Natural Health

I don’t think we have to assert any particular uniqueness of man, or separateness from the rest of nature, in order to find value in life. Personally, I find it more agreeable to think that man is a part of nature than that he is apart from or above it.

- Herbert Simon

To begin our exploration of natural health, in this section we will clarify what our health and natural health is and discuss the state of human health today, including the challenges you may face in improving your own health and quality of life over time.

We’d like to start this section by introducing you to the idea that abundant, natural health is both all around us and not all around us, everywhere and almost nowhere. This seeming contradiction is the riddle of natural health in our time, one which we will help you solve to create new health and growth in your life.

As we will discuss, great and obvious shortfalls in the health and well-being of people are everywhere today. At the same time, equally great and remarkably simple opportunities for new levels of health are around us too, but these opportunities are less obvious. In practice, our opportunities for natural health prove hard for people to see, and even to accept when we do see them, because of our history, culture, social environment, and conditioning and programming.
The word health is derived from older languages. In its present and earlier forms, health referred to wholeness or soundness of being. This definition hardly can come as a surprise. In one sense, we all know health, especially when we see or possess it. Almost universally, we acknowledge health as the foundation of life and human happiness, and often experience our health as a central concern in our lives.

But in another very real sense, most people don’t understand their health very well. Health, in its essence, is still a vague and uncertain topic to the majority of us, an area of our lives where perhaps none of us can claim mastery. It is even a subject that inspires fear and anxiety in many people. Health seemingly comes and goes in people’s lives, sometimes as an obvious consequence of our actions or with the process of aging, and at other times, seemingly as an unfortunate twist of fate. In this sense, our direct experience of health gives us very little insight into health’s origin and fundamental principles, let alone guidance on how our health is maintained and even enhanced over the course of our lives.

Adding to this lack of health understanding, from the perspective of natural health practitioners, is the fact that most people have remarkably low expectations for their health and even for the overall quality of their lives. If we discuss the central idea of health with others, most agree that our health is more than simply freedom from disease. People generally regard their health as a positive state of being, as a youthfulness or quality of strength and resiliency, but definitions deeper or more expansive than this are the exception.

In conversations with people on the topic of health, natural health practitioners often encounter strong objections and expressions of uncertainty when we advance broader and decidedly unfamiliar definitions of health: that our health is our fulfillment, that health is the realization of what and who we are as living beings, that our health is our optimization.

Very few people hold or can easily accept these new and expanded definitions of our health, without first being motivated to think about their health in new ways or given the opportunity to experience much higher levels of health themselves. But is this definition of health, if new and unfamiliar, really so far from the truth?

If we think about the health of other species, say human pets or livestock, we of course want them to be more than free of disease. We want them to be fully alive and actualized to the greatest extent possible. We want them to be big and strong, or cute and cuddly. We want them to be an idealization of who they are and what they are capable of becoming. Here, our implicit definition of health is nearly identical with the idea of health as optimization. Perhaps then, for people too, for the human species, health as optimization is a viable, and even accurate and desirable, definition of this central phenomenon in our lives.

As we will discuss in the HumanaNatura program, defining health in this expanded way has many advantages, even if it takes a bit of getting used to. Health as our optimization is certainly preferable to thinking of health as youthfulness, which incorrectly implies transientness and a lack of personal control or need for responsibility for our health over the course of our lives.

Health as optimization is a way of thinking of our health that is systematic and consistent with modern scientific understanding. It is an expansive and holistic idea of health, encompassing the physical, social, psychological, and even spiritual dimensions of our health. It is certainly a definition of health that implies and encourages action and new perspective for us all, and may have tremendous value for this reason alone.

For HumanaNatura, health in its fullest sense is the optimization of a living organism, or a community of organisms, including the human organism and human communities. Most of us are conditioned to think of people as apart from the natural order, and this definition of health may therefore seem new and uncertain. As we will see, it is way of thinking of our health that can have far-reaching implications in the way we approach both our health and our lives.

Still, most people don’t think of or pursue their health in this way, and almost certainly have not thought through the potential for and implications of this larger definition of their health. If people did think of health as the optimization of individual and collective life, as their idealization and that of their communities, and pursued their health with this idea in mind, our world today might be very different. Certainly, the principles of our health would be much better understood, and might even one of the most firmly established aspects of human knowledge.

In you reflect on our history, we have had many centuries of civilized life to think about and experiment with the enhancement of our health. By trial and error, we would have long ago worked out health’s essential attributes, if we had been so inclined or motivated to pursue this knowledge. Instead, our health today remains veiled and confusing to people, even in our modern times and in the face of the vast inroads modern scientists have made into the subject of our health.

For a variety of reasons, which we will discuss in the next section of the HumanaNatura program, the sustained pursuit of our health did not occur before our time. Over the many centuries of human civilization, across all cultures, people have frequently had very narrow ideas about our health, have generally been passive observers or recipients of their health, and at times have even questioned the importance of ensuring optimal health. Our health, so often, has been eclipsed by the pursuit and service of wealth and social power, preoccupations with religious and metaphysical ideals, and simple survival in the often difficult environments past civilizations have created for people.

As we work to clarify and expand our understanding of our natural health, and our potential for greater health and well-being in our lives, we immediately encounter the reality of health in the world today: our centuries-old misunderstanding and under-appreciation of health is still a substantial force in the world around us. Even with the dramatic advances in human science over the last hundred years, and with all of science’s profound insights into the world, our longstanding cultural ambivalence and confusion about our health is still with us in the modern world.

As you will learn through HumanaNatura’s natural health practices, this ambivalence and confusion greatly limits our individual and collective potential as people. For many in the HumanaNatura community, understanding our health and approaching it as our optimization, as a philosophical and practical challenge to improve and optimize the way we live, is the central issue and opportunity we now face as people today.

To explore this idea, consider our modern social environment. Even a modest examination of the state of health in the modern world demonstrates how the essential facts of our health remain locked in misunderstanding, neglect, and seemingly endless controversy. Our modern health reality is familiar to us all, and is fueled by the mass media each day. The topic of our health is marked by great amounts information (and misinformation) from diverse sources. It includes competing and contradictory ideas and theories of human health and well-being. It is slanted by commercialism and marred by exploitative practices. And, perhaps most importantly, discussions of our health frequently reveal our poor integration of important scientific findings that would greatly demystify and immediately work to promote our individual and collective health.

The unfortunate truth today is that we know far more about disease management than we do about the more fundamental topic of our health and health management, reflecting our enormous modern investment in disease treatment and the urgent attention our health receives once we have lost it. Imagine the potential of proactively focusing a portion of this investment on creating the essential conditions for individual and community health optimization. We might potentially eradicate a whole host of diseases and public health issues, and even greatly raise human living standards, in a single, self-sustaining, transformative effort.

If we continue our survey of today’s modern health landscape, we can also see that the subject of our health is still a matter of obvious indifference to many people. Almost everywhere we look, we see patently unhealthy behaviors. We see irrational and life-limiting pursuits practiced and even advocated by intelligent people. We see health-impairing, life-shortening, and even joy-reducing goals and priorities nearly everywhere we look.

From these observations, we can conclude that the essential nature of our health is still generally misunderstood by people today, and that the far-reaching impacts of diminished health on the quality and potential of our lives remains greatly under-appreciated. As we have suggested, the reasons for this misunderstanding and under-appreciation are rooted in our history, and in the structure and values of our society today, which are themselves products of history.

To test this conclusion for yourself, compare the major outlines of our history, or even the life histories of the people you know, against the ideal of a sustained quest for health, the committed pursuit of optimal personal and community vitality and well-being. From this perspective, you may see our current levels of health, and current priorities and attitudes about health, in a new light. Reaching this new perspective on health in our society, and becoming receptive to the idea of the potential for much greater levels of health, may take time but is the first milestone of the HumanaNatura program.

A related and critically-important idea about health optimization, which we will explore in greater depth in the HumanaNatura program, is that our generally poor health today limits our understanding and appreciation of our health potential itself, including our opportunity for personal transformation through our natural health. In other words, when it comes to the topic of our health, we literally do not know what we do not know. This may be true in many domains, but here our lack of understanding of the nature and principles of our health has enormous implications for us all, individually and collectively.

As a result of our reduced health and limited understanding of our potential for greater health, an enormous vicious cycle lies at the center of our individual and collective lives today. This limiting cycle works to bind both individuals and their communities to low levels of health, to reduced vitality and well-being, and even to narrow and more limited forms of human life. Historical inertia and traditional beliefs and behaviors still are dominating forces in most of our lives, and are much more powerful than we may realize, even with the advance of our science and understanding in recent years. In this most central aspect of our lives, our health, an ancient cycle of reduced human health, and of reduced human potential, remains unbroken for the majority of us.

HumanaNatura’s natural health program is intended to help you break this limiting cycle of diminished health in your own life, by serving as a bridge to new awareness of your health, its origins in nature, its key principles, and its transformative power to help you re-create your own life through new positive cycles of increasing health and well-being.

With these ideas in mind, we encourage you to imagine a new period of human development and new forms of human life for the future, ones where people cooperate for health and well-being, for their own development and optimization, rather than compete for wealth and power as in the past and today. In this time of emerging global abundance, this possibility may be closer than it first seems.