The Story of Life – Life, Love and Healing - The Essential Triad (Demo Version)

As I look back over my 50-odd years of work, It's clear that my life has provided me with an extraordinary set of experiences that have enabled me to study life and the healing process in a most profound and unique way. In a way that led me to help found an all-new approach to medicine, the holistic approach, that fully appreciates the central role of the mind-body axis, the effect of the mind on the body. And the role of thoughts, feelings, and emotions in producing health on one hand and sickness on the other. Today I'd like to share with you some of the most important and profound discoveries I have come upon in my 50 years of scientific study in my medical, psychological, and psychiatric practice. If you take the time to understand and embody these truths, you can absolutely change change your life, and you can use them as tools to heal your body and mind, as well as your relationships and your spirit, and to achieve health, wellness, success, and happiness. So if you are willing to give me a few minutes of your time, to simply be present with me for a few minutes, I can show you For instance, if I show you this picture and ask you to tell me quickly which of these three men is the tallest, you'll say the one on the far left, but you'll be wrong, because if you measure, you'll find they're all exactly the same height. The illusion here can be simply overcome by the use of logic and science. Or if I show you this picture and ask you if the horizontal lines are parallel to each other, You'll probably say no, but again, you will be wrong. These very primitive demonstrations reveal a very important principle, one that is key to healing and transformation of most of the issues and illnesses in our everyday lives, individually as well as in our society as a whole. What appears to be so clearly true is actually false, and you end up making a poor choice because you are seeing only a small part of the whole system you are dealing with. My father once told me a story about a certain very high-fashion woman who was looking for the perfect hat to wear with her special dress to the annual ball. But try as they might, none of the hat designers could come up with one that looked good enough to her. Finally, she went to the most famous fashion designer in all of New York City. He looked at her and at the dress for a long minute or two, and then went to a closet and came out with a long strip of ribbon. He twisted it and gathered it origami style and fastened it together with a couple of pins. She put it on, and voilà! The effect was beyond wonderful. "Perfect." "What do I owe you?" she asked excitedly. "$500," he replied. "What? $500 for 50 cents worth of ribbon?" Silently, he removed the hat from her head, pulled out the pins, and handed the ribbon to her. "Here," he said. "50 cents." Oops. You may recognize this as making the same point as the story of the fellow who killed the goose that laid the golden eggs, hoping assuming he could find the mechanism within and make it produce more than one golden egg a day. In other words, often knowing or having only pieces of the whole is not enough. You need to have them all and have them working together. Failing to see the subtle truths camouflaged in the big picture is the root of most of the disasters in our personal and collective lives, from the sinking of the Titanic to the Vietnam War, from the disaster of slavery to the global economic meltdown of 2008, from the catastrophe of Adolf Hitler to that of global climate change. If we were aware of the full picture, we could have avoided enormous suffering and death. Likewise, if you look back in your own life at some of the poor choices you've made in relationships, business, or self-care, how different your choices would have been had you seen the total picture and responded wisely. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. So I would like to invite you to look at the whole picture. My goal is to help you enlighten your awareness and develop a deeper understanding of how you can best meet the challenges in your life, whether they are physical mental, emotional, spiritual, or in relationships. And what I mean by looking at the whole picture is, although you may in the past have heard pieces of what I'm about to share with you, I'm going to ask you to understand it not only with your left brain, but also to experience it through visual images, to open to it through the sound of my voice and the sounds of music music and nature, and by using your mind and your imagination to feel it at the emotional level, to feel it in your soul, if you're able and willing to open yourself right now to the experience I'm about to share, to give yourself permission to realize that at this moment in time there's no other place you need to go Nothing that you have to do and no problem that you have to solve, and therefore you can relax and bring your awareness into the present moment. Originally, I was trained as a mathematician, scientist, and physician, but unlike so many of my contemporaries, I was interested in the phenomenon of healing, not just the techniques and technology of medical practice. What fascinated me and what I wanted to learn about was life and about people and how they could become more happy and healthy. I found that if I was going to understand the phenomenon of healing, I first needed to understand the phenomenon of life. After all, without life, healing has no meaning, and without healing, as you'll see, life could not have survived the harsh assaults of this environment. And looking at my own life, it has always been clear that everything really meaningful to me—my family, my pets, my friends—they all possess this amazing quality of life. But what is life? I decided I wanted to find out. What is this entity that comes in so many different varying forms, that is expressed in so many diverse and extraordinary ways. When you come into contact with it, you recognize expressions of life. You can feel it, right? But you can't actually see the life force itself, and you can't physically touch it. So how can we study and understand it? Perhaps the best approach is to begin by stepping back and taking a look at the source of the life force, at its beginnings, as far back as we are scientifically capable of seeing. And the best science I know of takes us back about 13.5 billion years ago to the time of the so-called Big Bang, the beginning of time and space as we know them. And the best of our knowledge tells us that in that first billionth of a second, the universe was a sea of undifferentiated plasma. That within the plasma, waves gradually formed, waves that condensed into elementary particles. And then hydrogen, and then gradually heavier and heavier elements that in turn slowly coalesced into nebulas and black holes, into stars and galaxies, including our own galaxy. That was about 9 billion years ago. And revolving around one of the minor middle-aged stars in that galaxy was planet Earth. And in those days, 5 billion years ago, this world was a hot, harsh, primitive, and very unforgiving place. It was a place of flaming volcanoes and boiling pools of lava. That gradually cooled and hardened, giving rise to a vast, naked world of bare minerals, gases, and waters. But nowhere was there any sign of life. Even the vast oceans were lifeless, yet they seethed with inorganic chemicals combining with each other through polarization and ionic bonding. Ionic bonds are the way atoms interact in a lifeless, inorganic world such as this was. Ionic bonds, such as those which occur when two atoms such as sodium and chlorine, for example, combine In this process, the chlorine atom takes an electron from a sodium atom in order to complete its outer ring and stabilize itself. This action, however, converts the chlorine into a highly negatively charged chlorine ion while converting the sodium atom into a positively charged ion since it now has one fewer electron than it has protons. In water, all these highly polarized ions then separate from each other and float around interacting with other charged ions, a situation not very conducive to the formation of the stable chemical compounds we associate with life. Justice in our daily lives Highly polarized attitudes do not produce lasting relationships. Then, into this bipolar world, along comes the carbon atom with a new idea. Instead of taking an electron from another element or having to lose one, carbon much prefers to share electrons with its neighbors. In this way, the outer rings from both atoms are completed, giving rise to their internal stability and balance, while at the same time not creating a highly polarized situation such as is characteristic of ionic bonds. These are called covalent bonds, and they bond carbon tightly to its neighbors. Pairs. The result: the possibility of much more stable compounds than were possible with ionized atoms. It was this new idea of covalently sharing electrons that made possible what we call organic chemistry, that led in turn to that otherwise highly unlikely phenomena we call living beings. This new sustainable kind of relationship made possible larger molecules containing hundreds and thousands of atoms. I call it the urge to merge, that energy or force that thus created giant protein molecules, including that very special kind of giant molecule the DNA spiral. And then, at some point, a group of these giant molecules decided to cling together and wrap a membrane around themselves, giving rise to the first living cell, a brand new entity on planet Earth, created by that same energy of holding together, that same urge to merge. This membrane was necessary for life to continue. The cell had to keep it intact so that the internal environment could continue to carry on the processes of life—respiration, ingestion, elimination, metabolism—and sustain homeostasis. Obviously, If the membrane were to be broken, it would have to be closed rather quickly, lest the essence of its life drain away. Thus, a membrane had to have a way to sustain this wholeness and repair itself if it is interrupted and restore its wholeness. This is the process we call healing, which is the strong tendency tendency to maintain wholeness and balance. So life and healing are very closely related and may actually be the same thing, or different expressions of the same deeper phenomenon, expressing the same essential urge to merge. And like this earliest cell, the very complicated bodies that we have still contain membranes, skin, and internal systems that must remain whole and that must heal from trauma back into wholeness. So when there's a trauma to the body, or trauma to a family or community or a nation for that matter, it gives rise to the need to quickly heal and become whole again. so that it does not lose that essence which maintains and sustains that life force. Another amazing thing about life is that it possesses the ability to reproduce itself, as that first cell did. And in time, as a result, soon there were lots of individual cells floating around. —each one slowly mutating and becoming more unique, each one going its own way and doing its own thing, having essentially no relationship to the other cells around it. Then, one fateful day, instead of separating, the daughter cells of a dividing cell felt the urge to remain together and to form function together, giving rise to the first multicellular organism, the first organism composed of individual cells functioning together as a whole. And again, we see that urge to merge at work, sustaining and healing the life force in action. You know this force. Can you feel it in your own desire to remain healthy and happy? In time, our scientific studies tell us, that same unifying force gradually gave rise to multicellular creatures of greater and greater complexity, with cellular specialization and the organization of subgroups of cells into organs and into organ systems, and evolving greater and greater diversity and intricacy. Creatures of great beauty and grace with remarkable abilities, and with their ever-increasing capability of action there developed higher levels of complexity and the need for a more complex system for coordinating the many organs and subsystems. So there arose the need for more complex information processing. For this special purpose, life invented the nervous system and the brain to sustain coordination. Harmonious action, and wholeness. In other words, we need a complex brain in order to tell the foot which way to carry the body so that the hand could reach the food that the eyes have seen. Complex nervous structures that could create neural networks that were up to the task needed to be evolved. They need to allow for fluidity of motion and the ability to function in the water with elegance and on land, and with refinements that allowed them to overcome gravity and rise gracefully, to soar effortlessly through the clouds. And at the center of it all acting invisibly, the fantastically intricate central nervous system ultimately responsible for maintaining balance, coherence, for sustaining wholeness and wellness. Can you imagine that this is simply another form of that same self-organizing principle principle that expressed itself as the covalence of organic bonds, an ever-evolving theme of wholeness and healing that plays within the nervous system like a beautiful melody, enabling the central nervous system to coordinate all the parts of the body and allow them to dance in rhythm with that melody, working through networks of cells, all communicating with each other chemically through neurotransmitter chemicals flowing across the synapses of neural networks, all in support of the sole function of having all parts work smoothly together, guided by a common purpose. Common purposes that might vary from From serving a tennis ball to throwing a pot, from playing a violin or dancing to surfing or doing a card trick or texting a friend. Imagine the job of coordinating all these parts so accurately and with such synchrony while still maintaining balance and coherency on the inside. Health. And as it evolved, the huge brain and nervous system of higher animals became able to express the urge towards sharing by sustaining wholeness and integrity in relationships with things and with others in the environment. Again, common purpose, oneness, and dynamic balance are crucial. Can you feel it at work here? That same force of holding together and functioning smoothly as a whole, that force that held together that first cell now holds together the members of the herd or family or community. In other words, that same force that creates health and wholeness within an individual is also responsible for creating health and whole relationships with respect to the environment and others in the environment. It is a sensitive and responsive connection, this innate drive towards merging into a sense of oneness and shared purpose. And we see it most vividly in the higher animals, and especially the mammals. We see it in the extraordinary way they are guided from within to support each other and to gather in families and herds for the common good. To join together and to act together with like-minded and like-bodied others, to serve, to protect, and to band together as communities. Just as the carbon atoms found a way to share and join together in stable structures, just as organic molecules merge to create life. Just as cells stayed together to create complex creatures, we see the same innate tendency among animals to form bonds to support common interest and function, interacting in a way that serves their shared values. And certainly nowhere is this life force more visible than in that incredible bond between mother and child. Have you felt this at some time in your life? Can you allow yourself to feel it right now? What we human beings call love is the emotional experience of this urge to merge, and the absolute joy of being with those you love How strongly can you allow yourself to feel it right now as you think of those you have loved? And one of the more dramatic expressions of this urge towards oneness, the drive to merge in love, to have and to hold, is that form of love that produces life, erotic love, passionate love for a person and the beauty within that person. And you know the power that attraction has. And you can also tap into your ability to feel filial love, the affectionate regard and friendship towards an equal. Agape to will the good of another. And storge, or empathy, the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. And compassion, all forms of this same fundamental force. Can you feel it? Take a moment and imagine And you can let yourself feel the love expressed in these images as you hold them in your mind. Feel it and notice where in your body you feel it. And can you even experience interspecies love? Different though they may be, all these relations Relationships, at their essence, have the goal of staying connected, of remaining together. And just as a damaged membrane requires healing, if the integrity of a couple or a group is broken, it must be repaired. Love: the healing process at the collective level. Love is the internal felt sense we experience. Healing is the phenomenon we observe in our physical, behavioral, mental, and emotional life. Love with a capital L—shared values, integration, inclusiveness, both/and, caring, intimacy, balance, harmony, empathy, compassion, wholeness, collective intelligence, and collective wisdom, and coherence. So give yourself permission to be right now in touch with your ability to feel love. And one surefire way to feel it more powerfully is to think of and mentally visualize someone who's precious to you and who you would hate to lose, or someone who makes you feel that special feeling inside— a child, a lover, a beloved parent, or even a favorite pet— and feel it. Right now. And whether this be someone from your present or your past, this feeling can be an anchor for you. And whenever you return to this thought, you will recreate within a most important awareness about your power to love, to heal, and to live. Yet beyond this exquisite beauty and magic As we are all aware, living is not unmitigated joy. There's pain in all our lives—physical pain and sickness, as well as emotional pain. There's the suffering we inflict upon ourselves and that inflicted by others, and there's the damage we do trying to escape our pain. And of course, there's violence at the collective level as well, and at the global level. But we can change all this. Next, we will examine these problems and the emergence of what I call the dark force and how, in all its forms, it can be confronted and transformed using the tools we are exploring. Learn more. Visit drmiller.com/Transformation. Thank you for spending this time with me.