This speech was originally delivered at the Transforming the Mind Conference, held in Portland, Oregon, in March 15th, 2008 at the National College of Natural Medicine (NCNM). The ambiance at its oration was inspiring, so much so, that NCNM’s president, Dr. David Schleich was asked to share it for a wider audience to view. That’s you, the Helfgott Blog crew, thanks for reading. Please note that this speech will be delivered in two acts.
We have been expecting you for quite some time. We’re very glad you’re here. Dr. Zwickey and her amazing team at Helfgott imagined a long time ago your being here at this moment. They could see you a long time ago this morning and they knew that you would be interested to think for a day or so about what a transforming mind might look like when it lingers among the ideas, images, words, and frameworks of medicine, their medicine, a medicine … medicine. They knew a long time ago that such matters of mind would resonate in this Great Hall, in this modest, great school.
“Transforming the Mind: consciousness in medicine”, they called it, also a long time ago, projecting ahead to today, and tomorrow, starting from their perspectives, then.
Today and tomorrow, as a result, we will explore the emerging paradigms uniting science, consciousness, and healing. Tall order that: letting notions of emerging paradigms meander in the fuss and rattle of our busy, productive minds, uniting complex thoughts. Meander is likely the wrong word. Such thoughts, in the form of images or words (which, indeed?) are more likely to be ricocheting among science, consciousness and healing than settling into nifty patterns yearning for order, neat and tidy for a proceedings report.
What can we mean by such a prescription for a conference beginning on a Saturday in the fourth month of the eighth year of the 21st century, whatever those particular co-ordinates may mean here in the Pacific Northwest, in America, in the spring, at this continent’s oldest college of natural medicine on Porter Street, in this room where there are a gazillion ghosts of ideas, theories, suggestions, therapies, modalities, systems?
Let’s begin somewhere to figure out what transforming the mind in the context of consciousness in medicine could mean to us so soon after breakfast. Since I’ve got the microphone, why don’t we begin with what’s behind my eyes, looking out, eager to travel from in there to out there, from inside my experience and consciousness, out, away from me, to you, and then, as I observe your reactions, back to me.
What’s in there? What montage of filaments and leitmotifs floating around all those synapses comes into focus? Can you imagine the mess in my head?
First of all, my specialty is medical history. From that landscape, there are all kinds of snippets of books and factoids funnelling at this second, coming from five decades of reading this and that, listening, speaking, and writing. Where did those ideas come from? What streets did I go down to find them? What landscapes influenced what I found?
Which streets were they? Hawthorne here in Portland; the Ramblas in Barcelona; the Boulevard of the Great Patriotic War in Leningrad; Flinders Street in Melbourne. Yonge Street in Toronto. OK, when I leave those streets and go inside, there are doors in the way. Maybe you can see and hear opening or closing some of those doors as I begin to speak about what’s inside. For example, I opened the door one morning of my small cabin at Tullybeg Beach in Connemara in Western Ireland. Right now I can see the Eastern Atlantic which is also the Western Sea of Ireland crashing into the rocks just below the promontory. It’s mid day and I am sitting on those eroded sedimentary couches at the beach and I am aware suddenly behind me, gliding down the wet grass of the dark green hill a figure in a black cloak. It is a woman; there is her dark, thick Botticellian hair moments later as she passes directly by, heading north, a furtive glance, ruby cheeks. I’m in my early twenties and so I am smitten. And behind my eyes I see, on a rocky beach four years later on South Island, New Zealand, near Dunedin, descending another dark green hill, this same figure, in a black cloak. Once again thick Botticellian black hair. She walks past me. A sliver of smile on her face. The yearning in me to connect the Irish idea of a woman with that New Zealand ghost shaped a romantic notion in me that my beloved would land some day, likely walking down a dark green hill. It turns out she came into my view from a rich valley in Central Europe instead. But, she had Botticellian hair.
What appeals to us most powerfully in these stored images, these stored sensations, probably is the unexpected; but that which might be random is connected by us somehow to all the rest.
I love that literature helps us connect the prose and passion of life; I love that literature teaches us about the possibility of connection. Only connect the prose and passion, the English novelist, E. M. Forster, said. You know, when the mood of a book stays afloat with the mood of a personal memory; say like the glimpse of darkness when Hamlet rambles or Lear rages, the leap into dazzling disquisition of Macbeth, or the Fool’s moment of surreal precision; perhaps the gentle, stabilizing loblogic of the well meaning Dunce in Twelfth Night who reminds us at the weirdest moment long after we read him into our consciousness that his presence in our lives as a memory was an idea in Shakespeare’s head, a memory in his very viscera, the whole continuum like a lifelong reading of the cross-hatch of love, happiness, madness, stupidity, anguish and confusion that frames our lives. We want characters in literature and people in our lives and moments in both to lay out simply and beautifully how it is, this life of ours.
…to be continued…!