Fresh Perspectives

A man stuck pins in me today. I’d never had acupuncture before, so it was a new experience. I didn’t go to remedy a specific pain. I wanted to be balanced, and that’s going to take a while. It seems I’m a complicated being. He explained some of the background of acupuncture to me first. As he spoke, I thought about what I know of Jin Shin and Reiki and quantum physics. I thought about Western medicine and modern education. How much more would we understand if we stopped clinging to single traditional viewpoints and began to try to synthesize the whole of human knowledge—including the “weird” stuff? Knowing is scary because with understanding comes responsibility—which may be one reason people occasionally get the urge to burn libraries and museums and erase knowledge. We want control, but we dislike responsibility.

We compartmentalize information according to how it was gathered. I believe in the scientific method, but it’s not the only way to see. It doesn’t work well with forces that are not obviously physical and can’t be readily controlled. Quantum reality lies beyond common sense. The doctor spoke about the Taoists and how they learned by observation. Observation is a key element of the scientific method, as is measurement. But not everything that is can be measured—such as love or beauty or thought. We pretend we can measure them, but we have to fudge definitions to squeeze them into our measurements. Even time slips by, defying reliability that would work at all altitudes and in all situations. When we’re being honest, we admit our understanding of reality is small and flawed at best. We’re only just realizing that when we disregard ancient teachings, we’re throwing out information that might inform our future. How much learning does humankind struggle to achieve over and over again because it keeps getting lost or destroyed?

An aspect of the problem which is not at all insignificant is that we, as humans, are an inextricable part of whatever we’re observing. Our viewpoint changes what we observe, and I’m not talking in mystical terms right now. We perceive and understand with our tools—our brain, senses, learning. We perceive what we agree to perceive. Do we have a name for it? That helps. Does it fit with what we think we know? No? Then we fumble it away or stomp it to death. We may never know it—whatever “it” was—existed.

Meridians of energy in your body. Connections between your mind and your cells. The soul. An afterlife. Remote viewing. We cringe at the many suggestions of things that don’t jibe with concrete thinking. Many call anything based on forces that to-date seem to be non-physical “religion”—as in, “I don’t do acupuncture because I don’t believe in that religion.” Religions have rules and boundaries. Anything beyond might be…evil? Even love (such as homosexual love) is sometimes rejected as lying too far from the rules. And anything that comes from a culture designated as foreign is automatically suspect.

My trying acupuncture isn’t much of a risk considering the practice is thousands of years old and millions of patients have sworn it works. They could all be duped, of course. We can see how easy it is to get humans to reject their honest perceptions. But I’m excited to gain this new view of what’s going on in my body which relates to what’s going on in my mind which relates to what’s going on in my world. I’m not afraid. I want to know.