I have perhaps used the word “adaptive” too loosely here and throughout this section. It is worth stating clearly that in a healthy biological system, a stress placed upon a system that is constructed to accommodate that stress (for example, the cartilage in a knee joint is constructed for walking and can accommodate running), the system will up-regulate its structure to maintain its function.
Summary of common chronic conditions
These cause delay by reversing feedback from negative to positive and so impose further delay to permit a return of the matrices of the terrain to negative feedback, which constitutes recovery.
1. Brook No Resistance
• Neuropathic Pain with or without discernible lesion
• Severe Abdominal Pain
• Asthma
• Migraine and Cluster Headaches
• Gout
• Diarrhoea and Vomiting
• Vertigo
• Severe Depression
2. Permit some Resistance (depending upon stoicism of patient)
• Tension and toxic Headaches
• Nausea and Dizziness
• Raynaud's Phenomenon
• Mild to Moderate Reactive Depression
• Cramp
Footnote to Section 3: adaptive capacity is not a heritable trait
Adaptation in the sense used throughout this book relates only to the health of the individual over a lifetime and reflects the capacity of the terrain. The terrain is an outcome of the development of an individual, an expression of an endocrine and metabolic disposition set in motion soon after conception. The embryo and foetus are impelled upon their developmental trajectory during gestation in negotiation with the terrain and current state of the mother but equipped with features obtained from the egg constructed during the grandmother's gestation of her daughter. In this loose sense, generational effects radiate throughout the associated terrains and are mostly variations in the response of individuals to environmental cues, but they are not heritable in the genetic sense.
I hope that the distinction between adaptation in the evolutionary sense and adaptive capacity as a measure of Poise will become clearer in The Structure of the Terrain in Section 5. Although this disclaimer is genuine and I am not proposing a reversion to a Lamarckian theory of heritable adaptation, I suspect that the absolute distinction between genes and the environment, between evolution by natural selection and the means whereby the terrain obtains the resources to manage daily life will not survive long into the future canon of biological science. Besides, good energy management and adaptation in the present may confer reproductive advantages.
There is no intentionality in the genome: natural selection has no future but the terrain does construct plans which go some way to defining our personality (to be discussed in Section 14). Unlike natural selection, capacitance has a future in view.
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20 Chambers Dictionary 9th Edn. 2003.
21 I have attempted to summarise and tabulate these ideas at the end of this section.
22 Traditional Humoral Theories tend also to favour cycles over hierarchies but they do tend to emphasise the organs at the expense of the unseen matrices in solution, which they could only infer or attribute non–material qualities. Of course they remained completely unseen until the development of the analytic techniques of modern chemistry.
23 Founder of the School of Individual Psychology, a paradoxical title because he meant it to mean “holistic” rather than individualistic: he was a socialist who considered the psychology of external relations every much as that of internal process.
24 Born 1905, died 1997, he may not be a household name but his Ein Psychologe erlebt das Konzentrationslager (published in English as: Man's Search for Meaning) is said to have sold 12 million copies since its publication in 1946.
25 I do not at all mean what is commonly meant by “mind” in humans in the sense of a conscious operator. Even this apparent “self” can at least in part be construed as the outcome of a stack of minds at cellular and tissular levels operating in obligatory concert.
26 I envy the rhetorical strength of the explanation given by the composer Pierre Boulez about his work Répons which leads me to think that talking about music may reflect well on this difficult discussion about health.
27 Loops of stimulus and response (converting positive feedback loops to negative ones reduces pain and distress).
28 A long way down the line, in evolutionary and physiological terms, the binary states of predator and prey structure our percepts and responses. See: Parallel Worlds at the start of Section Four.
29 Vicious cycles occur when opposite behaviours produce the same result. For example, in the case of gout, eating too much is as bad as fasting or eating too little; too much exercise exacerbates gout just as much as none.
30 Later termed Endobiogénie, Endobiogenics in English with Endobiogeny preferred by Dr Hedayat.
31 I use the word as shorthand for the collective automatic response and not at all some kind of unseen director.
32 The word ‘gentle’ refers to the capacity to induce change gradually and broadly so that abrupt change is averted. Pharmaceutical agents deliberately induce disruptive stress; this may be desirable in an emergency but usually put a greater load on the recovery of capacitance. Innocuous does not here mean ineffective.
33 In binary random systems, a flipped coin is said to be equally likely to end up heads or tails; the point about asymmetry is that a head is not symmetric with a tail.
34 It is of course a long way to human consciousness but even at lower levels of organisation, I suggest that in this third pole, the experience of that state of the mindedness emerges.
35 Developed further in Barker 2011, From Solstice to Equinox and Back Again: The influence of the midpoint on human health and the use of plants to modify such effects. See also Seasons of Life, Foster & Kreitzman 2009.
36 The current state of knowledge suggests that we do not construct a pattern recogniser de novo, but rather that structures within are attuned to our perceptual and processing organs in a manner analogous to Chomsky's Universal Grammar, but much more generic and fundamental.
37 Not a pretty word. Used by chronobiologists to avoid the ambiguity of terms such daily, dian and diel to indicate one complete cycle of photophase and scotophase.
SECTION FOUR
Poise as an ecological approach to health
Parallel worlds
We live simultaneously in two contrasting worlds but inhabit only one: we oscillate between them as if they were one. On the one hand we are experimenters and conduct trials in the world to see which ones work or most make sense. In this mode, we devise rules of thumb and engender a repertoire of empirical truths and observations from which we construct the routines of our daily lives. At the same time we may entertain wholesale explanations about the mystery of consciousness and the world it perceives, and may even be