FLOURISHING AS AN INTEGRATED ORGANISM

Fields of barley

by jeremy lent

A long time ago in the district of Song lived a farmer. His wife and sons worried about him because he was not, as they say, the sharpest tool in the shed. The farmer was concerned that his shoots of grain weren’t growing fast enough, so one day he decided to help them by pulling them up. He returned home to his family that evening, and announced, ‘I am worn out today, because I’ve been helping my grain to grow.’ His sons rushed frantically out to the fields, and sure enough there was the grain, dead and shriveled on the ground.

This rather droll story was told by Mencius, one of the greatest early Chinese sages. He used it to make a point about how a person should cultivate their own inner shoots: someone might want to develop themselves in a particular area, but it can only happen at a certain pace. ‘You must put some work into it,’ Mencius explained, ‘but not force it.’

Mencius loved to use the plant analogy to teach his philosophy of life. In the agrarian civilization of ancient China this was a powerful way to get people to understand how to cultivate qualities within themselves. ‘If people want to grow a tong or zi tree one or two spans thick, everyone knows how to go about nourishing it,’ he declared. ‘When it comes to the self, though, no one knows how to nourish it. Is it because people love a tong or zi tree more than themselves? No, it is because they don’t give the slightest thought to it.’

This analogy has powerful implications. It leads us to realize that the way we develop is profoundly affected by the conditions in which we grow. Mencius described how some eras produce predominantly virtuous people, while others engender more wicked behavior, pointing out that the contrast is not due to differences in people’s true nature, but how their qualities are cultivated. If you sow a field with barley, he said, the variation in the resulting produce will be affected by factors like the soil’s nutrients, how it was irrigated and how diligently it was weeded. Why, he asked, should humans be any exception to this rule of nature?

Given the striking similarities between principles that govern human nature and those that direct the growth and flourishing of the natural world, what can we learn about human flourishing by applying Mencius’s metaphor of cultivation? How can we get the shoots within ourselves to grow healthily into bountiful produce? As we investigate this question, we’ll come face to face with forces in the modern world that not only impair our flourishing but actively work against it – and we’ll consider what we can do, both individually and as a society, to mitigate them and nourish a life of well-being both for ourselves and all those around us.

health in harmony

When traditional Chinese thinkers contemplated how to achieve healthy flourishing, a crucial concept was harmony. As we’ve seen, harmony is an intrinsic quality of life itself, incorporating both competition and cooperation. Chinese philosophers understood clearly that harmony doesn’t just mean agreement. One sage distinguished between harmony and uniformity with the analogy of cooking a stew. To prepare a tasty fish stew, he explained, you make a broth with water, vinegar, pickles, plums and salt. If you harmonize the flavors well, a new taste emerges that is richer than the sum of the parts. By contrast, simply making things uniform would be like trying to flavor the water with more water.

Harmony, then, arises when you successfully blend contrasting elements within a system to create something greater. Sages extended this concept to a person’s emotions. Rather than trying to transcend difficult feelings, they taught that a person experienced well-being when their emotions arose harmoniously ‘in due measure and degree’ – just like the flavors in a delicious stew. Even the most painful emotions, such as grief arising from bereavement, could be welcomed and infused into the fullness of experience. ‘There is harmony in sorrow,’ declared philosopher Wang Yangming. What matters is to feel the emotion to the right degree, neither to suppress nor overindulge in it. ‘The excess of emotion,’ he explained, ‘is not harmony.’

Traditional Chinese medicine was based on a similar foundation. The Chinese understood the energy-matter of the universe, qi, to be in a state of continual flow according to cycles of yin and yang, and they applied these principles to a person’s internal makeup. When someone was sick, this meant that their yin and yang aspects were out of balance. The physician’s challenge was to recognize the source of the imbalance and restore harmony to the individual. This would usually be done through a combination of practices such as acupuncture, medicinal herbs and adjusting the person’s food, environment and activities.

This integrative approach to health was not unique to China. On the other side of the Himalayas a remarkably similar system developed in India, known as Ayurvedic medicine. There, physicians focused on three different forms of energy, called doshas, that could go out of balance. Once again, they used a combination of different modalities to treat a patient, with the goal of bringing their doshas back into harmony. Neither the Chinese nor Indian system saw a separation between the physical, mental and spiritual health of a person. It was understood that each aspect of a person and their environment needed to be in balance for them to thrive as an integrated organism.

How different from the mainstream Western approach to medicine! Building on the reductionist model of nature promoted by Descartes and Bacon, scientists gained an ever-greater understanding of the microscopic universe unseen to the naked eye, leading to what is known as the germ theory of disease, proposed in the nineteenth century by scientists such as Louis Pasteur. The consequent improvement in public health and the development of antibiotics and other drugs is one of the crowning achievements of Western civilization. But, as in other areas of scientific accomplishment, the triumph of the reductionist model has led to severe imbalances that now undermine much of its success.

Nowadays, most diseases that afflict us are complex, chronic problems such as heart disease, cancer and diabetes. However, our medical infrastructure is still based on the reductionist model developed primarily to fight infections. Doctors are trained to combat the disease rather than treat the patient. Studies of doctor–patient interactions show that doctors will change the subject as soon as patients bring up their emotions, and on average they interrupt the patient’s initial statement after just twenty-three seconds. Many doctors scoff at traditional Chinese or Ayurvedic approaches to disease, and at best view them as ‘alternative’ treatments to resort to only if conventional treatments have failed.

A number of leading medical researchers, though, are turning to Chinese and Ayurvedic traditions as inspiration for what has become known as integrative medicine. Back in 1948, the World Health Organization defined health as ‘a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity’. While this definition was virtually ignored by the medical establishment in the ensuing decades, it is now becoming increasingly accepted as the basis for health policy. Pioneering researchers are drawing connections between the Chinese and Ayurvedic view of health and the systems view of life.

Integrative medicine views the body as an ecosystem containing diversified microbial hosts, rather than a battleground where pathogens are fought to the death. As in Chinese and Ayurvedic models, health is understood not as a fixed endpoint, but an ongoing process, a harmonious balancing of different forces within an integrated organism. Health, like consciousness, is a natural attractor – never fixed but continuously following resilient, dynamic flows within certain parameters.

In fact, researchers are increasingly applying principles of complex systems to assess human health. It turns out that a healthy heartbeat and healthy breathing patterns demonstrate fractal properties, which tend to break down with aging and disease. Cancer is increasingly being studied as a disruption of the self-organized behavior of cellular networks. Along with physical health, mental health can also be understood in terms of integration: a study of neural networks in the brain shows that integrative small-world connective properties are lost in cases of schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease. In one fascinating study researchers converted brain scans into music and were able to identify more erratic fluctuations in the ‘music’ of schizophrenic patients than in healthy volunteers.

The human mind-body organism

Imagine discovering a treatment that reliably improves symptoms by between 25 and 50 percent across a wide variety of serious diseases affecting hundreds of millions of patients worldwide, with no adverse side-effects and costing almost nothing to produce. You might think you have a blockbuster on your hands, but don’t rush to the patent office. Such a treatment does exist, but thankfully it can’t be patented. It’s called the placebo effect.

Placebos can significantly reduce pain, improve symptoms of asthma and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), activate the immune system and enhance motor coordination in Parkinson’s patients, among other accomplishments. Astonishingly, placebos can work even if patients know they’re not the ‘real thing’. In one trial IBS sufferers were given inert drugs in bottles labelled PLACEBO PILLS, and still reported twice as much symptom relief as the group that received no treatment. How do they do it?

Placebos work through both changing a patient’s experience of their symptoms and, remarkably, alleviating the symptoms themselves. They do this primarily through the body’s autonomic nervous system, which regulates functions such as blood pressure, gastric motility and pulmonary action. Another way of putting it is that placebos are the work of our body’s animate intelligence – our ancient mammalian systems that evolved over hundreds of millions of years. One researcher has called this deep intelligence our ‘health governor’ and has shown that we share it with other mammals. For example, if a hamster is injected with bacteria that make it sick, it will launch a full-blown immune response during the summer, when it can rely on access to more nutrition, but maintains a low-level response in the winter, when it has to be more careful about resources.

Placebos demonstrate clearly what Chinese and Ayurvedic medicine take for granted but has been mostly ignored by Western medicine: there is no essential separation between mind and body in the integrated human organism. The placebo acts like a bridge between a person’s conceptual and animate consciousness. It works when a patient attributes a particular meaning to an intervention and channels the significance through his animate intelligence, which reacts accordingly. For this reason, some researchers suggest we should replace the word placebo with the term therapeutic meaning response, to more accurately describe how mind, body and culture interact in healing.

While placebos offer the most striking evidence of how the mind affects the body, they’re certainly not the only way. In fact, the impact our mindset has on the body may be one of the most significant factors in leading a long and healthy life. It’s been estimated, for example, that 90 percent of heart disease cases could be prevented by changes in lifestyle and attitude. While we’re all aware of the effect diet and exercise have on our bodies, what is less well known is how powerfully emotional states impact our health. If you have a good network of friends, that in itself can be a lifesaver: one study showed that adults with more social connections were half as likely to die from disease over a nine-year period as those who were more solitary.

A sense of optimism also plays a significant role in health outcomes – a bit like a universal placebo for life in general, causing people with more upbeat emotions to live longer, healthier lives. One study following heart attack survivors showed that optimism was a better predictor of avoiding a second heart attack than any other factor. Other researchers squirted rhinovirus into people’s noses and discovered that pessimists were twice as likely to develop a cold as optimists. In another study, a month after a group of office cleaners were told that physical work was good for their health, their average blood pressure dropped from elevated to normal.

Just as placebos act as a therapeutic meaning response, so having a more generalized sense of meaning and purpose in life has a powerfully positive effect on health. In a classic study, elderly nursing-home residents who were given responsibility to care for a plant showed significant improvements in alertness, happiness and activity levels. In Japan, cardiovascular patients who lacked ikigai, which means ‘having something worth living for’, were found to have a mortality rate 60 percent higher than those who had it.

An important way in which emotional state affects health is through its impact on telomeres, which are protective caps at the end of the DNA strands that make up our chromosomes, like the plastic ends that prevent shoelaces from fraying. Every time a cell divides, the telomeres shorten, and as they shorten, the chromosomes they produce get more frayed, something that has been linked with aging and cancer. Researchers have discovered that stress increases the rate at which telomeres fray. By reducing the level of internal stress, states such as optimism and a sense of purpose most likely help to keep our telomeres longer, thus reducing cellular wear and tear.

We’ve seen that reciprocal causality is a defining element of integrated, self-organizing systems – the system as a whole affects the parts, while the parts affect the whole. The relationship between mind and body is similarly reciprocal. While the mind affects the body, different aspects of the body are simultaneously affecting the mind. Since these recursive flows can lead to either upward or downward self-reinforcing spirals of emotional and physical health, managing them skillfully is clearly of the greatest importance.

The vagus nerve, which is a core component of the autonomic nervous system, has been found to play a crucial role. People whose vagal activity is more responsive to changes – known as high vagal tone – tend to be more sociable, empathic, expressive and cheerful. Not surprisingly, these fortunate people are highly valued as friends and tend to experience greater well-being.

Through intentional practice, we can learn to both improve vagal tone and, more generally, support our internal emotional experience. Bodily postures that express emotional states have been found to induce those states when they’re consciously adopted. For example, a head tilting upward elicits pride; hunching induces depressed feelings, and when a person smiles, this increases their enjoyment. Over fifty million people have viewed social psychologist Amy Cuddy’s TED talk that describes how an expansive ‘power posture’ can make you feel more powerful.

At a deeper level, we can follow Mencius’s wise advice and intentionally cultivate a sustained state of well-being as an integrated mind–body organism. Any kind of regular, vigorous exercise is beneficial for the body, but some practices are particularly valuable for cultivating a more robust connection between the mind and body. One that has become popular worldwide is yoga, a word that originally meant ‘to yoke’, and which was developed in ancient times as a technique to unite mind and body into a cohesive whole. Even though the exercises taught in a modern yoga studio often bear little resemblance to the ancient practice, which emphasized meditation and breathing techniques, they can still help to build mind–body connections for people raised in a dominant culture that mistakenly identifies the conceptualizing mind as the sole locus of identity.

Dancing and drumming are other modalities that, besides being enjoyable in themselves, have multiple health benefits. Drumming has been found in various studies to reduce stress, blood pressure and pain, by triggering endorphin release in the body, reducing cortisol and activating the immune system. Dancing has similar effects, along with improving motor coordination and enhancing social interaction. Both activities are deeply integrative, requiring a person’s conceptual, animate and social intelligences to engage and synchronize with each other, leading to the more harmonious inner states that the early Chinese sages identified as essential for good health.

Some of the most valuable integrative practices, still unfamiliar to many in the West, were first developed thousands of years ago in China. Known today as qigong (pronounced chee-gong) and tai chi, they may appear exotic and mysterious to Westerners who encounter them. A typical image that comes to mind is that of elderly Chinese practitioners in a park, dressed in white, moving meditatively and gracefully in unison. They are practicing tai chi, which only emerged in its current form in the nineteenth century, but is based on the same deep-rooted lineage as traditional Chinese medicine. Qigong, a more general term that means ‘skillful management of qi’, has a wide variety of forms.

Both sets of practices, based on the conception of a human being as an integrated mind–body organism, are designed to cultivate one’s internal energetic and physiological systems. Using a series of postures and movements, breathing techniques and meditation, a practitioner learns to become conscious of her inner energetic flows, gradually strengthening the neural pathways between conscious attention and those parts of animate consciousness that normally remain below the level of awareness. As a practitioner learns to attune with the ebbs and flow of her inner physiology, her lived experience can become more integrated and healthful. The intentional harmonious and fluid motions of qigong send signals of well-being to the body’s autonomic nervous system, which likely respond by initiating activation of endorphins and inhibition of stress hormones such as cortisol.

Eudaimonia: fulfilling your true nature

In addition to health and longevity, the world’s great wisdom traditions have identified another deeper quality that’s essential to a life of sustained flourishing. For someone whose way of living is infused with this quality, it’s possible to undergo serious tribulations, including illness, bereavement or other misfortunes, and still somehow experience a life of true well-being.

In Buddhism this experience of enduring happiness is known as sukha. More well known to those in the West is the key Buddhist concept of dukkha: the broad array of afflictive experiences that arise from the separation of ‘I’ and the ‘self ’, including feelings of unease, worry and grasping. We can situate sukha toward the opposite end of the spectrum of human experience: a deep sense of lasting well-being that underlies and infuses all emotional states. Consistent with the traditional Chinese view of harmony, a life of sukha doesn’t mean rejecting or transcending emotions – rather, it fully embraces every instance of emotional pain and pleasure that arises. If we consider human consciousness as a series of fractal layers, this becomes easier to understand: while experiencing the moment-to-moment fluctuations of daily life at one level, we can meet all the hubbub at a deeper level with a spacious sense of abiding equanimity.

While early Buddhist practitioners were developing this notion of sukha, thousands of miles to the west, in ancient Greece, Aristotle was formulating his own understanding of what it means to authentically live the good life. Aristotle made a crucial distinction between two forms of happiness: hedonia and eudaimonia. Hedonia, as its name implies, refers to transient states of happiness that arise from pleasurable stimuli. It has a much broader meaning, though, than the modern word hedonism. It includes every kind of sensual pleasure, such as tastes and sounds, and also the fleeting but less tangible kind of pleasures that we get from being praised, feeling powerful or admired, acquiring material goods or feeling financially secure.

Eudaimonia, on the other hand, refers to the state arising from fulfilling one’s true nature. Do you remember how Aristotle proposed that every living being has an intrinsic purpose? When a human being is striving to achieve his full potentiality, and flourishing in his unique way, that is the state that Aristotle called eudaimonia. Living according to the principle of eudaimonia, he taught, was the source of sustained well-being. For centuries the philosophical schools that dominated the ancient Greco-Roman world, such as Stoicism and Epicureanism, based their teachings on the core concept of eudaimonia, differing only in their interpretations of what it actually meant to live one’s life in the best possible way.

With the rise of Christianity, the classical distinction between eudaimonia and hedonia was mostly forgotten in Western culture. However, in recent decades there has been a resurgence of interest in Aristotle’s definition of the good life, primarily as a result of the rising popularity of a school of thought known as positive psychology. Just as the conventional Western view of health as a lack of disease is gradually being supplanted by a more integrative perspective, so in the field of psychology there has been a new emphasis on the positive attributes of well-being rather than merely trying to fix a patient’s psychological problems.

Positive psychology examines the characteristic traits and behaviors that undergird a life of sustained well-being. Leading researchers in the field, inspired by Aristotle, direct their attention on the attributes necessary to achieve the deeper, more enduring state of eudaimonia. It’s important to note that focusing on eudaimonia doesn’t mean rejecting hedonic pleasures. There is nothing wrong with pursuing the joys of friendship, feeling proud of your accomplishments or wanting to be financially secure. In fact, it’s very likely that pursuing authentic flourishing as a human being will lead to many of these hedonic delights. Problems arise, however, when people make the mistake of believing hedonic states will give them a deeper sense of enduring well-being. As Buddhist teachers have pointed out for millennia, these states are transient, and desiring them, grasping at them when they’re present, and longing for them when they’ve passed, are major sources of dukkha. Focusing attention, however, on recognizing and fulfilling your true nature can allow you to flourish even in the face of adversity.

An excerpt from The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Spirituality to Find Our Place in the Universe (Profile Books, 2021).

Jeremy Lent , described by Guardian journalist George Monbiot as “one of the greatest thinkers of our age,” is an author and speaker whose work investigates the underlying causes of our civilization’s existential crisis, and explores pathways toward a life-affirming future. Read more about his work at: https://www.jeremylent.com/