The major flaw in psychological theories is their search for the subconscious in cognition whereas it is clear that subconscious skills account for the most ancient human faculties: those that are shared with all other animals. (See: The Thalamic Mind, later in this section.) Intellectual consciousness—that so distinguishes us from them—dazzles us into missing its obvious source in our ancient sensorimotor capabilities. Intellect has evolved so recently that it could not possibly replace our psychic and social selves even though it has dominated cultural evolution by the series of technologies that it has engendered, transforming us from clever hominid to our current dominance.
Communication existed even before the emergence of multicellular life: the signal made no sense without a receptor as audience and cannot be relaunched without another signal as feedback. Rhythmicity and cycles in harmony (remember Kepler) dominate the solar system with the fluctuations and minor inexactitudes of planetary and lunar motions. Music and physics and biology are each studies in change and transformation. Monotony is repetition of the exact; repetition of the approximate, as reassuring as our heartbeat, is essential to music and so we are changed by themes retraced but remain ourselves. Time and Space are the great continuities against which all differentiations can occur. Music is not possible without silence.
Anatomy and physiology in time
Physiology describes the ever changing, rapid flux of the processes of life. Some of these processes are so rapid as to be, for practical purposes, unmeasureable. Anatomy describes the tangible product, the accumulated result of physiological processes generated over a relatively long period but which has settled into a state which alters little over relatively short periods; relative, that is, to our sensory perceptions. Of course, the physical body is not generated by a random flux but from the operation between the products of DNA upon the physical body of the gamete and upon the structures that succeed it. These reciprocal operations generate the complexity of our physiology. Our anatomy emerges like Aphrodite from the sea: our physiology remains in solution, below the waves, as it were. Maintaining this simile for a moment, land depends for its structure on the marine environment. Medicines operate only at sea and at the land margin: they may alter or diminish the size of the waves, but change the terrestrial excursion only as far as the weather does.
Time provides a crucial dimension here.
Resonance
The Terrain is a structure. The Matrix is a structure. We may speak of the structure of a thought. What is the point of calling each of them a structure if any arrangement can deserve the title? Surely if there is no persistence in biological time, there is no point in calling any arrangement a structure. It is reasonable to call the Parthenon in Athens a structure because of its persistence through more than one lifetime, but a thought disappears as soon as a person no longer thinks that thought and even when memory is trawled to recover that thought, evidence from recent neurology suggests strongly that we reconstruct that thought. This reconstruction must have a template, however approximate to the original it might be, to work from. False memories are known to be capable of construction. If not, it would be difficult to ascribe meaning to the words “illusion” and “delusion” and even to find any truth in the possibilities of the Imagination, capital letter intended. Consciousness is a kind of Imagination which has a fluid relationship with Reality, whatever that might turn out to be or whether it can ever turn out to be known, so grounded are we in our Imagination.
The Imago of our lives has a persistence; the degree of persistence and the capacity to stabilise its image is at the core of psychic and social and physical health. Just as the oscillation between Day and Night generates a pulse in the SCN in the hypothalamus, the pulse resonates throughout the body by way first of satellite pacemakers, principally in the liver and kidney.60 Deoxyribonucleic acid in its diploid double helical state resonates with ultraviolet life. The different atoms at the centre of porphyrins on which plant and animal lives depend resonate to light and oxygen, to mention the two most crucial to us. The position of the attachment of functional units in the five–membered ring of the steroid “nucleus” is both mobile and fixed, according to time and circumstances. These alternations and oscillations are at the basis of sex expression and of adaptation to the world. These resonances are as fixed as we can become in the world as we face it bathed in the vagaries of our glycaemia and uric acid levels. Our urge to fix our consciousness of these out of solution and in more durable form may account for the Parthenon and the statuary it houses, to say nothing of the Sphinx or the remains of the Olmec.
It will be clear to you when rehearsing the constellation of generative influences in the history of your patients, how enduring and life–forming these resonances are, how eerily the patterns repeat and, as we get older, how patterns that formerly seemed remote and discrete become closer, and we notice how they are repeated in the generations we and our siblings beget. The stale metaphor of the jigsaw commends itself here (and is useless if you have not attempted a large and complex one) where shades and tones in one corner join up to another centre of activity, previously thought quite separate and unrelated until you cross–reference with some once–famous oil-painting reprinted on the cardboard box. The capacity of the terrain to fix all these signals into a simulacrum of stability and coherence is an integrating requirement for the health of our consciousness. The ability of medicinal plants to modify these resonances is at the heart of the herbal medicine. I wish to explore this in later parts of this book.
Lines and penetrance
Cooperation is a means of having “the best of both worlds”. No human being can develop without it, as expressed most eloquently by John Donne: his “No Man is an Island” shows how competition concentrates some qualities but excludes others. As discussed earlier,61 a boundary usually shows itself as an obvious marker of change but not necessarily of separation. Each person and every object is physically separable but belongs always to a larger whole. Within the human body, barriers are more often filters that differentiate: membranes, for example, are fences with multiple gates. Barriers contain and organise so that the separated elements can then be fused in productive and thermo–efficient ways. Penetrance is as important as separation in any ecosystem. The deepest example of obligate mutualism in the history of Life must surely be the presumed inclusion of microorganisms into cells to create mitochondria and chloroplasts. Nearer to home, absorption of nutrients and successful metabolism depends upon the penetration of microorganisms into our intestines. Without our biome, healthy life would be impossible. Without commingling our meiospores, the species would not continue. The very notion of a species calls into question not only inter-fertility but also the gradability of individual qualities: when does a difference in degree become a difference in kind? The question sits at the heart of our ability to generalise and to make useful statements, about health in this case. When we review our patient's terrain, we treat its particularity but we could not do so unless we had noticed patterns in the terrain of others.
The terrain is the adaptive mechanism of the Human Matrix. The Matrix emphasises the interdependence of all matrices together with the epigenetic responses to the world and the psychosocial relations of which the individual is composed, and the artefacts of culture to which we all respond and contribute.
Rationality
Cause and effect become entangled and become lost in circularities in complex systems such as the human embodied mind. When such systems interact, as they must because they cannot exist in isolation, cause and effect seem to emerge again: a person gets wet when caught in a shower of rain. Yet the shower of rain could