What Is Medicine?
Before the more recent reference to tinctures and therapies, the term ‘medicine’ meant Oneness. People’s such as the Hopi, ancient Egyptians, Buddhists, alchemists and others, saw medicine as more than a cure for what ails us. For them, medicine was a form of living wisdom, a full and vital experience of our wholeness. For them, to be healed was to be whole, to see oneself not as parts – higher and ego, physical and emotional – but inseparable and indivisible.
They built a way of life around their one-self, and practiced their faith within the dance of doing and being; simultaneously self and other, sister and mother, spirit and form. Acting as one point in a realisation beyond time-space, where all that is celebrates the spectrum of oneness.
Believing there was a way of seeing the world more clearly and being guided by this clarity, each culture developed a story to behold the sacred wisdom of not knowing. In time this story became a path, a map, and a source of sustenance. Some spoke of the wheel, others made sacred the journey, but all shared their picture of ‘what is’ in the language Spirit revealed.
Ever so slight revisions of the story appeared in each re-telling. Religious doctrine underwent exegesis, and conquered lands re-negotiated the terms of their design. From the first inkling of oneness within a society to the first re-telling of its wonder, a world incessantly changing left nothing unchanged to pass from one moment into the next… and so to speak of origin and authenticity is to ask a rainbow which colour it prefers.
Medicine and wholeness have more recently been separated out from the way we operate, and made into a belief system that promises to solve our problems. As free agents of modern culture, we are encouraged to pick through the various wisdoms available to us and re-appropriate these living maps into a montage of personal principles. We use these principles to help us achieve a means to an end such as a global shift or the raising of consciousness. And while these goals feel worthwhile, it is important to remember that medicine is not about conquering challenges and curing disease. It’s about living in zero point awareness where Spirit is yet to reveal the nature of this moment. It’s about surrender to the holiness of all that is, simultaneously operating as the I and the I Am. And it’s about being an inseparable and indivisible self, a self without edges or boundaries (or exceptions).
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