The 9 Petalled Flower Of Peace: Petal 1 - Healing

The document is couched in the terms of small vows; vows are an important part of ancient spiritual cultures; to give one’s word to something is an indication of giving certain spiritual intent and was regarded as having legal force in ancient traditions; in India, among druids, among the Germanic and Anglo Saxon people, among Iranians and Arabs, Hebrews etc. Ones word is, or ought to be, ones bond. By making a vow, it is something we individually can actively do, and instead of waiting for the political leaders of the world to “make peace" we can begin to take the peacemaking process into our own hands. By following all or some or most of the vows contained in our Jaipur declaration, we can all actively hasten the eventual redrawing of the age of truth and peace on planet earth (Satyuga).

This may seem obvious but it needs spelling out. Many illnesses are caused by us ourselves, through adopting unhealthy diet, consumption, lifestyles etc. Much violence is actually self-violence, including mental violence based on self-doubt, self-recrimination etc. Why? Perhaps deep down feelings of guilt nurture patterns of self-harming behaviour. In the West, and elsewhere, there have been outbreaks of strange self-harming incidents, when teenage girls and boys (usually girls) physically stab knives and other sharp implements into their arms and legs. This behaviour had an outbreak in Hong Kong in 1994 (see Davies, James Cracked: why psychiatry is doing more harm than good (Icon Books, 2013) caused in some way by copy-cat behaviour. Humans tend to like mirroring each other, so these self-harming behaviours can spread like wild fire; but so too can their opposite - not self-harming! Some religious practices also involve self harming, like extreme mortification by Christian monks, or by Shiias re-enacting the martyrdom of their Imams at Karbala etc. While yoga emphasises it is healthy to seek to transcend the physical limitations of the body, one can carry this to extremes; there is a difference between a healthy asceticism and extreme self-mortification. The path to planetary nonviolence cannot go by way of doing violence to the self.

Everyone has a slightly different interpretation of this, depending on culture and background etc. For some this will mean vegetarianism, while for others, their regimen may not be suited to an exclusively vegetarian diet. Common sense should prevail

This should be obvious, but sadly some medical practitioners do not live up the Hippocratic Oath, and sometimes put the profit of the pharmaceutical giants above their duty to healing their patients. In extremely dark times, such as in Nazi Germany, some doctors (like Mengele in Auschwitz) experimented on camp inmates and caused horrible sufferings. Some microbiologists have been misusing their medical knowledge to produce biological and chemical weapons which can cause untold damage to human beings and to the environment. We call for all this type of work to stop.

There has been a gradual closing down of thinking in medical circles in the past years, as the prevailing paradigm of materialistic medical science has come to hold sway over all healing regimens, at least in advanced industrialised countries. New legislation has been passed under the aegis of the European Union outlawing the ancient and respected practice of herbal medicine. The influence of the pharmaceutical companies on people’s right to everything, affordable, non-invasive health care is a problem. In Brazil, a project called Living Pharmacies has drawn on indigenous medical knowledge from Amazonian Indian cultures and found that most diseases can be treated using native plants, thus not requiring expensive importation of pharmaceutical medicines, which are mostly synthesised from plant compounds anyway. In India, the Ayurvedic medical system is an ancient and honourable practice which heals people by treating the whole person. Chinese medicine does the same. Indigenous European medicine likewise had this spiritual aspect, starting in Ancient Greece where healing was under the God Apollo. The pharmaceutical companies have been proved to be falsifying data, suppressing counter-evidence of efficacy, and suppressing data of negative side effects of their medications. See Davies, James Cracked: why psychiatry is doing more harm than good (Icon Books, 2013 who gives detailed and substantial evidence that this is going on with the manufacture and sale of drugs for treating mental illness; it has been proven that on many occasions, these expensive drugs work no better than placebos, but this evidence is being systematically suppressed and hidden from the public.

This is the crucial point - all previous civilisations and cultures have recognised that healing, medicine, area sacred arts and that to fully treat and heal someone you have to have a paradigm that extends beyond the merely physical symptoms; the person’s outlook, mental views, and will-to-live all have to be harnessed and engaged. Jain, Buddhist, Hindu, Christian, Jewish, Muslim and all indigenous spiritual systems have always recognised this - but today’s so called scientific medicine has largely turned it back on these facts, thus, surprise surprise, while hospital bills and spending on health services sky rocket, to pay the big pharmaceutical companies, people are still getting sicker. Disease means literally not being at ease. And illness is a great source of violence to a human being. The kink between healing and peace is ancient, and many famous philosophers have also been medical doctors. Medical professionals around the world have long pointed out that nuclear war, or a third world war, would produce so many victims of radiation sickness, that it would overwhelm the world’s medical facilities. The Red Cross and the World Health Organisation have given evidence to the International Court of Justice in its finding against the legality of nuclear weapons, that given these facts, such weapons should be banned by international treaty. It was the medical doctors involved with International Physicians Against Nuclear War who persuaded Gorbachev to go ahead and agree to end the confrontation of the cold war nuclear arms race. IPPNW later received the Nobel peace prize. The greatest change to medical doctors worldwide ought to be to end the arms race, to see universal and complete nuclear disarmament, along with other weapons of mass destruction, and to see peace and nonviolence reasserted as the fundamental law of human nature. S international coordinator of Philosopher for Peace, I have always likened our own work to that of healing a global body politic which is suffering from various illnesses, delusions, illusions, phobias and racism, extreme nationalism, greed, jealousy, envy, ignorance, fear, arrogance, hubris, loss of memory, lack of attention span, gender violence etc.

The figures of mental illness are frightening, as statistics show that mental illness is increasing worldwide. 1 in 4 people in the UK and USA will develop a mental illness in any given year, in the UK and USA alone. But what model are we using to treat people’s mental illnesses? If we are using a purely scientific medical model, and giving people pharmaceutical drugs, it is not sufficient to heal them long term. At best, it simply allays the symptoms. What is needed for healing is a deeper process. There is a Spirituality working group that meets as part of the Royal Society of Psychiatrists in the UK. Dr Carl Jung always argued one has to treat the whole person, and accept at face value some of the strange phenomena of mental illness (voice hearing etc.) - (see Jung listed in the bibliography). Dr R. Laing of Glasgow likewise argued that psychiatry needs to empower people to fall back in love with life, and to rebuild the broken fabrics of their families and to find caring circles of community where their symptoms can be alleviated. The misuse of psychiatric diagnosis for social control is well documented, in Nazi Germany and Stalinist USSR, and in Maoist China or Pol Pot’s Cambodia.

This is a difficult one, as much of modern medical knowledge is based on experimentation with animals - yet much of this experimentation is now no longer needed and modern scientific methods have reached a place where actual animals no longer need to be killed, dissected etc. To achieve a non-violent planet, we must end this merciless war on animals for medical use, and phase it out, so that other methods of conducting basic medical research can be discovered and implemented.

This is a difficult one, as much of modern medical knowledge is based on experimentation with animals - yet much of this experimentation is now no longer needed and modern scientific methods have reached a place where actual animals no longer need to be killed, dissected etc. To achieve a non-violent planet, we must end this merciless war on animals for medical use, and phase it out, so that other methods of conducting basic medical research can be discovered and implemented.

This last vow sums up this entire petal’s concerns. There are a huge number of complementary and alternative treatment systems now being researched which are able to heal people effectively, in most cases, and also all kinds of subtle energy healing systems using essences, homeopathy, spiritual healing energy etc. All of which should be researched by scientists and medical researchers. Medical colleges and teaching hospitals should be drawing freely on this research instead of sticking exclusively to the materialistic paradigms of healing through expensive intervention. More emphasis on prevention early on should be given. People should be free to choose which healing system they wish to use, on their various health insurance or national health services that are available. Health is a basic human right and a key avenues leading to peace.