exhausted narcissism and clearly diminishing returns from multiple addictions before what health offers becomes sufficiently and meaningfully attractive. And yet there are always corrections nudging us towards the health vector if we but heed them. When we don’t, the corrections get more and more bleedin’ obvious until we either die and move on to our next adventure, or begin our journey over to the love path, in earnest, in our current life.

Because of this sense I have of health, I often publish articles that deliberately expose my failings and weaknesses. Anger is one, self-pity is another, and of course there are yet others. Sometimes I choose to reveal facets of these things as poems or more poetic pieces, sometimes as arrogance or incredulity, but I always share them uncommented. I walk the walk in my life – probably “stumble the stumble” is truer – and talk the walk at my blog. 

Pursuing health, as I understand that process, requires this sort of non-signposted disclosure of me. I do not want to prescribe, do not want to browbeat, do not want to be a hypocrite, and I will not vainly try to present a (seemingly) watertight description of reality. We must each make our own wisdom, which will always be unique to us. It is precisely this uniqueness that makes love so impossibly beautiful, so far beyond mechanical automation, beyond bureaucracy, beyond utopia, that it exists as a wholly different music. Our interdependent experiences in ‘physical’ reality contribute mightily to that music, but as humans we can do little more than deduce this in a fragmentary way, with apparently random blinding insights permitted to us from time to time. 

As the saying goes, God moves in mysterious ways. 

In summary, my sense of All That Is understands entropy as a necessary process serving evolution. It is our great human difficulty in handling our egos that makes this seem violently, brutally cruel, as if we are for the most part unfairly, pointlessly imprisoned in the devil’s playground.

So when I talk about the health-wisdom-love triad, I’m referencing something more fundamental than the human ego and its endless concerns, and also more encompassing and thus beyond materialism’s tenets. The triad is to me something that operates beyond opposites as we experience them. As such, this fundamental triadic unity hovers at a distance from us, a little like the horizon does: an emergent ‘illusion’ resulting from a constellation of interoperating factors, including but not limited to our egos’ perceptions, the tight constraints of ‘physical’ existence, cultural reflexes, and personal habits of thought. 

Like the horizon, health is something we aim for but can never quite reach while seeing through ego’s eyes. As self-mastery and humility begin to find their feet in the quality of our being, as ego fades to translucency, the health horizon moves toward us as an earned and supportive embrace, in whose arms problems become challenges willingly met. 

Well worth it, don’t you think?