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A Global and Evolutionary Perspective on Chinese Medicine
By Lonny S. Jarrett The following is abstracted from Lonny S. Jarrett's new text, "The Clinical Practice of Chinese Medicine" to be published in the Fall of 2003. Copyright, Lonny S. Jarrett, 2001 Fifteen billion years ago there was an explosion and something came from nothing. This nothing is the eternal ground of being that gives rise to the phenomenal universe. The outward momentum of this explosion is the force behind evolution itself. Up until our own moment of original trauma, we too live in a state of non-arising. However, it is fate that we must lose ourselves and, in response to some shock in life that constitutes our own personal "big bang," a new pathological momentum is generated as the ego is born and our life diverges from its ground of being in dao. As adults, we may realize the assumptions we made at the age of 4 no longer serve us at 45, and that our compensations no longer protect us but are, in fact, gradually killing us. It is in this moment of insight we may understand that nothing ever happened, that the "big bang" was an illusion of our own construction, and we are exactly who we need to be to change now. Similarly, the time has come for the human race as a whole to realize the ego has outlived its usefulness as the primary source of motivation for human behavior. The ego, or created self, is a vestigial aspect of mind that no longer contributes any significant function to our individual survival or to the survival of the species. The appendix may have, at one time, performed an important physiological function for human beings. Now it merely collects and sublimates toxicity until it cannot contain any more, at which point it ruptures. In such cases, death from toxemia occurs rather quickly in the absence of intervention. Similarly, the ego may well have conferred a selective advantage when we first crawled out of the primordial ooze. Now, however, with nearly 6 billion egos on earth, it is increasingly clear that greed, narcissism and self-interest threaten human existence itself. Humanity is at a turning point. This turning point requires us to choose between the death of the species or the death of the human ego, or collective created self, as the next step in human evolution. For only if humanity can see itself as one with all of creation, and only if our primary motivation as individuals becomes for the sake of the whole, will we humans survive to fulfill the promise of our collective destiny on planet earth. The clock is ticking, and the time this evolutionary step must be taken is now. For the ego thrives on time alone. Born in our moment of unbearable pain, the ego derives its momentum from our past. It lives fueled by all our erroneous interpretations of our life experience strung together to prove to our imagined selves that we are who we think we are and that life is how we think it is. The ego also thrives on the notion of some imagined future that will afford us the time to change. This notion that life will at some point be better allows us to "work on" our issues without actually ever dropping them. The clock is ticking, and the time to change is now. Acupuncture provides a perfect momentary stimulus to instantly align a patient's qi with the absolute to provide a memory of original nature untouched by life experience. However, that experience must be properly nurtured and cared for by the patient or we will only ever help him become relatively more functional. If the patient's own will is not focused on freedom as his primary goal, we will only ever use the five-element system to continually chase his excess and deficiencies around the sheng cycle, effectively keeping him in a state of ignorance (samsara). Every action has one of two consequences: it either perpetuates or dispels ignorance. To harmonize a patient's qi and return him home with his ego in control is no different than treating a battered woman and sending her back to an abusive husband. The ultimate goal of treatment is never a relative improvement, but rather an absolute alignment of the heart/kidney axis with the evolutionary momentum of dao itself. The ability to initiate such a change does not depend on any level of technical knowledge regarding healing; rather, it is born solely of the practitioner's alignment with the absolute and the desire to be free and engender freedom more than anything else. In the following sections of this text, I explain several treatment paradigms that help clear blocks and restore the integrity of the heart/kidney axis in order to lay a solid foundation for long-term treatment. It must be clear at the outset that I view the goal of all healing relative to diminishing the influence of the false self and the emergence of a new being, one that embraces an enlightened perspective on life, not out of self-interest but for the sake of the whole. ConclusionsI. Loss of True Self
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