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This reminds me of the book Island by Huxley. One character (like all the characters, are just Huxley giving a lecture from an eastern perspective) talks about how in the West we treat the symptoms of physical sickness and patch up mental sickness with pills, but we don't, as a society, care much for prevention by producing healthy bodies and especially care little for producing healthy minds: "Well, there was that group of American doctors," she answered.
"They came to Shivapuram last year, while I was working at the Central
Hospital."
"What were they doing here?"
"They wanted to find out why we have such a low rate of neurosis and
cardiovascular trouble. Those doctors!" She shook her head. "I tell you, Mr.
Farnaby, they really made my hair stand on end—made everybody's hair
stand on end in the whole hospital."
"So you think our medicine's pretty primitive?"
"That's the wrong word. It isn't primitive. It's fifty percent terrific and fifty
percent nonexistent. Marvelous antibiotics—but absolutely no methods for
increasing resistance, so that antibiotics won't be necessary. Fantastic
operations—but when it comes to teaching people the way of going through
life without having to be chopped up, absolutely nothing. And it's the same
all along the line. Alpha Plus for patching you up when you've started to fall
apart; but Delta Minus for keeping you healthy. Apart from sewerage
systems and synthetic vitamins, you don't seem to do anything at all about
prevention. And yet you've got a proverb: prevention is better than cure."
"But cure," said Will, "is so much more dramatic than prevention. And
for the doctors it's also a lot more profitable." "About the way they treat people with neurotic symptoms. We just
couldn't believe our ears. They never attack on all the fronts; they only
attack on about half of one front. So far as
they're concerned, the physical fronts don't exist. Except for a mouth and
an anus, their patient doesn't have a body. He isn't an organism, he wasn't
born with a constitution or a temperament. All he has is the two ends of a
digestive tube, a family and a psyche. But what sort of psyche? Obviously
not the whole mind, not the mind as it really is. How could it be that when
they take no account of a person's anatomy, or biochemistry or physiology?
Mind abstracted from body—that's the only front they attack on. And not
even on the whole of that front. The man with the cigar kept talking about
the unconscious. But the only unconscious they ever pay attention to is the
negative unconscious, the garbage that people have tried to get rid of by
burying it in the basement. Not a single word about the positive
unconscious. No attempt to help the patient to open himself up to the life
force or the Buddha Nature. And no attempt even to teach him to be a little
more conscious in his everyday life. You know: 'Here and now, boys.'
'Attention.' " She gave an imitation of the mynah birds. "These people just
leave the unfortunate neurotic to wallow in his old bad habits of never being
all there in present time. The whole thing is just pure idiocy!" Out of context it reads a bit funny, but the whole book is compelling. Everything Huxley and Watts took from eastern philosophy is interesting. Full book here: http://www.huxley.net/island/aldoushuxley-island.html |
We're so busy rushing here and there that we never touch nor live in the now. And we have children and expect them to just do the same. It's sad really.
We think to ourselves, "If I had a billion dollars, then I would be happy" yet all we need in order to be happy is to fully live every moment and stop looking to the future or regretting the past. Just live right now.